Descartes Skepticism In Meditations

Descartes’s overall goal in Meditation one is to find certainty in a world full of deceit. To do this, he demolishes all of his prior knowledge to the foundations and rebuild. He is searching for one principle in life to be completely true no matter what. He is looking for that one certainty, that is free of any skepticism. Skepticism is like a nagging voice in the back of one’s mind, always telling them to doubt and question, to find everything that could be considered false. It makes one question even the simplest of things. Descartes uses two parts of his personality, Hopeful and Doubtful, to show his opinion of scepticism. Hopeful remains positive despite any evidence that contradicts what it thinks. And Doubtful is the side of his mind that finds any and every way something could be a lie, In an attempt to find an absolute
truth. To demonstrate his skepticism in the world he uses the argument that “for many years [he has] been sure that there is an all-powerful God who made [him] to be the sort of creature that [he] is,” (Descartes 2). His rationalization for this argument is that because the god made everything around them, that he could have in fact never made any of it deceiving him of his entire world. With this thought in mind it is logical or him to doubt everything, leading for his search of one absolute truth. In Meditations One, he does not meet his goal to find one absolute truth in the sense that he is skeptical about everything even absolute math facts. Skepticism helped him in his mental journey of finding the truth because it gave him the ability to think of every possible scenario that could be tricking him. In Meditations Two, through rationalism Descartes’s goal is to set aside anything that causes the slightest doubt as false until he finds certainty, or until he becomes certain that there is no certainty in the world.
Rationalism is the idea that reason alone is a source of knowledge and is separated from experience. Rationalism allows Descartes to think of all reasonable doubts and to find certainties. In Meditations One, his skeptical argument was that nothing must be real because everything is made by the same deceiving god, but with reasoning he can gain a certainty from that.
Descartes rational side having truly and so “thoroughly thinking the matter through [he] conclude[s]... this proposition, [he] is, [he] exist[s],must be true whenever [he] assert it or think it,” (4). To think he must exists and that can be certain. Even though the content he thinks about may be deceiving, he is still able to think making him real. This is a display of rationalism because despite what his senses were telling him he was able come to one absolute truth. Descartes was able to meet his goal to find at least once certainty with the help of
rationalism.