I finished reading Descartes’ Meditation: Concerning Those Things That Can Be Called into Doubt and I find it a little strange that he comes to the decision that it is better to “fall back into the train of [his] former beliefs” in fear of it all being an “agreeable illusion” (12) with “imaginary liberty” (12). After our discussion on Bertrand’s The Value of Philosophy, I thought the point to philosophy was to “enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind to speculation” (Bertrand) but Descartes questions than reverts back to his former opinions out of fear of what he could find. The whole ordeal reminds me of The Allegory of the Cave. The idealized individual that Socrates and Glaucon are discussing “would rather suffer anything then entertain these false notions and live in the miserable manner” (Plato 4). Descartes is fearful of the unknown and therefore decides not to further question the topic of truths and reality. Is it not the objective of a philosophy to question everything in an attempt to broaden the spectrum of possibility despite the outcome? Frankly, I just found the whole ending a little contradictory to everything we have previously discussed.
On another note, Descartes questioning of whether the “perception of all…objects” (9) does “not exist otherwise than as [we] perceive” (9). It is an interesting concept. For instance, if somehow, my eyesight changed and I started seeing the sky as green, most people would tell me that I am wrong and that the sky is blue. Yet, how can anyone tell me that what I see is false? The idea that the sky is blue is a fact imposed on all by the majority who can see the sky as blue and anyone who does not fall in that category has flawed vision. I had a conversation with a strange boy once about colours. The conversation was about whether the colour that I see as green is the same shade or even colour that he sees as green. In the end, how can anyone ever describe colour without using another colour for comparison? I am not sure if my train of thought is clear but during the time when I was discussing this, it made perfect sense. For example, more likely than not, two people do not share the same vision when it comes to colour. So two people could be looking at the same object but are seeing two different shades or colours but they would never know the difference because their whole lives they have been told that the colour they see is, for instance, red. It is impossible to ever know the difference. It is the idea that there is not one reality but realities based on perception. Simply put, my reality verses let us say Muna’s reality or Robin’s reality.
Once again on to another topic, which is actually a little off-topic but I am going to bring it up anyways. While I was reading Meditation I, the portion on dreams verses perceived reality reminded of a conversation I had several months ago with the previously-mentioned boy. The topic up for debate was whether dreams were just the activeness of our subconscious mind seeping into to the conscious mind or another reality in which we exist when we are sleep. His theory was that we exist in multiple realities but we are only aware of the reality when we are in it. He said that when we sleep, we might just be leaving the physical being of one reality and transporting to a physical being in another. In the separate realities, things that we may conclude as impossibilities in one reality may be truths in another. At the time, I said that the theory was completely unrealistic and he said that I could doubt it but I could never prove the theory to be wrong. That little anecdotal story all spawned from Descartes’ idea “that there exist no certain marks by which the state of waking can ever be distinguished from sleep” (5).
In conclusion, that is what I thought about Descartes’
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