Week 11 Reflection- Descartes SALONIKA

I found the reading quite confusing however; there were lots of questions and reasoning
that went along in my mind while reading the text. In the first meditation, Descartes
says ‘that there is nothing at all that I formerly believed to be true of which it is
impossible to doubt’. I really connect to this thought as according to me, everything on
this earth, above and beyond it is the creation of god or us. Since the notion of God is
created by us in our minds. Therefore it leads to a point that no truth is pure in its form.
There is always subjectivity in everyone’s experience and truth is always relative. As
Liang says one can only experience the behavior of one’s experience and never the
experience.

I liked the way how he has tried to connect imagining of the senses to perceiving and
thinking. So in a way we think, hence we perceive that we are for e.g. Feeling the heat.

Irony of the eye is that it can never see itself, yet everything around it with assured
certainty. He says that the mind exists, but isn’t that too our own imagination. So then
what is a mind? If I point it out, where do I exactly place my finger and say ‘this is mind
and here it is’!

Another question that comes up is do we perceive what we think or think what we

perceive? And if over everything else we need a mind, but what is it exactly? How can
we for certain say that we know any other object around us, when we ourselves don’t
have the truth or clue about who and what we are?

Opinion! Whatever this is to be meant, in its true sense I think holds the power and key
to a lot of questions that has been sprouting in my mind. As Descartes says that it is
difficult to rid one’s self so promptly of an OPINION to which one has long been
accustomed. But again the logic according to Descartes will be that you only have an
opinion when and if you have a mind. Somehow it all seems so entangled with each
other that no matter how hard we have been trying to find its origin, its birth, the truth,
one can never see it. Or is there any truth at all, what if its all in the imagination of our
mind that there has to be a start?

This reading has really left a doubt over my entire existence and every frame of thought
that I hence represent. For eg. we all know that 2+2=4. But who gave the definite value
of 2 having 2 parts that make it 2 and for us to add on like that? How do we know for
certain that 3+2=5? As 3 could just be a figure, an imagination, at most an opinion.
Which over the years have seemed to be taken as definite and unquestionable place in
people’s mind. So can I say for a fact that we live by opinions and hence nothing is true?
Maybe that’s why history keeps changing. Nothing is for constant, be it anything. It
grows or reduces tells us that anything tomorrow can change. And yet we will still be
here trying to have some kind of constancy in our life by defining and giving the object
its properties.

Somehow I’m not really content with Descartes’s understanding and belief that there is
a demon that constantly deceives us into believing certain notions like 2+2=4 of
anything else in the world. If we are dreaming the sensory experience about the
external world then what happens when we actually sleep and see what we call as
dreams? Are we seeing a dream within a dream? So how does one know that he is ever
awake? And as such then where is the demon to be blamed when all of this is the
perceiving and thinking of the mind which is my own and nobody else’s? Coz the whole
concept of god and the demon is nothing but just in the mind. An opinion formed by us.

If he respects his criterion of certainty to maintain his beliefs as true, then why did he
doubt them in the very first place?

So we did not form the world and the objects that we perceive or think. It’s the other
way round. They were always there for us to be perceived and thought of! So who or
what kept it all there for us to perceive? And I do not believe that it is god or the devil. I
am a thinking being. Going by that notion, then we can understand the quest to seek
truth and question everything around us.

Concepts like god, evil, body, material things are such that makes philosophy cultural
and it cannot exist any other way. I was somehow trying to look at philosophy
untouched by any of the cultural factors, but then since it is us (humans) who has
introduced the subject philosophy then how can we study it solely as a separate body.
Also, if it is not compared with any other thing (culture) then how do we even know that
it is of any value or not? Therefore, I rest on this case with the understanding that
philosophy has to be understood within and around us like any other topic or object. So
can be said for understanding oneself, our mind, with our senses and facts and truth we
seek for.