Daily Inspiration Quote by Rene Descartes

Descartes opens his Discourse on Method by flattering everyone and skewering them at the same time. “Common sense,” he suggests, is the only resource no one believes they lack. It’s a sly bit of social psychology dressed as egalitarian comfort: even the perpetually dissatisfied consumer of everything else somehow feels fully stocked with judgment. The line works because it weaponizes a polite premise (reason is universal) to expose an impolite fact (self-assessment is wildly unreliable).

The subtext is a setup for Descartes’s entire project. If each person is convinced their reasoning is sufficient, then “common sense” can’t function as a credential. You can’t build knowledge on the mere feeling of being reasonable, because that feeling is precisely what everyone shares. The remark quietly undercuts tradition, authority, and the everyday confidence of “I’m just being rational” long before he introduces methodic doubt. It’s not just a joke about arrogance; it’s an argument for why a rigorous method is necessary in the first place.

Context matters: Descartes is writing in a Europe still tangled in scholastic inheritance and religious conflict, where claims to truth were often defended by pedigree or piety. By pointing out that satisfaction with one’s own judgment is universal, he clears the stage for a different standard: procedures that can be checked, repeated, and disciplined. The mathematician’s sensibility shows through: feelings of certainty don’t count; only a method that survives scrutiny does.