2. Rethinking the Cartesian “I”

There is perhaps no single philosophical idea more inculcated in the Western psyche than that of Cartesian Dualism. Indeed, it seems very likely that many of the contemporary discussions going around regarding the “mind/body problem” would be perfectly comprehensible to Descartes as the vocabulary in use is essentially his. Although the Cartesian model and its subsequent implications for our notions of the subject became a major part of the modern paradigm, it is not without its problems and critics.

The goal of the Cartesian project is to lay a permanent, universal foundation for knowledge. To achieve this, Descartes claims that we “cannot possibly go too far in [our] distrustful attitude”––better to have a method that excludes some truths, than one that justifies some falsehoods. Descartes started his line of reasoning by doubting everything, so as to assess the world from a fresh perspective, clear of any preconceived notion. The four precepts that characterise the Cartesian Method:

1. “The first was never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to comprise nothing more in my judgement than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt.
2. The second, to divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible, and as might be necessary for its adequate solution.
3. The third, to conduct my thoughts in such order that, by commencing with objects the simplest and easiest to know, I might ascend by little and little, and, as it were, step by step, to the knowledge of the more complex; assigning in thought a certain order even to those objects which in their own nature do not stand in a relation of antecedence and sequence.
4. And the last, in every case to make enumeration’s so complete, and reviews so general, that I might be assured that nothing was omitted.”

Descartes then applies the method to itself––challenging his own reasoning and reason itself–– in order to derive three things that are not susceptible to doubt and which support each other to form a stable foundation for the method:

1. that something has to be there to do the doubting (I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am ( i cannot doubt that I think)
2. The method of doubt cannot doubt reason as it is based on reason.
3. By reason there exists a God and God is the guarantor that reason is not misguided.

Thus Descartes discovers his first item of indefeasible knowledge, his famous cogito, ergo sum, “I think therefore I am.” This foundationalism allows for the expansion of knowledge from first principles.Descartes saw the universe as dividing into two types of entities: mental and physical. Following Aristotle, Descartes understood the universe as consisting of substances which have essential properties; the essence of physical reality is spacial is extension, while the essence of mind is thinking (any state of consciousness). For Descartes we are essentially thinking beings but we do have a body which is completely determined by the laws of physics; the mind is free the body is determined; the mind is indivisible but the body is infinitely divisible. Therefore mind is eternal while the body is mortal; we know our own minds in a way we cannot know the physical world. Each of us is innately aware of ourselves as a thinking thing, by an unmediated understanding I think, therefore I am. By posing this distinction between body and mind, physical and mental, Descartes was able to make room for science and religion to coexist thereby laying a large part of the foundation of the Enlightenment.

However, we have problems. How do these two domains, these two separate metaphysical realms relate to each other causally? how does the mind connect with the body and therefore, the external world; how can a nonmaterial mind can influence a material body? Descartes suggested that the pineal gland is “the seat of the soul”, or the place where the soul and the body connect. For Descartes the soul is unitary, and unlike many areas of the brain the pineal gland appears to be unitary as well; it seemed to offer a place where sensory stimulus could be unified––microscopic inspection reveals it is formed of two hemispheres. Descartes (incorrectly) believed that only humans have pineal glands, just as in his view, only humans have minds––thus the special nature of the pinneal gland is ‘proof’ that it is the point at which the mind and body connect. This also led him to the belief that animals cannot feel pain, and Descartes’ practice of vivisection––the dissection of live animals––became widely practised throughout Europe until the Enlightenment.

The “pineal solution” is problematic because its speculative and empirical nature seems to fly in the face of the first precept of methodic doubt; it is arrived at by guess work and intuition which contradicts Cartesian method. Some of Descartes’ followers tried to do away with this by suggesting that, in fact, there is no causal connection at all, that it is God himself who mediates our engagement with the physical realm. It is God who lifts our arm for us when we want it to go up or down. Hardly and improvement over the pinneal solution, the problems with this view are self evident.

Additionally, we ask ourselves : in light of this fundamental separation between mind and body, how do we reconcile the deterministic nature of the physical realm in which our bodies exist with the freedom of the will? Is free will merely epiphenominal in nature? The closest Descartes comes in responding to this is to claim that when we feel free we are free. Again by the rigourous methodic standards of his own method this does not seem sufficient as an explanation of such a fundamental problem. Given this separation between mind and body and the fundamental doubt we must maintain over the contents of our senses, we must now face the next problem of how we can know anything exists at all. Descartes deals with this in the following way: we can know true reality when we have clear and distinct ideas; God is good and perfect and as a result will only give us clear and distinct ideas (he is not a deceiver); the existence of God proves the validity of clear and distinct ideas; Clear and distinct ideas prove the existence of God. Clearly, these statements are not adequately defined or validated; the infuriating self validation of these propositions has been dubbed “the Cartesian Circle.”

From this we must logically continue by asking: how then do we know other people really exist? Can we make a compelling Cartesian case for the existence of other minds? The answer seems to be no. I cannot “know to be true” that anyone feels or knows anything at all. If I stick a needle into my thumb I feel pain; If I stick a needle into the thumb of the person next to me, I feel nothing at all––I can never observe or know someone else’s consciousness. Thus if we follow the Cartesian method we seem to be lead towards a scepticism with regards to the existence of other minds. Although it seems unlikely that this is a conclusion that Descartes would have desired, it does seem difficult to avoid a solipsistic end.

