
Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’ (2017) - jonbaer
https://aeon.co/ideas/descartes-was-wrong-a-person-is-a-person-through-other-persons
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ElBarto
This profoundly misunderstands Descartes.

Descartes is about proving existence through doubt.

If you start doubting everything around you, what is left is your own mind
that must exist since it is thinking and doubting.

It has nothing to do with being a 'person' as a social construct, or about who
I am.

~~~
sametmax
Interstingly, this "I think therefor I am" has been taken as the most barebone
possible way to demonstrate what exist and what does not. However, each word
of the sentence makes an assumption that it never tries to demonstrate:

\- "I": assumes individuality and that the mind is a local phenomenon.

\- "think": assumes cognition and that it's a process of the mind.

\- "therefor": assumes causality.

\- "am": assumes there is such a thing as existence at our level.

Those are postulates, not demonstrated facts. It's perfectly ok to have those,
as long as you declare them as such. However, when you study Descartes,
teachers never do so. It's disappointing when the whole point is to teach
people to "doubt everything".

There are other philosophies that doubt those postulates. Some assume we are
not individuals, but focal points on a collective conscientiousness. Some
believe thinking is actually not a creative process, but merely the act of
receiving information from another source. Some think we live in a
deterministic world, and causality is an illusion our mind uses to make sense
of things. Some will say we are not, existence is the symptom of a greater
activity like a shadow.

In the end, even something as simple as "cogito ergo sum" can be dissembled to
the extreme and debated.

Which is why I enjoy philosophy less and less. It's a never ending source of
questions, with very little useful answers for day to day life. It's not
practical at all, and my most philosophical friends are also among the most
unhappy.

Even antiquity philosophers, despite dispensing practical advises on how to
live your life, fall into the trap on not giving any applicable way of
reaching their standards.

It's like saying "quit" to a smoker or "eat less" to an obese. True.
Practical. Not gonna help.

~~~
pasabagi
>Descartes, teachers never do so.

When I was taught Descartes, the flimsiness of the whole 'cogito' thing was
really emphasised. I actually don't think I've ever heard of anybody in the
philosophy world who took the binding between personal existence and thought
as any kind of raw fact, at least not in the terms Descartes proposed.

Most of the treatments I (vaguely) remember were about the interesting
observation, implicit in the Meditations, that there's something unusual about
existential predicates.

I think if you stop thinking of philosophy as a body of answers, and more as a
body of in-depth examinations of questions, then it gets good again. It's a
bit like maths - nobody would ever suggest that the concept of a Heesh number
is an answer to a particular kind of question. It's more an interesting way to
talk about tiling.

~~~
Nav_Panel
> I think if you stop thinking of philosophy as a body of answers, and more as
> a body of in-depth examinations of questions, then it gets good again.

Agreed. I like to frame it as such: the "point" of philosophy is a form of
play, rather than a quasi-theology.

------
Laukhi64
I don't see anything that I'd explicitly disagree with, but I also can't help
but have a feeling that something is lost in translation. I'm not sure that
Descartes and African philosophers are talking about exactly the same thing
when they say something like "person".

~~~
ordu
Of course they told about different things. Distinction between self/other is
a definition of a person.

But at the same time they spoke about the same thing. If you killed a person,
you would be a murderer, and it doesn't matter what definition of a person you
use. There are some small differences though, like killing a toddler seems not
so bad, if toddler is not a person yet.

I personally believe that toddler is not a person yet. Homo Sapiencs pup
becomes a person somewhere between 1 yo and 3 yo. At 1 yo she learns to walk,
and gets location independance, she needs some time to learn to be
independant, and then at 3 yo she get into psychological crisis, when she
learn what the difference between "Me", "Parents", "My desires", "Parents
desires", "Rules" and so on. So 3 yo is absolutely the point where she is a
person already. While less than 1 yo she is not a person, but external and
disconnected physically limb of her parents.

~~~
hopler
For everyone's sake, don't test your theory on any toddlers.

Why draw the line at age 3, and not 9 (Age of Reason) pubescence (Coming of
Age), or post-pubescence? People under the age of maybe 30 universally have
terrible misconceptions about how the universe works, making them dangerous if
they are given full freedom.

~~~
technothrasher
_For everyone 's sake, don't test your theory on any toddlers._

Amen to that!

 _Why draw the line at age 3_

I believe because the original poster was positing that self-awareness is the
dividing line between person and non-person, and was claiming that this
happens at age 3. Of course, the real world isn't that simple. Not only do
newborns show some simple self-awareness (See Rochat's 'Five Stages of Self-
Awareness'), but some animals also show various levels of self-awareness
(Gallop's Mirror Test, and others) and I'm not sure most folks are prepared to
give animals personhood.

~~~
ordu
_> Of course, the real world isn't that simple._

Yes. Any our theory is a simplification of reality.

 _> I'm not sure most folks are prepared to give animals personhood._

Yeah. This is a problem I think. Is there is any way to define a person, which
can justify human right to eat a chicken. Self-awareness seems the most
promising.

~~~
gowld
Why do you have a human right to eat a chicken, or a cow, or a pig?

[https://www.reddit.com/r/likeus/](https://www.reddit.com/r/likeus/)

Why do you not have a human right to kill a person, when push comes to shove
comes to bullets?

------
cdoxsey
> Accepting that others are vital to our self-perception is a corrective to
> the limitations of the Cartesian view.

