The Cogito Cul-de-Sac Pt. 4

This series is basically filler until I can educate myself to the standpoint of science (haha, little Hegel joke). Actually, I’m reading like a madman. Really. Lewis Carroll and Deleuze’s Logic of Sense are on my list…

Descartes’ heavily autobiographical first person narrative concerning his philosophical and scientific procedures is especially enticing. To identify with Descartes the human narrator is to take a step closer to accepting his conclusion and alleged foundation for scientific inquiry and general criterion for truth. As Copleston elaborates, Descartes holds that “I cannot be deceived unless I exist. The Cogito, ergo sum, provided it is taken in the sense of affirming my existence while I think, eludes all doubt, even hyperbolical doubt. It occupies a privileged position, since it is the necessary condition of all thought, all doubt and all deception.”(7) The positive existence of an empirically verifiable, yet seemingly immaterial, subject is the basic Cartesian starting point for doing science at the dawn of modernity. The body is also there for Descartes, but its role and existence among other physical things in a basically mechanistic world of automatism is subordinated to the pure subject of intellection, the subject which grasps itself in the intuition of the cogito.

What about this Cartesian conceptual split of the human being? Is it, in reality, a great idea to make such a deep and demonstrative formulation of a philosophical distinction, almost a complete division, between mind and body? It is on a point like this where Merleau-Ponty begs to differ with Descartes. For Merleau-Ponty, the body is the subject. There is no question of an elaborate connection between essentially different entities. A subject, for Merleau-Ponty, does not inhabit a body.(8) Now, Descartes did eventually have to face the fact of the obstinacy of the human body’s presence when it came to giving an account of the self as a thinking thing. His letters to Elisabeth of Bohemia provide evidence of his attempts to deal with the problem of mind-body dualism when pressed on the issue. He does not offer a very satisfying solution.(9) It is not always easy to put certain realities into words, let alone to know when one is actually perceiving clear and distinct boundaries when it comes to the fundamental ontological elements. Philosophers often try to do the best they can.

7. Charles Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy,
New York: Doubleday, 1994, Vol. IV, p. 96-7.

8. Cf. Charles Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy,
New York: Doubleday, 1994, Vol. IX, p. 399.

9. See Descartes’ letter to Elisabeth in his Philosophical Essays and Correspondence, Ed. Roger Ariew, Indianopolis: Hackett, 2000, p. 215-16.

Matter for Kant

I would like to write a paper, at least 25 pages, about theories of matter from Berkely to Kant. Obviously, I anticipate setting it up with the background of Locke’s views on matter; but I’d like to avoid getting into an infinite regress, so to speak,  concerning the entire history of materialism. Some of the questions I plan to address are: Why is it important to understand what Kant says about matter? From whose positions does Kant start in forming his own views on the status of matter? How do theories of matter develop in the historical progression from Berkeley to Kant? How does Kant’s theory of matter square with my own views?

The Cogito Cul-de-Sac Pt. 3

The sidewalk is seen, heard, smelled, and may even be tasted when it and what follows from its physical existence come into contact with the appropriate sense organs and faculties of sensation. Copleston adds:

In any case it seems true to say that for Descartes what is apprehended in the Cogito, ergo sum is simply the I which is left when everything other than ‘thinking’ has be thought away. It is, of course, a concrete existing I which is apprehended, and not a transcendental ego; but it is not the I of ordinary discourse that is to say, for example, the M. Descartes who speaks with his friends and who is listened to and observed by them… it is not precisely the I of the sentence, ‘I went for a walk in the park this afternoon.’5

What appears to occur is a pure apprehension of a thinking being simply by the action of thought itself. It is also important to note that Copleston affirms that the Cartesian ‘I’ is not simply a socially constituted and intersubjectively recognized locus of identity, nor is it the grammatical subject of an organized system of expressive signifiers, the universal or generic first-person singular pronoun of an established language.

The reality of the ‘I’ is independent in the sense that it is empirically verifiable each and every time the particular human subject thinks, which for Descartes includes such other activities as doubting, understanding, affirming, denying, willing, not willing, and feeling. It is the sheer proximity of an individual’s conscious awareness to these allegedly universal human activities that gives Descartes’ cogito such a powerful persuasive force. Descartes is looking for a “general criterion of certainty.” The cogito provides this in a basically direct intuition. He uses God as a mediator to assure clarity and distinction.6 Is there any better way to attempt to provide a general criterion of certainty than to express what is claimed to be the one particular indubitable truth, essentially able to be universalized simply by appealing to the individual as the sole performer of it?

5.  Charles Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy,
New York: Doubleday, 1994, Vol. IV, p. 96-7.