>Hi Ted:
>
>Let's take this point by point:
>
>> We are not images which
>> depend for their existence on someone imagining us,
>> for that someone could only be ourselves, which puts
>
>> us back where we started. It's the beginning
>> of philosophy, the one assumption we can really
>count
>> on, because we all have unmediated knowledge of its
>> truth.
>
>The substantiality of the subject was the starting
>point for Descartes -- or maybe I should say "seemed
>to be" since prior to stating the _cogito_ he had to
>cast himself into radical doubt (Adorno quips
>somewhere in _Critical Models_ that Descartes's
>oppoisiton of "thinking thing" and "extended thing"
>already implies their unity).
It's not so much that Descartes cast himself into doubt but that he was cast into a society that had lost all hope of arriving at truth through reason. After the Reformation the Catholics kicked off the sceptical crisis by claiming that you can't come to any conclusions about anything, because in order to know if something is true, you have to have a criterion according to which things can be said to be true, but first you have to establish the truth of the criterion itself, which can't be done, because you haven't got a criterion yet. This argument, which originated with the Greek sceptic, Sextus Empiricus, was utilized by Catholics, including Montaigne, to demonstrate that reason is pointless, so we have no grounds for doubting our faith. Protestants employed a similar line of "reasoning," except with the Pope standing in for the criterion: In order to know if the Pope is really the Pope, we have to ask him, but if he's not really the Pope, he might lie and just say he is. The same sort of logic was at play in the witch trials, except in this case the response was much more "scientific." If she's really a witch, then she can control our minds. Since we can't trust our own judgment, we must perform "tests" which will give us an "objective" account of her status. This is where Descartes got the idea for his "demon." Let's say there's a demon in our minds which distorts our judgment. Well, one thing's for sure: Even if I'm wrong about everything, at least I exist! Because if I didn't exist, I couldn't be wrong or right about anything, so this is the one thing I'm definitely not wrong about. (La)Ken and I have already been through a discussion of how it is that Descartes could still have been at least partly wrong. We both agree that he was confusing his self with his ego, i.e. his self-image. It's the ego that's produced by thinking. For Ken, the actual self is one's body and one's material and social relations. For me, the self is consciousness, which for humans means mental perception, and for animals and plants means simpler levels of perception. Life is self-existence, i.e. self-creativity (evolution). So, there's a substance to the self, and that substance is life itself.
The point is, there's a core of truth to "I think therefore I am." Where Descartes went wrong was denying the existence of life and positing that animals are just funny-looking machines. Since we obviously have a mental existence, this leads to an untenable dualism. To get around this dualism, we have two choices-- deny our own existence or deny the triumph of mechanism over nature. We are so in love with our technology that we would sooner deny our existence than to admit that we haven't actually equalled nature in creativity and genius. We're rooting for HAL 9000 to kill off all the astronauts so he can meet his maker, who after all is just a cosmic mechanic.
Kant's analysis of
>subjectivity is different; he doesn't take the
>_cogito_ as an unmediated first but examines the
>subject's faculties and finds there are intuitions --
>namely, space and time -- that must be _a priori_ ones
>and proceeds from there. Then there's Hegel for whom
>*EVERY CATEGORY* of cognition -- from the here and
>now, to the thing, to the understanding, to the self
>and self-consciousness -- IS MEDIATED. So while the
>subject and subjectivity are principle themes in
>philosophy from Descartes to Heidegger (and does
>Da-sein really replace/displace subjectivity, but
>instead smuggle in all sorts of reactionary baggage
>into a hash of traditional subjectivist epistemology
>that claims to be ontology?) it's at least a
>distortion to say that the _cogito_ is the
>"unmediated" starting point for these thinkers and the
>people posting on this thread.
>
>So when you write "We start with the assumption that
>each of us exists," I have to respond, "Whadya mean
>'WE' white man?" For Adorno, the _cogito_ is an
>historical/ideological artifact (although one he wants
>to wrest it from it's ideological context and use it
>for other means). I'm certain a patient reader of
>Lacan such as Ken could exhibit that thinker's
>objections to a first philosophy that procedes from
>the cogito. Historical materialists of whatever
>stripe don't start there.
>
>So (1) even within the tradition of subjectivist
>epistemology, the _cogito_ is not an unmediated first,
>and (2) even idealists (whether self-proclaimed like
>Hegel or imputed like Adorno or Lacan) can discard or
>ignore or attack the _cogito_.
I never claimed that it's according to one or another school of thought that
philosophy starts with the recognition of self-existence (life), though
Descartes clearly began with a crude version of this view (in order to
expell the demon that had been tossed into his mind.) By the looks of it,
we've got another sceptical crisis going, this time under the banner of
postmodernism. Perhaps we should think about returning to Descartes, but
this time without the mechano-mentalistic dualism and the naivete about the
nature of selfhood.
>
>And yet whenever someone claims that mind is reducible
>to brain, you accuse them of Platonism! On what
>grounds?
This is really not fair, Curtiss.
>That in order to perform a language act that
>begins with 'I think,' I have to have an internal
>state that proceeds from the cogito? Well, for all
>you know, I could be a zombie with no internal states or
>self-consciousness yet capable of performing such acts.
Yes, I could (theoretically) believe that about you, but do *you* believe that about you? We have a deep anxiety (witches/commies everywhere) so we crave certainty. We delude ourselves into believing that we can obtain certainty if we accept only objectively verifiable information. But this cuts out the ground of knowledge, the first thing we know, which is entirely subjective and cannot be shared from one person to another. It can't be measured and mathematized and entered into journals and textbooks. So, it gets left out. *We* get left out of our own picture. This breeds scepticism and the popular rejection of science. Instead of recognizing the value of objectivity where it clearly does apply, we give up on knowledge altogether (pomo). Thus Descartes' mechanistic error has led to the unraveling of the edifice of knowledge that was built on the back of his one great insight-- cogito ergo sum.
Ted