Cartesian Self Research Articles

Knowledge-ing as a response-able practice in the Anthropocene: Re-turning (to) the research events like an earthworm

This paper began with the assumption that the habitual practices of knowledge-creation, which have shaped the day-to-day contexts of teachers and researchers, are not greatly different from the practices that have led to human-made catastrophes in the Anthropocene. I pondered over my experiences as a researcher in an attempt to gain insights for thinking about and engaging in knowledge-creation differently to become more response-able in the Anthropocene. Inspired by post-qualitative research practice, I re-turned, like an earthworm, (to) two research events. A theoretical framework informed by critical posthumanism and feminist new materialism guided the process. Through these re-turns, I came to understand that creating knowledge is a complex and indeterminate process that always accompanies the ‘more-than’. Attending to the notion of knowledge-ing, I discussed the ways in which knowledge emerged as a flow that was neither fully graspable nor static through more-than-human intra-actions. What I propose in this paper is not a methodological technique, but rather, a mode of practice that might disrupt our sense of Cartesian self. I offered some suggestions for teachers and researchers to reimagine the practices of knowledge-creation as a way of reinventing their subjectivity and responding to the damaged earth more responsibly.

Regaining the Lost Momentum toward Authenticity: Heideggerian Being in Fowles's The Magus and Golding's Free Fall

The post-war human, contrary to the Cartesian self, is so enmeshed in the inauthenticity of the modern time that he has lost sight of who he is and what he seeks in the banality of the present time. Martin Heidegger, in this regard, introduces the notion of an authentic being called ‘Dasein’ who has accepted his mortality as ‘being-in-the-world.’ In the same vein, an idea embraced by twentieth-century fiction writers was the modern human being and its idiosyncratic hallmarks extensively discussed in modern literature. The Magus by John Fowles and Free Fall by William Golding are two investigated fictions in this study in which the protagonists embark on a journey of self-discovery culminating in alterations in their outlook on life and discovering how to gain authenticity. The outcome of this study is that both sides have partially adapted to this world of being with all of its spatio-temporal limitations after having faced their mortality and temporality. Keywords: Authenticity, Dasein, Heidegger, Literature, Temporality

Quartet of Selves: Quinn’s Personal Identity

The present article discusses the concept of personal identity in Paul Auster’s City of Glass by focusing on Daniel Quinn’s multiple “selves”. It questions the idea of the Cartesian self as an underlying and neverchanging structure because that notion is problematic to understand the quartet of selves that Daniel Quinn represents: “himself”, William Wilson, Max Work and Paul Auster. Instead, it takes into account Daniel Dennett’s idea that the self is a useful abstraction that helps to understand our cognitive states by means of a coherent narration, and Derek Parfit’s notion of successive selves. All these help to understand how Daniel Quinn’s personal identity is built in the novel.

What Am I? Descartes’s Various Ways of Considering the Self

In the Meditations and related texts from the early 1640s, Descartes argues that the self can be correctly considered as either a mind or a human being, and that the self’s properties vary accordingly. For example, the self is simple considered as a mind, whereas the self is composite considered as a human being. Someone might object that it is unclear how merely considering the self in different ways blocks the conclusion that a single subject of predication—the self—is both simple and composite, which is contradictory. In response to this objection, this paper develops a reading of Descartes’s various ways of considering the self. I argue that the best reading of Descartes’s qualified claims about the self, i.e., about the self qua mind or the self qua human being, presupposes an account of the unqualified self, that is, of the self simpliciter. I argue that the self simpliciter is not a mind, and that it is not a human being either. This result might suggest the pessimistic conclusion that Descartes’s view of the self is incoherent. To avoid this result, I introduce a new metaphysical account of the Cartesian self. On my view, the self is individuated by a unified mental life. The self is constituted by the beings that jointly produce this mental life, and derives its unity from it.

El descubrimiento del yo según David Hume

This paper deals with Hume's criticism to Cartesian self and his account of a social self discovered through emotions, pride and sympathy. It wants to give possible solutions to Hume's contradictions on personal identity.

