1 Overview
We’re going to look at this paragraph by paragraph.
2 Meditation one (p. 9)
Yellow: Note how unnecessary the project is, and:
Green: How impractical it is (it gets in the way of his life, he lives his life without having undertaken it)
Blue: The project, and ‘methodological doubt’
3 p. 10
Yellow: Foundationalism: itself unquestioned.
Green: My senses “sometimes” deceive me, so what I learn “from” or “through” them can be doubted, and that’s most of what I know.
Two classical grounds for doubting the veracity of reports of sense experience:
- insanity
- dreaming
Descartes rejects, apparently, the first, and does so while rejecting the evidence of my embodiment. Note that he takes his own sanity for granted. See pink.
But he accepts the second as a legitimate grounds for doubt. Note here how it is his reasoning that confuses him. See blue.
But perhaps, like an artiust who uses colors, the imagination—the faculty at work in dreams—is not entirely novel in its productions but is only combining or dividing real things. See purple.
4 p. 11
Indeed, perhaps composite things in general are compositions of “more simple and universal” things. See yellow.
Green: Sciences of the composite are doubtable. Perhaps sciences of the simple (arithmetic) are not.
I have an idea of God. How do I know that God is good?
Blue: The possibility of error in arithmetic reveals God did not create me as incapable of deception.
5 p. 12
Yellow: There is nothing I can’t doubt.
Green: But belief is also a matter of habit, so that to correct my errors in beliefs requires also that I correct my habits. But to correct habits requires that I take up a certain extreme regimen, namely:
Blue: I take up the opposite of my “doubtful . . . but nevertheless highly probable” views.
Pink: Nothing dangerous here, because action is not at stake, only knowledge.
Purple: I now take up the opposite of my “doubtful . . . but nevertheless highly probable” views.
Yellow again: But meh I’m lazy.
6 Meditation two (p. 13)
Green: Note how the project is different now. Forget the habit-fixing model. I’ll just “put aside” opinions that can be doubted.
Blue: “I suppose that everything I see is false [omnia quae video falsa esse].” What does that mean? Something like: Everything I see misleads me, in the sense either that it misleads me into thinking something is there that isn’t, or that it misleads me into thinking something is something else, i.e., something that it is not.
Now in pink the main argument of the first two meditations. Let’s walk through it together.
I want to note, not just for the sake of pedantry, that the basic structure of the outline is one familiar to Descartes’ audience from Augustine (354–430). Augustine uses a version of the argument that, even if I am in error, it follows that I exist, all over his works. And more generally you also find a lot of the inner search of the Meditations in Augustine, in particular his Confessions. What differs in Descartes isn’t the argument itself, then, so much as the systematic and fundamental importance of the argument; the fact that the argument is not just one source of certainty but the very font of the possibility of certainty.
7 pp. 14–16
But what am I? Descartes imagines a few possibilities. See yellow on pp. 14–15 for the punchline.
Note especially how Descartes folds sensation, the imagination, and the will into ‘thinking’. Thinking now comes to mean all mental activity—as such, we might emphasize, to distinguish, for example, sensing as an operation involving eye balls, ears, etc., which I can doubt, from the fact that I am sensing, which I cannot. We might distinguish between:
- There is a red ball in front of me
- I see a red ball
- I seem to be seeing a red ball
The first two can be doubted; the third cannot and is part of what Descartes calls “thinking.” See yellow on p. 16.
8 pp. 16–18: the wax
Green: I perceive ‘objects’ with my mind.