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?
In a message dated 2/17/2008 11:25:53 AM Eastern Standard Time,
jPolanik at nc.rr.com writes:
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’.
Joe;
I would expect “greater depth” to include the other functions constituting
the structure of the personality beside the Nous function of cogito, ie.,
the Psy functions of feeling/emotion and perception. Saying as
much I realize that from the strictly thinking standpoint “feeling”
remains in contention along with doxa.
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’.
Yes, of course, but in that sense the thinking reflection is always
apostiori and ex post facto to experience and, at that, only a part
of reflection/response
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.
But it may be neither a “report” or prior to fact, but an
unmarked sensation or intuition that remain beyond the
reach of thinking. Ordinarilly, if something is not reflected
through thinking it is considered “unconscious” or beyong
the reach of consciousness. This, however, is equally true
for emotional or perceptive experience and not just “thinking”
(that the West equates as the bedrock of “consciousness”).
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’.
On the way, however and qua deduction, a self-predicating
tautology is involved and by which thinking, more so as
analytical thinking, is grounded indicating that all questions of
“is” or “am’ are proto-tautological.
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).
That is of course true but confined to the modus of cogito rather than
experience simply because it has its ground in experience. No sooner,
however, the translation is made to thinking than the tautological nature of
thinking prevails.
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
And that is precisely where the grand tautologism is encountered,
ie., by the discarding of the middle term by which experience and
the ontological I am are connected. That is certainly the great saltus
that DesCartes makes and whether for him or Heidegger “I experience therefore
I am” remain logically spurious. What I am saying, however, is that the
exclusionary jump is logically necessary and by which the state of nihilio is
encountered but by the necessity of the logic involved is understood and thus
qualified. I am not sure that Heidegger achieves this (qua Descartes) or at best is
extremely ambiguous about it.
Bernard
Bernard
–
Philosophy is, after all, done ultimately in the first person for the
first person. — H-N Castaneda
@^@~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~@^@ http://what-am-i.net
@^@~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~@^@
