Descartes Meditations Summary

Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings

The main goal of Descartes in Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings was to find the truth behind all of his beliefs in order to build a solid foundation of certainly and to focus his beliefs strictly on his idea of certainty; essentially to question knowledge. His beliefs are mainly based on the theory that if someone is confident about knowing something then they must be correct. Three key issues are being discussed throughout the book ; the existence of him being a thinking thing, our senses deceiving us, God as a supreme being, and being deceived by the Evil and Genius, as well as the idea that the body is an extension of the mind. Throughout reading all the meditations, discussing the cogito,

along with the terms of the senses and the external world, the dream hypothesis; I will state that Descartes comes into conclusion that he exists; knowledge exists and God exists. Throughout the meditations, there are two real doubts; senses and the external world being the first. Descartes believes that senses and external world may cause one to doubt.
The First Meditation opens with him reflecting on everything that he has been wrong about, along with his beliefs that were created based off those false ones. As a result of this, he feels necessary to reexamine everything he has believed in the past. “Everything that I accepted as being most true up to now I acquired from the senses or through the senses. However, I have occasionally found that they deceive me, and it is prudent never to trust those who have deceived us, even if only once.” (pg. 19) Descartes in this quote states that at times our senses can be really deceiving, as can dreams.
He then decides to assume that he is sleeping. “Let us assume therefor that we are asleep and that those things are not true- that I open my eyes, move my head, extend my hand- and we do not even have such hand nor this whole body.”(pg. 19) Here he is reasoning that we could be dreaming, and that there isn’t a way to tell the dreaming world from reality. “But I am not a man who is used to sleeping at night and having all the same experiences than insane people have while awake? How often does the nocturnal quietness convince me of familiar things, for example that I am here, dressed in my gown, sitting by the fire, when I am really undressed and asleep in my bed?”(pg. 19)
He then goes on to say that even if he is dreaming, there are some things in life that are the same weather you are dreaming or not.
Descartes mentions that dreams are like the pictures of painters and that painters paint with some basis of truth.

“For dearly even painters when they try to imagine the most unusual sirens or satyrs, cannot assign natures to them which are completely new; rather they simply mix up the parts of different animals. Even if they happen to think up something so novel that nothing like it was ever seen before- so that it is therefore very dearly fictitious and false – nonetheless, at least the colors from which they paint it must surely be real.” (pg.20) They may fuse together different parts of bodies or images, but the simple parts such as shape, quantity, and size are in essence real or at least derived from the real things. So he reasons, that more tangible ideas (physics, astronomy, and medicine) are formed by simplex ideas (arithmetic and geometry) and can be

misleading.
“Thus we might conclude reasonably from these considerations that physics, astronomy, medicine and all other disciplines that involve an examination of composite things are indeed doubtful; but that arithmetic, geometry, and other such disciplines that discuss only very simple and general things, and are not concerned with whether or not they exist in nature, contain something that is certain and beyond doubt.

For whether I am awake or asleep, two and three added together make five and a quadrilateral figure has no more than four sides. It seems impossible that one could ever suspect that such clear truth are false.” He believes that there’s no way these obvious truths are false. Descartes claims that the idea of God has been inside him forever and it must have been put by him in his creator. He begins to question whether God is a deceiver or not, but then again God is always said to be good, so it has to be something else that allows him to be deceived, not God because God doesn’t have any imperfections. Thus the idea of the evil genius is born, that this being is putting a lot of energy in misleading

Descartes.
Second meditation he is trying to determine what truth is and what is not. He believes that if nothing in his mind exists, what is true, maybe nothing is. But as long as he is thinking, that means he is in existence. The Cogito comes in play here, the idea that whatever thinks, I think therefor I am. He argues that thought does exist and it cannot be separated from him, he believes “I am therefore I exist. And as long as I continue to think, I will continue to exist.”
Throughout all the meditations Descartes constantly re-examines each belief. It is through the dream hypothesis, the idea of the Evil Genius and his ideas about the senses that he concludes in fact that he is an existing thing, God does exist and so does knowledge. His arguments, although confusing at times were pretty accurate in deciphering between what is false and what is reality. By the end of the meditation it seems as though he is right back where he began and that in fact he did not get anywhere. He was better off to just believe what he originally believed then to question it and put him through such torture. In essence it was almost as though the only thing that he proved was that his senses were intended to help him figure out the world and everything about it not lead him to discovering the truths of the universe.