Heidegger

eupraxis at aol.com wrote:

>[Joe]: “Descartes doesn’t actually say ‘cogito ergo sum’ anywhere in
>the meditations. he is dramatizing its use and discovery.”

>[Wil]: No, he said it in the prior Discourse on Method (Part IV) which
>is the model for The Meditations on that question. [end]

in part 4 of the Discourse on Method (DoM), Descartes describes the
sequence of his thoughts. he is doubting … everything.

“I resolved to pretend that all the things that had ever entered my mind
were no more true than the illusions of my dreams. But immediately I
noticed that while I was trying thus to think everything false, it was
necessary that I, who was thinking this, was something.”

when Descartes says ‘immediately I noticed’, it sounds to me like he is
trying to describe a flash of insight or intuition: while I am doubting,
it is necessarily true that I am … something.

“And observing that this truth ‘I am thinking, therefore I exist’ was so
firm and sure that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics
were incapable of shaking it, I decided that I could accept it without
scruple as the first principle of the philosophy that I was seeking.”

here Descartes presents the cogito, I think therefore I am, as a
restatement of his intuition.

“After this I considered in general what is required of a proposition in
order for it to be true and certain; for, since I had just found one
that I knew to be such, I thought that I ought also to know what this
certainty consists in. I observed that there is nothing at all in the
proposition ‘I am thinking, therefore I exist’ to assure me that I am
speaking the truth, except that I see very clearly that in order to
think it is necessary to exist.”

this is a remarkable passage. Descartes is admitting that he saw and
accepted the truth of ‘I think; therefore, I am’ before he understood
why it is true.

* * *

in any event, how does this analysis support Heidegger’s effor to remove
‘ergo’ from ‘cogito ergo sum’ to yield the target of Heidegger’s
promised deconstruction, ‘cogito sum’?

if Heidegger succeeds in proving that Descartes’ thinking process was
syllogistic; then, the ‘ergo’ is appropriately used.

if, on the other hand, Heidegger accepts Descartes’ claim that his
(Descartes’) thinking process was not syllogistic; then, without further
analysis, it would be fallacious to conclude that the ‘ergo’ is
unjustified.

P = the cogito is a syllogism
Q = the use is ‘ergo’ is appropriate

P -> Q
-P

if Heidegger attempts to conclude -Q at this point, he is perpetrating
the fallacy of denying the antecedent.

I won’t just *assume* that Heidegger is perpetrating a fallacy;
consequently, I would expect him to do one of the following:

1. show that there is no other thinking process other than syllogistic
that could possibly have been employed by Descartes.

2. identify the thinking process actually used by Descartes and show
that it does not justify the use of ‘ergo’.

does Heidegger exercise one of these options; and, if so, where?

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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Posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
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