Descartes Meditations One and Two: I Think, Therefore I Am

Greetings and welcome everyone. I'm Dr. Chris L. Firestone and this is the Firestone Files. Over the past few months, we've been on quite a journey together, meeting the Fire Stones and celebrating the life of Charlie Kirk. And now, as we enter December, we embark on something new, a special series I'm calling Decart December. All through this month, borrowing any festive detour, we will turn our attention to one of the most significant figures in western thought, Renee Deart. Across five episodes, I'll guide you on an intellectual journey through Renee Deart's famous meditations on first philosophy. These lectures include an introduction, meditations 1 and 2, meditations 3 and 4, meditations 5 and six, and a conclusion.

So, I invite you to grab a notebook and a copy of the meditations if you have one, your favorite mug filled with your favorite drink, and settle in with me through December as we walk with Daycart through doubt, discovery, and deep reflection. This is Decart December. I am Dr. Chris L. Firestone, and this is the Firestone Files. Enjoy.

around. Hi, I'm Dr. Chris Firestone, professor of philosophy and turning to the philosophy of Renee Deart. This is the second lecture on Decart. In the first lecture, we introduced Renee Deart and the history of ideas and how his philosophy uh situates itself among other thinkers of the time. Today we move on into the meditations themselves with particular reference to meditation one and two. Um before we go jumping right in, I thought I'd take a moment to stress once again the significance of the meditations to Decart's philosophical portfolio. One way of looking at Decart's career is in a series of say uh three decades in the 1620s.

He's young, he's in his 20s. He writes some philosophical works. Now he's publishing along the way things in mathematics and science but his mature philosophy his metaphysics and so forth takes time to develop as he continues to study the sort of instrumental uses of reason and science and mathematics. He is thinking profoundly about the grounding of the empirical sciences and mathematics or the lack thereof that he's finding in philosophy.

So in this in the 1620s when he's in his 20s he writes a book called rules for the direction of the mind in that work I call it his kind of tooling up phase he's dealing with how to use reason critically why it's so important to read philosophers carefully uh look for coherence look for good argumentation and he's trying to develop a series of rules or guidelines for himself really and for other thinkers of the time to get philosophy back on track. That work is never published or actually it's published postumously. So um again he's not in a position yet to become you know to make his thoughts known publicly on these things but he is definitely thinking about them. So if you go into the next decade the 1630s we find another book emerging on metaphysics and philosophy. It's called lemon or the world. It has three parts. On light, on man, on the soul.

Again, this goes unpublished. It's published postumously after he's become famous and has died. Um, and we see him working out some of his thoughts in these areas. We don't get he's only he only writes up as far as we know the first two parts of that never getting to on the soul which becomes a topic of the meditations later on. Um and again we this is unpublished. He's still thinking things through.

So if you think of the 1620s as his tooling up phase, he's the 1630s are his experimental phase where he's starting to start to put this stuff into writing and where he actually stands uh philosophically and how he's going to write the ship of philosophy for the uh purposes of science and mathematics and so forth. It's in the late 1630s that he writes a book called Discourse on Method that actually does get published and you find in that some preliminary ideas that percolate and become concrete when we get to the meditations things like the mind body uh composite understanding of the human person.

He has yet to formulate in his mind um material reality as as a mental extension that we find later on in the meditations and so forth. And so we have this sort of prolamama if you will to his ultimate writing that has become world famous and that is the discourse uh uh um I'm sorry the meditations on first philosophy and that's what we're going to really talk about here today. Okay. So these are written in 1641 and published and become world famous. Now in the last lecture we had a look at the introduction. Who is he writing this to? As we found out he's writing it to theologians at the University of Paris.

His point here is to help them to use arguments from pure reason that can convince the common man that aren't situated in the revealed word or aren't limited by the testimony and so forth. Uh that would is convincing to the choir and convincing to the parishioners but not necessarily to this growing group of skeptics that we find um throughout the you know western hemisphere. we we find throughout the uh philosophy uh in Europe.

Um he says he's going to prove the existence of God, the existence of the soul and he'll do so in such a way that no one can deny it and that theologians can then build their theologies and uh so forth in a more convincing manner. Um he's going to use natural reason alone, not revelation or revealed truths, but just natural reason. doesn't mean he doesn't hold uh revealed truth in high regard. He simply recognizes that it um is uh less convincing to the skeptics than arguments from natural reason. So here we are. We arrive at meditation number one. Now a couple interesting things to know about the meditations.

They appear at least fictionally to be happening on six days. that is he wakes up in the morning, makes himself a cup of coffee, uh he may even have a fire going at some point during the day and he's thinking and he's writing his meditations down. And each day kind of takes the argument one step further. Sometimes in my classes when I talk about Daycart, I talk about the six days of creation that Decart has because he has six meditations and on day six he creates a vision of the human person as a mind and a body and in the corpus if you will of the western say philosophical tradition.

The meditations are kind of like Genesis that is we find an authoritative text here in the meditations that establishes the vision of the human person as a mind and a body. So that's kind of where we're going and we're going to look at two days of his meditations uh here in this lecture. So what's he going to do in meditation number one, day one, if you will? Well, his goal in this meditation is not to prove his prior beliefs to be false. He takes that to be an impossible task. That's a task that would require far more of uh any one philosopher than he could possibly muster. And certainly in such a short book he that's not going to happen.

