This week’s reading was not something I easily connected with.  The way I am wired just does not appreciate Descartes’s style of writing.  The layout of a statement followed by an explanation reminds me of SAT science prompts, and that really takes me out of the readings.  Personally, I would prefer a narrative or an essay-styled approach, but Descartes does not care about my opinion (as he is very dead).

As for his arguments, he began very sensibly, and I could see where he was coming from, but I started to become increasingly confused as to where his process was going.  Yes, “I think, therefore I am” makes sense, and I can understand why Descartes says it is good to doubt everything, but then he goes on to say that “[w]e must believe everything that God has revealed” regardless of whether God’s revelation is believable or not.  Is this a contradiction? Does this make sense at all?

I walked away from this reading with more questions than answers.

One thing I found interesting were Descartes differentiation between what he describes as the two ways of thinking: perception and volition.  Perceptive thinking, according to him, includes the senses, general intelligent thought, imagination, and basic comprehension.  Willful thinking, or volition, is just thinking with choice: “desire, aversion, assertion, denial, and doubt”.  I think it would be all right to say volition equates to opinionated thinking, and I mean that with both positive and negative connotations.  Descartes says, furthermore, because people are very capable of opinionated thought, people are often in error because they “make a judgement about something without having an accurate perception of it”.  So then… Can we ever be sure of anything?  Are people capable of finding completely unbiased truths?  Descartes states that there are these common notions, these axioms, that are accepted as truth such as “What is done can’t be undone” amongst a good many other axioms that he could have listed, but decided not to because “there are ever so many more”.

Overall, Descartes’s thought processes seem to be mostly sound, and it is clear that he was writing pragmatically with the intention of helping others see his perspective as well as how to adopt his way of thinking.  His ideas of how to perceive reality and the unreliability of the senses are actually similar to Plato’s in some cases.  In the allegory of the cave, Plato questions the reliability of the senses because all the prisoners that were chained to the wall accepted the shadows as truth; it was all they knew.  However, the two philosophers differ when it comes to how the world and reality should be interpreted.  Plato would agree that truth about the world could be found through introspection, and Descartes presented the idea that truth is instead found by observing nature and basing our beliefs about reality on that.

I understand why many of my classmates enjoyed this reading as opposed to a narrative or an emotionally charged reading, but I really struggled with this one.  My lack of personal connection made it difficult to understand and, therefore, difficult to agree with and relate to.  I am hoping to return to more narrative or essay-styled readings.