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Author
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Topic: Putting Descartes Before the Horse (February 2001)
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Dave Thomer
Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy
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posted 02-04-2001 10:08 PM
   
The February Philosophy update is now up. |
Pattie Gillett
True Believer
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posted 02-04-2001 10:10 PM
It’s no wonder so many modern philosophers (with the exception of our fearless webmaster ) are such heavy drinkers. How else are they supposed to handle stuff like this and fight the urge to reach in and strangle their own gray matter?
I admit that while I’d rather have Rush Limbaugh give me a root canal while espousing his thoughts on what’s wrong with society than read most philosophy textbooks, I have a soft spot for Descartes. It’s probably no coincidence that he’s the one I find most lucid and least likely to lapse into “hey I’m a philosopher, watch me make words scream in pain” jargon. Plus I always relate Descartes’ statement to a weird sort of game I played as a kid. Maybe you played it, too.
Think back: your imagination has been in overdrive. You’ve been doing some heavy-duty pretending. You’ve been Superman, He-Man, a Smurf, whatever. You’ve been really into your role in that way that only a kid and maybe Robert DeNiro can be. Now you’re back. And you realize this is you. You can’t really step out of you. This is the name you are always going to have, this is the body you are always going to be in. Pretend all you want on the outside, but inside stays you. What if you wanted to leave? Can’t do it. You can change your hair, clothes and your face, but there’s only so far in you can go. Now you have a headache and you have to go look for some chocolate milk.
Anyway, that’s what always made Descartes easy for me to understand. If everything on the outside could change but I was, more or less, stuck with me, I must be the only thing I’m sure of. I’m sure Dave will say this is a pretty negative way at understanding Descartes but he’s the one that had the poor guy disappear into a puff of logic.
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Kevin Ott
True Believer
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posted 02-04-2001 10:12 PM
My own way of dealing with the universe has always seemed pretty Cartesian to me. The only thing I don’t have to have faith in is the fact that I exist, I figure, since I know I exist simply because I have the ability to know. So I’ve got to take everything else on faith – the fact that what my senses tell me is happening is actually happening, the fact that other people around me exist, the fact that I’m sitting here typing a response on a keyboard to an article that someone named Dave that I’ve known since high school wrote, and not hooked up to a giant machine somewhere with Keanu Reeves spitting out gross orange stuff and pulling cables out of his neck in the pod next to mine.
So I take that to what seems to me to be a natural conclusion, which is having faith in the people around me. In a way, I think of my friends and neighbors and co-workers and telemarketers that call during dinner in the same way that most people think of God: They do really great things, sometimes they do awful things and we can’t understand why, but they’re wonderful and beautiful and if I just continue to have faith, they’ll make a great world for me. In a lot of ways, they – and the world I also have faith in – already have.
Life is pretty good, when you think about it.
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Dave Thomer
Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy
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posted 02-05-2001 02:12 AM
What's cool about Descartes is what you guys have both picked up on -- the being-sure-of-yourself part. (There's some great stuff about personal identity in your response, Pattie, that we might want to start up another thread for, to parallel the What Does It Mean to Be Human thread.) It is a nice bit of reassurance, and it also demonstrates how any kind of philosophical argument or investigation has to begin from the starting point of our most immediate observations.Where he runs into trouble is where he goes after that. Kev, you talk about faith, which I think is great. In fact, I think that what the last several years of philosophy have proven is that ultimately any argument rests on some initial unprovable assumptions -- and for those, you have to have faith. (There are a bunch of people, many of whom I work with and respect a great deal, who disagree with me here, but I can't see any way around it.) But that wasn't good enough for Descartes. He was convinced that if he couldn't prive everything beyond all possible doubt, there was no point in going forward. And that's when I think you start needing the heavy drinking.  |
slgorman
One of the Regulars
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posted 02-05-2001 03:59 PM
Slightly tangential (surprised, much?) to Pattie's "I'm always me" comment--and when you're trying your hardest to not be yourself (c'mon, we've all done it at parties, work, school, dating, etc.) who is the one and only person in the universe that always knows you are faking it? Yourself. I am famous for this, I've faked out friends' parents (an actually hobby of mine in high school, but I digress), people I've dated, co-workers, the lady behind the counter at McDonald's, lot of people. Not in mean, evil, underhanded way, let me clear that up right now. Just in that "I wish I was a better person" or "I'm really cool" way. I have a little theory on why this never actually ends up working in the end, and it's because deep down, you are still you and you know it. Then whole house of cards comes tumbling down. Hence my personal philosophy of just being myself, everyone else be damned. Because in reality, I'm the only person in the world who will always have to live with myself, so I'd better not waste valuable time trying to trick myself into thinking I'm something I'm not because I will always know the truth--I'm me no matter how much I may not want to be at the time. And nothing will change that. |
Ray Bossert
One of the Regulars
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posted 02-09-2001 02:24 PM
Call me the evil skeptic, but the cartesian notion of self-awareness guaranteeing self-existence does not seem entirely convincing to me.
