Descartes Meditation 6 Analysis
In Meditation Six, Descartes argues the difference between substance of mind and matter. He points to distinct ideas for the inseparable essence of mind and sensation with its mistakenly confusing ideas, to a divisible body. This diminishes the human experience to that of maneuvered body haunted by some ineffable entity. The split between mind and body as separate entities lies within Descartes characterization of material and immaterial substances. The mind is an immaterial substance which thinks, wills, desires, and reasons and is the whole of our being. (287) Bodies are the material extended mass interacting with other things of extension by use of sense perception.(287) While minds by their immaterial nature are indivisible, bodies can
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For Kant, nothing can be known of self, because it is a condition, not an entity, of knowledge. We had certain limitations on what we could understand. Namely, we comprehend the world outside of us in terms of material objects and persons that causally interact with each other in space and time. This is where the problem comes in. A person is an object just as any other extended substance is. He says in order to know ourselves, there is required in addition to the act of thought, which brings the diversity of every possible insight to the unity of apperception, a determinate mode of intuition, whereby this multifarious is given; it therefore follows that although my existence is not certainly appearance, the determination of my existence can take place only in conformity with the form of inner sense, according to the special mode in which the manifold, which I combine, is given in inner intuition. Accordingly I have no knowledge of myself as I am but merely as I appear to myself. Kant asserts that we only know ourselves as we appear to ourselves. As I stated in “We Can Know Ourselves: Refutation of Kant’s Self”, “It seems that Kant is attempting to insisting that we cannot know our own nature which certainly makes sense when we reflect how we understand the world outside of our body, it does not hold the same weight when we reflect on ourselves.” (p. 5). Surely we reflect on ourselves, but in a much different way than how we reflect on objects separate from ourselves. Kant asserts that (the transcendental ego) is unknown to the individual, thus creating a major crisis of personal identity and the original existential
For Kant, nothing can be known of self, because it is a condition, not an entity, of knowledge. We had certain limitations on what we could understand. Namely, we comprehend the world outside of us in terms of material objects and persons that causally interact with each other in space and time. This is where the problem comes in. A person is an object just as any other extended substance is. He says in order to know ourselves, there is required in addition to the act of thought, which brings the diversity of every possible insight to the unity of apperception, a determinate mode of intuition, whereby this multifarious is given; it therefore follows that although my existence is not certainly appearance, the determination of my existence can take place only in conformity with the form of inner sense, according to the special mode in which the manifold, which I combine, is given in inner intuition. Accordingly I have no knowledge of myself as I am but merely as I appear to myself. Kant asserts that we only know ourselves as we appear to ourselves. As I stated in “We Can Know Ourselves: Refutation of Kant’s Self”, “It seems that Kant is attempting to insisting that we cannot know our own nature which certainly makes sense when we reflect how we understand the world outside of our body, it does not hold the same weight when we reflect on ourselves.” (p. 5). Surely we reflect on ourselves, but in a much different way than how we reflect on objects separate from ourselves. Kant asserts that (the transcendental ego) is unknown to the individual, thus creating a major crisis of personal identity and the original existential