Rene Descartes' classic philosophical work, Meditations on First Philosophy, is a participative exercise in thinking. Join one of history's great philosophical minds in considering the nature of the world and how we think about it.
In Meditation IV, titled "Of Truth and Error," Descartes begins by recalling what we can know with certainty, our own existence and the existence of God. And it is the latter, God's existence, that suggests a path out of subjectivity into objective knowledge:
"And now I seem to discover a path that will conduct us from the contemplation of the true God, in whom are contained all the treasures of science and wisdom, to the knowledge of the other things in the universe."
If God exists, and God is no deceiver, then we have good reason to rely on our God-given capacities, when rightly used, to discover Truth. It is the notion of being "rightly used" that takes up most of Descartes' attention in this Meditation.
We are, by nature, finite, and yet our freedom of judgment is for all practical purposes infinite, so we must restrain that freedom in proportion to our grasp of reality.
"Whence, then, spring my errors? They arise from this cause alone, that I do not restrain the will, which is of much wider range than the understanding, within the same limits, but extend it even to things I do not understand, and as the will is of itself indifferent to such, it readily falls into error and sin by choosing the false in room of the true, and evil instead of good."
When we fail to so restrain our judgment, we fall into error. Descartes, then, takes his position alongside Socrates in the plea to always keep our own ignorance in view.
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