The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe

The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe

Porous Skins and Tactile Bodies: Juxtaposition of the Affective and Sentimental Ideas of the Subject

This article brings together two ideas that authors in theoretical humanities tend to consider in isolation—of affect and of sentiment—and investigates what conceptions or imaginaries of the subject these ideas have historically relied on and reproduced. When viewed from the lens of the theory of subjectivation, the contemporary notions of affect and the modern sentiment tradition not only reveal significant conceptual, epistemic and ideational overlaps, but they are both kinds of critique of the liberal individualistic subject. Engaging the methodology of juxtaposition, I bring together the affective porous subject (drawing on the work of Teresa Brennan) with the modern sentiment idea of the sensible body, focusing in particular on the 17th- and 18th-century neurological discourses of sensibility in the work of Albrecht von Haller, Georg Ernst Stahl and others. I argue that the modern sentiment tradition forms part of the genealogy of affect in that its ideas of sensibility and sympathy foreground one of the tenets of affective subjectivity: namely, that the subject emerges through (rather than predates) ecological exposure, membranous permeability and nervous responsiveness. In this sense, both the sentimental and affective notions of the subject operate as forms of critique of the idea of Cartesian self and of the disavowal of relational and/or dialogical subject in Western philosophy.

Xavier Zubiri y María Zambrano: de la crisis europea a una reforma del entendimiento

Life and work of Maria Zambrano and Xavier Zubiri as representatives of the first period of «Escuela de Madrid», crosses and articulates in this paper research, through the criticism that both philosophers do about Cartesian self, allowing thus to address the originality of Spanish thought from an anthropological perspective. The solipsism, which is verified by Ortega y Gasset, is an evidence of the European crisis that outstands in modernity and the point of view of this analysis.

Outside the Box

We’re big on The Self these days, aren’t we? Self-care, self-management, self-disclosure, self-efficacy, self-directed learning, self-examination, self-testing, self-administration of medication, self-actualisation: you name it, the 21st century Western individual is depicted as doing it or striving for it. What is more, professional practice and medical ethics are increasingly defined in a way that valorises the patient’s Cartesian self. We must respect their autonomy, share decisions with them, make ourselves accessible to them, and protect their data, where ‘them’ is actually a singular term, referring to ‘him’ or ‘her’. Yet as family doctors, we also know that few people — and even fewer truly healthy people — are …

“Platonic relationships” in China's online social milieu: a lubricant for banal everyday life?

This article focuses on how the term “Platonic relationships” is used by Chinese Internet users when discussing online relationships. The study relies primarily on personal narratives of online relationships, opinions provided by members of several domestic social sites, and an online survey. Used in the Chinese online context, “Platonic relationships” can refer to exclusively Internet-based relationships, but with no implication of seeking for the Cartesian self. Playing with “Platonic relationships” by containing the relationships online symbolizes an act of defiance against the ordinarization of enchanting and engrossing online affections by banal, everyday life. Chinese netizens strategically exploit the Internet to fulfill their emotional needs in order to improve the quality of their daily life.

The Moviegoer's Cartesian Theater: Moviegoing as Walker Percy's Metaphor for the Cartesian Mind

Binx Bolling is the moviegoing protagonist of The Moviegoer (1961), Walker Percy's first novel. In an interview, Percy once referred to Binx as a “victim” of Descartes. Did Percy intend some connection between Binx's moviegoing and his unfortunate, Cartesian heritage? In this essay, I argue that Percy used Binx's moviegoing as a metaphor for his having a Cartesian mind. As Percy knew, many Descartes scholars regard the Cartesian self as a purely thinking thing whose mind is like a theater. Seated in that theater, the self entertains ideas, or mental objects, which stand like a solid screen between the self and the nonmental world outside. It is consistent with the two most widely held readings of Descartes on the nature of an idea to regard ideas as mental objects, as I discuss in the first section. In section two, I argue that there is ample evidence to support our seeing Binx's moviegoing as a metaphor for his Cartesian mind. In the final section, I describe how our reading The Moviegoer in this way might enrich our understanding of this novel, Percy's other work, and Percy himself.

