Today we're going to be talking about Descartes’ Meditation Two.
So first, let me give you a little bit of context and talk about where this all fits
in with what we’re doing.
And then we'll just walk through the text of Meditation Two and the text of Meditation Three.
Meditation Two and Three is where we get the payoff from this process of radical doubt
that Descartes began with in Meditation One.
So just to think about the context here: Descartes is giving us a new program, looking for a
new foundation for knowledge.
We might ask, What’s wrong with the old foundation?
What’s the old foundation for knowledge?
The old foundation is sense knowing.
It’s using the senses to enter into a relationship with objects in the world,
in a way that gives us a reliable grasp on these objects and gives us some sort of way
of working toward an essential understanding, a grasping of
them through their four causes.
It's the old way…
old foundation for knowing would be to begin with the senses
and then try to work through to some kind of grasp of what a thing truly is.
The four causes will give us an idea of what a thing really and truly is in its essence.
What does Descartes begin in Meditation Two by doing? Let's take a look at this.
He’s thinking about this. What is the source of my knowledge?
How does this knowledge get into my head?
Well if we think about this, we realize that all the knowledge that we have, that we think
is so reliable, either comes to us through our senses, through
our eyes, our ears etc., or it comes to us through our memory.
And so we're thinking… some of you in response to the last exercise said
“One of the things I'm certain of is I'm certain that I'm more than 15 years old.
Just because it’s a fact. I know that about myself.”
And I didn’t press you on that last time, but I can press you on it now.
If I were to challenge this, I’d say, “How do you *know* that you’re over 15?”
You have to draw up on store of memory.
Some of you are reasoning about other things that you are certain of, and for either one…
for each of those things, either it’s your senses or it’s your memory,
which in fact is really, if you think about it, just memory of your senses,
‘I saw the numbers on the birth certificate, then I did some calculations and math to figure
out how old I am.’
But I’m relying upon my senses to give me an accurate picture of the certificate, as
well as to give me an accurate representation of reality.
But if all my knowledge is coming from these sources, and maybe ultimately just from this one,
what Descartes does is argue in Meditation One that the senses are an unreliable source of knowledge.
They’re not sufficiently secure to be a foundation for knowledge.
So we need a new foundation.
This new foundation for knowledge is going to be Descartes’ turn toward the self.
So what we’re looking for Meditation Two and Three is a way in which the knowledge
of the self, specifically of the self’s thought, is going
to be more certain than knowledge from the senses.
It's going to be foundational for all other knowledge.
That’s going to be the new foundation.
The self and the self’s thoughts that turn out to be the new foundation that he's looking for,
because they’re proof against all possible
doubt in a way that senses and memory are not.
Think about virtual reality or any other kind of science fiction scenario.
Some kind of mad scientist or Matrix-type computer can deceive me about anything that
comes through my senses.
Any sensory thing has to process through my brain, so any device that can stimulate those
exact same neurons can make me have the experience of thinking
that I see or feel something.
That's been the promise of virtual reality for the past ten or twenty years.
And anything that can cause me to have the same sort of neural stimuli or thoughts can
cause me to have a memory, even though the memory or the senses don't
necessarily correspond to what the real world is outside of me.
So Descartes’ diving deep into the mind and the mind’s knowledge to try to find
a new foundation, and then to build back up on that foundation.
So Meditation Two is where we get the foundation and the building up.
In Meditation Three we get a proof for the existence of God.
We’ll talk about both of those today.
But it's against this backdrop of trying to undermine the senses and memory that this
new foundation makes sense.