How to Read Descartes Ideally, one should read a single meditation each night. Descartes after something here. Usually people present the Meditations as Descartes attempt to begin with no philosophical presuppositions so as to develop a body of knowledge that is unconditional and thus indisputable. That is certainly related to his project, but that's not all of it. Remember that the Meditations on First Philosophy is written in part as an introduction to philosophy, not a technical treatise meant solely for the already educated classes of Europe. Descartes wrote many things for that audience, and its not nearly as evocative as the Meditations.

Now of course he fails in finding a truly unconditional standpoint from which to reconstruct all knowledge. Finding the flaws exactly is an exercise I'll reserve for class. But in this second goal, making young readers into sophisticated thinkers, the Meditations is clearly a success.

This book is even better if you don't know a whole lot of philosophy. A little bit is good because Descartes is trying to address persistent philosophical positions, but he's also trying to introduce the reader to philosophical argumentation and it can be a lot more fun, and I like fun, if you're not reading from the point of view of someone already somewhat skilled in these sorts of argument.

I may have been too young when I first read Descartes, perhaps young enough for it to be harmful. Certainly early enough that by the time I had gotten into graduate in school in philosophy I had taken a fair number of classes for which this was a required text (Intro to Philosophy, Rationalism and Empiricism, Philosophy of Knowledge). When I got to grad school and took Continental Rationalism my first semester, I read the Meditation yet again and was completely sick of it at that point.

But the first time I read it, I was a precocious and undisciplined high school student. My high school grades were not what they could have been, and yes Dungeon and Dragons could have had something to do with that, and yes, laziness was also a factor, and, in my own defense, being really confused by the people around me didn't help any. The notion that the world was an illusion, that was pretty exhilarating. Kids today have the Matrix. In my day, we had to blow our minds the old fashion with words. This was literally surprising stuff. Perhaps its why I didn't do drugs like the people I hung around with (they were so much less confusing than the people who weren't, or didn't admit to, their chemical recreations.) Descartes doubt is deeper than Matrix style doubt however, he's not claiming that the world is really some alternate but equivalent replacement for the phenomenal. Rather the phenomenal world is flawed, and, at least in so far as the first meditation ends, there may be no other world behind it. At least no other world about which we could make knowledge claims.

In the process of his inquiry, Descartes was able to make doubt into a method. Nothing needed to be taken for granted. Just because my high school teachers, or the kids next door or anyone else said something was true didn't mean that it was. This is just the kind of tool that take an already marginal youth and send him into an internal exile.  ¶ #

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