Rene Descartes On Reality Analysis

Life is a journey which involves bettering yourself and gaining knowledge. All people have brains to think, interpret, and create anything they can imagine in their mind. But have you ever wondered if your perception of reality was truly real and not a giant deception. A man named Descartes had a very similar thought. In fact, Descartes decided in order to really know the realness of existence he had to forget all the knowledge his mind had gathered through his lifetime. The man disregards all knowledge that has no support to be true as well as all fundamental ideas in order to prepare his mind for the new beginning. He begins to wonder about his very existence and even considers that his life as he knows it is just simply a dream. The man …show more content…
In his old life there were simply to many things that were uncertain. In order to be completely certain about the truths he thinks are true he must completely restart his life and his way of thinking. Taking everything, he knows apart piece by piece in order to remain convinced of its truth. That means everything he was not entirely convinced to be truth he was forced to question, even the things that most would never question. If Descartes ever believed something he was uncertain about he would have made no progress on his journey. “I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last” (First Meditation, pg. 12). His opinions and thought made Descartes unique. He is always in a meditation, he is always emptying his mind of opinions because he fears his opinions will get in the way of what is truth and is not. He planned to destroy what he knew of himself and constantly doubt his own …show more content…
He finds that a large portion of what he has known has originated from physical senses. An example of this is when you look at a mountain far in the distance it appears small, but in reality, if you stand closer to the mountain you will realize how large it truly is. Descartes realizes that your senses cannot always be trusted, therefore he must question everything his senses tell him to be true in order to not stray from his plan. Descartes also realized that it is much of your senses that create dreams. Since he cannot trust his senses he likewise cannot trust his dreams. He can never be certain that he is dreaming or in reality because there is no absolute answer. Descartes also begins to doubt God. He doubts God and his faith because God is perfect and therefore cannot deceive. “But if it were inconsistent that His goodness to have created me such that I am deceived all the time, it would seem equally foreign to His goodness to allow me to be deceived even occasionally” (First Meditation, pg. 14). He proposed his own question with the possibility that it is possibly some evil demon that is actually responsible for his deception. In order to take power away from the demon, he again must not believe in anything that is sensed or believed to be true through the body. Because of all he has discovered he has to disregard all thoughts and