Q&A: Descartes and Certainty
Descartes and Certainty
Question
Good evening!
Descartes was the first to ask in a methodical way how we know that thought and the senses really reflect reality faithfully. My question is: why assume at all that this is not the case? After all, in the end we do manage, on that basis, to function in the world. So what if there is no absolute certainty? Note that I am not asking how, after David Hume, science still works anyway. Rather, I am asking about the very search for absolute certainty.
Answer
He was not the first. There were already skeptics in ancient Greece (the Pyrrhonists, for example).
The question of why to seek certainty should be directed to whoever is seeking it. I am not seeking it, and I have written more than once that this search is foolish, unnecessary, and hopeless.
But the fact that we manage to function without certainty does not mean the search is unnecessary. We also manage to function without whipped-cream cake, without physics, without mathematics, and without literature and poetry. So are those unnecessary too?
Discussion on Answer
I understood that that was the question, and I answered it.
That was a different question: obviously one should investigate how we can know reality. My question was why, for Descartes, the mere fact that science works and that we manage to get along in the world was not enough. Of course the tools need to be refined, but why is certainty necessary?
By the way, I mentioned Descartes specifically because he was the first to doubt in a methodical way, not just in the sense of plain skepticism.