Do you agree with Rene Descartes Meditations?

[Maffei]

Since the beginning of Meditations Descartes wants to find the better way to approach reality in the highest level of certainty. That is, one can't simply pressuposes the existence of what is observed and then just keep on as if it was obvious. We use to do it automatically as a presumption, and what I think is interesting about him is how he is rigorous with things we are not used to doubt.

So he goes on step by step with the proof of his own existence as a thinking thing (cogito) and later with the proofs of God to guarantee that the things presented to thinking things have not its origins in supposed non-existence/error/evil (this terms have semantic correspondences). Theological issues are not so important to his thought as the fact that this philosophical God serves as a basis to rely on a positive ultimate truth, that is, there is not production of error. Error would be a lack that came from the finite condition etc.

I don't want here to explore things you can search by yourself or say if I agree or not with this. Nothing would be less relevant to a said philosophical debate than what I think is right.

But you were talking about the critiques. I am just learning too. What I can see is that the entire building that Descartes projects to a safe science has it's very beginning in the subject's rational activity. People can criticize how much they want, but this is a model present to our way of thinking: if there is something certain, it has to be clear and certain to a subject. Maybe the bad consequences of this is the fallacy than can derive from it: "if it is not clear and certain to me, then it is not existent" (if you know the name of this fallacy, I would appreciate) This would give lately an excessive trust in the subject as the great solver.

An alternative view (or critique?), as we can read on Heiddeger, is to look at what comes before the subject: the being. Being would come before the subject, and the subject could not longer be the starting point of the building. We exist as beings before being thinking things, and our being condition is what reunite us with totality, supressing that separation you were talking about. But I really prefer listening to what others have to say about this last point than giving possibly weak answers.

[Sculptor1]

Reason without evidence is not much better than conclusions from faith.
Without empirical backing meditations form the comfort of the fire-place on dark winter evenings might as well be the fantasies of Tolkien, except less entertaining.

[Felix]

Maffei: "An alternative view (or critique?), as we can read on Heiddeger, is to look at what comes before the subject: the being. Being would come before the subject, and the subject could no longer be the starting point of the building."

I don't think there's a salient difference between the two conceptions, the premise is the same: one can doubt the existence of the objects of perception but one cannot doubt that one is perceiving them. The debate is over whether one (the subject or object) can exist without the other or whether they are codependent. What is the sound of one hand clapping?

[Maffei]

Maffei: "An alternative view (or critique?), as we can read on Heiddeger, is to look at what comes before the subject: the being. Being would come before the subject, and the subject could no longer be the starting point of the building."

I don't think there's a salient difference between the two conceptions, the premise is the same: one can doubt the existence of the objects of perception but one cannot doubt that one is perceiving them. The debate is over whether one (the subject or object) can exist without the other or whether they are codependent. What is the sound of one hand clapping?

Seeing the difference between the two perspectives may justly require the suspension of cartesian model. The latter claims to arrive at being(s)/things/propositions with rational activity of the subject as the beginning and the only mean to do it, while the heideggerian perspective approaches how this we call subject is already a being that has to be observed first. So he will rescue the presocratic problem of being and all those kind of questions that posterior philosophical tradition substituded by subject versus object division.

Just a try... The difference that results is that the meanings are no longer derived from subjectivity as the only source. Meaning is radiated from all existent beings and are perceived because we human beings share with them this "being attribute". In this sense claps can only occur with one hand. The task is not anymore that of the brave explorer in search of the objective meaning of things. It is necessary to allow to the said objects some active characteristics only thought to be present in the subject, as well as to think the existence of the subject beyond a rational apparatus. The percipient subject is considered now an existent being experiencing conditions that he has not chosen, having his perceptions influenced by what he projects, and maybe in a condition of retraction because he is not what he projected to himself.

'I think therefore I am (a thinking thing)' is a sentence that don't respond if thinking things exist nor in what terms they exist. So all the said relation between subject and object, all the traditional science that derived from the cartesian confidence in the subject are ultimately absorved by existential processes.

The text "Heidegger's Critique of Cartesianism", by Abraham Mansbach, can elucidate us better about it: https://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Cont/ContMans.htm

[Felix]

As I understand it, Descartes cogito refers not to thinking alone, as commonly interpreted, but to all manner of perception. In that sense it is like the mortal mode of self-awareness called "buddhi" in Hindu/Buddhist philosophy. Buddhi is a diminuation of the omniscient-like Consciousness/Beingness of "atma," which is considered to be eternal.

