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Descartes' Deconstructive Project

Descartes' Deconstructive Project

Postby chad » September 4th, 2007, 8:03 am

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Postby Dan65802 » September 6th, 2007, 6:58 pm

"Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that." - Martin Luther King
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Postby postodave » September 12th, 2007, 5:05 pm

I cannot claim to be an expert on Descartes though I have read the discourse on method and a few of his letters. So although I can't give you a detailed criticism of him I'd like to share some thoughts which may be helpful.

Firstly it may not be a matter of reading postmodernism back into Descartes as that Descartes himself stands at a key point on a trajectory that leads to postmodernism. Sire (I know he's not a major player but I find him helpful suggests that while Descartes concept of God (and a great deal of his ontology) is pretty much the same as that of earlier Christians such as Aquinas the real diffrence is his shift in perspective where he comes to prioritise knowing over being, epistemology over ontology. The problem with this approach is that starting from knowing as such leads eventually to the idea that you cannot know hence a shift from knowing to constructing meaning (postmodernism)

For years I wrestled with the problems of epistemology under the mistaken impression that epistemology is something we do in order to know (the rationalist approach). Eventually I realised that epistemology is in fact an attempt to explain what we have done when we have known.

Knowing itself is a profound mystery. A friend of mine who was rather visually minded put it like this after I had struggled to explain it. Imagine a pyramid, the very tip of the pyramid is what we know and it rests on the rest of the pyramis which is everything we don't know.

So when I try to construct an epistemology I have to begin from an ontology; I must say if the world is like this then knowing works like this. Now all this can be testable to some extent and open to revision in the light of experience but it is not logically provable.

Pascal who disagreed strongly with Descartes talks about the reasons of the heart, but by heart he is not talking about something emotional or sentimental. Amongst the things he thinks we know by direct experience are the basic principles of maths and logic, that we are not dreaming, that we exist (contra Descartes) and (for some of us) that there is a God who loves and cares for us.

I would like to finish by recommending books that I have found helpful. They are all by Christian writers but they cover philosophical issues though sometimes in a very practical way. Os Guiness on doubt several books such as and also his original L'Abri lectures on this topic which are still available on tape. Hans Kung 'Does God Exist?' The first part of this compares Pascal and Descartes who he sees as exponents of critical rationality and critical rationalism respectively. Roy Clouser, Knowing with the Heart This is a real gem, set out in dialogue form it argues the case for religious experience as the basis for knowledge of God. I'm sorry I can't recommend anything more heavyweight but if you are interested in pursuing philosophy from a Christian perspective you might like to look at I hope that's some help but I've no training in philosophy so I can't get too technical.
So I drew my sword and got ready
But the lamb ran away with the crown
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Postby Robert » September 17th, 2007, 1:54 pm

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Postby JRosemary » September 23rd, 2007, 4:00 am

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Re: Descartes' Deconstructive Project

Postby Kolbitar » September 25th, 2007, 12:28 am

Hello Chad.

::He doubts all "except what is necessarily true." What is necessarily true turns out to be a whole lot. His project is more to discover how he knows it - and the answer is that he is a cognitive thing. Would this render a better understanding of Descartes?

I'm not sure that "what is necessarily true" actually "turns out to be a whole lot." What Decartes takes as necessarily true is only that, which has mathematical certainty. What is mathematical certainty to Decartes? It is nothing other than clear and distinct ideas - it's not enough for an idea be clear, it also must be distinct. Thus Etienne Gilson writes:

…all that can be clearly and distinctly known as belonging to the idea of a thing can be said of the thing itself… But what is it, to know something distinctly? When a mathematician knows a circle, he knows not only what it is [it's definition]`, but, at the same time, what it is not. Because a circle is a circle, it has all the properties of the circle, and none of those that make a triangle a triangle, or a square a square. Philosophers [according to Decartes] should therefore proceed on the same assumption.

Decartes took ideas as the very things themselves, as that which we know, instead of -- as the Realists before him did -- that *by which* we know things (akin to eyes through which we see). In doing so, he implicitly rejected a large bit of accepted epistemology to which he had no later recourse when trying to salvage the world of our senses. The idea of a soul -- i.e., a mind/body composite - contains ideas that are separable. Instead of taking the mysterious mind/body fact as it stands, Decartes insisted on subjecting it to an arbitrary standard of clearness and distinctness, which inevitably led him to the "ghost in the machine" fiasco. On the one hand "I think therefore I am" is clear, yet on the other it is distinct in so far as it leaves no room to say about physical reality that it is anything other than illusion. So, to posit the real existence of physical reality outside our minds, which cannot be done if ideas are what we know, Decartes had to draw upon the idea of God, which, in turn -- he endeavored to show -- would secure our conviction that the physical world exists. Thus Decartes drew upon the ontological argument for God's existence (which uses an idealist basis), then proceeded to argue that such a God would not deceive us.

