Descarte and Enlightenment

We have come to see and understand ourselves as subject and not objects of the living world this is as a result of the thoughts introduced to the masses that questioned everything they stood for, thoughts about their place in society and the role one played. This essay seeks to unravel the role that Descartes had in the manner in which people understood themselves as, by critically analyzing the shift in medieval times and the birth of the modern world. This essay will focus on the shift in how people understood themselves as subjects and objects and God’s creatures to individuals seeing themselves as free assigners of meaning in their lives with this acknowledging the draw backs such as the burden of choice, the birth of modernism and other political theories
In the middle ages before the writings of Descartes were introduced to people, people couldn’t help but understand themselves as determined or created by God as that was the way in which they understood the world they lived in, they were ruled by a Divine right where one understood their place in society as part of the divine plan of God himself (Dreyfus, H& Kelly, S.D.2011:13). The order of things in a middle aged society was not questioned as members made sense of everything in terms of the divine plan of God; this was their way of life.
During this period, it was understood that God was the center of all existence and his will structures the universe and that all things were part of the divine plan such as on what basis one understood themselves in the society they lived in, but thoughts about who they want to be or become were seen unimaginable as everything was already structured (Dreyfus, H& Kelly, S.D.2011:14).
Before the scientific revolution, Ancient astronomers supported the Ptolemaic strategy that the earth was, just like God was understood in the middle ages as the center of the universe but with the rise of the Copernican theory it disputed the Ptolemaic strategy as an inelegant and