Heidegger

In a message dated 25/10/2008 16:13:03 GMT Standard Time, jPolanik at nc.rr.com
writes:

Joe:
translating ‘cogito’ as ‘I think’ is itself dubious.
Jud:

Côgitô.

*Cogito* - Literally translated “cogito” is Latin for “I think,” - there is
nothing remotely *dubious* about it. It is only ever found in Latin writings
and documents in the sense of côgitô: *to think, ponder, consider, plan..*
To arbitrarily and wilfully change the meaning of the words of an ancient
language and twist its meanings as used by the writer of ancient texts such as
that of Descartes in order to pervert its connotation to support and lend
credence to some private doctrinal agenda is strictly inadmissible.

It is crude chicanery in the style of Heidegger and his well known
perverting of ancient Greek to suit his metaphysica manqué. Latin vocabulary was/is
used in science, academia, and law, and like all learned men of his time
Descartes had an excellent knowledge of what was at that time the Lingua franca of
the civilised western world. It was used as it was, rather like English is
used now by all educated people whose mother tongues were different in order
to communicate. Had Descartes desired to employ another word in place of
*cogito* he could easily have done so.

Arbitrarily changing the meaning of *cogito* to that of the completely
different verb: *experior, experiri, expertus* (to try, test, experience, prove)
or any suitable cognate is a shabby trick which holds no water at all in any
serious, academic forum.

Ignoring for a moment the type of modern half-wit who would even
(temporarily and conditionally) accept the existence of an all-powerful demon bent upon
trying to deceive a person into thinking that he exists when he does not, as
part of some philosophical *axiomatic* parlour game, (and one is tempted to
say that such an idiot does not deserve to exist in the first place afflicted
with such an attenuated mental condition,) there is a much more serious
hidden, sinister transcendentalist intent involved in the wish to put different
words or meanings into the mouth of this mathematical genius and
religio-philosophical non-entity.

It is a feeble attempt to cloud the corollary antecedal giveaway of the
human educative payload and the obviousness of its experiential hominine
significance - and it does NOT work.

To use Descartes in the manner that Plato used Socrates, as a form of
unchallengeable ventriloquist’s dummy, is ineffectual in the case of Descartes.
Although the devious Plato could put as many words in the mouth of Plato as
he wished in order to further his obnoxious transcendentalist agenda (Because
Socrates words were not recorded by him at all) it is different in the case
of Descartes, for we have his texts.

The substitution of *experience* in place of *think* in Descartes
aspirational axiom is obviously an attempt to occlude the objective intellectual
inference provided by *think. But if it is thought that by closing off or
bracketing out the historical, biographical, educative study and acquisition of
knowledge such as an educatee requires in order to formulate a philosophical
statement in Latin, and replace it with the more subjective, mute, passive or
immanent condition of *experience* - it still fails to brush under the
conceptual carpet the fact that to generate the sentence *I think therefore I
experience* implies a vast historico-biographical compendium of antecedal
detail.

The inferential impact of *thinking* OR *experiencing* and forming such a
neurological complexity as the sentence: *I think therefore I am* OR *I
experience therefore I am,* with all of the lexical, grammatical and syntactic
significance that such knowledge entails, immediately reveals and exposes the
utterer as being unmistakably and patently an educated HUMAN of the type who
participated in the current state of sixteenth and seventeenth century human
West European learning that such philosophical employment of the Latin
language provided.

Such a discovery immediately blows the whole childish concept of the
*cogito* and the importance of Descartes (in anything other than the field of
mathematics (and the techniques and strategies of sycophantically kissing Bishop’s
rings) out of the “philosophical” water, and renders any theorising on the
basis of Descartes with the apparently necessary manipulation of his
word-meanings totally irrelevant.

Jud.

Posted on Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 7:00 am
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