wertion
1mo ago
I don’t agree with OP but I don’t think cotard’s is a good response to the cogito. Certainly, it can be thought: “I don’t exist,” or “there is no experience happening at this very moment,” but as beliefs, they are incredible, which is why cotard’s is regarded as a delusion.
wertion
1mo ago
But you don’t have to accept that second thing, and it doesn’t follow from the first. Even if one grants value should be assigned to the most stable thing (I think that runs into a grounding problem) you still have to explain why value should be assigned AT ALL.
wertion
1mo ago
This is a kind of phenomenology: I would recommend reading Husserl’s Crisis in the European Sciences, where he lays out a more developed version of a view like this.
The problems:
- the self having value is just assumed
- the existence of the outside world from its ability to change the ego doesn’t follow: outside world could be part of the ego.
- how do you know others have selves like the ego? If you’re following Descartes you u’re starting from an assumption the outside world can be made up or deceiving.
I don’t think the view is as novel as you supposed; and I don’t think it’s as airtight as Claude thinks.
The best version of this was offered by Husserl, whom I recommend you read.
While Husserl doesn't provide an ethics in Crisis, he did hope to develop one, and some of his students, Edith Stein, for instance, did try to develop ethical insights out of his position. But his project in the crisis is actually very close to what you describe as your own in the second paragraph. Husserl wants to build philosophy (ethics included) out of something that is apodictic, for him that is the Cogito. But while Husserl accepts, with some criticism, Descartes Cogito, he says that he does not go far enough, and that there is actually a further Cogito, which is more holistic. Even when the Cartesian, Husserl writes, is in the throes of his most intense doubting, wherein all he can seem to affirm is the bare cogito, he is still at that moment subjected to phenomenal experience: and the existence of that experience is just as undoubtable as the bare cogito. So, in this moment of radical doubt, one has not just the simple statement: I think therefore I am, but also has, at the same moment, the world. You only have the self, the cogito, but this cogito can be taken to be a "transcendental ego" which is constituting the world. (At this stage of Husserl's thinking he is drawn to a transcendental idealism). At this moment, Husserl writes, we can put aside concerns about the existence of the noumenal world, and deal only with the apodictic phenomenological one revealed to us through our Cartesian method of doubting: and, happily, this phenomenal world has among its basic structures many of things we hoped to find "really out there." Crucially, for an ethics, we have a primordial phenomenological experience of "being with" other people, which is ineradicable from our phenomenological experience, and upon which, we consequently are motivated to act. The question of the "real" existence of other people, the problem of solipsism, is thus sidestepped: what surely is is only that which cannot be doubted, which includes our phenomenological experience of others as others, hence we can treat them as other subjects.
To your final paragraph, it seems to me that the whole problem of other minds stems from the fact that it is in fact not the same logic whereby we become sure of our own existence that we become sure of the existence of other minds. I have first-hand, undeniable experiential proof of my own mind's existence, whereas, I only observe other people behaving "as if" they are minded: if all I have to prove my own existence is the so-called "bare cogito" then that certainly does not allow me to become sure of the existence of other minds. It's perfectly coherent to imagine myself as a solipsistic god mind: the bare cogito gives me no evidence this is not my situation. The expanded Cogito of husserl, however, may provide a way out, allowing you to sidestep this "coherence" talk altogether, which to me seems like an epicycle.
And a point on Ethics: it still seems to me you're putting the cart before the horse, here. I want an Ethics, you say, and I want it to be systematic: that means I'm going to have to make an unwarranted assumption to get this thing off the ground. It may be true that your system couldn't exist without accepting as brute this one fact "selves have value," but that's an extremely hard pill to swallow when the premise of your system is to be as reductive as possible and to ground ethics only in the most undeniable things. You have gone to all the effort to provide an extemely minimalist world picture--just the bare cogito--but then brought in this assumption, whose hugeness is made flagrant by the modesty of the rest of the system's assumptions. It's like trying to rake a zen garden with a bulldozer.
It also seems like normal ethics doesn't fall out of this view: my intuition would be if something did not decrease myself's coherence but did harm to other people, it would still be wrong. So not only are the grounds of ethics assumed by this system, they seem to open space for repugnant conclusions about what is ethical to be drawn.
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