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The Grammar of Experience
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 March 2014
Abstract
What do we learn when we focus analysis – not so much on the content of experience – as on its universal features and functioning? Descartes believed that such focus (when exercised by someone employing his first-personal method of inquiry) held the key to the fundamental metaphysics of our universe – that it could reveal fundamental truths about the nature of substance, or at any rate could reveal some fundamental metaphysical categories and their contrasts. He believed such focus could lead to a certain doctrine of dualism. Philosophers now widely hold that Descartes' method was profoundly wrongheaded, in no way a candidate method for illuminating the material universe that is our own. In fact, however, Descartes' method is considerably more serviceable. While unable to do what Descartes thought it could do, nonetheless it is ideal for examining a taxon that this essay will refer to as grammar or structure in the most general sense. Grammar is a contrary of content or materiality, though not the only one since materiality enjoys multiple contraries. Thus Descartes' method can lead us to a certain dualism, but not the one that Descartes imagined.
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- Joint winner of the 2013 Philosophy prize essay competition
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2014
References
2 It's worthwhile noting here that the process of ‘putting things into words’ introduces a vast quantity of materials additional to the raw contents of experience – not least the concepts required to do the putting of things into words. So it is wise to exercise extraordinary caution as we proceed. This will be a recurring theme in the present essay.
3 ‘Lies’ is indeed the right word, as in Descartes' conception experience is a form of testimony; the senses are personified. In the Second Meditation Descartes speaks as though the mind and the sense are in conversation about the properties of a certain piece of wax, each making different contributions to the picture: ‘Evidently it was not any of the features that the senses told me of.’
4 Leaving aside, of course, the referent of ‘I’ – a point on which Descartes has been taken to task, not least prominently by Frederick Nietzsche: ‘What gives me the right to speak of an “I”, and even of an “I” as cause, and finally of an “I” as cause of thought?’ (Beyond Good and Evil, part 1, par. 16.)
5 Hume, one might recall, said as much (Hume, D. 1978. Treatise of Human Nature, (Oxford: Clarendon PressGoogle Scholar) (original work 1739)). Russell too was critical of the inference (Russell, B. 1945. A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and SchusterGoogle Scholar), 56). And William James struggled mightily with the question and with what ‘I’ refers to in both Descartes' and Hume's narratives (James, William. 1890/1950. The Principles of Psychology, Volume One, (New York: Henry Holt & Co.Google Scholar Reprinted, New York: Dover Publications)). In Descartes' own time, Georg Lichtenberg took issue with Descartes' ‘I think’:
We know only the existence of our sensations, representations and thoughts. One should say, it thinks, just as one says, it lightens. It is already too much to say cogito, as soon as one translates it as I think. (tr. in Zoeller, ‘Lichtenberg and Kant on the Subject of Thinking’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 1992, 30, 418; for the original in German see Lichtenberg 1967–72, Schriften und Briefe, ed. Wolfgang Promies (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag), Vol. 2, 412.)
6 Part III: chapter 1.IV of his masterwork Being and Nothingness, Sartre 2003[1943]. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology. Tr. Hazel Barnes. (London: Routledge).
7 It would seem that there is a tradeoff between resolution and scale-freedom, and that the question of object orientation has a great deal to do with both. But I shall not pursue that subject here any further.
8 This was a point that Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex, Parshley, H. M. (translator), (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984 [1949])Google Scholar) especially was at pains to explain contra Sartre, a point with which Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Smith, C. (New York: Humanities Press, 1962)Google Scholar) and that more recent feminist phenomenology has championed – see especially Thalos ‘Towards a theory of freedom’, Theoria 134, 1–25, (2013).Google Scholar
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11 Cf. Lohmar, Dieter (2011) ‘Categorial intuition’ in H.L. Dreyfus and M.A. Vrathall (eds) A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (Wiley).
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13 In ‘Truth deserves to be believed’ (Philosophy 88(344): 179–96 (2013))CrossRefGoogle Scholar I argue that truth (unqualified) is about proprieties. To fill out this idea, we will be obliged to say that logical truth is about proprieties of thought specifically, where by contrast material truth concerns the proprieties of correct representation of the ‘material’ facts of the world. This idea is worked out in Thalos (in progress ‘The government of logic and mathematics’).
14 And had there been ideas he should have liked to communicate but did not feel able to do so openly for fear of reprisals or personal repercussions, I think we are entitled to suppose that he might well have shown these without saying them.
15 In a sympathetic spirit, John Carriero (‘Epistemology past and present’, draft in progress) says that Kant and more recent epistemologists are up to is illuminating ‘epistemic practice’, whereas Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza are up to something else – namely, illuminating the ways in which our cognitive equipment is in line with the ordering principles of the world.
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