Descartes, Husserl, and Derrida on Cogito Conf. Dr. Sorin SABOU Director, Research Center for Baptist Historical and Theological Studies Baptist Theological Institute of Bucharest Instructor of Biblical Studies, Liberty University svsabou@liberty.edu Abstract Cogito ergo sum is a new beginning in the history of human thought. The cartesian foundation for human thought serves as the basis for the way the whole world is understood. All major thinkers are referring to it and interact with it. Husserl and Derrida build their understanding of metaphysics in debate with this new beginning and argue for the need of phenomenology, and use it to evaluate the history of madness. Keywords: method, Descartes, Husserl, Derrida, metaphysics, truth, phenomenology, transcendental subjectivity, madness, language
Descartes and Cogito The overall method of Descartes is a method of doubt. He dismisses knowledge derived from authority, senses, and reason. 1 His demonstration is one of clarity and absolute certainty. 2 He is determined to bring any belief based on sensation into doubt because they might be a dream; mathematics included, because of the existence of an evil demon with supreme power of cunning about everything. Doubting for Truth For the sake of his method, Descartes called into doubt all his previous beliefs. He recognizes that his doubt is merely hyperbolic. 3 In this way he is clearing the mind of preconceived opinions that might obscure the truth. This is an original system of methodical doubt through which Descartes erects new foundations for knowledge based on the intuition that, when he is thinking, he exists. 4 1. Richard A. Watson, Descartes, Rene, in Encyclopaedia Britannica. Ultimate Reference Suite, (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2004). 2. 3. 4. Justin Skirry, www.iep.utm.edu/descarte/. Skirry, Watson, Descartes, Rene, 6
Descartes method of doubting exposed in the Mediations 5 worked in the following way. His intention was to doubt every proposition he was able to. For that he used two conjectures: the conjecture of the dream, and the conjecture of the evil demon. All his knowledge can be just a dream or all his knowledge can be a big lie because some evil demon is devoted to deceive him. Descartes s point with these two conjectures was to show their bizarreness. He needed a measure of certainty that goes beyond everything, even reaching the incredible and the bizarre. Going on these two bizarre conjectures he concludes that he is able to doubt absolutely everything, with just one exception: Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). He can doubt everything but he is not able to doubt that he thinks. To doubt is to think and to exist. He sees himself as a thing that thinks, that is a thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, etc. When someone doubts its own existence he must exist in the first place to be able to doubt. He goes further and searches for certainty of a truth. The general rule he establishes is that all things he is able to perceive clearly and distinctly are true. These elements of clarity and distinctness are taken from 5. Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. John Co;ingham, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2004). 7
his single and indubitable truth; they guaranteed its certainty. The certainty of his existence is an essential characteristic of certain truth. This criterion of clarity and distinction helps Descartes to bring back much of what he was doubting at the beginning. This is like geometry: you have a theorem and you can demonstrate it by deducing it from axioms by using rules logic. I think, therefore I am (is his axiom) and everything that I perceive clearly and distinctly is certain (is his rule of logic). Based on these he discovers that God exists, and that God would not deceive his thinking mind in believing that the external world with the objects in it is false if this world would not exist. For Descartes there are, beyond God, two separate and distinct substances (the material substance that occupy space, and the mind that thinks). These two are independent of each other. Husserl and Cogito 6 Husserl admires Descartes and follows him up to a point, but from there on he goes on a different path. Husserl goes that far that he is willing to speak about phenomenology as a new twentieth century Cartesianism. 7 According to Husserl the themes in Meditations are time- 6. A version of this section was published in Sorin Sabou, Snippets of Modern Wisdom, Jurnal teologic Vol 13, Nr 2, (2014). 14-18. 7. Edmund Husserl, Paris Lectures, trans. Peter Koestenbaum, (Hague: M. 8
