Introductory essay

Summary

‘I would not urge anyone to read this book except those who are able and willing to meditate seriously with me’, Descartes says to his readers in the Preface (p. 8, below), and he makes it clear that he means the Meditations not to be a treatise, a mere exposition of philosophical reasons and conclusions, but rather an exercise in thinking, presented as an encouragement and a guide to readers who will think philosophically themselves. Its thoughts, correspondingly, are presented as they might be conducted by its author – or rather, as though they were being conducted at the very moment at which you read them. Indeed, the ‘I’ who is having these thoughts may be yourself. Although we are conscious, in reading the Meditations, that they were written by a particular person, René Descartes, and at a particular time, about 1640, the ‘I’ that appears throughout them from the first sentence on does not specifically represent that person: it represents anyone who will step into the position it marks, the position of the thinker who is prepared to reconsider and recast his or her beliefs, as Descartes supposed we might, from the ground up.

This ‘I’ is different, then, from the ‘I’ that occurs in the Replies to the Objections. (Extracts from both of these also appear in this volume; how they came to be written is explained by the translator in his Note on the text, p. xliv.) In the Replies, Descartes speaks straightforwardly for himself, and the ‘I’ represents the author of the Meditations.