In Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes said he doubted everything in search for certain, or absolute, truth. The first thing he found that he could …show more content…
Descartes set about doubting almost everything in order to find truth, but he didn’t doubt enough to understand a world from a perspective other than his own. Nietzsche was the first to suggest that philosophers before him could be wrong in their belief that there could be an absolute truth. Merleau-Ponty lived in a world where science had developed a lot since Descartes. Art and philosophy had also developed, philosophy from Nietzsche’s works, which caused even more of Descartes’ flaws to be brought forth. With modern science at his disposal, Merleau-Ponty pointed out that just about every school of thought was changing; thus Descartes’ analytic geometry would not translate to the physical world. Descartes was right about a few rudimentary things – his need to doubt, and math and science as a way to understand the universe – but he was mistaken in thinking he could find absolute truth through either of these