How do we know the truths of life?
The beliefs of a rationalist is that only reason can distinguish reality from illusion and give meaning to experience. It is said by the rationalists that abstract reasoning can produce absolutely certain truths about nature, existence, and the whole of reality (9-3). A priori ideas or innate ideas are not based off of experience or observation, but ideas that within reason. Renee Descartes is a believer in the coherence theory of truth, which is when new and unclear ideas are evaluated in terms of rational and/or logical consistency with already established truths. The most important criteria for this theory is clarity and distinctness. Descartes said that his theory contains everything which gives certainty to the rules of arithmetic.
I have always been a person to question why things are done the way they are. Not because they are wrong, per se, but because we are told from the beginning that we should do things according to how society deems proper. Why? Things are changing day to day within society and we are changing our beliefs accordingly, based off of what we are told. According to Descartes's first philosophical work Rule for the Direction of the Mind, rule 3 advises that once we have chosen a subject to study, we should confine ourselves to what we can clearly intuit and deduce with certainty ourselves and that we must not rely on what others have thought. Though we can become "in a too absorbed study" of the works of earlier thinkers that we can become infected with their errors (9-3a). I've always wanted to learn my own lessons, since a very young age. I have listened to those who have earned my highest respects and heard of their experiences. I've taken them into deep consideration when experiencing things for myself, though, I want to get a clear understanding of why things happen the way they do and why I should or should not do them.
Far too often many of us seem to get "infected" by the errors of earlier thinkers by not examining them further. We believe that because they said it and they were respected, we must believe it. Descartes believed he could apply a mathematical method to problems, for example, he stated "a straight line is the shortest distance between two points" to prove less evident proofs (9-4a). He also stated in his Rules that we must not accept anything we can doubt. So, how do we know the truths of life? We don't, necessarily. We can, however, "reject" things we do not understand clearly until we can do our own research to obtain what we believe is a clear understanding of something. What Descartes believed is that if we have any doubt at all, we should not accept it as true. We also should not base our beliefs based on what we have been told, instead we should evaluate them thoroughly before believing that it is an absolute truth.
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