Is Dasein a Reality?
February 17th, 2008, search relatedRelated posts :: Is Dasein a Reality? :: Is Dasein a Reality? :: Is Dasein a Reality? :: Is Dasein a Reality?
Bernx at aol.com wrote:
>jPolanik writes:
>>2. a few pages later, Heidegger writes “The ‘I think’ is reason, is
>>its fundamental act”. Descartes defines ‘I think’ as we would say ‘I
>>experience’. a more accurate translation of ‘cogito; ergo, sum’ into
>>today’s idiom would be ‘I experience; therefore, I am’
>The fallacy in this is that experience goes far beyond what is
>thinkable and leaves I am unqualified, incomplete and thus stuck in
>the limitations of cogito.
Bernard, I would agree in the sense in which ‘beyond’ connotes ‘greater
depth’.
the case for the proposition ‘I experience; therefore, I am’ rest upon
the fact of experiencing.
imagine any sort of pre-reflective experience; for example, walking
along a quiet path thru the forest in the springtime. you suddenly
notice a bird singing; and, perhaps, even that you have been hearing it
for some brief time before it fully pulled you out of your reverie.
reflecting on the fact of this immediate experience you say, ‘I
experience’.
that statement, ‘I experience’, certainly represents or encodes a
thought; but, it reports a logically prior fact — the experiential
fact of which it is a report.
from this fact one may conclude: I experience; therefore, I am
Heidegger’s case against the cogito is based on denying that, contrary
to Descartes protestations, there is a deduction involved in the step
from ‘I experience’ to ‘I experience; therefore, I am’.
even if Heidegger spotted a deduction in proceeding from the thought ‘I
experience’ to the thought ‘I experience; therefore, I am’, he is wrong
to attribute this step to Descartes. Descartes is proceeding from the
*fact* of experiencing to the thought ‘I experience; therefore, I am’.
this step, the one Descartes actually takes, is not deductive in the
sense claimed by Heidegger who portrays it as an instance of modus
ponens (a hypothetical syllogism in the jargon of Descartes’ day).
I would call the step Descartes actually takes a ‘forensic inference’, a
primitive form of what Kant would develop into the transcendental
deduction. it is based on a very simple principle: from a fact one may
infer that all of the logically necessary preconditions of that fact
have been instantiated. (a simple example: you see a child. you infer
that it had a mother.)
what are the logically necessary preconditions of that fact that I
experience? there is only one: it is logically necessary that I am.
‘I experience; therefore, I am’.
Joe
–
Philosophy is, after all, done ultimately in the first person for the
first person. — H-N Castaneda
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http://what-am-i.net
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