The idea of selfhood emerging from the context of relationships reminds me of the Japanese word for "human", 人間, which literally means "between people".
Chinese.
Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’ (2017)
21–30 of 52 posts
Re: Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’ (2017)
#22This profoundly misunderstands Descartes. Descartes is about proving existence through doubt. If you start doubting everything around you, what is left is your own mind that must exist since it is thinking and doubting. It has nothing to do with being a 'person' as a social construct, or about who I am.
> If you start doubting everything around you, what is left is your own mind that must exist since it is thinking and doubting.
Actually, what's left are merely thoughts. Cogito ergo sum actually begs the question: in attempting to establish the existence of "I" (a subject) it assumes the existence of "I".
The fallacy-free version is: this is a thought, therefore thoughts exist. From the existence of thoughts, you cannot deduce that a subject is needed unless you additionally assume that thoughts necessarily need a subject. But do they really?
Re: Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’ (2017)
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
That we are self contained human beings isn't obvious to me. All of my opinions, thoughts, and actions are a reflection of my surrounding social group.
So if all your friends starts killing would you start as well? I believe you have free will, your imagination, a brain and you can assess for yourself what actions you eant to perform.
I bet if your situation was such that your friends start killing, you would be in the same situation and start killing too. Yes we have free will, very much so. That is why we kill.
Re: Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’ (2017)
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interstingly, this "I think therefor I am" has been taken as the most barebone possible way to demonstrate what exist and what does not. However, each word of the sentence makes an assumption that it never tries to demonstrate: - "I": assumes individuality and that the mind is a local phenomenon. - "think": assumes cognition and that it's a process of the mind. - "therefor": assumes causality. - "am": assumes there i…
>Descartes, teachers never do so. When I was taught Descartes, the flimsiness of the whole 'cogito' thing was really emphasised. I actually don't think I've ever heard of anybody in the philosophy world who took the binding between personal existence and thought as any kind of raw fact, at least not in the terms Descartes proposed. Most of the treatments I (vaguely) remember were about the interesting observation, im…
> I think if you stop thinking of philosophy as a body of answers, and more as a body of in-depth examinations of questions, then it gets good again.
Agreed. I like to frame it as such: the "point" of philosophy is a form of play, rather than a quasi-theology.
Re: Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’ (2017)
#25> Accepting that others are vital to our self-perception is a corrective to the limitations of the Cartesian view.
This brought to mind John Calvin's Institutes. In the first chapter he suggests that knowledge consists primarily of two parts: knowledge of self and knowledge of God, and oddly, the best way to know oneself is to know God:
> If, at mid-day, we either look down to the ground, or on the surrounding objects which lie open to our view, we think ourselves endued with a very strong and piercing eyesight; but when we look up to the sun, and gaze at it unveiled, the sight which did excellently well for the earth is instantly so dazzled and confounded by the refulgence, as to oblige us to confess that our acuteness in discerning terrestrial objects is mere dimness when applied to the sun. Thus too, it happens in estimating our spiritual qualities. So long as we do not look beyond the earth, we are quite pleased with our own righteousness, wisdom, and virtue; we address ourselves in the most flattering terms, and seem only less than demigods. But should we once begin to raise our thoughts to God, and reflect what kind of Being he is, and how absolute the perfection of that righteousness, and wisdom, and virtue, to which, as a standard, we are bound to be conformed, what formerly delighted us by its false show of righteousness will become polluted with the greatest iniquity; what strangely imposed upon us under the name of wisdom will disgust by its extreme folly; and what presented the appearance of virtuous energy will be condemned as the most miserable impotence.
In particular the concept of the Image of God has profound consequences for the way you think about dignity and human personhood.
I recently watched Won't You Be My Neighbor, the documentary about Fred Rogers, and was struck by the way he treats an interacts with people, not as means to some end, but as ends in themselves, with real dignity and respect.
It was counter-cultural at the time, but boy is it strange now. It feels like everything is outrage and disingenuousness. We treat people like tokens of their tribe, with pure contempt and toss them aside like their worthless and inhuman.
Maybe Calvin was on to something.
Re: Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’ (2017)
#26When people write "persons", my head starts spinning.
Re: Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’ (2017)
#27When people write "persons", my head starts spinning.
When making such a distinction, people refers to a group en masse, while persons refers to a collection of individuals, emphasizing their actions as individuals as opposed to as a whole.
Re: Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’ (2017)
#28I don't see anything that I'd explicitly disagree with, but I also can't help but have a feeling that something is lost in translation. I'm not sure that Descartes and African philosophers are talking about exactly the same thing when they say something like "person".
Of course they told about different things. Distinction between self/other is a definition of a person.
But at the same time they spoke about the same thing. If you killed a person, you would be a murderer, and it doesn't matter what definition of a person you use. There are some small differences though, like killing a toddler seems not so bad, if toddler is not a person yet.
I personally believe that toddler is not a person yet. Homo Sapiencs pup becomes a person somewhere between 1 yo and 3 yo. At 1 yo she learns to walk, and gets location independance, she needs some time to learn to be independant, and then at 3 yo she get into psychological crisis, when she learn what the difference between "Me", "Parents", "My desires", "Parents desires", "Rules" and so on. So 3 yo is absolutely the point where she is a person already. While less than 1 yo she is not a person, but external and disconnected physically limb of her parents.
Re: Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’ (2017)
#29Definitely some heat equation or field/particle transformations possible here.
Re: Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’ (2017)
#30I don't see anything that I'd explicitly disagree with, but I also can't help but have a feeling that something is lost in translation. I'm not sure that Descartes and African philosophers are talking about exactly the same thing when they say something like "person".
Someone like Descartes is not plumbing the depths of mathematics, or the soul, as a group activity. But anyone since, who reads or is read to about theories that have carried on, becomes that informed person because of exposure to these ideas. The ivory tower is just a prison if it exists without a press.