There may be an interesting thread to pull about whether a western philosophical tendency to focus on an idealised rational individual confronting the world has led to a particular idea of the self. Though I'm not sure whether this has been the dominant view in analytic philosophy post linguistic turn, or whether it has ever been the mainstream in continental philosophy. This would need a lot more work to unpack.
Trying to construct a conflict between Descartes sense of self in the cogito(which as far as I can see amounts to nothing more than 'I exist') and African philosophy seems deeply odd. If Descartes 'sense of self' is mere existence (and I think this is a very odd reading of the cogito), then are we supposed to say that African babies don't exist until they become part of society?
My understanding is that the cogito isn't mere existence but that it is proof of mere existence.
A baby, like everything else in the world, is something you perceive through your senses and that you can thus never be sure really exists. Let's say that Descartes laid the premise for the Matrix.
> If you start doubting everything around you, what is left is your own mind that must exist since it is thinking and doubting.
Actually, what's left are merely thoughts. Cogito ergo sum actually begs the question: in attempting to establish the existence of "I" (a subject) it assumes the existence of "I".
The fallacy-free version is: this is a thought, therefore thoughts exist. From the existence of thoughts, you cannot deduce that a subject is needed unless you additionally assume that thoughts necessarily need a subject. But do they really?
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.
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.
Except it's "Cogito ergo sum", not "I think therefore I am"
"I" here is whatever is the origin of these thoughts, and nothing more. Not you.
He explained it as "we cannot doubt of our existence while we doubt"
So no, there is no postulate, just observation. However far the doubt goes... well, there is still something doubting, and thus thinking (doubts are thoughts), that has to be.
Otherwise there would be no doubt.
That's all.
Wether it's an individual human's mind or the self-deceiving / self-ignorant projection of a 6 dimensional octopus, wether thinking really is an independent creative process or just the deterministic result of outside events doesn't matter.
"Cogito" implies "I", it's just not required in latin. Espacially since it's been first coined by Gómez Pereira (not Descartes), a spanish man, language in which you can say "pienso" and not provide any "I".
I disagree, Descartes believes that he had proven the existence of "a priori" thought, a place from which thinking could be conducted without doubt - that was the point of his project. That place is also the only reliable locus of personhood in his view. Future thinkers who talked about "embodied" thinking, were conceiving of a personhood that could exist before that a priori consciousness, rather than as a doubtful thing perceived by it.
Well, again that is not the same thing. It's about 'personhood' only in the sense of existence.
To quote Wikipedia:
"While other knowledge could be a figment of imagination, deception, or mistake, Descartes asserted that the very act of doubting one's own existence served—at minimum—as proof of the reality of one's own mind; there must be a thinking entity—in this case the self—for there to be a thought."
The thinking entity that is proven to exist is the person. To descartes that thinking entity is the very core and fundamental unit of the person. The body and the interactions with others is irrelevant to that core.
I'm not sure that is right. From the proposition 's runs' I can validly infer that s exists. This does not commit me to the view that running is fundamental to s's personhood.
Similarly, the claim that if s thinks then s exists does not entail that a further claim that thinking is central to s's personhood.
> This does not commit me to the view that running is fundamental to s's personhood.
That is not Descartes conclusion or my conclusion.
To Descartes, the person as experienced in a priori thought has a special primacy over all other existing things. While "s" may be doubted due to its a posteriori nature, the self is fundamentally undoubtable in its existence, hence "I think therefore I am".
To Descartes, the existence of a priori thought is the building block of all logic and personhood.
The differences are due to the logic and perspectives of the positions, not the concept of a 'person' itself. It's a similar difference to the concept of a person under existentialism as contrasted with cartesian dualism.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
> For everyone's sake, don't test your theory on any toddlers.
I do not kill dogs belonging to other people (or any dog, to be clear), why should I kill toddlers belonging to other people? And if I claim that toddler is an external limb of parents, than killing toddler means damaging parents, it is like to cut off their arms or something like. It is a good enough reason to not kill toddlers, isn't it?
> Why draw the line at age 3, and not 9 (Age of Reason) pubescence (Coming of Age), or post-pubescence?
Because the line between a person and not a person is drawn to separate humans from other animals. To make humans special and to give them rights to kill animals, to own animals. We need a way to justify our denial of animal rights on land or on any other kind of property and so on. So we should try to draw a line such a way, that reflects specialty of humans.
Someone like Descartes is not plumbing the depths of mathematics, or the soul, as a group activity. But anyone since, who reads or is read to about theories that have carried on, becomes that informed person because of exposure to these ideas. The ivory tower is just a prison if it exists without a press.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is there any reason to think that we have such a choice? Spinoza, a contemporary of Descartes, makes a good case that we don't have such any option at all. In fact, one particular quote I love is a very simple one: "Men are deceived in thinking themselves free, a belief that consists only in this, that they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined."
I think this is in some way separate from the metaphysical issue of free will and determinism, since whether our choices are determined by the universe or by us is quite a separate question to the extent to which society influences our choices in general. In my experience, it is absolutely not "still up to us" whether we are influenced by these factors, and a belief that it is up to us is more dangerous since it's delusional. The whole existence of the field of psychology, advertising, politics and propaganda is based on the idea that many things are not up to us - unfortunately we don't get to decide, but we like to think that we do.
Our desires, hopes, fears, opinions etc. are all imported from outside sources to a great extent, and it takes critical thinking to seriously ask about those - critical thinking we very rarely, if ever, apply to ourselves, because it leads to a kind of cognitive dissonance. I have personally suffered through this as I went deeper into political philosophy and saw that many concepts I held so dearly to were simply unsubstantiated, things that I believed due to ideological factors (from which none of us are ever free) and from my friends and relatives (which we may distance ourselves from to some extent only).
The idea we have control over these things without this critical-induced "pain" of having to confront ourselves is farcical.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.