less and can give birth to what is characteristic of phenomenological method. 8 Continuity with Descartes Husserl follows the train of thought in Meditations and at one point he will go his own way, but still making references to Descartes greatness. The subjectively oriented philosophy of Meditations is carried out in steps. The philosopher withdraws into himself and then, from within, a;empts to destroy and rebuilt all previous learning. 9 He first has to discover an absolutely secure starting point and the rules of procedure. 10 The ego is engaged in philosophizing that is seriously solipsistic; 11 he infers the existence and veracitas of God, and then he deduces objective reality as a dualism of substances. In this way he reaches the objective ground of knowledge. 12 Through this return to the ego cogito Nijhoff, 1973). 3. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 3. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 4. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 4. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 4. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 4. 9
Descartes inaugurates a completely new type of philosophy, it is movement from naive objectivism to transcendental subjectivism. 13 Discontinuity from Descartes Husserl sees in this radical turn to the ego cogito the path that led to transcendental phenomenology. 14 So, we begin, everyone for himself and in himself, with the decision to disregard all our present knowledge. 15 But, can we find evidence that is both immediate and apodictic? From this point forward Husserl begins to depart from Descartes, even if his shadow will continue to be present. The evidence he finds is the evidence given by the existence of the world; 16 to be in the world precedes everything. 17 This experiential evidence is a hypothesis that needs verification. 18 Husserl makes a great shift that leads to transcendental subjectivity, it is the shift to the ego cogito, as the apodictically certain and last basis for judgment upon which all radical philosophy must be ground- 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 5. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 5. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 5. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 6. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 6. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 7. 10
ed. 19 There is no knowledge that is valid for me nor a world that exists for me, the entire concrete world ceases to have reality for me and becomes instead mere appearance. 20 This radical detachment from any point of view regarding the objective world is termed by Husserl the phenomenological epoch. 21 This is a methodology through which Husserl comes to understand himself as an ego and life of consciousness in which and through which the entire objective world exists for him, and is for him precisely as it is. 22 For him the world is nothing other than what he is aware of and what appears valid in such cogitationes. 23 He sees himself as the ego in whose stream of consciousness the world itself first acquires meaning and reality. 24 Husserl tries to leave aside any vestige of Scholasticism found in Descartes; that is why, he does not see ego cogito as referring to an apodictic and primitive axiom. 25 The ego cogito is not the foundation for a 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 7. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 7. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 8. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 8. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 8. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 8. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 9. 11
deductive and universal science, a science ordain geometrico. 26 He does not follow Descartes in inferring the rest of the world through deductive procedures according to the principles that are innate to the ego. 27 This is the error Husserl considers that Descartes has done. Descartes transformed the ego in a substantia cogitans, that becomes the point of departure for conclusions by means of the principle of causality. 28 Husserl says that we must regard nothing as veridical except the pure immediacy and givenness in the field of the ego cogito which the epoch has opened up to us. 29 The independent epoch, with regard to the nature of the world as it appears and is real to me, discloses the greatest and most magnificent of all facts: I and my life remain untouched by whichever way we decide the issue of whether the world is or is not. 30 To myself I discovered that I alone am the pure ego, with pure existence and pure capacities. 31 Husserl says that through this ego alone the world make sense to me and has possible validity. 32 Through the phenomeno- 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 9. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 9. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 9. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 9. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 9. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 10. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 10. 12
