In Second Meditation in Volume VII of the standard edition of Descartes (AT VII), the meditator’s search for certainty leads to the conclusion of the kind of being she is, along with the conditions that support her existence, and how the nature of the mind is better known than the nature of the bodies. The meditator provides the readers with the wax analogy to give the readers a better understanding. What and how the meditator comes about to her reasoning about her existence, the defining of the word “I”, the analogy of the wax, the incapability of the senses and imaginations to grasp the pure knowledge, the reason why only the intellect can know will be discussed here, ending with the nature of mind being known better than the nature of bodies.

First, how the meditator reaches to the investigation of the piece of wax and what she is trying to prove by it will be explained. The meditator is trying to discover what kind of being she is, to make certain her existence, and to prove that the nature of the human mind is better known than the body through intellect alone. Initially, the meditator is searching for the certainty and discarding anything that can raise doubts. As “Archimedes used to demand one immovable point to shift the entire earth”, she wants to find one certainty (a point) to understand or be on path to understand further greater things (AT VII 24).

In order to find the certainty, the meditator implies that first everything must be rejected and built back up discarding the doubtful things (AT VII 18). The bodies, according to her, can be doubtful because the existence could be deceived by an evil deceiver (AT VII 22), the thing possibly deceiving her to believe and see everything being experienced at the moment. However, the meditator deduces that thinking and own existence are of certainty because whether thinking or deceived by the deceiver who made things doubtful to her, she must be thinking in order to doubt and that being a thinking being, to be deceived needs her to exist; if she doesn’t exist, the deceiver will not have her to deceive. From there, the meditator comes to the point to state “I am, I exist” but yet had no understanding of what the “I” is (AT VII 25). After considerable thinking, the meditator comes to conclude that the “I” is not just a thing that thinks, wills, and understands but also the thing which imagines and senses. The meditator states that such conclusion and knowing of the “I” wasn’t reached through imaginations or the senses and clarifies using the analogy of the wax.

By: Kaung

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