English Science and Literature club🤓✍️📖

300.

November 27, 2024 (14271)
In his Principles of Philosophy, Descartes, from the very beginning, compels us to “doubt everything that we can doubt.” He boasts that he himself doubts the existence of his own body and everything that it perceives through the senses. He says that the senses sometimes deceive us and, therefore, can’t be trusted. The only sure thing appears to be the mind that is thinking. For Descartes, “the knowledge of our mind is not simply prior to and more certain than the knowledge of our body, but it also more evident.” Those who disagree “haven’t done their philosophizing in an orderly way, and haven’t carefully enough distinguished the mind from the body.” A thought means “everything that we are aware of as happening within us, and it counts as ‘thought’ because we are aware of it.” All our thoughts might be wrong, but the fact that they are ours and that we’re doing thinking is, for Descartes, beyond doubt.
Many great thinkers struggled with this assertion, trying to refute Descartes’ “immediate certainty”, “absolute knowledge” or “thing in itself” as “I think” was dubbed in other languages. The most famous reply to Descartes, probably, comes a few centuries later from Nietzsche who calls him a “harmless self-observer” and insists that his formula contains “a contradiction in adjecto”. This reply can be found in the first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil, and although it’s apparently done in “a disorderly way”, it blows up the foundation of Descartes’ metaphysical castle as if it were “nothing more than sand and mud.” French grounded in Latin doesn’t withstand an attack from German grounded in Greek.
But let’s forget about Nietzsche and raise a doubt about our own language. Our principles of psychopolitics also demand, quantum fieri potest, doubt everything. What if an “evil genius” (or, as we say today, “an army of great thinkers of rival languages) deceived us to believe in something that makes no sense? What if our language as a whole doesn’t make any sense? What if English doesn’t make any sense? From a perspective of any other language it surely doesn’t. Are we free to learn to think in a new language?

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4 viewsVladimir Svetashev, Nov 27 at 11:49

300.

November 27, 2024 (14271)
In his Principles of Philosophy, Descartes, from the very beginning, compels us to “doubt everything that we can doubt.” He boasts that he himself doubts the existence of his own body and everything that it perceives through the senses. He says that the senses sometimes deceive us and, therefore, can’t be trusted. The only sure thing appears to be the mind that is thinking. For Descartes, “the knowledge of our mind is not simply prior to and more certain than the knowledge of our body, but it also more evident.” Those who disagree “haven’t done their philosophizing in an orderly way, and haven’t carefully enough distinguished the mind from the body.” A thought means “everything that we are aware of as happening within us, and it counts as ‘thought’ because we are aware of it.” All our thoughts might be wrong, but the fact that they are ours and that we’re doing thinking is, for Descartes, beyond doubt.
Many great thinkers struggled with this assertion, trying to refute Descartes’ “immediate certainty”, “absolute knowledge” or “thing in itself” as “I think” was dubbed in other languages. The most famous reply to Descartes, probably, comes a few centuries later from Nietzsche who calls him a “harmless self-observer” and insists that his formula contains “a contradiction in adjecto”. This reply can be found in the first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil, and although it’s apparently done in “a disorderly way”, it blows up the foundation of Descartes’ metaphysical castle as if it were “nothing more than sand and mud.” French grounded in Latin doesn’t withstand an attack from German grounded in Greek.
But let’s forget about Nietzsche and raise a doubt about our own language. Our principles of psychopolitics also demand, quantum fieri potest, doubt everything. What if an “evil genius” (or, as we say today, “an army of great thinkers of rival languages) deceived us to believe in something that makes no sense? What if our language as a whole doesn’t make any sense? What if English doesn’t make any sense? From a perspective of any other language it surely doesn’t. Are we free to learn to think in a new language?

BY English Science and Literature club🤓✍️📖