The Road to Substance Dualism

AbstractThe common materialist view that a functional account of intentionality will eventually be produced is rejected, as is the notion that intentional states are multiply realisable. It is argued also that, contrary to what many materialists have held, the causation of behaviour by intentional states rules out the possibility of a complete explanation of human behaviour in physical terms, and that this points to substance dualism. Kant's criticism of the Cartesian self as a substance, endorsed by P. F. Strawson, rests on a misinterpretation of Descartes. The so-called ‘causal pairing problem’, which Kim sees to be the crucial objection to substance dualism, is examined, and Kim's arguments are rejected.

In Search of the Cartesian Self

Cyberspace has been hailed by some as a medium through which users can experience themselves as disembodied, freed from the corporeal trappings of the “real” world. Literature proclaiming the merits of this disembodied ideal has often described the user’s existential state as a form of Cartesian disembodiment, but without (in our view) giving serious consideration to whether this label is warranted. This paper explores the extent to which alterations to the contingency relation said to exist by Descartes, between mind and body (or physical system), result in experiences of disembodiment that can legitimately be described as Cartesian. After examining various examples of altered contingency relations—from case study reports of pathological experiences of disembodiment to research evidence on online relating—we conclude that cyberspace does not constitute a suitable medium for the realization of the Cartesian self, even in users who intentionally seek to become disembodied. The more we try to disengage with the body, the more its importance is revealed to us.

Challenging the Cartesian Self: Autobiography as an intertextual/interrelational discourse in the works of Aritha van Herk and Kristjana Gunnars

Recent works by the Canadian writers Aritha van Herk and Kristjana Gunnars articulate a metamorphic approach to autobiography that subverts the assumptions of authenticity and objectivity central to autobiography and historiography. van Herk's Places Far From Ellesmere and Gunnars' The Substance of Forgetting and The Rose Garden: Reading Marcel Proust interweave fiction with history, autobiography with critical theory, and philosophy with cultural geography. Each text's reflexive awareness of itself as a hybrid continuum of oppositional discourses articulates a counter model of the ‘academic autobiography’ as a meditation on the writer's engagement with others. In dissolving the boundaries between texts and intertexts, authors and readers, each work engages the reader as a further extension of a textual continuum creating a community that challenges the assumptions of the Cartesian subject, offering instead a model of a narratable self.

Displacing the subject

Dialogical epistemologies of the self have been influential in rethinking the politics of ethnography. Although critiquing the centered Cartesian self as the locus of knowledge, these approaches focus attention on the researcher and assume the primacy of the self-knowing subject. This article draws on Peirce's argument that `man' is a sign to supplement critical theories of knowledge. Although Peirce focused on the semiosis of consciousness, we can apply his interpretive framework to think about other interpretants of the researching sign, the discourses that shape the meanings of the self as sign, and the hazards of the ethnographic encounter.

Wittgenstein y las objeciones a la primera persona

La disolución del yo cartesiano se redujo a un puro enunciado sin sentido o vacío de referente. Por ello el yo ha dejado de ser entendido en filosofía como un objeto referencial. De esta distinción entre referencia y no referencia, echará mano Wittgenstein para elaborar su crítica a la metafísica tradicional y a la teoría del significado. Pero aún así la problemática de una primera persona nos salta a la vista en la medida en que en el lenguaje es imprescindible para dar cuenta de la conciencia, y si bien es cierto que no es un término cuya existencia sea referencial, no por ello se vacía de cierta existencia, aunque no es un término objetivo, puesto que ni siquiera es objeto del intelecto, pero esto no deja de tener influencia en el mundo.