While responses to the problems have been discussing have been offered by the thinkers that followed Descartes––indeed, this has been one of the central tasks of modern philosophy––it seems that the crucial and lingering legacy of Cartesian thought lies in its revolutionary conception of the subject. In the 17th century, this conception laid the foundation for the modern idea of self and identity and set the mood––along with the thought of Bacon––for a new world of progress and mastery made possible by a new, radically humanistic perspective which objectified nature and, increasingly, humanity itself. As we noted above, the ontological model that results from Descartes’ method is dualistic: mind and body, internal and external; and this dualism favours the subject, the mind or the “I” as it is the seat of indefeasable knowledge. With Descartes the subject was no longer defined by ethics as it had been with Plato, Aristotle and Cicero; rather it became the locus of pure knowledge, uncertain of its relationship with the practical sphere of everyday life. Indeed, the modern idea of subjectivity owes much to Descartes as his dualist ontology penetrated deep in to the western psyche and has remained there despite the many criticisms of his method.

The last 250 years, however, have seen the emergence of diverse critical views of the Cartesian subject; but these critiques have not been with out problems of their own. For many contemporary critics, the various historical ideas of the subject are linked to power. The 17th century saw a philosophical movement towards the inner-self and away from the practical world. Descartes is seen as establishing a tradition which understands mental life as being contained inside the subject. Foucault claimed that this interiorisation of the subject was representative of a kind of rationality ‘designed’ for survival in the elite life of the courts; it separated public and private and delineated class and power. Merchant adds that this understanding of subjectivity contributed to the increasingly mechanised and emotionally detatched view of nature that had until then been viewed as living and female. And years before this, Marx too recognised the historic nature of Cartesian thought and understood that the social foundations on which is was based were shifting. Marx worked to establish a critique of subjectivity, pointing out that intellectual ideas are merely products of the conflicts of society; and claimed that what the Cartesian tradition––or philosophy in general––has taken to be human nature (the alienation of subjectivity) will be over come by communism which will place mankind in “the objective world.” The prophetic lucidity and immediate subsumption of the self into the larger reality of economic determinism which characterise Marx contrasts starkly with Freud’s claims that the ego, the conscious self, is essentially a construction of unconscious conflict between the id, reality and superego. Where Marx begins with the social conflicts that guide the historical consciousness of mankind towards a determined conclusion, Freud starts his study with the individual case of unconscious neurosis which can, through the development of general understandings via many case studies, be used to diagnose society and understand history––their deterministic claims about the fundamental nature of mankind rest in economics and psychology respectively.

Foucault’s contribution to the critique of the self does away with anything resembling human nature and views the subject as a construction; his project being the creation of “a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.” Under the name of “discipline” Foucault represents a number of cultural technologies which, when implemented by the appropriate institution, create the subject, and collectively the modern soul. For Foucault the subject emerges at the intersection of cultural discourses on power and develops historically.

For Derrida too, the Cartesian subject is an historical creation which is undergoing its historical demise; but for Derrida the self emerges out of language rather than power. Derrida’s critique of the Cartesian “I” is that Descartes does not distinguish between “pronouncing” and thinking, thereby implying that the two are the same. However, in Derrida’s view once committed to language, the statement “I think, therefore I am” immediately inserts itself within “a system of deductions and protections” which must presuppose an Other. Thus, because of the inherent uncertainty of interpretation and the instability of meaning, pure self cannot exist––the very idea of it disappears in to language.

Looking into furthrer into the past we must also consider that, for Aristotle, the distinction between mind and body would not have been understood in the Cartesian sense. Aristotle discusses the soul, but the soul is not seen as being distinct from the creature itself––it describes form and essence. Indeed, even for Augustine, whose inward retreat into Christianity and rejection of the desires of the body can certainly be seen as a precursor to Descartes, this mind/body distinction is not clearly defined. This is not to say, however, that Aristotle and Augustine did not believe in the emotions; there is never the sense that these emotions are simply and only products of the mind, rather they appear more like experiences of the world which are understood as modalities of being.

Although Kant made the distinction between the world and observer, he nonetheless refuted Descartes by introducing the phenomenal view of understanding experience. He posited that the world cannot be understood in any way other than how we experience it––any understanding of the world is necessarily phenomenal because all knowledge begins with experience which forms the fundamental intuitions of the mind. Hegel’s phenoemenology continues and attemps to complete the work of Kant. Abandoning the hierarchichal notion of inner and outer experience, observer and object, Hegel views experience itself as being in the world as phenomena of the mind; for Hegel, it makes no sense to draw the distinction of things in themselves because in order for the phenomenon experience to occur there can be no separation between the mind and the world––it is all ‘Spirit.’

Above all it is Heidegger who seems to stand in direct opposition to Descartes, providing the turning point between the contemporary and the romantic critique of subjectivity. Hiedegger, in a sense, returns to and develops the ancient understanding of experience as an immediate unity of being in the world through a critique of the notions of time and presence. If Descartes asserts that that Being is reducable to two substances, mental and physical, then it is Hiedegger who most directly opposes this dualism by offering a unified conception of being in Dasein.

HEIDEGGER BBC 1-7