In a recent post, I argued that Descartes was incorrect to infer from the subjective experience of thinking the existence of an active thinker, which I labelled the “self”:
One does not have to be a long-practising meditator to experience directly and for oneself that there is no thinker of thoughts: thoughts think themselves. They cannot be anticipated; their contents are not known in advance. They arrive unannounced from the depths, like bubbles popping at random on the surface of a dark ocean, or like heavy raindrops splashing into puddles without a discernible pattern or rhythm. Consciousness is simultaneously the context in which thoughts arise and the witness of them. Outside of consciousness, there are no thoughts (or emotions, or sensations.) Descartes was wrong to conclude that thinking proved the existence of the self. Unlike many Buddhists and secular meditators, I am not yet convinced that there is no self, but I am confident that thinking is not evidence of it. Instead of saying, "I think therefore I am," Descartes would have been more accurate to report, very simply and without drawing conclusions, "There is thinking." English is very familiar with active verbs that have no subject. For example, we do not assume a rainer of rain when we look outside and see water falling from the sky. We declare, straightforwardly and honestly, "It is raining" without attempting to define what "it" is.
Perhaps, however, I have Descartes all wrong. Perhaps what he meant to infer from his inner awareness of thinking was not the self, but instead being-as-such. Could he have meant that the appearance of thoughts in time was evidence of existence itself, both theirs and his as entities, and of their being a relationship between the two in which he could take an interest in a recursive, self-reflective manner? Am I reading too much into this? I begin to wonder what Descartes truly meant when he said, “Cogito ergo sum.” In translating sum into English, we have both the “I” and the “am” of “I am.” By way of the word therefore, did he mean to argue that his internal awareness of thinking was proof of the “I,” or proof of the “am,” that is, of what Martin Heidegger would call Being (capitalized), or is the “I am” fundamentally entangled and indivisible?
Just as Kant was aroused from his “dogmatic slumber” by Hume, so have I been excited by Heidegger, who makes the bold and controversial claim that the entire history of Western Philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche has been a grand mistake because it has not been grounded in a proper ontology. In the introduction to “Being and Time,” Heidegger sets for himself the task of “destroying the history of ontology,” which he regards of fundamental importance in resetting philosophy on its correct footing. He begins:
Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it blocks our access to those primordial 'sources' from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn. Indeed it makes us forget that they have had such an origin, and makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even understand.
So, what we take to be “self-evident” is probably not at all obvious—we simply assume it to be so, unreflectively. Heidegger continues:
The ego cogito of Descartes, the subject, the I, reason, spirit, person … these all remain uninterrogated as to their Being and its structure, in accordance with the thoroughgoing way in which the question of Being has been neglected.
If we agree with Heidegger to this point, we are on very dangerous ground because the entirety of philosophy begins to shift beneath our feet. We begin to sense that the touchstones of our faith are illusory. Despite these dangers, Heidegger goes on to devastate whatever certainty remains:
With the 'cogito sum' Descartes had claimed that he was putting philosophy on a new and firm footing. But what he left undetermined when he began in this 'radical' way, was the kind of Being which belongs to the res cogitans, or—more precisely—the meaning of the Being of the 'sum'.
What are we to make of this? Do we take Heidegger seriously? I think we must, but the implications are almost too enormous to consider. I continue to read “Being and Time,” though it may precipitate a dramatic reorientation of my worldview.