Hallo, this is Dr. Bin Song at Washington College.

As explained in the previous unit of Modern Philosophy, underlying the enterprise of modern philosophy termed by Descartes as the “Tree of Philosophy” is the root of “metaphysics” which addresses the most generic traits of basic substances of the world, viz., soul, body and God. Therefore, to appreciate the title of Rene Descartes as “Father of Modern Philosophy,” we will spend the following two weeks to read the entirety of Descartes’s “Meditations on First Philosophy,” and I hope you can get as much insight as you can from this incredibly rich, and quintessentially “modern” text of philosophy.

Being among the enshrined modern philosophical classics, none of a single word in these Meditations can be overlooked by contemporary readers. However, these Meditations were after all written almost 400 years ago, which would naturally indicate some unfamiliar nature to readers today. One of the difficult reasons to read Descartes’s Meditations is to grasp how Descartes used old, scholastic terms and jargons to express his modern thought. If we gradually peel away these pre-modern layers from the kernel of his thought, we will find the distinctively modern traits of Descartes’s thought in the kernel, and thus, feel immediately connected to it. In the following, I will provide a brief and preliminary explanation of prominent themes of Meditation I-III, and I hope it can facilitate your actual reading of the book.

Firstly, the title of the book “Meditations” is fairly interesting. Starting from Aristotle’s “contemplative life,” running through Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations” and Augustine’s “Confessions,” the philosophical tradition of the West evolved into Descartes’s “Meditations” to have indicated a rich “meditative” lineage where “meditation” is understood as a systematic reflection upon philosophical problems, and the reflection is aided by a certain kind of focused mental discipline. This richly meditative tradition of the West tends to be overlooked by contemporary readers since the current use of the term “meditation” is easier to be connected to Hindu, Buddhist or other non-Western practices of meditation. However, if we read the entirety of Descartes’s Meditations, we can still find some similarity between this meditation of a philosopher’s with other more religiously oriented ones. To put it briefly, this philosophical meditation also needs a two-way system of descending and ascending, or one of reduction and recovery. In Buddhist Chan meditation, for instance, you need to focus upon your breathing so as to reduce your consciousness to a peaceful and all-encompassing base, and then, employ that purified consciousness to re-contemplate worldly phenomena so as to live a mindful life here and now. Similarly, Descartes uses the method of “doubt” to challenge the validity of every piece of knowledge he acquired before; once he got to the bottom of his doubt, he found one piece of knowledge that he cannot doubt, viz., the existence of the thinking “I”; and then, he would do further contemplation upon all ideas that exist within this thinking “I” so as to check whether any of these ideas can provide certain knowledge of the outside world. I believe every reader, as long as they closely followed each word of Descartes’ Meditations, would also experience such an intense process of purification and reunification of human mind, which makes Descartes’ thought process deeply “practical” and “performative” in the regular sense of doing “meditation.”

Secondly, the method of “doubt” used by Descartes to get to the all-encompassing base consciousness of “I think,” is not a normal one. It is termed as the “hyperbolic doubt” which would consider any piece of human knowledge as completely false as long as it indicates a scintilla of uncertainty and dubitability. Using this hyperbolic doubt in Meditation I, Descartes threw away all pieces of knowledge, which he acquired through sense, imagination, memory and even pure intellect, with only the sheer activity of “I think” remaining as the rock bottom of human consciousness that cannot be thrown away any more. Here, the radical departure of Descartes’s philosophy from the pre-Modern Aristotelian one cannot be more visible: as we explained before, Aristotle’s natural philosophy is based upon the common-sensical observations of worldly phenomena. However, here, Descartes says that humans’ “common-sense” does not make any sense until every piece of it gets radically doubted and thoroughly scrutinized. Since doubting and scrutinizing require the ability of independent and free human thinking more than anything else, we can surely discern a distinctively “modern” sign of Descartes’s philosophy, just as we once characterized Copernicus’s heliocentric astronomy as indicating the same strength of human thinking and thus, as the starting point of modern scientific revolution.

Thirdly, since Descartes does not take “common-sensical” observation as the starting point of the pursuit of human knowledge, the more authentic approach to obtain human knowledge for Descartes is termed as “idealism,” which is distinguished from another very important, later lineage of modern thought, viz., “empiricism.” Descartes’s idealism suggests that in order to obtain human knowledge about anything in the world, we cannot start from a naïve perception of the world which takes the existence of things in it as granted, since the very existence of things in the world has been put into radical doubt in Meditation I. Rather, because the inner world of human subjectivity, which is termed by Descartes as “I think” or pure thinking, is more certain than anything else, we need to search for “ideas” that exist in our mind first, and then, infer whether these “ideas” correspond to realities outside the human mind; in other words, we need to examine whether these “ideas” can inform us of any knowledge about the outside world. Through this idealistic approach of epistemology, Descartes categorizes the origin of human ideas into three groups: ideas can be innate, invented, or affected from outside. Descartes also scrutinizes these ideas one after another regarding their validity of informing knowledge of objects outside human mind. In other words, rather than taking “realities” to be the prior origin of “ideas,” Descartes pays his primary attention to “ideas” in human mind, and then ask whether “ideas” inform humans of “realities.” Since “ideas” are more primary than “realities,” the role of autonomy and human free thinking gets prioritized and glorified during the process, which is surely a re-affirmation of the “modernity” of Descartes’s thought.

Finally, another significant aspect of Descartes’s Meditations is his theology, viz., his reflection on the existence of God and the role of the idea of God in regaining the validity of human knowledge that he has radically doubted prior to the conclusion of “I think; therefore I am.” For Descartes, it is a crucial step for the aforementioned epistemological approach of idealism to know that God is the creator of “I,” and more importantly, God is so good that He would not make “I” commit mistakes even on ideas which “I” can perceive vividly and clearly. Only after making sure the ultimate kindness of God, viz., “God is not a deceiver” in Descartes’s own words, Descartes thinks that we can believe our “natural tendency” to think of certain ideas in our mind, such as those mathematical ideas and sensory perceptions, as corresponding to realities outside of human mind. Be this as it may, our wondering is that: is God really an absolutely necessary idea to Descartes’s system? Or as some scholars intend to argue, is Descartes’s meandering thinking on God just a sign of Descartes’s “political shrewdness” since he did not want his writings and his person to undergo the same destiny of Galileo Galilei under the censorship of the Church? I would be very interested in hearing your thought on these questions.

In a word, in Meditation I-III, Descartes finds the undoubtable foundation of human knowledge, “I think therefore I am,” via a radical method of hyperbolic doubt, and then, after proving the existence of a kind God, he intends to re-ascend from the all-encompassing base consciousness of “I think,” and regain human knowledge via the approach of idealism. Please do read the Meditations word-by-word, and my summary here by no means captures the full glory of this quintessentially modern writing at the dawn of modern philosophy.