philosophy, or not to philosophy

today, since i'm feeling uninspired, i will dip my bloggity fingers into a little philosophy. now you might ask, "how can you delve into philosophy on a day you claim to feel uninspired?"
"valid question, my good sir," i say. how i plan on discussing philosophy without the help of my brilliant mind is, by reusing the work it has already helped produce. in other words, i will be using one of my old philosophy papers to help me.

and before you turn away from reading at the very mention of "philosophy", think. give your brain a little treat. philosophy is good food for the brain.

my discussion is based on "meditations on first philosophy" by rené descartes.

here i'll discuss only the second of his 6 meditations in the book. this one concerns the nature of the human mind. reader beware, thinking too deep into the text below might boggle your mind!

-- i am, i exist --

[first, a short intro]
In ‘Meditations on First Philosophy’, Descartes attempts to reconstruct philosophy from the bottom up. To accomplish his quest for absolute certainty, Descartes believes he must begin from scratch. He must deny all his beliefs until he believes in absolutely nothing. Then he can begin to carefully examine everything and establish its definite verity before accepting it as fact. With this selected knowledge that he knows is the absolute truth, he can build a solid foundation upon which to base his philosophy.

In the second meditation, Descartes delves into one of his more discussed ‘cogito’ or ‘I am, I exist’. If Descartes wants to believe that he is living in a world created by a deceiver and wants to reject any and everything as trickery, he can. But who is it then that is making this decision to deny everything? Is it possible to deny the existence of the one who is denying it? So it must be certain that the thinker exists, hence ‘I am, I exist’, for without the thinker there is no thought. And without thought, the ‘I’ cannot exist. The ‘I’ does not refer to the body or anything material, for Descartes has established that nothing is honest. He might be deceived, but the to be deceived or to doubt, the existence of an entity is required. One cannot deceive a non-existent entity. This entity that has no form or shape and yet is aware can only be the thinking. So the ‘I’ possibly refers to the self-conscious being, to the awareness of existence.

Imagination is not the same, and can be incomplete or deceiving. The mind is aware that a piece of wax, when heated can take immeasurable forms, but the imagination cannot possibly run through each one. The mind is capable of understanding that regardless of what the wax is subject to and the form and shape it adopts, it is still in the end, wax. Descartes proceeds with another example to illustrate how our mind makes judgments. When one sees a group of men walking outside, despite being concealed in hats and coats, one can still tell that they are men, and not robots posing as men. ‘And so something which I thought I was seeing with my eyes in is fact grasped solely by the faculty of judgment which is in my mind’ .

The understanding takes place in the mind. What the mind makes of what the sensory perceptions is upto the ‘I’, for it is the thinker. The fact remains, however, that the wax might be false, the men might not exist, but it is certain that the senses seemed to perceive them. And it is the mind that attempts to make sense of it and understand it. So the existence of the mind is certain. Descartes says that he will have an easier time mulling on the perception of the mind for the mind understands whereas the senses are easily deceiving.

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that's it for today. comment and lemme know what you think. perhaps tomorrow i will post more about descartes' thoughts on the existence of God. or simply a post about my own mundane existence!

namaste!