Gilson on Descartes: "indisciplinatus"

From Ivo Coelho, RORTY’S ANTI-FOUNDATIONALISM AND FIDES ET RATIO :

There should be no difficulty, I think, in agreeing with Rorty’s attack on Cartesian subjectivity. Again, there should be no difficulty in agreeing with Rorty’s attack on the Cartesian search for apodicticity. Rorty quotes Dewey and Wittgenstein to the effect that a natural quest for understanding has been run together, by modern philosophers, with an unnatural quest for certainty. Even more interesting however is Rorty quoting Gilson on Descartes’ unwarranted extension of an excessive ideal of certitude to all spheres: “From the point of view of medieval philosophy, Descartes plays the role of the indisciplinatus – someone who takes pride in insisting, no matter what discipline is in question, on the same degree of certainty, no matter how inappropriate. In a word, Descartes no longer recognizes an intermediary between the true and the false; his philosophy is the radical elimination of the notion of the ‘probable.’”

The bridge that does not exist

If I affirm an object, it exists.

if i affirm myself, i exist.

what i am doing here is: affirming an object as real, as being; affirming a subject as real, as being. 

if i can make the further judgment that the object is not the subject, i have objectivity. 

of course, i could specify further: in what way is the object not the subject? there is the objectivity of "2 + 2 = 4", of mathematical entities; there is the objectivity of a thought, or a dream; there is the objectivity of a snake that enters a goa house... of a new planet that someone claims to have discovered... 

Descartes assumed that he knew the self in an apodictic way. he assumed also that he did not know any object in an apodictic way. hence his problem, the problem which we call the bridge.

he did not bother to engage in a detailed study of what was happening when he was knowing. 

not that there is no difference between affirming the self and affirming an object that is not the self. there is a difference. but - and here is where each one has to get clear for himself - it is possible to know objects, and we do it a thousand times. 

here you could in an idle moment read my notes on Heidegger (hermeneutics). Here you could reflect on Wittgenstein's unique handling of the problem. 

one of Descartes' problems was his mathematical training: he expected, wrongly, mathematical certitude for everything. Even Rorty says that: Descartes was like the undisciplined child who does not know when to stop asking questions. (And Rorty, surprisingly, quotes Gilson quoting Descartes!) (I have this in my Rorty article.) 

do we have mathematical certitude w.r.t. the reality of the self? not exactly. but to deny the self is to engage in a performative contradiction. (you can deny the self. the conradicition is not logical. it is performative: beween saying and performance, or reality, if you wish.) 

do we have mathematical certitude w.r.t. objects like a cat and a mat and a tree and a dog and ohther subjects? no. do we need such certitude? no. do we have the self kind of certitude in these cases? no. but we do come to the point where to ask furhter questions would be plain foolish (even Rorty!). "the spade hits rock" Wittgenstein says. Absence of further relevant questions, L says. physical certitude, perhaps the Thomists would say... 

If you need some references:

Hermeneutics and Method, p. 26 para 2.

Verbum cwl 2, p. 98 last para.

Insight, cwl 3, p. 401 last para. the pseudo-problem of transcendence. 

Being-in-a-world

When Heidegger insists that we are being-in-the-world, it means that there is no presuppositionless starting point. When Descartes wrote his Meditations, he was already writing.

[O]ne of the presuppositions that escaped Descartes' notice when he set out to put everything in doubt, when he tried to clear the slate of his consciousness and start out from scratch, was that the entire work of doubt relied upon language. By using a word that he had borrowed from his Jesuit teachers, 'meditations,' he was trying to suggest a kind of inner soliloquy of the soul with itself, a solitary, world-less, naked and - here's the punchline - pre-linguistic contact of the soul with itself. But of course, everything he said, and I mean everything he said, every last word of it, was deeply embedded in the words he used that he had inherited from the Jesuits, and from the scholastic philosphers before them, and from his mother and father, and from the books he had read in school, and so on. [...] As Ludwig Wittgenstein [...] said, there is no such thing as a private language. Wherever Descartes starts his Meditations, it will be in the middle of a public language. (Caputo, Philosophy and Theology 46.)