I found Heidegger's conception of Dasein to be vague, couldn't tell exactly what he meant by it, but it appears to resemble buddhi more than atma, because of the focus on limitation and death, which from the perspective of atma are illusory.

[Maffei]

I found interesting these hindu/buddhist notions, and I'll take a look.

I still don't see how cogito could refer to anything else than rational activity. Descartes' Meditations begins exactly telling us of the impossibility of our sense perceptions in giving us anything reliable. If there is something said to be eternal, it would be the cogito itself, the idea of God and mathematics. But all of this was possible only by subject's rational activity, the exclusive way to acess truths shown by what he calls a "natural light".

This natural light have correspondance to buddhist ideas and Descartes are alike then too when relies on introspection. But to the buddhists he is doing it with the the "wrong tool" and being distracted by neurotical procedures. In Meditating with Descartes Karen Parham imagines that a zen master would slap Descartes in the face to awake him of this distractions. You can find this article in https://philosophynow.org/issues/132/Me ... _Descartes .

[Hereandnow]

Maffei
I found Heidegger's conception of Dasein to be vague, couldn't tell exactly what he meant by it, but it appears to resemble buddhi more than atma, because of the focus on limitation and death, which from the perspective of atma are illusory.

Heidegger can't be understood unless one is deeply IN the body of thinking which is his element. But even if one is like myself, partly IN, often OUT, irrevocably in the middle, he opens extraordinary doors of understanding

Interesting to note that Heidegger, in his "only a god can save us" interview, gave Buddhism a surprising, if puzzling, nod:


SPIEGEL: About two years ago in an exchange with a Buddhist monk, you spoke of "a completely new method of thinking" and said that this new method of thinking is, "at first, possible for but few men to achieve." Did you mean to say by this that only very few people can have the insights that in your opinion are possible and necessary?

In the prajnaparamita, the cogito

Heidegger: [Yes, if you take] "have" in the completely original sense that they are able in a certain way to give utterance to [these insights].

SPIEGEL: Fine but the transmission [of these insights] into actualization you did not make apparent even in this dialogue with the Buddhist.

Heidegger: And I cannot make it apparent. I know nothing about how this thought has an "effect." It may be, too, that the way of thought today may lead one to remain silent in order to protect this thought from becoming cheapened within a year. It may also be that it needs 300 years in order to have an "effect."

That Heidegger would consider the "wordless thought: as a new method of thinking is a surprise for someone who called language "the house of Being". I imagine a Buddhist would think Being and Time to be rubbish, yet here is Heidegger not looking to primordial language (as he often does) as a key to a reemergence of meaning lost through the trivialization of centuries of degradation, but to the very art of shutting up altogether.

Is this such a surprise, though? After all, experiences we have are entangled things, which is one of Heidegger's most important points. Shutting up.as the monk does, cannot be conceived outside of the conceptual framework we call the self, our human dasein (one has to keep in mind that Heidegger's thinking IS logocentric). Our trouble, and I think H wold agree, is that since all the rises to the understanding, is itself interpretatively bound, even human dasein is tentative as a working ontology. As Levinas (a massively interesting thinker) says: the absolute other is an abiding feature of our Being here. 'Language' is a term, and is, at best, interpretative. The question is, what can Being, housed, if you will, in language, reveal about Being if the explicit terms of inquiry are dropped and one opens oneself up to disclosures in the world altogether free of the strictures of mundanity.

Descartes is rather left in the dust.

[Hereandnow]

But then, I really should add, Descartes is the one who set a standard for what the "real" is, didn't he? At least in my mind. What is real? This inevitably goes to the issue of knowing and justification. To apprehend something as certain, or more certain than an alternative, rests with how it is acknowledged and believed. Descartes made a remarkable "discovery" (though it took Husserl to realize this clearly (notwithstanding objections): It is that the cogito , the egoic center, that is actuality itself, and as such, constitutes non discursive justification of the real. It is an absolute, and from this absolute existence of all things find their reality justified. Their reality is a projection of our own, and they are therefore epistemologically derivative.

I find this line of thinking very important. It challenges hermeneutical accounts in which absolutes are thought implausible (I think Heidegger called it, derisively, a kind of "walking on water"). The Cartesian cogito is, I take it, the standard for what is real; or better, in being a self, it is not the thinking (though Heidegger would say this, wouldn't he? It is IN language that all meaning issues forth) but the Being'itself that gives the essential meaning of reality. After all, even if language "carries" existence, or houses it, existence remains entirely Other than language.