In reading Descartes’ meditations, he states that he knows that he exists and that he thinks. Both of these statements are incorrigible. However, something I am wondering about is this – how can he claim to know that he exists and thinks, without first knowing what thinking and existing are, in and of themselves? It seems like he is jumping the horse here.
This is the most important philosophical work of the modern period, so I assume there’s something I’m just not getting here. Any thoughts?
Descartes’ Meditations can be considered important from the historical perspective of having sent modern philosophy down the wrong road all together.
Descartes believed he could discard everything he learned from the Jesuits and construct a new philosophical system grounded on what was entirely indubitable. What he concluded that was indubitable was that he exists. Besides the arrogance of the whole project of the Meditations, the famous “Cogito ergo sum” is dead wrong and misleading.
“I think, therefore I am” implies that what the mind know primarily and directly are its ideas. (Here is where we get into some necessary distinctions). Thoughts in the mind, contrary to what Descartes alleged, are not “that which” we know. Ideas are, rather, the means “by which” we know. Ideas or concepts are, so to speak, self-effacing in the act of knowing some thing. The mind knows things, real or imagined. The ideas themselves are not the direct objects of knowledge. To state matters again and more fully, "Ideas, and sense perceptions, are that “by which” we know, and never “that which” we know.
The consequence of Descartes confusion in asserting that what we know directly are ideas and sense perceptions, is that we then have know way of knowing whether our ideas and sense perceptions give us reliable information about the world. Descartes answer to this conundrum he created is to assert the God was trustworthy and would not allow us to be deceived by our ideas and percepts.
Well, that hardly resolves the problem. Locke’s empiricism tried to escape Descartes idealism, but Locke still retained the view that “that which” we know primarily are our ideas and percepts and not things “by means” of our cognitive activity.
The David Hume drew the obvious conclusion to all of this – skepticism about knowledge. Kant tried to rescue knowledge from Hume’s skepticism by constructing his own theory of categories of the mind and so on, which organize sense data, etc. This project was an utter failure, also, except in the minds of Kant’s modern day disciples.
The solution was not to be found in responding to Descartes by constructing new theories. The answer is to recognize the error in Descartes Meditations in which he treats ideas as “that which” we know rather than that “by which” we know. In other words, if instead of “I think, therefore I am” Descartes had said “I know, therefore I am” the history of modern philosophy would not be so disordered.
The incredible disorder of modern philosophy, especially in the area of epistemology, is a classic illustration of Aristotle’s saying, “A little error in the beginning amounts to a colossal one in the end.” The seemingly small error committed by Descartes snowballed through the centuries. I attribute Descartes error to his profound arrogance.
And we can see that so many modern philosophers lack common sense because they still put Descartes before the horse.