Elegy under the Knife: Geoffrey Hill and the Ethics of Sacrifice

We read in sacred scripture: And God tempted [fristede] Abraham and said: Abraham, Abraham, where are you? But Abraham answered: I. You to whom these words are addressed, was this the case with you? --Kierkegaard (21) The great experiences of our life have properly speaking never been lived. Are not religions said to come to us from a past which was never a pure now? Their grandeur is due to this exorbitance exceeding the capacity of phenomena, of the present and of memory. To the voice that calls from the burning bush, Moses answers, Here am, but does not dare to lift up his eyes. --Levinas (Phenomenon and Enigma 68) The Here am of the Hebrew Bible sounds different after Descartes's cogito; after Kierkegaard and Levinas, the cogito sounds different with their re-sounding of the Here am. The apodictic elegance of Descartes's certification of the subject contrasts with the Bible's tentative performative: the Here am names a self at risk of failing in its response to a call, and a self falling into danger if it succeeds. While the cogito names a self transparently present to itself--a coincidence of thought and being in the act of self-consciousness (Zizek 15)--the Here am is a subject without sovereignty over thought or being, a subject in the vicinity of an infinite alterity and exteriority. The Here am is an identity that is not simply itself because it finds itself among unreadable signs and confronted with a demand or challenge still to come. It is a creature uttering its fragility, and for modern thought about subjectivity this utterance is a revelation of an excess in the self, a dramatic noncoincidence between being and the experience of selfhood, an ontological charge that exceeds the circuitry of identity. The Here am--an admission of guilt as much as presence, of obedience more than self-assertion--can never be the divine that am. Kierkegaard himself is not simply Kierkegaard; in Fear and Trembling it is Johannes de Silentio who speaks, a pseudonym or alter ego displacing a proper name. It is in this moment of displacement that we find a capacity of the self to answer to alterity, precisely in its incapacity to sustain the cogito's seamless equation between being and consciousness. Levinas finds a decertification of the cogito even in Descartes's thought: In meditating upon the idea of God, Descartes sketched, with an unequaled rigor, [...] a thinking going to the point of the breaking up the think (God, Death, and Time 215). The Cartesian self, after Levinas, ruptures under the thought of God that overflows every capacity; the 'objective reality' of the cogitatum breaks up the 'formal reality' of the cogitatio (God and Philosophy 173). What remains of selfhood, for Levinas, is an in which the nucleus of the subject is uprooted, undone, [...] an torn from the concept of the ego [...]. This is the that is not but which says 'here am' (181-82). One way to understand this assignation that is not designated, or this I without ego, is as subjectivity attuned to an absolute that exceeds itself, an absolute that cannot be correlated with its own being or knowledge, and that brings that being and knowledge to crisis. Kierkegaard and Levinas imagine this absolute relation in different ways--Kierkegaard's Here am is a response directed first to God, Levinas's first to the human other--but even in their different maps of transcendence they share an essential concern: that we notice the modern subject trembling at its implication in an alterity it can neither avoid nor understand. The trembling represents Kierkegaard's theological critique and Levinas's ethical critique of thought that coerces the subject into abstraction and subsumes irreducibly particular identities into universal totalities. Kierkegaard and Levinas, in their distinct (and at moments antagonistic) critiques of philosophical abstraction and totalization, want us to understand that the human is realized as a nearly unthinkable singularity, its uniqueness derived from its untransferable obligations and unrepresentable commitments to an alterity that cannot be reduced to the terms of the self. …

Who are we? From a modern Cartesian self to alternative views on selfhood

The advent of postmodernism, post structuralism and social constructionism led over the last years to a multitude of theoretical philosophical reflections on possible meanings of the psychological basic concept ‘selfhood’ or ‘subjectivity’. The modern, sovereign self was deconstructed and no longer considered as an ontological fact but rather as a product of language. The stable core self from which many traditional psychological theories start, was dethroned and substituted by a narrative, multiple and variable self that is permanently constructed and reconstructed in social situations. May we invite the reader to reflect on this fascinating subject together with Anna and Tom, the two interlocutors. Starting from the question ‘Who are we?’, we make a tour of the different schools of thought on subjectivity. Departing from the subject concept of Descartes, we track symbolic interactionistic, post‐structuralistic, social constructionistic and narrative hermeneutic ways. All these ways provide us with a different ‘view’ on subjectivity/selfhood and raise new questions that are relevant to researchers in the social sciences.

