/lit/ - Literature

>>16192263
No, that's all of Descartes and modern philosophy that it is not! It is not because you are you and it is you who decides, in all the systems that you believed, in all the doubts that you had, you were at the beginning all along!

But I can't convince you, that's the point. You have to meditate by yourself, because to come to believe it ('believe' isn't the right word), you have to start from yourself, because you are the provider of truth. That's why Descartes called his book the meditations, and that's why it's so peculiarly written and always in the first person. It's just a hint, the meditation is yours to accomplish. The Kingdom is within you, so only you can free yourself. Etc.

>>16115384
That's what you'd believe if your higher education consisted in youtube videos. Read up on the French Third Republic's school system (1870-1940).

OP here, thanks for all the replies. Could someone answer my question though? I'm not so interested in having a summary of the dogma thrown at my face without source. Thanks.

>>16034884
Cynicism doesn't make you happy and that's enough of a rebuttal if you've read Descartes. Engage with what beauty you can contemplate down here using sports, physics, sex, music or whatever. Among other things this will build a sense of the worthiness and dignity of the human type which built makes you ready to engage with philosophy. In the meantime you can just look into your own experience and history and recognize that the so called Machiavellian types are always just people with a pathology.

What to read about losing one's sense of identity to the point of being disconcerted when looking at mirrors? Other than Hamlet.

That is, Descartes is striving to establish a basis for all knowledge for the second time (though the first time, in the Discours, wasn't serious) and what he found he needed was to emphasize the I, the subject! That's the finesse of it: the source of objectivity, the basis of knowledge is in you Descartes says. Slightly out of subject but this is spelt out in the third meditation (cogito is in meditation 2) with his first proof of the existence of God, which truly is a thing a beauty. God, he says, exists, because I can conceive of him, and since I am lesser than the idea of Him (for instance I am finite while he is infinite), the idea must have been put in me by something that is not me and that I henceforth call God. This is a very difficult argument of course but the essential thing, for what I'm explaining here, is the idea of the proof, namely it's a PROOF FROM WITHIN.