…top of page 65, next bullet point, his discovery of an activity that can't be separated
from him. Bottom of 64, his reasoning about his body and his soul, but I don't know what
a soul is, it’s some sort of I-know-not-what, some sort of air or fire that dwells inside
the body. Is it the breath, or the heart? Is it brain
waves? Who knows what the soul is? We'll set that aside, too.
What is it that I know, I think, about my body? But I gave up my body when I gave up
my senses and my memory. There's this one activity that is inseparable
from me. I need to answer the question: What am I?
(Student: Thought exists.) Right. It's in the middle of page 65. “What
about thinking? Here I make my discovery: thought exists, and it alone cannot be separated
from me. I am, I exist, that is certain, but for how long? For as long as I am thinking.”
Back to Mariana, perhaps. Mariana exists so long as she is the one being deceived.
(pause) So his first conclusion here is that thought
and only thought is inseparable from me. Wherever I am, whenever I'm certain that I'm existing,
there's always me thinking, it’s the *thinking* me that exists, that I'm certain of.
What about the sleeping me? Do I know I exist when I’m sleeping? Not really, not unless
I’m thinking in my sleep. If I’m in a coma, I don't know, if I’m insensible, I
don't know. But as long as I'm actively thinking and reflecting
and aware of my own thinking, *then* I have that guarantee against the Evil Demon.
Something important here: Descartes jumps pretty quickly from this conclusion that thought
is *inseparable* from me to the conclusion that my *essence* is thought, that I *am*
my thought, deep down. I'm not a rational animal, I am a thinking substance.
His answer to “what am I?”… (pause)
…is “a thinking substance,” I’m a thing that thinks, that's what I am. Everything
else I don't know about, but right down at the core the one thing that is undoubtedly
me, it's inseparable from me, is my thought. Therefore he thinks he's justified in concluding
also that my *essential* quality is nothing other than thought.
My thought is nothing… my essence is nothing other than thought… oh, I forgot I shared
this, I’ve got to sharing it. (pause, unintelligible)
So his conclusion, he goes from the realization, the insight that only thought is inseparable
from me, to the conclusion that only thought, thought is the only part of me, is the only
thing that is my essence, therefore I am a thinking substance. This is his definition.
Something to think about, especially in the context of PHIL 203 and of what’s coming
in this course. There's a big difference between saying “I am a thinking substance” and
saying “I'm a rational animal.” What are some of the differences? That's… we’ve
got two people, one says “I’m of thinking substance,” the other says “I’m a a
rational animal.” They’re both correct in a sense, but they differ about what’s
most essential in themselves. What’s included, what kind of ideas or qualities
are included in being a rational animal, that are left out of being a thinking substance?
(Student: unintelligible) Okay. So if I’m an animal… Notice, “animal”
here is the noun, “rational” is the adjective modifying the noun. So most fundamentally
here for Aristotle, humans are animals, so they have all the properties that animals
have, including having a body… (pause)
…part of having a body is having bodily needs, bodily desires, so all the desires,
and the need to feed the body, to wash the body, to keep the body warm so it doesn’t
freeze to death, all those things are built into the definition of man for Aristotle.
They're left out for Descartes, because I'm just a thinking substance. Do I have a body?
I do in fact have a body, but I need to reason my way to it, because the body is not *essential*
to what I am. I would be the same thing, the same Descartes, the same Anadale, without
my body. In fact if my body turned out to be a deception
by the Evil Demon or a dream state, it would still be me doing the thinking. So my essence
wouldn’t change if my body were radically different from what I suppose it to be.
(pause) So things like will and desire…
(pause) …and also bodily needs, come in very early
on, very, very deep down at the foundation of what it means to be human, for the “rational
animal” definition. Those things get added in later for Descartes.
So if I were trying to predict this, just looking at this piece of thought, I would
expect the modern tradition following Descartes might potentially have some problems with
relating the mind to the body, with dealing with the body in its proper place in human
affairs and in human life. As we spin forward through the centuries,
we'll take a look at that idea, looking forward to Nietzsche’s Last Man and beyond, to catch
up to our starting point later on. So keep that in mind. There's something happening
here that’s taking the body sort of off the table for the time being, until the mind
can reason its way back to it.