Cartesian Methodology Applied to Personal Intellectual Growth

...Cartesian methodology calls for intellectual individualism; it emphasizes reason as the common possession of all men. The reason that people disagree is that their reason has been perverted by the wrong kind of education, or poisoned by superstition, or vitiated by preoccupation. Descartes held that all men had equal and natural ability to make sound judgments, and to distinguish the true from the false, until and unless these abilities were crippled or stunted by improper education or by acquiescence in traditional error and superstition.

Descartes used the analogy of a city at this point. If a city "just grows," by unplanned additions and accretions, it will inevitably become disordered and chaotic; but if the city, from its inception, is built according to a systematic and well-designed plan, it will develop in an orderly fashion. Descartes urged that each person should plan his own intellectual life, laying out the design for it as an architect might lay out a plan for a city; he urged that men recognize the unreliability of others knowledge, whether they were living or dead, and see that reliance on such knowledge would result in an unplanned intellectual life that would be as chaotic as an unplanned city. He wanted every man to be able to plan, to doubt, to rectify error, and to cultivate his own reason. If each of us could do this, he thought, the society in which we live would naturally be a good one.