It goes without saying it’s just my personal review

I guess I have to make a few compact explanations about what this book is actually about before I begin.

Discourse of method is a few meditations -meditations here means chapter- that Rene Descartes, known as father of modern philosophy, made when he tried to create a method on how to acquire absolute truth. So that if everyone adopt his method, they can’t be fooled anymore, they can differentiate right from wrong, true from false, etc. Like for example, how can we be sure that something exists, not just an illusion? How can we be sure that our eyes don’t deceive us?

There’s lots of points I would like to make about this book. So I will make a list.

• My first impression

It’s a very difficult book to read. For a few first times I read this book, I barely understood what he was trying to say. To be honest I thought when he wrote this, he was on his own world, detached from reality. Which after finishing the book, I guess that’s kinda true, which I will explain later.

• Situations where reading this book becomes easier

To my surprise, this book is easier to read when you’re almost asleep, like your consciousness is between dream and reality, then you start to assimilate with Rene. I read the book as if I was him writing about this book.

It’s because this book is definitely like someone who ‘s sleepy or drunk. One thing he talks about A, and suddenly at chapter 5 he talks and explains about anatomy which has nothing to do with how to acquire truth.

To understand him better, you have to read this book, when you’re not a busy man, when you’re in your free, really free time, when you’re in a safe space, and when your survival instinct is turned off. Because from what I read, that’s how I imagine Rene is doing, which makes sense after learning more about his upbringing – being rich af.

• Rene Descartes is like me

When reading his writing, I feel like I resemble him a lot. First of all, he wasn’t a very good writer. That’s why the book is hard to read. It is understandable as he made a disclaimer that actually he wanted to make a method “only” for himself to pursue the truth. And there are a lot of other disclaimers in this book. And finally it made sense to me that reading this book is easier when I enter his mind and read from his point if view.

The second way he resembles me is that I catch the vibe that he is a kind of person that doesn’t like to be criticized. By making lots of disclaimers, he remove readers’ opportunity to criticize him, as he already know where he’s wrong at and point that out first.

Third, I strongly think he’s an INTP just like me. A lazy thinker. Which after one google search, apparently I’m right.

• Rene Descartes may fool the world but oh no not me

One of the most famous controversy of Rene is that by using his method, he concludes that God must exist because humans are imperfect, therefore there must be a more perfect being which is God. First of all, lazy. Second of all, I don’t believe someone with the thinking capacity of Rene make such poor argument, especially when it’s about God.

Therefore, I strongly suspect that during the time of his writing, for his writing to be able to be publicly accepted, he must have inserted the prove that God exists through his method. That way even the church might help him distribute his meditations. Needless to say I think he’s at least an agnostic. The kind of God he believes in is Spinoza God. In sixth paragraph of chapter 4, he mentioned something that he deemed is perfect, which is the quality of God, they are: limitless, eternal, unchanged, all-knowing, and all-powerful. When I read those, that’s the universe! The same kind of God that Buddha taught us. Not the kind of God that gets angry, sad, jealous, and tests humans for his belief.

• I think, therefore I am

This is the most famous quote from his work. We exist because we think. If we don’t think, then we don’t exist. I once read a disagreement from someone about this famous quote. They say that something could exist even if it doesn’t think. But to me, Rene is right.

Imagine the world, the vast universe. There’s no doubt it exists. But then imagine there’s no subject, there’s not a single thing in this universe capable of thinking. Only rocks and gases, no observant at all. Nothing. Then does that universe exist? Something exist because it enters someone’s mind. If there’s no “someone” to know something exist, then isn’t that thing the same as not existing?

That’s why at first, I thought Rene was just a lazy person who has too much free time to think about unimportant things. Then the next thing I know I feel like he is a strong thinker, just a bad writer – that my judgement remains unchanged. And I must acknowledge that his work doesn’t have any real world application since his method on how to acquire absolute truth is impractical, it could took eternity to acquire truth. But when I enter his mind, I know that even though it’s impractical, Rene must be satisfied to have found the method to do that.