Descartes’ Dreaming Prisoner and the Desire for Certainty

a revealing metaphor ending the first Meditation

Fairly extensive attention has been paid in secondary literature on Rene Descartes to the extended analogy found at the end of the first of his Meditations On First Philosophy. This may be in part because, on the surface, it has all of the characteristics of a rhetorical embellishment, a facile comparison, simply reiterating what has been said before and providing a useful ending point for that first Meditation.

Another reason for this neglect may also be that this section comes after three intense and interesting sequences of increasingly problematic doubt, often (and quite naturally) taken to be the very core of the first Meditation. So it comes to be seen, or even ignored, as an afterthought, since it does not seem to deepen the earlier-articulated doubts.

Since the Meditations, like the Discourse on Method, presents the reader with a fictional composition that purports to represent and reflect Descartes’ actual thoughts and reasonings, this section may be ignored by some readers because it seems too carefully contrived, and in part, because the audience, in most cases, already has a good idea where the narrative is going.