Cogito: from Descartes to Sartre
Mo Weimin
Cogito, as the first principle of Descartes’ metaphysical system, opens modern philosophy of consciousness. Cartesian cogito nourished western philosophy positively and negatively. Positively, because it served as the starting point for philosophy of consciousness to pursue the certainty of knowledge or truth. Negatively, because many philosophers thought that a thinking thing (res cogitans) or mind cannot be a substance, or even that we can do philosophy without the Cartesian cogito. Then philosophy developed to a great extent by criticizing Cartesian cogito and advancing persuasive ideas simultaneously.
Maine de Biran insisted that the phenomental is the object of intuition while the noumental is the object of belief, whereas Descartes confused these two things. I will (Volo) should substitute I think (Cogito).In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant criticized four kinds of transcendental paralogism of rational psychology of Descartes, because they infer from the formal conditions of thought to a substance of thought.
Transcendental ego was the pivot of phenomenology of Husserl. Husserl intended to purify Desacrtes’ psychological and empirical ego and transform it into transcendental ego by phenomenological reduction. Moreover Husserl thought that Kant, just like Descartes, took psychological consciousness in time, and not transcendental consciousness, as basis of knowledge. We can find no transcendental ego in Kantian philosophy.
Descartes starts with the reflexive consciousness, while Sartre begins with the pre-reflexive consciousness as the basic datum in which the ego of reflexive consciousness does not appear. According to Sartre, the ego and the world are posited as correlative to one another in reflexive consciousness. Therefore Husserl’s transcendental ego is excluded. Although the consciousness is primary in contrast with ego, it has nothing substantial, it is the pure appearance.
Descartes ascribed human freedom to the faculty of human soul, while Sartre thought that freedom belongs to the very structure of the being-for-itself. The being of human reality and human freedom are inseparable. It is precisely in anguish that human being takes consciousness of his freedom. The anguish is the mode of being of freedom as consciousness of being. In this regard, Sartre agreed with Kierkegaard and Heidegger and ran counter to Bergson.
Sartre differed with Kant and Husserl as to the precise relation of consciousness to ego. Sartre reproached them with solipsism because they established the epistemological relation between my being and others’ being without considering the ontological relationship.
Although Heidegger thought that the relation of human realities should be relation of being and that relation should make human realities depend on one another in their essential being, considered my being with other as the essential structure of my being without starting with Cartesian cogito, Sartre took objection to Heidegger’s theory of Mit-Sein (being-with) in which the problem of the other is only one false problem. Heidegger sought to substitute being-with-other for being-for-other. However, Sartre emphasized that being-for-other precedes and founds being-with-other.
As we know, Sartre was in his turn made a target of criticism by Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, Canguilhem, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze, etc., Ricœur nevertheless wanted to reconcile Cartesian cogito and Nietzschean anti-cogito.
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1 Immanuel Kant,Kritik der reinen vernunft,Felix Meiner Verlag,Hamburg,1956,379a,A351.
1 ibid.,382a,A354;383a,A355.
1 Jean-Paul Sartre, La transcendance de l’Ego, Vrin,1966.
1 Jean-Paul Sartre,L’être et le néant,Éditions Gallimard,1943,p.23.
1 Jean-Paul Sartre,L’être et le néant,Éditions Gallimard,1943,pp.24-26.
2 ibid.,p.29.
3 ibid.,p.57.
4 ibid.,p.59.
5 ibid.,pp.59-60.
6 ibid.,p.81.
1 Jean-Paul Sartre,L’être et le néant,Éditions Gallimard,1943,p.64.
2 ibid.,p.255.
1 Jean-Paul Sartre,L’être et le néant,Éditions Gallimard,1943,p.284.
1 Jean-Paul Sartre,L’être et le néant,Éditions Gallimard,1943,p.455.
2 ibid.,p.286.
3 ibid.,p.288.
4 ibid.,p.290.
1 ibid.,p.307.
2 Jean-Paul Sartre,L’être et le néant,Éditions Gallimard,1943,p.309.
3 ibid.,p.404.
4 ibid.,p.341. |