Redefining Self-Perception: Descartes vs. Classical Traditions

René Descartes signifies a unique change compared to ancient and medieval traditions in many ways. The ancient and medieval traditions consist of ideals of which people impose meaning on things. These classical traditions also consist of how a person identity starts from outside of the body and the works its way inwards towards a complete person. Those traditions had a perception that humans began to analyzes themselves outside of themselves first before they analyze themselves internally. Descartes challenged the ancient and medieval traditions by having a different perception of how he came to know things. Descartes, instead of imposing meaning on things, he would derive meaning from things. He also challenged the classical traditions because

This is a change from ancient and medieval traditions, like Aristotle, because Descartes does not focus externally on a soul or on an external thing that is using the human body; rather Descartes believes that the body is used to give us perceptions but that we cannot always trust these perceptions while seeking the truth (Brown 156). Descartes explains that “... our senses sometimes deceive us, I wish to suppose that nothing is just as they cause us to imagine it to be… I resolved to assume that everything that ever entered into my mind was no more than the illusions of my dreams” (Brown 156). Descartes also mentions that he does not believe all things are false because of his existence, he thought “... remarking that this truth ‘I think, therefore I am’ was so certain… if I only ceased from thinking, even if all the rest of what I ever imagined had really existed, I should have no reason for thinking that I had existed. From that I knew I was a substance the whole essence or nature if which is to think” (Brown

Saint Augustine explains in his work, The City of God, “... the one who lives according to God and not according to man, ought to be a lover of good, and therefore a hater of evil. And since no one is evil by nature, but whoever is evil is evil by vice, he who lives according to God ought to cherish toward evil men a perfect hatred… hate the vice and love the man” (Brown 106). The classical traditions impose meaning from what they interpreted to be good and what they interpreted to be evil. Descartes signifies a change in this tradition because he believes that meaning is not imposed on things but rather meaning is derived from things. Descartes expresses this tradition by explaining the human relationship with God. He first describes things that could not exist without human nature, “as to the thoughts which I had of many other things outside me, like the heavens, the earth, light, heat, and a thousand others, I had not so much difficulty in knowing whence they came, because, remarking nothing in them which seemed to render them superior to me” (Brown 157). He expresses that these things have the same equivalence or less of an equivalence to his existence. These ideas that are less than Descartes could be ideas that came directly from Descartes himself. He notices