Rather he wants to clear false beliefs away so that he can uh find a new foundation for knowledge. Now this clearing away of false beliefs um has some uh negative side to it too. In order to clear away false beliefs, he obviously has to clear away all his beliefs, which in probably includes some true beliefs, maybe many true beliefs and so forth. But the point is here is that until you know how to separate the wheat from the chief, you're not going to make any progress in providing a foundation for knowledge. One idiom you might say that's appropriate here is, "Fool me once, shame on you.

Fool me twice, shame on me." In other words, he could be fooled by philosophers and their understanding the foundations for philosophy and so forth. Um, but if he goes on in that ignorance, then shame on him. He's going to clear them all away. And I think I talked about in the last lecture the kind of nuclear bomb that meditation one actually is. It clears away all past systems, all past authorities. And for the first time in say philosophical history, we're going to start with what I think. what do I know?

Um not uh seeking tradition or authority first but looking at the use of reason in its encounter with the world. So um he says in the meditations that this whole approach might appear to make him look insane because it's going to lead him to doubt things like he has a body or that he's being appeared to by a camera or by trees and so forth and people like that he says we put into asylums. But something is different about Decart's approach. He doesn't believe per se that that's the case. He just doesn't know what he can trust. And so rather than um being insane, he asks the reader to join him on a thought experiment.

And this thought experiment is going to wipe away all of our beliefs in search of something that we can hold on to for certain. Now um you might think of in meditation one if you've ever looked at any movies uh the movie Inception or the movie uh the Matrix how do you we know says Decart that we're not living in a dream that all of these things our bodies our hands our movements and so forth are in fact dreams maybe a first layer dream or second layer or a third layer dream and so forth And so if you have that kind of uh thought experiment that maybe that we're living in a dream world um then uh even maybe I'm not so insane after all.

Maybe I can doubt even the most obvious things that I take to be true uh for the sake of this thought experiment. So he says there's one idea in his mind that he that he's been focused on for so long that doubting it may seem to be um make him crazy and that's the belief in God. He is focused on God so much in his life that getting rid of that idea seems difficult in this thought experiment. But he can't deny that even if God's good and that he wouldn't trick him and so forth that he has been deceived.

And so it's not going to be good enough to start like say the metaphysicians before him with a belief in God because it's clear that our knowetic structure, our epistemic uh belief system has errors in it and God has not seen fit to stop that from happening and so forth. And I can't quite figure out what belief is true and what is false. I really can't believe can't start my uh epistemic system with belief in God. So, um even if we assume the existence of God, it's true that I find myself occasionally deceived of these things. And so, um we're going to have to look elsewhere.

So, he's going to assume as a thought experiment that some evil demon, some malignant demon is trying to trick him at every turn. Think of this as the little evil demon on his shoulder is trying to trick him into to believing that he has hands and eyes and a a mouth and he he he he has trees and he has an office in front of him and so forth. and uh he's going to remain resolute in that belief uh until he can find something that even the evil demon can't trick him up.

Interestingly, like in many creation accounts, if we go back to that uh illusion that I said that Decart's meditations are like the genesis of the western philosophical tradition, we have an evil demon here present just like we do in many creation accounts. And this evil demon is going to help Daycart uh indirectly as a sort of uh devil's advocate, if you will. He's going to try to test all of his thoughts and beliefs to see whether or not he could be fooled of them. And if he can find any belief that even the evil demon can't fool him of, then he will have he will have a foundation for knowledge that's worth building upon.

So let me it's might be important now. One of a book I often use in my class is Robert Paul Wolf's uh 10 great works of philosophy. Let me read that last section here where he makes this assumption. This is quite interesting. This is the second to last paragraph in meditation one. I will suppose then not that deity who is sovereignly good and the fountain of all truth, but that some malignant demon who is at once exceedingly potent and deceitful has employed all his artifice to deceive me.

I will suppose that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, figures, sounds, and all external things are nothing better than the illusions of dreams by which of uh by means of which this being has laid snares for my credul. And I will consider myself as without hands, eyes, flesh, blood, and any of the senses, and has falsely believing that I am possessed of these, I will continue resolutely fixed in this belief. And if indeed by this means it be not in my power to arrive at the knowledge of truth, I will have to suspend judgment. He goes on to say, the sentence goes on and on. This is one of the longest sentences you'll ever want to read. I think it might be the whole paragraph.

But the bottom line here is his assumption of an evil demon. And we find that very early on just like we do in the book of Genesis when uh when the devil shows up and tries to trick Adam and Eve. And uh Decart is bent on not being tricked. And so as we move into meditation two, he has a methodology established to help him find u a foundation for knowledge that is beyond all question and that even he can't question it. So that's evening and that's morning on day one of the meditation. So, as we move into day two, meditation number two, Decart wakes up in the morning, says, "Yes, I've got a methodology that can help me here."