There's a number of things to be said about all this -- and philosophers did say them. For instance, if God gave us the rational means to figure out that reality is an illusion, then God is not deceiving us; perhaps He gave us these "illusions" for His own purposes which weren't meant to include their representations as actual existences outside our minds - that is conceivably our mistake, not His.

Or take Decartes clear and distinct idea mind. Mind is a thinking substance; an idea which, when pushed to the point of distinctness, excludes extension in space (i.e., excludes the idea of "body"). This thinking substance idea is clearly refuted by the facts of our experience, for a thinking substance can do nothing but think-yet I do other things than think, and sometimes (like when I sleep) I don't think at all.

Accepting Decartes' assumption that ideas are what we know, the empiricists pointed out that the idea of cause and effect is anything other than clear and distinct. How, then, can God have caused an idea of Himself and/or of physical reality when cause is an idea that lacks the very certainty upon which Decartes philosophy claims to rest? The failure of Decartes thus gave rise to the success of Hume. If an (intellectual) idea -- such as God, or mind -- does not spring from a sense perception (again, sense perception is no longer a means of knowledge, as it was to the realists, but that of which we're directly aware) then naturally, since a cause of sense perception is meaningless, so is anything purportedly outside of it causing it. Sense experience is certain - because it is what it is; and mathematics has certitude because it expresses relations between ideas: all the rest, according to Hume (proceeding on Cartesian assumptions), is meaningless.


Incidentally, this Cartesian method takes many forms of "rationalism", depending on which area of thought it's applied: from Atheism to Deism to Unitarianism, it works to clear away any undesired implications which cannot stand the scrutiny of being clearly defined and distinctly understood.

It’s all very interesting…

Jesse
The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before. --Chesterton

Sober Inebriation: http://soberinebriationblog.blogspot.com/
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Postby Robert » September 25th, 2007, 1:29 am

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Postby chad » October 15th, 2007, 10:39 am

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Last edited by chad on October 15th, 2007, 10:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby chad » October 15th, 2007, 10:40 am

I really appreciate all the discourse. Thank you guys.

While it may have been necessary to presuppose the laws of logic, Descartes never explicitly makes this move. I don't think he can given his 'evil genius' criteria. Now, I don't agree that the evil genius hypothesis gives adequate reason for doubting everything except one's own mental states (the "cogito ergo sum"), but Descartes made such a strong assertion. It seems Descartes cannot take for granted intelligibility of the universe as did Spinoza and Hobbes later on. The evil genius criteria is what seems to me to undermine even his deconstructive project. He can ask of any doubt, "Perhaps the evil genius has deceived my memory, and so the very memory that I was deceived is mistaken. Or perhaps my memory is correct, but my perception was not. Perhaps my senses made me think that I had been deceived, when in fact I had not. I thought I hallucinated and saw a giant elephant, but maybe there really was a giant elephant." He falls into an infinite regress of self-doubt, and its a bottomless pit. In the end though I think Descartes does take for granted laws of logic in order to get the ball rolling. My contention is simply that by his own criteria of what constitutes reasonable doubt (which we find out entails the extreme evil genius notion) he cannot take for granted the laws of logic (or the intelligibility of the world). It seems like he does (implicitly) and this undermines his project. To the common criticism of his haphazard ontological and cosmological arguments for the existence of God I am adding the less common criticism (to my knowledge) that even Descartes' deconstructive project fails.
Last edited by chad on October 16th, 2007, 10:24 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby mitchellmckain » October 15th, 2007, 2:11 pm

I am no great fan or defender of Descartes, but I am a critic of deconstruction, which I find to be a rather lame replacement for creative thought. And so I would like point out that what Descartes is doing is not deconstruction, but is very much a work of creative thought that uses skepticism as a tool, and is in fact the classic work that demonstrates the value of skepticism in analytical thought. Descartes is certainly not wasting the time of readers by simply demonstrating that what someone else has written is not complete and not without logical flaws. One of the most fundamental presumptions, in any creative work to discover the truth, is that there is a truth to be discovered. Deconstruction, however, can plead self-righteous innocence of making any such presumption, but as a consequence it breaks no new ground, content to simply judge the efforts of others.
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Postby Robert » October 19th, 2007, 1:47 am

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Postby Robert » October 19th, 2007, 1:49 am

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Postby chad » November 1st, 2007, 11:52 pm

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Postby Robert » November 2nd, 2007, 12:46 am

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Postby Robert » November 2nd, 2007, 1:08 am

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