Well there is Faith which is a very different thing from Descartes cogito. The cogito acts more as a beginning point..there is nothing more certain, there is no truth I am more certain of, than that "thinking is" (never mind whether or not there is an I doing it) and radiating out from that most absolute certainty all else is less certain, that is I am less certain of all truths beyond that truth or contingent upon that first truth.

Certainty is subjective.
Truth is objective.
The first truth Descartes was certain of was that there was thinking going on. And this thinking he wrongly or rightly attributed to some I. But that thinking might just as well be attributed to something more inclusive than the I. We need not trust anymore in the subjective I than in the intersubjective WE.

---------- Post added 05-11-2010 at 04:08 AM ----------


Maybe he didn't.

One kind of certainty is subjective. "Certainty" in the sense of confidence that a proposition is true. But a different kind of certainty is objective. "Certainty" in the sense of the impossibility of error. They should not be confused.

Descartes was certainly talking about the second (objective) kind of certainty. He was not interested in the first (subjective) kind of certainty.

He was a rationalist so I would argue that the Cogito was the center of certainty for Descartes. To be even more critical, Descartes might have even placed certainty in the realm of God, as it was his belief that God places the knowledge of the outside world into our Cogito, thus creating certainty.

This is why dualism cannot work without some type of function for the word God. I use it to function for inter-subjectivity.

Most things are in God's realm. Certainty probably the least of them. What else you write here may, for all I know, be true. But, I really would not know.

By the by, Descartes was certainly a Rationalist, but paradoxically, he was certainly not a rationalist.

This is the essence of rationalism, you can come to certain truths without the need of experience, .

Now that spring is here, I suppose I will be doing garden-work, and I understand that a heidigger is a useful tool, so I suppose I will get one.

A Heidegger is not a useful tool, even in a garden. Or perhaps especially in a garden.

Understanding Dasein allows for the ability to abstract this concealed understanding or experience of reality, and overcome the ontic, inauthentic, existence that we have been left with since Descartes.

Without inter-subjectivity, you can't reach an objective truth.

That's Rationalism, not rationalism.

Yes. I realized that as soon as I tried to use it. It has no function (as you would expect). It is a scam. (The term, I believe, is 'heidigger").

Prior to Descartes' idea of a closed Cogito separate from the exterior world, ideas of consciousness were described under the term soul, and the soul was always something that was developed within a community and never isolated from the exterior world. Descartes unsuccessfully left philosophers in either solipsism or naive materialism, and both had drastic effects on the attitude of the entire Western Culture.

Prior to Descartes was St. Augustine who wrote:

In respect of these truths, I am not at all afraid of the arguments of the Academicians, who say, What if you are deceived? For if I am deceived, I am. For he who is not, cannot be deceived; and if I am deceived, by this same token I am. (City of God, Book XI, Ch. 2)

Where we find words reminiscent of the Cogito, closed and all. The idea of a private person in society, but still independent of society, is much older than Descartes. In fact, it might even simply be true!

This will be a little about Cartesian ideas in relation to Heidegger. It is no way exhaustive. I hope it isn't going to derail the thread, but more positively, hope it may highlight a number of concerns raised by Kennethamy whose pertinent questions I don't think have always been clarified as charitably as they could have been.

Okay. I think one of Heidegger's main critiques is to tweak out a basic structural problem in Cartesian philosophy per se (which can also be traced in the likes of Searle, Husserl, Satre, and good, old fashioned A.I.). It is about the relationship between the external world (res extensa) and the human mind which contributes meaning, intentionality, function predicates, and so on, (res cogitans), to that external world.

After drawing our attention to some of the more fundamental problems and misconceptions this perspective has in trying to understand the world (see section 12 and 13 of Being & Time), he moves on to critique the Cartesian notion of Spatiality, or Spatial Contiguity, viz. the subject-object relationship.

