Descartes's Argument Essay: The Value Of Individual Identity

The importance of individuality has been something not just emphasized by human beings but is deemed a part of human nature. But what really makes a person who they are? Is it the color of one 's hair or the contour of his or her face? Along with these genetic traits, comes numerous individual similarities with parents such as interests and even a person 's accent. This idea of individuality, or also known as the self, is the personality and ideas that are in each individual that separate them from every other person. These individual characteristics however, don 't come from a person 's genetic code or parents, but are instead formed through each individual 's choices throughout his or her life. This sense of self is completely intertwined …show more content…
Descartes in his second meditation made the claim that "I think, therefore I am". Descartes reached this conclusion by separating his body and all of his senses because he felt he was not able to trust anything except the idea that his mind existed. This assertion by Descartes can be seen as an argument that Descartes was able to find his self only by removing everything else from the equation. However, because of Descartes previous interactions with his surroundings, Descartes self had been molded by his reality previous to him removing himself from it. Descartes had attended numerous academic institutions in France along with learning through self-observation in nature. Descartes in his search for reasoning had to place himself in numerous new locations and be around many new ideas to further help shape his understanding of his self along with his understanding of rational thinking. One of the reasons that Descartes went looking for rational thinking was because he felt that he was no longer able to trust his body or his surroundings. This brings up another side of the argument of whether you are able to have a self with a false reality. In Plato 's "The Allegory of the Cave", a group of people are chained to a wall and the false reality they know is made up of shadows on the wall. It is not until leaving the cave that someone would be able to view the one true reality of the world. Would the chained individuals truly be able to create a self based on a false reality in the cave? When looking back at the fish bowl analogy, you can see that every person 's view of reality is different. Even if every person were to be unchained and shown the one true reality, each person would view things in slightly different ways and would even reflect on false passed experiences in