Descartes Method Of Good Reasoning Analysis

Despite all of Descartes’ past educational and travel experiences, he decides he must first study himself and his soul to start over. Descartes decides that he needs to discard all of his current positions, even if they may be right, because he did not trust what he was taught and what others and society taught and thought was the truth. Descartes explained how he discarded his current positions and started fresh, “…I learned not to believe anything too firmly of which I had been persuaded only by example and custom; and thus I little by little freed from myself from many errors that can darken our natural light and render us less able to listen to reason” (Descartes 6). Descartes, first, had to reason out what he believes as true to free himself …show more content…
For his method of good reasoning, he broke it up into four maxims: non-hastiness, division and analysis, order of invest and the completion and exhaustive. The first rule of the method is to be clear and distinct. Descartes explains how he came to avoid faulty and hasty judgments, “…carefully to avoid hasty judgment and prejudice; and to include nothing more in my judgments than what presented itself to my mind so clearly and so distinctly that I had no occasion to call it in doubt” (10). When he starts rebuilding his opinions and views, he makes judgments on things that he knows is 100% true and nobody can disprove what he believes. Descartes also had to be careful of being content with false reasoning. The second maxim, which is division and analysis, is to divide these judgments and analyze them. The third maxim is to organize a person’s thoughts by starting with what it is the simplest to what is the most complex. The last maxim is to make conclusions based on the other three maxims. These four rules of the method are very crucial because he needs a foundation in which he can rebuild upon before reconstructing his beliefs, opinions, views and morals. Even if he could not get at the truth, as a result of using these rules, he is …show more content…
He explains how God created the laws of nature, “…later he did no more than apply his ordinary concurrence to nature, and let nature act in accordance with the laws he had established” (24). God did nothing more than establish his laws to nature, he allowed for nature to act with the unwritten laws he established. God created matter and laws of nature for nature to follow and after he created it, nature follows the rules of what God formed naturally. Descartes explains how there would not be able to be nature without there being laws, “…I tried to demonstrate all those laws about which one might have been able to have any doubt and to show that they are such that, even if God had created many worlds, there could not be any of them in which these laws failed to be observed” (24). In order for there to be a world with human existence or some type of existence, there must be matter and nature in which is followed from God. With nature and matter come laws because without laws, there is nothing for living things to go by. The laws of nature control everything in the world and nothing can break the laws of nature. Going back to Descartes’ view of human beings coming from a perfect being, this could be said the same for nature. There would be no nature if it was not for God, nature was not made “perfectly” but there are many imperfections. He concludes that a person’s soul is not