Descartes

Descartes focuses on widening his understanding of the world. He sets out to do this by (1) abandoning his previous preconceptions about right, wrong, and the like, (2) reading and travelling in order to expose himself to the most of what is available to him, and (3) rebuilding and refining his beliefs. Descartes begins by realizing that his teachers and his studies were biased on the whole; he rests with the idea that he “could discover much more truth from the reasoning that we all make about things that affect us and that will soon cause us harm if we misjudge them, than from the speculations in which a scholar engages in the privacy of his study” (11). On this note, he holds that because students are fed the ideas of their schools and teachers, they are not easily able to formulate their own opinions based on experience. He argues that “our judgments are [not] as pure or as solid as they might have been if we had full use of our reason from the moment of our birth, and had been guided by that alone” (13), thus he seeks to revise his judgments from their base. Descartes describes this process in four parts: (1) only accept what has been proven or is incontrovertible, (2) break the ideas down into separate parts, (3) reevaluate the parts from simplest to most complex, and (4) expose himself to ideas that may conflict with his, so that he can really see all that he has taken it all into account. After the end of these processes, after nine years, Descartes comes to the conclusion that his moral code – that is, what is most important to him – is to: obey laws, customs, and God; be firm in his actions and opinions; and control his desires (in a similar fashion to what Krishna would promote) by trying his best and accepting defeat.