Heidegger never says it is wrong to understand the world in these terms, in fact, in many practices, such as the sciences, it is really quite the best thing to do. H's critique is that this perspective just misses out too much detail. It is too simple, too elementary to grasp human existence and comprehension in and of the world. For H, ontologically speaking, humans do not construct an understanding-interpretation of the world from the Cartesian position alone, namely, that of theoretical contemplation and cognition of substances.

Humans are already "absorbed in the world" (P80.54), plunged into it, so much so, that any talk about putting ourselves into the Cartesian position and say, giving function predicates to substances out-there, and then thinking we have arranged all our ontological knowledge, or the vast array of common-sense and coping knowledge "is misleading" (p96.67).

In the early chapters of Being and Tiime, Heidegger maintains that whatever we're going to talk about, we are already-always in the world. We are coupled to it, coping with things, doing things, using things and not always thinking about it. To this extent, we, as babies, children and adults, have pre-theoretical understanding; precognitive, unthinking yet extremely skillful and yet ruleless ways of going about much of our coping business; we have intelligibility; know-how of things without the need to know-that or to be contemplating stuff; we have skillful coping and skillful thinking without needing to intellectually understand what is going on. We have a way of dealing and coping in the world which is not something always believed or with formal rules or carried out with much if any thought. This is the background which H believes 2000 years of philosophy have completely overlooked.

So, of the Cartesian mind-body dichotomy? If it positions itself as if there were some self-sufficient (Descartes) substance called mind who like some transcendental god-thing, could be a detached observer of the world, who contemplates his ball of wax (Descartes), his billiard table (Hume), or his ship moving down river (Kant), and then writes up his reflections into the persuassion that he has significantly come to understand the world, is incomprehensible, a bewitching metaphysic, simply because being in the world is the essence of human existence. We, the mind, can never step out of it, never be the spectator as such, the closed off Cogito, simply because we are always-already an actor within it. It is the persuassive notion of a Cartesian spectator which according to H, has distorted much understanding of ontology and human existence in the world.

Hope this has helped to some degree :popcorn:

Thanks a lot MMP2506. I guess you're right, and I hope I haven't messed up your discussion. I think I was mainly trying to address the question Kennethamy raised back on page 3 (I think) about the rough ground which accordingly wasn''t being clarified enough. I immediately - and perhaps wrongly - interpreted this notion of rough ground as H's background and have tried to give a little clarification of it. Why it is important and how it acts as a cornerstone to H's critique. I was also under the suspicion that perhaps the cogito-mind was gradually being understood as some kind of closed off, self-sufficient, independent entity and tried to raise the suspicion that after H's critique it perhaps isn't too helpful to think in these terms, even if clothed in other disguises, namely, those of the normative-capitalist-liberal understanding of "private person", "independent of" etc (page 5). I don't know anything about Merleau-Ponty, or very little, but one day will try to make my way through something by him. As I understand, H didn't really ever mention the body and M-P tried to get this back. Thanks again, MMP for your kind words.

Prior to Descartes was St. Augustine who wrote:

In respect of these truths, I am not at all afraid of the arguments of the Academicians, who say, What if you are deceived? For if I am deceived, I am. For he who is not, cannot be deceived; and if I am deceived, by this same token I am. (City of God, Book XI, Ch. 2)

Where we find words reminiscent of the Cogito, closed and all. The idea of a private person in society, but still independent of society, is much older than Descartes. In fact, it might even simply be true!

The quote comes from Book XI Ch 26.
The chapter's title is intriguing "Of the Image of the Supreme Trinity, Which We Find in Some Sort in Human Nature Even in Its Present State."

Augustine is talking about the Trinity as reflected in human nature. This trinity is Existence, Knowledge of Existence and the Love of Both.

The Cogito really only covers two of these three. Existence and knowledge of existence.

But Augustine says that "the love of both" is of "equal moment"

"And when I love these two things, I add to them a certain third thing, namely, my love, which is of equal moment." - (Augustine same chapter)

Love or "charitas".

In Heidegger it is usually translated as "care".

Have you ever looked into the philosophy of Duns Scotus? His philosophy of being was instrumental in Heidegger's development, and he uses "Being" much in the same way as Augustine and Heidegger.