logical epochi the natural ego, specifically my own, is reduced to the transcendental ego. This is the meaning of phenomenological reduction. 33 Husserl does not use the Cartesian discovery of the ego cogito as an apodictic proposition and as an absolute primitive premise, but to notice that the phenomenological epochd has uncovered, through the apodictic I am, a new kind and an endless sphere of being. 34 It is the sphere of a new kind of experience: transcendental experience. 35 So, this phenomenological epochd reduces me to my transcendental and pure ego; I am the sole source and object capable of judgment (solus ipse). The most important thing is not about the ego cogito but a science about the ego - a pure egology. 36 And this is the ultimate foundation of philosophy in the Cartesian sense of a universal science. Derrida on Cogito The overall approach of Derrida is on Cogito and the history of madness. Derrida starts his analysis based on Foucault s reference to 33. 34. 35. 36. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 10. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 11. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 11. Husserl, Paris Lectures. 12. 13
Descartes s Meditations. 37 Philosophical dignity has nothing to do with madness and insanity, they do not have entrance into the philosopher s city. 38 By its essence Cogito cannot be mad. Derrida offers an analysis of Foucault s interpretation of Descartes and interrogate some presuppositions of Foucault s history of madness. 39 Foucault reads the Cartesian Cogito within the framework of the history of madness. Foucault s a;empt to write a history of madness as madness speaks on the basis of its own experience and under its own authority. 40 Madness is linked to silence ( words without language, without the voice of a subject ) and the language of reason is rejected. According to Foucault the history of madness is an archeology of a silence. 41 Derrida argues that such a history or archeology of silence can- 37. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965). 184-187; Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978). 32. 38. 39. 40. 41. Derrida, Writing. 32. Derrida, Writing. 33. Derrida, Writing. 34. Derrida, Writing. 35. 14
not be wri;en. No one can speak against the order of reason except by being for it; the concept of history has always been a rational one. 42 But such a book was wri;en by Foucault, that is why, we need to see its particularities. Silence is not non discourse, but a discourse arrested by command. 43 Foucault goes after the origin of the split between reason and unreason (madness) and their free circulation and exchange. Reason and unreason are at the same time an act of order, a decree, and a schism, a separation. 44 The common root of reason and unreason/madness is a logos, a unitary foundation. 45 This logos is also the very atmosphere in which Foucault s language moves. 46 The heart of the ma;er is that reason can have a contrary, an other of reason. 47 For Foucault the concept of madness overlaps everything that can be put under the rubric of negativity. 48 The structure of this exclusion is for Foucault the funda- 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. Derrida, Writing. 36. Derrida, Writing. 38. Derrida, Writing. 38. Derrida, Writing. 39. Derrida, Writing. 39. Derrida, Writing. 41. Derrida, Writing. 41. 15
mental structure of historicity. The moment of this exclusion does not have archetypal exemplarity. 49 If this great division is the possibility of history itself, what does it mean to write a history of this division? 50 Is it to write the history of the origin of history? Foucault interprets the text from Meditations as the philosophical internment of madness; 51 this is a prelude of the historical and sociopolitical drama. It is an act of force. That is why, to write a history of madness means to execute a structural study of a historical ensemble (notions, institutions, juridical and police measures, scientific concepts) which holds captive a madness whose wild state can never in itself be restored. 52 Philosophy from Descartes onwards is the system of certainty that functions to inspect, master, and limit hyperbole, and does so both by determining it in either of a natural light whose axioms are from the outset exempt from hyperbolic doubt, and by making of hyperbolical doubt a point of transition firmly maintained within the chain of rea- 49. 50. 51. 52. Derrida, Writing. 42. Derrida, Writing. 43. Derrida, Writing. 44. Derrida, Writing. 44. 16
son. 53 Someone philosophizes only in terror, but in the confessed terror of going mad. The confession is simultaneously, at its present moment, oblivion and unveiling, protection and exposure. 54 53. 54. Derrida, Writing. 60. Derrida, Writing. 62. 17
Bibliography Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978. Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy. Translated by John Co;ingham. Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2004. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization, a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Pantheon Books, 1965. Husserl, Edmund. Paris Lectures. Translated by Peter Koestenbaum. Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1973. Sabou, Sorin. Snippets of Modern Wisdom. Jurnal teologic Vol 13, Nr 2, (2014): 5-27. Skirry, Justin. www.iep.utm.edu/descarte/. Watson, Richard A. Descartes, Rene. In Encyclopaedia Britannica. Ultimate Reference Suite, Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2004. 18