The self as a responding-and responsible-artifact.

The powerful illusion of a unified, Cartesian self responsible for intentional action is contrasted with the biologically sounder model of competitive processes that yield an only partially coherent agency, and the existence of the illusion of self is explained as an evolved feature of communicating agents, capable of responding to requests and queries about their own decisions and actions.

Commentary on "Minds, Memes, and Multiples"

Commentary on “Minds, Memes, and Multiples” Michael Bavidge (bio) Multiple Personality Disorder challenges the idea we have of ourselves—selves whose essential characteristics are simplicity, identity, transparency. Stephen Clark argues that we should look behind the myth of a unitary self to an older tradition which represents personal integration not as a given but as something to be striven for, “a distant, luminous goal,” a “light” over the multiple parts of the human personality, a therapeutic and personal ideal of ourselves as persons separate from the ideas that invade us and the experiences that flow through us. He argues that this notion has a number of advantages. It is compatible with the data of Multiple Personality Disorder. It avoids Cartesian myths while providing a self substantial enough to meet both philosophers’ demands for an explanation of the coherence of experience and clinicians’ requirements for a therapeutic objective. Clark sees Multiple Personality Disorder as an exotic manifestation of the unstable and fractured nature of familiar experience. He points up the complexities of our personalities and the passivity of our normal experience. So our everyday experience comes together with the psychiatric disorder to encourage a looser, more dispersed notion of the self than has been felt necessary since Descartes. The notion of self which we think of as Cartesian (though, Clark suggests, Descartes may never have accepted it), caught on as part of the settlement between the emerging sciences and older wisdom. The basis of the settlement was that the world was to be made amenable to scientific investigation and our innermost selves were to be protected from it. This requires that the self has to be all the things that the rest of the world is not—non-spatial, privately accessible, outside determinist, causal chains, simple and indivisible. The settlement was never stable, and, as contemporary arguments over the cognitive sciences demonstrate, it is as controversial today as ever. Multiple Personality Disorder adds psychiatric considerations to the evidence piling up against the Cartesian self. However, the diagnosis is extremely controversial. A highly critical editorial in the British Journal of Psychiatry in March 1995 suggests that the condition is largely generated within therapy. 1 The diagnosis, as the New Scientist (June 17, 1995) reported, seems excessively subject to trends and fashions. 2 Clark shares these reservations, but he concludes that there is now strong evidence of a “real condition.” Yet he does not discuss what he means by a “real condition.” Certainly he intends to exclude malingering or mere therapist suggestion. Nevertheless, he prefers to interpret the disorder as a matter of one [End Page 29] person having different strategies for dealing with a stressful world, rather than as the emergence of a plurality of persons. Some psychiatrists will think that his acceptance, however qualified, is too much of a concession, while others may feel that he is not allowing the alters, and therefore the condition itself, to be “real” enough. Clark’s philosophical remarks are also circumspect, but ambitious claims are there. He wants a re-appraised, strong theory of the self, though he doubts that the truth of such a theory could ever be established. Nevertheless, for Clark, we need a notion of self as “substance, a real being”; we discover and rediscover it; “it becomes aware of itself in me.” Apart from its philosophical advantages, the notion of self he wishes to revive has therapeutic value. Autonomy is the therapeutic target. Understood in Cartesian terms, Multiple Personality Disorder presents paradoxes of autonomy. Cognitive autonomy is the defining characteristic of the Cartesian self; when we have multiple persons, the question arises: autonomy for whom? The difficulties are softened if our idea of self allows for plurality, opacity and divergence within the one person, so the prospect held out to the patient is the possibility of repossessing the fragmented parts of his or her life. Clark engages in a two-fold maneuver for making sense of Multiple Personality Disorder. He revives a looser philosophical concept of self, and he interprets the disorder as an extension of ordinary experience in which there is a divergence of coping strategies rather than a plurality of egos. One could argue that Clark is too optimistic...