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Le 'Dennettian Novelist' n'existe
pas... |
Poor Descartes, as I have
remarked before, usually comes in for a ritual denunciation in books about
consciousness, blamed for having espoused or even invented dualism, the
doctrine of the separation of body and spirit. I think it would be more
accurate to see him as presenting a new secular and rational perspective
on the conception of the soul which was then prevalent (and to a
considerable extent, still is); one which actually narrowed down its
sphere of influence to the pineal gland. It seems perverse to me to
suggest that later European thinkers got their dualism from Descartes
rather than from the common Christian heritage, though that seems to be
the way most people see it
But Descartes is relevant to
the current debate about consciousness in other ways, too. In particular,
I think his most famous argument, the 'cogito', challenges some
currently-popular perspectives in a way which is well worth
considering.
The cogito ('cogito ergo sum' - I think, therefore I am) is
surely the most well-known argument in philosophy - it occupies the
kind of place in its field which the Mona Lisa, Hamlet's soliloquy, or
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, occupy in theirs. This kind of mass popularity
can, paradoxically become a barrier to proper appreciation. In order
to draw out its importance for consciousness, I should like to
focus on two points about it: first, it isn't original; second, it isn't
logical. |
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Not original, because the same argument can
actually be found in St Augustine. I don't think anyone knows for sure
whether Descartes found it there or came up with it independently, but the
obvious question is - if St Augustine came up with it first, why aren't we
all talking about St Augustine's cogito?
The
reason, I think, is that the argument was of no great importance to St
Augustine. He was in pursuit of faith, not doubt, and was more interested
in God's existence than his own. He puts no particular stress on the
cogito argument, and readers who aren't particularly looking out for it
could easily read it without noticing its signficance. For Descartes, by
contrast, everything depended on it. He needed a point of certainty from
which to begin the construction of his metaphysics: St Augustine already
had a source of certainty in God. Descartes also turned to God as a
guarantor of knowledge, of course, but in his case, unprecedentedly, God
did not come first. In this respect, modern philosophers are
mostly in the same boat as Descartes, and if they want certainty,
they have to undertake a similar
exploration. |
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Not
logical? I don't, of course, mean that the cogito is illogical, or
contains flawed reasoning. But the cogito is often interpreted as a piece
of pure logic, an a priori argument whose
truth does not depend on observation, like the truths of mathematics. This
is a mistake.
Suppose the characters '2 + 2 = 4' were to appear by
chance in the pattern of clouds in the sky: the statement they represent
would still be true. But if the clouds somehow lined up to form the words
'cogito ergo sum', it would be false - the clouds are not doing any
thinking. Descartes is not offering a logical proof, but making a claim
that certain kinds of perception, or thought, are immune from error. In
particular, when I perceive my own existence, I cannot be wrong, because
if I didn't exist no perceiving would be going on. Even doubting my own existence actually proves it,
because only entities which exist can doubt their own reality.
There
may be just a few other perceptions which have a similar immunity from
error. Arguably, you can't be wrong about being in pain, for example,
though you might be wrong about the existence of the dentist. But I
digress... |
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The
point here is that if you're looking for philosophical certainty, and you
can't get it from God, it can only be found in the first-person view, and
in the self. But the first-person view, and the reality of the self, are
just what many modern thinkers about consciousness would want to do
without. These days, we look to empirical science for the truth, and
distrust our own inner phenomenal experience, although all our knowledge
of the world, and of science, actually derives in the final analysis from
interpretation of our own subjective phenomenal experiences (doesn't
it?). |
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It
wasn't always quite like this. In Brentano's day it was natural to think
that the business of psychology included the classification and study of
one's own inner, subjective sensations: but the disastrous
over-development and subsequent collapse of introspectionist psychology
functioned like a nuclear explosion, not merely destroying the existing
structures, but rendering the whole territory of phenomenal experience
uninhabitable and even unvisitable for a generation. During the era of
Behaviourism, subjective experience and even consciousness itself was
actually denied as a result. Those days have passed, but many still feel
that if something can't be investigated from the third-person point of
view, it can't be brought within respectable science at
all.
I
suppose this epitomises the dilemma of consciousness as it exists today:
direct, first-person investigation of phenomenal experience seems to
lead nowhere, but certain key aspects of consciousness - qualia, meaning,
selfhood, and so on - seem to have no place in the objective third-person
account. |
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Some,
of course, are bold enough to offer eliminative accounts of these
intractable phenomena: for them, the Cartesian suggestion that all
knowledge ultimately springs from phenomenal experience must surely be
profoundly unpalatable. Could this be one of the reasons why Descartes
keeps getting such a drubbing? |
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