At this point, I am more intrigued as to why Descartes decided to ‘apply [him]self earnestly and freely to the general overthrow of all [his] former opinions’.

Could it be said that Cartesian scepticism is solipsistic and induces a state of ontological sickness? That we can only know our own existence and are forced to acquiesce to epistemic limitation. Was Descartes suffering with existentialist angst, proposing that his pain did not emanate from within, but that it is around him? Did he find it incomprehensible that a benevolent God would allow suffering to envelop this Earth? For a malignant God offers little reward in the afterlife. Pleasure for Descartes was ‘the pleasure to be gained from contemplating the truth, which is practically the only happiness in this life that is complete and untroubled by pain’ (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-ethics/.) Perhaps he was a man frustrated who felt isolated from society and his contemporaries; a man misunderstood and believing himself to be anomalous with the rest of the world. Except perhaps Princess Elizabeth of the Palatinate, and he wrote to her as follows (Virginia Woolf calls to mind):

‘I have even greater evidence of your powers ­ and this is special to myself ­ in the fact that you are the only person I have so far found who has completely understood all my previously published works. Many other people, even those of the utmost acumen and learning, find them very obscure; and it generally happens with almost everyone else that if they are accomplished in Metaphysics they hate Geometry, while if they have mastered Geometry they do not grasp what I have written on First Philosophy. Your intellect is, to my knowledge, unique in finding everything equally clear; and this is why my use of the term `incomparable' is quite deserved.’ (http://www.mun.ca/animus/2001vol6/andrews6b.htm: para.4).

OF THE THINGS WHICH WE MAY DOUBT (ALL 12)

What Is Wrong With Descartes' Philosophy?

Doubt,

Is doubtful,

With doubt,

Yet, it is doubtless,

That doubt,

Doubts doubt, although

I am doubtfully aware,

That I can't doubt myself,

And yet, I doubt it.