Why Did Rene Descartes Do Not Exist

Descartes was a believer in God, but he decided to question everything he knew to find out if he was being deceived or if everything he knew was the truth. Before he proves that he exists, he must doubt everything that he knows. He even contemplates the idea of God being a deceiver because he feels that everything he senses is in someway a lie. He concludes that it is not God that deceives him, but there might be a more powerful “demon” that has the goal of deceiving him. Descartes proposes to himself to not let the demon deceiver win, and to find truth in every aspect of his life, no matter how hard it could be. To doubt everything in his life, Descartes must first prove that he exists, and that he is not nothing. To prove this, he has to
He realizes that all of his ideas and thoughts have objective reality, and some formal reality. His thoughts are able to have formal reality because his mind is a substance that can give reality to other ideas. His thoughts have formal reality because for Descartes mind is a substance, but they have less formal reality than his mind has. On the other hand, objective reality is present in the ideas of the mind. Most of his thoughts and ideas come from himself because he is able to give them the small amount of formal reality that they need to exist, therefore the Descartes mind always has more reality than his thoughts. Descartes says: “For just as the objective mode of being belongs to ideas by their very nature, so the formal mode of being belongs to the cause of ideas…” (28). This means that the cause of something will always have more reality than the result and that no object or thought can come from nothing because nothing has no reality. This leads Descartes to realize that there is an idea in him of a something that has all the formal reality, an object, person or thing that gives reality to everything. Descartes argues that if one of his ideas has more reality than him then it cannot come from him, then this means that his mind is not the only thing that exists. He knows that this cannot come from him because he is a finite mind, and the thing that contains all of the reality must be infinite. There is no way
People do not know why they are in there, but none the less, they seem to always follow it. Following Descartes arguments, people crave and need to figure out if the things that surround them are true. Due to this, people find themselves in the Cartesian Circle. The Cartesian Circle is the endless cycle that people enter when they are not sure if everything that is around them is true. They find themselves doubting everything, even their existence. Like Descartes they are lost and not able to find their way. But once they realize that they exist because of “I think, therefore, I am”, they are able to move on to believe that God exists. Once they realize that God exists, then they know that they cannot be deceived. Since the beginning they need to trust that God is real and that everything that He is telling them and everything that He created is true because He cannot deceive. The Cartesian Circle is the process of going through mind, thought, attribute and mode to get to the point were people realize that they cannot be deceived because God exists, and deceiving is not in his nature. To prove that everything that surrounds us is in fact true, it is necessary to go through these steps. This is why it is so hard to escape it, because people are always searching for the truth in everything and to find each truth they need to get to the idea that God exists, and from there, trusting this truth, they