This brought to mind John Calvin's Institutes. In the first chapter he
suggests that knowledge consists primarily of two parts: knowledge of self and
knowledge of God, and oddly, the best way to know oneself is to know God:

> If, at mid-day, we either look down to the ground, or on the surrounding
> objects which lie open to our view, we think ourselves endued with a very
> strong and piercing eyesight; but when we look up to the sun, and gaze at it
> unveiled, the sight which did excellently well for the earth is instantly so
> dazzled and confounded by the refulgence, as to oblige us to confess that
> our acuteness in discerning terrestrial objects is mere dimness when applied
> to the sun. Thus too, it happens in estimating our spiritual qualities. So
> long as we do not look beyond the earth, we are quite pleased with our own
> righteousness, wisdom, and virtue; we address ourselves in the most
> flattering terms, and seem only less than demigods. But should we once begin
> to raise our thoughts to God, and reflect what kind of Being he is, and how
> absolute the perfection of that righteousness, and wisdom, and virtue, to
> which, as a standard, we are bound to be conformed, what formerly delighted
> us by its false show of righteousness will become polluted with the greatest
> iniquity; what strangely imposed upon us under the name of wisdom will
> disgust by its extreme folly; and what presented the appearance of virtuous
> energy will be condemned as the most miserable impotence.

In particular the concept of the Image of God has profound consequences for
the way you think about dignity and human personhood.

I recently watched Won't You Be My Neighbor, the documentary about Fred
Rogers, and was struck by the way he treats an interacts with people, not as
means to some end, but as ends in themselves, with real dignity and respect.

It was counter-cultural at the time, but boy is it strange now. It feels like
everything is outrage and disingenuousness. We treat people like tokens of
their tribe, with pure contempt and toss them aside like their worthless and
inhuman.

Maybe Calvin was on to something.

~~~
lisper
The problem with this approach is that when different people acquire knowledge
of God they often end up with very different results and no way to reconcile
them, c.f. the Islamic State.

------
mac_was
This is environmental determinism and it is an old concept. Obviously we live
with others and other can have impact on us but it is still up to us if are
impacted by them or we are self contained human beings which decide for
themselves.

~~~
Geimfari
That we are self contained human beings isn't obvious to me. All of my
opinions, thoughts, and actions are a reflection of my surrounding social
group.

~~~
mac_was
So if all your friends starts killing would you start as well? I believe you
have free will, your imagination, a brain and you can assess for yourself what
actions you eant to perform.

~~~
bsenftner
I bet if your situation was such that your friends start killing, you would be
in the same situation and start killing too. Yes we have free will, very much
so. That is why we kill.

~~~
mac_was
Animals do not have free will and they kill as well, they kill because of
instinct so your point is not true.

~~~
bsenftner
Animals certainly have free will. It is nonsense to believe otherwise.

------
jrootabega
No one has to be wrong. It seems like there are at least two overlapping
questions here. "Am I?" which links to Descartes (at least the modern popular
distillation), and "how am I?" which links more strongly to this piece.

------
seltzered_
Sorta related there’s a book called “Descartes Error”:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes%27_Error](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes%27_Error)

[https://www.ianwelsh.net/review-of-descartes-error-by-
antoni...](https://www.ianwelsh.net/review-of-descartes-error-by-antonio-
damasio/comment-page-1/)

------
lioeters
The idea of selfhood emerging from the context of relationships reminds me of
the Japanese word for "human", 人間, which literally means "between people".

~~~
bitxbit
Chinese.

------
booleandilemma
If I was the last man alive in a post-apocalyptic world I’d still be a person
though.

Not to mention I’d have time enough at last to get to all those books I’ve
been meaning to read.

~~~
zwkrt
I don't disagree, but I find it interesting that if you were the last person
alive you would spend your time reading the literary artifacts of other
people, thereby continuing to grow and define yourself through social action.

------
amelius
So in a hypothetical situation where all people except one are wiped out, then
that one remaining person is not a person?

~~~
mbrock
They might remain a person insofar as they think in language and in other ways
exist in reference to a community even if everyone else is dead—in this view,
they might also lose their personhood as they become another kind of being
after dissociating from human community.

------
wwarner
Definitely some heat equation or field/particle transformations possible here.

------
Y_Y
This is very close to one of the main theses in Hofstadter's "I am a Strange
Loop", that your existence/consciousness must extend into the minds of people
you know and interact with.

------
OnlineCourage
> Ubuntu philosophy

First off, there's no such thing as, "X philosophy." Philosophy (the noun) is
a field of study, there's no such thing as, "My personal philosophy," \- you
don't get your own philosophy, there's just "philosophy." It wouldn't make
sense to say, "well according to my own personal mathematics..." Likewise it
doesn't make sense to do this kind of comparative cultural philosophy
nonsense. It's extremely plausible that ancient African philosophers could
have been absolutely wrong with certain propositions they put forward, and it
is absolutely plausible that French philosophers in the early modern age were
completely wrong. There's no, "happy smile and hold hands, let's all agree
that there are different philosophies." That would be called politics, not
philosophy.

> a person is a person through other persons

Secondly, that was not what Descartes was talking about, he was not talking
about how to define a person, he was talking about how do you create a
platform on which to define absolute truth of the existence of something. He
was saying, "well, suppose you have a mind, doesn't matter where that mind
comes from, just a mind...if that mind doubts that even itself exists, that
doubting proves that it exists, therefore it exists." He wasn't talking about
defining personhood, he was talking about securing the foundation of how
knowledge works.

------
opvasger
When people write "persons", my head starts spinning.

~~~
grzm
When making such a distinction, _people_ refers to a group _en masse_ , while
_persons_ refers to a collection of individuals, emphasizing their actions as
individuals as opposed to as a whole.

