Rene Descartes, Meditation 1 ｜ The Senses, Dreams, and Doubt ｜ Philosophy Core Concepts

Hi, this is Dr. Gregory Sadler. I'm a professor of philosophy and the president and founder of an educational consulting company called Reason.io, where we put philosophy into practice. I've studied and taught philosophy for over 20 years, and I find that many people run into difficulties reading classic philosophical texts. Sometimes it's the way things are said or how the text is structured, but the concepts themselves are not always that complicated, and that's where I come in. To help students and lifelong learners, I've been producing longer lecture videos and posting them to YouTube. Many viewers say they find them useful. What you're currently watching is part of a new series of shorter videos, each of them focused on one core concept from an important philosophical text. I hope you find it useful as well. So he tells us that he has learned many things in his life through all of these senses or by the senses. That would include not just the things that he has had direct sensory experience of, like, you know, for example, seeing this book in front of me or the chalkboard that you're looking at right now. But also the things that we receive through the intermediary of the senses, like, for example, people telling us about what they themselves have seen. In some respect, that would be even less reliable than the things which we witness ourself. But Descartes knows from his own experience that our senses sometimes do deceive us. And we can think of many examples that were long sort of tropes by his time. For example, when you stick a stick into the water, it looks like it's bent, but we know that it's not actually bent. Or to use another one, when you see a square tower at a great distance, it actually looks like perhaps it's round. And there's all sorts of other things along these lines that we can bring up as examples. As a matter of fact, although Descartes didn't really picture this to himself in his own time, understandably enough, what you're watching right now is really, strictly speaking, an illusion. It is, you know, a recording of me talking to you here in my home studio. But by the time that you're watching this or hearing my voice, whatever happened is long since past. It's sort of like a painting. And he uses examples of paintings and other similar imagery work in his discussion of this issue. So he knows, to recap, that there's many ways in which the senses could be deceiving us. And, you know, an example of that, things at a distance. So he asks himself, okay, we can doubt some of those matters. Maybe once I get past a certain range, I should actually be a little bit cherry of agreeing to what my senses say. I hear a sound far off. Is it a kitten? Is it a human baby? Is it perhaps a recording of something? You know, if I take my glasses off, my range of good perception is drastically reduced. But what about the things that are, so to speak, right up in our faces? What about the experiences that we're having right now? And Descartes says, for example, now, of course, he's writing this after the fact. He says, although the sense sometimes do deceive us when they have to do with things that are hard to perceive and greatly distant from us, we can recognize perhaps many other things that we can't reasonably doubt because we know them through this medium of the senses. For example, that I am here sitting in front of the fire, dressed in a robe de chambre, you know, sort of a nighttime gear, having a piece of paper between my hands and other things of that nature. So can I doubt right now that I'm right in front of this chalkboard or that I'm wearing a tie or anything along those lines? And at first he says, I'm not going to consider the cases of the insane, although he actually names off quite a few different types of people who are crazy. He says, I'm not going to, isn't this perhaps to compare myself to the crazy people who have their brains so troubled and obfuscated by the dark vapors of bile that they assure other people constantly that they're kings or when they're actually poor, that they are dressed in golden purple when they're actually naked or imagine themselves, for example, to be made of glass, which was actually a problem at the time. And some people still have those beliefs. And Descartes says, let's put that aside. We're not talking about insanity here. Don't we all go through something that should allow us to call our sensual perceptions into question? Like, for example, dreaming. Don't we believe all sorts of things to be true that aren't actually the case? You know, for example, I've had many dreams, he says, where I am sitting here in front of this fire with a piece of paper in my hands. How do I know that right now I'm not actually dreaming? I mean, the perceptions that I have are pretty clear and they certainly seem convincing. But I know that in the past when I have been dreaming, I have dreamed things that fooled me into thinking that I was in my waking life. Just to give you an example from my own experience, I've had dreams where I actually punched in at work, worked an entire shift, punched back out, and then woke up from the dream realizing that now I had to go to work again and that I didn't get paid for the eight hours of labor that I put in, eight hours of imaginary labor that I had simply dreamed. How can we tell the difference between dreaming and waking life? And this is an object that, you know, subject rather, I was going to say it's an object of many movies and novels because it's so fascinating of a problem. Maybe we could be in fact caught in a dream. How would we tell the difference? And Descartes says that from where I sit right now, I don't actually see any marks or criteria by which I can actually determine whether I'm sleeping or whether I'm awake, whether the perceptions that I'm having are true or the perceptions that I'm having are false, at least in the sense that they don't represent reality. The reality would be me in my bed in, say, pajamas or something like that. He says there are no indices and marks certain enough that I can distinguish cleanly or clearly, nettement, between sleeping and awakening. And I'm surprised by this, he says. And so that raises some problems. He says, well, all right, let's concede that. Let's say that I can't actually tell the difference between dreaming and waking. At least there has to be some truth in the perceptions that I'm having. You know, he says the components of these dreams should be, in fact, real or true. Right. There has to be something in them. So he says, for example, all the things that are represented in sleep are sort of like paintings, which have to be formed by resemblance, by similarity to something real and true. But then again, don't painters paint things that we know don't exist? Well, at least we're pretty sure don't exist in real life like mythological creatures. And he says, well, yes, that's that's quite true. You know, he says it's true that painters represent sirens and satyrs and, you know, bizarre and extraordinary forms. But they can't attribute to them forms and natures that are entirely original, entirely new. Why? Because they're made of a certain melange, a certain mixture and composition of the members of different animals. So, you know, we picture a unicorn, for example, and there are no unicorns in real life. But we imagine this usually white horse. Right. And then we just put a horn on its head. We're using our productive capacity of imagination to create that. And we can do that because we've seen horns and we've seen horses. So at least there have to be horns and horses then. Right. He says, well, you know, we could be wrong about that. But maybe there's more simple things, he says. He says for the same reason, you know, these these general things. Maybe they could be imaginary. But we do have to at least admit that there are things that are simpler and more universal that would be true and existent. And we would put those together, perhaps into certain arrangements. And that would give us the the information, the ideas that we have streaming into us. We think from the senses. So he says the mixture of which no more nor less than that of certain true colors. All these images of things that reside in our thought, whether they're real and true or or, you know, imaginary and fantastic would be formed. So what would this include? He says, well, this would include corporeal nature in general and its extension. And as well as that, the figure or shape or structure of these extended things, their quantity or greatness and their number. At least those things, you would think, would be something we can rely upon. And now we've actually gone quite far away from the world that we know and we're perceiving or at least think we're perceiving. Right. And now we're getting to a lower level structure. And he said, well, you know, even in a dream, all of these things would still be reliable, even if we can't tell that we're in a dream. We'll see whether Descartes can actually rest everything on that foundation or not.