5.16 Commentary on descartes’ discourse on method and meditations

Descartes thought that learning for yourself would be better then learning from someone else, since people tend to have emotional influences. It is probably true that learning from the source when studying human behavior is going to be more efficient than learning from someone’s interpretation of the source if you use good judgment yourself. In the case of emotional observations (or observing human behavior) this is especially obvious because the people who preach have a tendency to pretend they know more than they actually do, or try to appear to be better than they are. In this emotional prejudice the truth can be altered from reality, or the source. As Descartes said, “Those who set about giving precepts must esteem themselves more skilful than those to whom they advance them” (pg 7). In other words, someone might alter the truth solely so they could come up with something to say, while the real truth might not be capable of being expressed so easily, it can only be observed. Some things in life are too complicated to express, but however there are going to be people who believe they can express those things, even though they cannot accurately do so. Even knowing your own understanding of the truth might not be completely certain, as you might distort reality or truth so it can be easier to understand, yet possibly not understood at the same time. However, someone’s version of the truth might help you to think about the things you have observed and make you better able to interpret reality for yourself – you just should remember that what they say might be wrong and that you need to rely on your own observations and empirical evidence to make certain of its truth. That shows how even something you label false might have elements of truth.

It is hard to assess the truth of many emotional circumstances, however, because emotions are not easily measured. For instance, if you are going to assess how much one person likes someone else, you cannot say, “this person likes that person with 60% passion”. You could take various factors of the relationship and analyze them, however for each one of those factors you are going to have an emotional (possibly wrong) opinion as to how much each of those factors weigh in. Dealing with emotional intelligence is basically dealing with an endless number of unknowns, only leading to more unknowns. The only thing to do would be to keep exploring unknowns until you find some minor degree of things you know to a reasonable degree are true. In that manner anyone’s idea of what is real could be very uncertain, and that is why it is best to explore reality for yourself. Everyone obviously takes information from reality for themselves, and they are living in the real world just like everyone else, however there can be degrees of separation from an actual experience. A clear example of that would be that you could possibly learn more about the truth better from someone directly then indirectly.