Um, he's happy to have rid himself of all false beliefs. He knows he has collateral damage with regards to true beliefs, but he likens this whole experience to swimming in deep water. He says, "Like I'm in deep water here. I can't find the bottom and shredding water on top is becoming exceedingly difficult. So the task at hand he tells us is to uh be like Archimedes the myth of Archimedes. You see, our committee set out to move the earth and he said that if he could find one fixed point, then he'd have the power he needed to move the world.

And so, Deard likens his quest to the quest of Archimedes. that is he's seeking after the Archimedian reference point. The point in our knowetic superructure that is immovable that he cannot doubt that he cannot find suspicious in any sort of way. So, uh it's interesting that right toward the beginning of meditation two, he uh he thinks he's on to something. Now, notice something in meditation two. Ultimately, he's going to get to the famous Kogito ergosum. I think, therefore, I am. Everybody knows this is in meditation, too. But it actually doesn't actually show up in a direct way in meditation 2, so far as I can tell.

There are a couple of important quotes. And the first one we find fairly early on on the second page of meditation 2. He says, um, "Doubtless then, I exist since I am deceived. and let him deceive me as he may. He can never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I shall be conscious that I am something. So that it must infin be maintained all things being maturely and carefully considered that this proposition I am I exist is necessarily true each time is it it is expressed by me or conceived in my mind. So there's the first quotation we have that's similar to the uh I think therefore I am famous phrase that is attributed to Renee Deart. He his gut tells him that he's a thinking thing and even an evil demon can't fool him of that. Now he takes a break for a moment from this and he looks back at history and he asks himself what about a rational animal? Maybe that's what I am.

But as he unpacks those terms carefully considering an animal, what is an animal but something a term that is derived from sense perception. Of course, rational animal also hearkens back to Aristotle and the philosophy that made assumptions without the method of doubt and led to the kind of metaphysics that Deart was rejecting. So here he is talking about this um this notion and rejects this notion because it's too complicated. It draws upon things that I can't uh verify and so he doesn't want to go that direction. He also thinks back to the malignant demon concept and says that demon can trick me of anything. If if there's one thing he can't really trick me of um it's that I'm a thinking thing.

I mean, what about the attribute of the soul of perception? Maybe that's something I'm a perceiving thing. But perception itself is something that is manipulated by the malignant demon. And so, Deart says, "No, that can't quite be the case. It's the attribute of the soul that is thinking itself. That's the thing that doesn't seem to require a body." And so, if you go further on, about a page later, he's got the second quotation. Um that's important here for the uh Kito uh insight. He says um thinking is another attribute of the soul and here I discover what properly belongs to myself.

This alone is inseparable from me. I am I exist. This is certain. But how often? As often as I think. For perhaps it would be it would even happen if I should wholly cease to think that I should at the same time altogether cease to be. I now admit nothing that is not necessarily true. I am therefore precisely speaking only a thinking thing that is a mind understanding or reason terms whose signification was before unknown to me. I am however a real thing, a real existent. But what thing? The answer was a thinking thing. So here we have the second statement of the I think, therefore I am.

And here Deart believes he's discovered the Archimedian reference point for all knowledge. No evil demon can fool me of the fact that I'm a thinking thing. Because in order to fool me that I'm a thinking thing, I must be a thinking thing. And therefore um that's the one point that is immovable. As soon as I stop thinking I stop existing and if I'm thinking then I must be a thinking thing. You can't fool me of that. Now you could fool me of arms and legs and and and and immediate sense perceptions. He even goes into right after establishing this truth two challengers. immediate perception which he uses the example of a wax nose have changing its shape and so forth.

I can be fooled of its nature. I could be fooled that it's not really a nose at all or it could it could melt and change its form altogether. Thus again I really don't know what it is that I was that I've been encountering in sense perception.

He also looks at mathematics 2 plus 2 equals 4 and he says that has a kind of quality about it that sort of transcends my doubting doesn't it and then he remembers learning mathematics and so forth in school and the mistakes that he's made there and he says that can't be something I could be fooled of that theoretically in my judgments but I can't be fooled of the fact that I'm being fooled that there is a me to be fooled and that's where he lands um as a foundation for acknowledge it. And this it's one thing that's important to note before we close this lecture. And that is this one thing is an indivisible thing. It has no there's no spatial nature to it. It's a if if he's proven one thing, this Archimedian reference point is a dot. It's an indivisible infinitely small thing that we call me.

I mean that's pretty much all we have on the table thus far. So meditation one, the method of doubt is established. Meditation two, I am a thinking thing. I am a mental substance. Of this, I can be most certain. That's it for now. I'll look forward to talking with you about the meditations three and four in the next lesson. Thanks for stopping by to spend some time with me here on the Firestone Files. I hope today's reflections offered you some new insights and perspective on life. If you enjoyed the episode or found it valuable, I'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to like, subscribe, and share it with someone you care about.

I'd also love to hear your thoughts. What resonated with you? What challenged you? Or what would you like to hear more about in future episodes? Drop a comment below or send in your suggestions to the email in the description. Your input helps shape where we go next. This has been Dr. Chris Firestone. Until next time, keep asking the big questions and remember the kingdom journey is always best with your friends. Further up and further in. Bye for now.