Uncertainty of Descartes

It seems to me that in the first part of this writing and the excerpts before it that Descartes says that people should only study things that one can be certain about.(4). By this he meant that it is a waste of time to study things that you will not be able to come to a certain conclusion about. The problem with this is as he states there are very few things that can be studied without certainty, namely arithmetic and geometry. He claims that these two forms of math are so free from doubt because the concept is based on something that cannot be interpreted in any other way as things in nature can be. Because there are so few examples of these types of sciences he says that the only things one can know with certainty are things that can be intuited or deduced; In other words things so obvious that they would be impossible to misconstrue if the people discussing it had any sort of scientific mind.

One of the problems with this is as he claims later that we use our senses to take in all information in the world and we use this information to make our judgments about the sciences. He goes on to say that the sense that is produced doesn’t necessarily have to have any resemblance to the thing that produced it (31) and this can create a problem because the human mind automatically associates one feeling with another, in fact he states “It is the custom of people, whenever they notice any similarity between two things, to attribute to both of them…whatever they have found to be true of either one” (2)

So the mind alters things for the body unconsciously so they can have a better understanding of them so it seems that it would be hard to know anything for certain.

This seems to limit the things available to study down to almost nothing including religion because there is a lot of uncertainty involved that is put down to faith. Later in one of the passages he retracts his claim that the senses are always deceiving, in fact he claims that they are almost always able to tell correctly what is happening, except in two cases, things that are small or distant (104) so this slight correction does nothing to change the fact that religion would be one of the things that is uncertain.

He does however, say that we should not be prevented from believing in divine matters because that is a matter of will and faith and they should be able to be deduced correctly. (7) I was surprised that he wrote this though because that reasoning seems to be so outside of what he was preaching about knowing things for certain and the scientific method. I think his views seem to differ between topics because he does not want to go against religion and say that it shouldn’t be studied despite the fact that it seems in accordance with other things that he says should not be studied.