What was Descartes' project?

Answer 1

Descartes' project involves starting from scratch. He wants to begin by presupposing nothing. The fact that he finds himself believing something is not automatically a reason for thinking it true; neither is the fact that other people have believed it, no matter how many people, how firm their belief, how long they have believed it, or how highly regarded they are. Descartes will begin by taking nothing for granted. It may be in the end that the conventional sources of wisdom will be vindicated, but it will not do to begin by assuming that they are reliable; only a compelling argument can show that. Descartes proposes to conduct this investigation into the warrant for our beliefs by doubting everything until it has been shown to be an acceptable belief.

Surely it must have struck most of us at one time or other that such a project would be extremely valuable. It is often forcibly brought home to us that we believe a good deal that is false, and when this happens we become vividly aware that our procedures for discriminating truths from falsehoods are not very reliable, and long for a more adequate procedure. The project of pure inquiry may be motivated by what Alasdair MacIntyre has called an "epistemological crisis."

Such a crisis involves a discovery which forces one to reinterpret a great deal of evidence whose explanation one had felt certain one understood. One might, for example, suppose on what seemed compelling evidence that a certain person was one's friend. Despite all one's evidence it might one day become perfectly clear that this person did not care about one at all. Suddenly everything the person did would be seen in a new light: actions that had seemed spontaneous would now be seen as calculated and scheming; actions that had seemed signs of affection would now seem deliberately deceptive expressions of pure self-interest; actions that had seemed generous or selfless would now seem greedy and grasping.

This sort of experience can be profoundly unsettling. One may naturally be led to the quite dismaying thought that if one could have been so mistaken about this acquaintance, one could well be mistaken about any of one's acquaintances. (One could also have the further worry that one could be mistaken about all of one's acquaintances, but this seems psychologically less likely--and for good reason, since the possibility of error about every case does not follow from the possibility of error about any case. Compare: anyone now alive could become the last person on earth, but it could not happen that everyone now alive became the last person on earth.) It may well seem at such a time that the only alternative to the discovery of a foolproof means of distinguishing true friends from false is this sort of damaging wholesale skepticism.

One consequence of Descartes' determination to begin from scratch was a refusal to accept any belief on authority, and thus an increased emphasis on the importance of the individual in working out his or her own beliefs. (In this respect Descartes' influence might be compared with that of Luther a century before.) This was during a period in which the influence of the Church in matters of belief was still very strong: Descartes' principal philosophical works, the Discourse on the Method and the Meditations, were published in 1637 and 1641, respectively; it was only a few years earlier, in 1633, that Galileo was condemned and sentenced to life imprisonment by the Inquisition for maintaining that the Earth moved. (Indeed Descartes' knowledge of Galileo's condemnation led him to be fearful of condemnation by the Church; he went so far as to suppress his first scientific work, to have been called Treatise on the Universe. And it should be noted that Descartes did not mean to be subversive; indeed, he hoped that his views would become official Catholic teaching, and wrote a textbook (the Principles, 1644) in hope of furthering this end.)

Answer 2

Descartes' project was to establish a method of acquiring knowledge that would be certain and indubitable. He sought to doubt everything in order to arrive at foundational truths upon which to build his system of knowledge, famously encapsulated in his phrase "I think, therefore I am." His goal was to create a secure foundation for science and philosophy.