Living in an environment where all speeches aim to reach the truth of things is to share a verbose spectacle where doubts and certainties have the same chances of success. The reason is the best distributed thing among men. And it is in such a way that no one thinks he wants more than what he already has. This is how the French philosopher began his work on method.
For Descartes, there are no men with more and men with less reason. This is an innate characteristic inherent in the human species. So how can there be error in judgments? It is necessary to seek a secure and definitive foundation on which the truth can be universalized.
The Greeks admitted that by observing nature, they would interpret, unveil the truth contained in the phisis and from that they would guide their destinies, following the imperatives of the cosmos. The medievals (read the Christians) understood that the foundation of reality was God and revealed truth consisted in the laws that man must know in order to act. Both think from the perspective of the object. Both imagine being able to deduce the truth, either from the authority of nature or from God, which allows us to consider such philosophy as realistic (res = things). Thus, man, as a subject, is merely a spectator of the divine play or the wonder of the cosmos. It is a determined piece that only fulfills a function without having any importance in the role of discovering reality.
In this way, speeches and actions were carried out under the always external authority of passive human puppets. All wonders as well as misfortunes were caused in the name of God or for the sake of the Whole. With this, contradictions arise in reality that awaken the shrewdness and intelligence of those who do not see man merely as a passive agent in the process of knowledge.
These contradictions led men to disbelieve God and men themselves, suspending judgments of reality, making knowledge impossible (skepticism). Here comes a man capable of saving the truth, attributing its responsibility to the constructor of arguments.
Descartes uses the same method as those skeptics who do not believe the world can be known. Thus, he doubts everything that is possible to doubt (the body, people, God, himself, the world, etc.) until a moment comes when the doubt ceases. You can doubt anything, but you can never doubt that to doubt you have to think. cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am!) is the first and most fundamental evidence of the truth from which to start. This means that all possible knowledge is human, even interpretations about God, what is said about him. So he's a mere creation of our fantasy? Perhaps! But not according to Descartes, for whom God is a being necessary as a second truth due to the thinking subject's awareness of his own imperfection.
We therefore have a division of two substances, since thought is real while the rest depends on it: a extensive res, which is the matter and the Res cogitans, which is the spirit, reason or just thinking subject (in universal terms). This psychophysical dualism subordinates the world to the human mind so that only through the representations of the spirit are things known, that is, they they only make sense (read existence) from an approach that argumentatively constructs the world through purely principles intelligible. And the way to reach these principles is what Descartes writes in his Method speech:
1. Evidence: according to Descartes is the rule that allows us to have clarity and distinction of intelligible principles. As they are simple ideas, they are the source of all theoretical construction of knowledge;
2. Analyze: is the process by which we decompose our immediate representations into simpler representations in order to organize and order the data in order to understand the object;
3. Synthesis: moment reached after decomposition; it means that the disorganized whole of a representation is synthesized in an ordering of its parts, composing it into a now organized whole;
4. Enumeration: as there are possibilities of failures, this is a general verification of the process in order to guarantee that the object was correctly and properly analyzed.
In other words, Descartes submits sense data (source of error) to the yoke of human reason (source of truth). To better understand what it is about, as well as to understand how the method works, let's see how Descarte considers human ideas or representations:
- Adventurous ideas: they are representations coming from the senses (comes = comes from outside). These are the source of errors in judgments, because a judgment is not made about things but about the way we understand things. Thus, judgments that are based on these ideas, according to Descartes, are sources of error, as they tell us how the thing appears and not what it is;
- Fictional ideas: fiction is the name for what doesn't exist. It means to say that our imagination can, from adventitious ideas, form beings that do not have no correspondence with reality (winged horse, for example, which is the idea of a horse with wings). They never instruct us about anything;
- Innate ideas: they are simple principles in themselves and of a mathematical nature. It is only possible to represent the spirit by an intuition (that is, they are not things). For example, the circle, triangle, perfection, etc. They are the mark of the creator in our spirit and that allow us to know the particular objects. They are only rationally deduced and demonstrated.
Therefore, it is with these criteria that, according to Descartes, there can be absolute and universal science understood as a construction of a thinking subject and, therefore, active in the process of knowing. The consequences and responsibilities are always human. If God helps, it is due to an intervention that cannot be evidenced (that is, his projects cannot be known).
By João Francisco P. Cabral
Brazil School Collaborator
Graduated in Philosophy from the Federal University of Uberlândia - UFU
Master's student in Philosophy at the State University of Campinas - UNICAMP
Philosophy - Brazil School
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/filosofia/rene-descartes-duvida-hiperbolica.htm