It's a bit circular, no?
At least from a symbolic language standpoint it doesn't hold any water.
"I think therefore I am" already assumes an I to do the thinking. One has to already buy into some subject, which we don't even know how to express, to perform the action before one can even approach the action.
It is simply a matter of the fact that an action is being done...he isn't using the Latin infinitive. We don't translate it as "To think; therefore, I am." Indeed, such a statement makes little sense and does not demand a logical conclusion.
That thought occurs, thought being that event which inspires my action, proves that something exists...but not an "I".
Especially not if the "I" that we think is thinking is merely perceiving thinking and not having a thought at all.
Now, assuming that Descartes includes perception with thought (it's been six years now, so I'm a little rusty), "Perception exists; therefore an 'I' exists" seems a more palatable modern adaptation on this theme. But even so, it does not prove that the "I"...this kind of personal spirit exists.Yet I'm not even sure this proves that "I" exist. Just because I think I perceive thought still doesn't mean that there is some personal self perceiving it. To be total materialist, why can't this self-perception simply be the brain simply projecting thought for its millions of cells to deliberate on? Or in a wholly spiritual sense, what if what we think we perceive is really the perception of some higher, master oversoul? I know I'm talking pretty whack right now, but since we have here a Descartes who is toppling skepticism, I'd like to see how he overturns these skeptical questions. |
Dave Thomer
Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy
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posted 02-09-2001 02:44 PM
Well, to start off, I think you've hit on a major problem with the thought experiment. The exercise of doubting everything requires the use of concepts that were learned through the process of experience; Descartes and I think others like him assume that the rules of logic and mathematics could be developed by a mind without any investigation of the world, but frankly I find the notion silly. So there's one problem: Descartes makes implicit use of the experiences that he explicity doubts.Also, it should be said that in the Meditations, what Descartes says is "It must finally be established that this pronouncement 'I am, I exist' is necessarily true every time I utter it or conceive it in my mind." The cogito we all know and love is something of a paraphrase from the Discourse on Method. And yes, it does assume an 'I', because the question at hand is "what perceptions of mine can I trust?" I don't believe it's truly possible for me to assume I don't exist. I'm not saying the Western-defined sense of self that Descartes was using is the only option, but it strikes me as close to impossible that one could be aware of the thought process "OK, I don't exist . . . if anything's thinking these thoughts, it isn't me" and not believe there's some kind of contradiction there. quote:
To be total materialist, why can't this self-perception simply be the brain simply projecting thought for its millions of cells to deliberate on? Or in a wholly spiritual sense, what if what we think we perceive is really the perception of some higher, master oversoul?
In this case, I think you need to be able to articulate these questions without using phrases like "what we think" or "self-perception", becuase they imply a self to be perceiving. There's nothing saying that the individual I perceive myself to be might not be part of a higher consciousness, but that wouldn't eliminate my existence as an entity. However, these are nits. Your points are good ones. The thing is, I wanted to let Descartes play on the field he designed. In that case, his proof of his existence works out OK. The problem is, he gets trapped within his own mind, because he's destroyed all the connections between himself and the world he lives in. Which is, to me, the larger problem in Descartes' writings. | |
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