Doubt as a premise for an upright defence of rights. Critical view of cartesian philosophy

Abstract

We are living in times that show us a society that is too much, too much, abhorred and gregarious, comfortable, gullible, manipulable and directed towards its own admiration of its own intellectual disdain. To think critically about something today is not freely accepted by the official and factual powers who apply censorship with total impudence if the opinion expressed warns us of their calculated and dishonest intentions. Thus, we face a reality where either you think, repeat and abide by what they tell you to think, repeat and abide by, or you are stigmatized and persecuted as a social misfit (unsupportive, facist, ultra, sexist, homophobic, denialist, etc.). Any attempt to think differently, critically and objectively, if it goes against what is planned by the current powers, this is repressed through immediate censorship. The aim is to turn people into a submissive mass, obedient and happily subjugated to the external powers; the aim is to turn into accomplices of evil all that distracted and not very hard-working mass that seems not to be interested in the truth in their lives nor in the harm that can be done to them or their children. It is about making us live in society subjugated to an authority that is not our own understanding. Hannah Arendt said that daring to insert the self into the world and to begin a personal history is the power that philosophy fosters. Therefore, the best antidote to this social evil we face is to look again at the philosophy of rights. As such, the gaze we choose in this article, we look to René Descartes, whom, by the way, Hegel called a 'hero of thought'. Although with the nuances and criticisms that are developed in this work, the truth is that Descartes had the greatness of daring to question all the knowledge of his time, he dared to doubt everything. And this is not trivial, since those were times of the Holy Inquisition and the censorship of everything that was written; moreover, not long before, Giordano Bruno had been burned alive. Despite all this, Descartes had the courage to remove, with his works, that reality that forced the acceptance of a single truth and which few, if any, dared to challenge. I will begin by using a descriptive method and then, especially in the criticisms, I will prescribe my point of view on Cartesian philosophy, ending with its pertinent relation to law.
Keywords: Descartes, doubt, rights, submission, critique.