Descartes's Critical Reflections

Descartes's Critical Reflections 

External events that shape an era such as new technologies or great destructions, plant the seeds of new ideas by questioning traditional concepts. During the time Descartes lived, rapid development in technologies and changes in social norms lead people to a realization phase as they slowly became aware of the broader picture. People observed that redefining limits were possible and it was in fact happening so their perceived world expand. The more you learn, the more you realize how little you about even the most basic things in life. G.W.F. Hegel suggests that Descartes successfully represent this era where people are faced with technologies that are strangers to them and experience what it’s like to realize the unknown.

Descartes’s idea to doubt everything around him was not only a method people were already starting to accept as they too were experiencing sudden changes but it was also an experiment that tested the possibility of the distinction between soul and body. “Thus this “I,” that is to say, the soul through which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body and is even easier to know than the body, and even if there were no body at all, it would not cease to be all that is.”(Page 19, line 37-40) According to G.W.F. Hegel Descartes “introduces to philosophical discourse critical reflections on its own conditions of possibility.” Descartes suggested the ideas that our senses were not reliable to obtain the truth, only ideas formed by reasoning could be trustworthy. But methods were so contrarian that he himself realized he can’t implement them because damage was already done as he has lived him whole life relying on his senses. All these experiments with how the human mind works and how senses and imagination affect what the mind perceives, light the way as man realizes the diversity of himself. G.W.F. Hegel in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy mentions that “Descartes represents a decisive step in the self-consciousness of philosophy”.

The era of scientific development was, from another perspective, an era of confusion and uncertainty. According to Descartes’s method, the pursuit of truth begins with doubting all there is and not relying on senses and imagination to perceive and at least begin to comprehend the self by only cognitive processes. “My entire plan tended simply to give me assurance and to cast aside the shifting earth and sand in order to find rock or clay.” His attempt to change his whole perception by constructing a level of consciousness that allowed him to reach truth instead of being detained by senses and imagination is a good method to cope with the external world of confusion.