Well Here Goes Nothing...

I have never written a blog before so I’m really nervous. I’m also not very good at explaining things. It always appears to sound better in my mind and then it turns to crap when I actually write it out. Anyways, I’m going to give this a try so just bear with me.

I had a lot of trouble understanding some of Descartes’ writings so I broke down the parts that I did know and went from there. I thought that Descartes was stating that it’s harder for the people who have no faith or nothing to live for to find it harder to believe that the soul continues to go on long after the body has died in the part labeled number 2 of the first page starting with “for although to us the faithful…neither by the fear of God nor the expectation of another life.” But it seems that he second guesses himself further down in the paragraph when he states “we seem to be admonished that all which can be known of God may be made manifest by reasons obtained from no other source than the inspection of our own minds.” He brings up the idea that God and religion is just all in our minds. He also talks about how faithless people want physical proof of God and Heaven. I find that physical evidence is impossible to show because the only way for people to truly see God is when they pass away and travel to Heaven and meet him there. As far as we know, no one has ever returned from the dead to tell us that he’s real. I believe that physical proof can be found in us as well. Miracles happen every day. People walk away from terrible accidents that should have claimed their lives without a scratch. People that we thought had an incurable disease will just go to the doctor one day and find that the illness is completely gone and they are not sure how.

He wants people to forget everything that they know and drop all the knowledge that they learned through experience, school, and mentors. I don’t see how anyone could actually cut all the strings of their mind to start fresh on an issue. The First Meditation discusses how we can become alien with something over time. Even if it is something as familiar as our hands that we use to complete tasks every day. If we focus on the idea that the hand is alien then it will eventually look and feel completely alien to us. He also talks about how dreams can feel real as well. I agree with him on how he describes dreams as almost real yet they can become very unfamiliar. Dreams can be so familiar and people, places, and things that we see everyday usually appear in them. But dreams also can feature unfamiliar people and places and even events sometimes. I feel that we have yet to truly understand dreams and where they come from exactly.

Descartes seems to do a complete turnaround in the Second Meditation. He starts to experiences many doubts. The paragraph starts out with “The Meditation yesterday has filled my mind with so many doubts.” He compares his fall to being trapped in deep water and that he cannot touch the bottom or simply float on the water. His moment of doubt only seems to last for a few paragraphs. He seems to finally come to a conclusion in section 6 of the Second Meditation when he states that he is a “thinking thing.” He lists what a thinking thing does and states that we have thoughts and doubts and feelings and we can refuse and have denial and agree. He just lists all of these amazing things that we, as people and thinking things, can do and will do. He also says in the tenth section that our minds do wander and allow us to come up with many ideas, true or untrue. I like how he concludes that we should just leave our minds to wander.

I’m not sure if I have this right or not, but I would like to think that maybe I understood just a little bit of it. And I feel like I just wrote a novel so I guess I need to work on that. At least I know that I made it through my first blog! =)

P.S. I commented on Amy Smith’s post.