Post from Karthik

A post from Karthik while he sets up his blog...

Descartes and Plato

I thought the Descartes primary reading was extremely interesting. My thoughts were all over the place when reflecting on it, but one main ideas caught my attention: the connection between Descartes and Plato, in regard to Descartes’s assumption that the physical world we perceive is false or unreal. The basis of Descartes’s writing is to understand the nature of the self in a world where everything else is false. He begins by assuming that nothing is real, and attempts to find substantial proof for his existence. He comes to the conclusion, later on, that the world around us is perceived by the mind: “We say that we see the wax itself, if it is there before us, not that we judge it to be there from its colour or shape: and this might lead me to conclude without more ado that knowledge of the wax comes from what the eye sees, and not from the scrutiny of the mind alone…And so something which I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact grasped solely by the faculty of judgment which is in my mind.” Thus, Descartes suggests that all perception is subject to the scrutiny of the mind. This reminded me very much of Plato’s idea of the truth, first metaphor, and second metaphor.

The tenet of Plato’s philosophy is that there is one original, intangible original of any object, that is created by God. It exists in the realm of thought, one that can’t be created. Any creation of replication of the thought, then, is simply a representation of the prefect original. Furthermore, he claims that human’s can’t recreate the perfect original which exists in this ideal realm; therefore, any representation of the original is a distortion of it. The distortions become progressively worse as more representations are made. This becomes very interesting when considered from a neuroscience perspective. For every object that we, as humans, see, it takes time for the light to reach our eyes, and time for our brains to send signals that unscramble the light into a meaningful object. In that time, the object has changed in some way, whether by age, or time. Thus, for every object we see, what we are actually seeing is only a fragment of it, it is only a representation of the original. Connecting this to Descartes, it begs the question that he attempts to answer: what is real? Is what we perceive ever the Truth? To be honest, when I first read Descartes, I thought his assumption that everything around us isn’t real was a little farfetched. When reflecting on it with Platonic thought and neuroscience, however, his assumption is correct. All that we perceive around us is in fact a false representation of the actual object, caused by the very limitations of our minds judgment. This ultimately provides weight to Descartes’s argument, the sign of life is the existence of thought.