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René Descartes Meditations

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René Descartes is an extremely influential figure in Western philosophy. His work is studied in introductory high school courses and at a doctorate level. Descartes’ ideas have seeped into popular culture, visible in works like George Orwell’s 1984, the film series The Matrix, and the more recent movie Inception. He is responsible for what is perhaps the most widely recognized philosophical phrase ever uttered: “I think, therefore I am”. The path to Descartes’ lasting effect on the Western world can be found in his Meditations; specifically, the first four, where he attempts to strip himself of preformed opinions and lays the groundwork for deeper thinking in his later meditations and later works. He makes leaps and bounds in tackling the question …show more content…

Beginning to dismantle these falsehoods, the meditator comes upon the question of whether or not the senses can be trusted and turns his attention to dreams. If dreams, according to the meditator, can fool a person into believing they are awake and experiencing movements that they are not, then there is no guarantee that what one believes they are currently sensing is not also an illusion or some manner of a dream. One cannot trust the senses; the claim is that there is no guarantee of …show more content…

He describes a hierarchy of ideas in which certain ideas hold higher levels of objective reality than others. He determines that if something has a certain degree of objective reality, it must be caused by something with the same or more objective reality. God, being an infinite being, would in his hierarchy have the most objective reality; thus, the meditator (or any other thinking being) cannot be the source of the idea of God. The infinite is not made to be comprehended by the finite. Nothing is bigger than the idea of God, so nothing could have been the source of the idea of God but God. Descartes’ meditations have resonated so deeply throughout history and in essence become a “Big Idea” because they question our immediate reality in an uncomfortable but intuitive way. In an era when Aristotelian thought ruled all and knowledge was thought to come from the senses, suggesting that the senses could not be trusted at all was revolutionary and potentially

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