Comment by madacoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by madacoo | Hacker News Reader

> The book was a refutation of the distinction between mind and body, and all the fallacies that follow. “I think, therefore I am” was, in Heidegger’s reckoning, a “naive supposition”, an anthropocentric conceit that went all the way back to Plato. Humans cannot be imagined either outside or prior to the world into which they are “thrown” – a bed of land, language, tradition, history and more. Heidegger believed that only once this embeddedness, this “Being-there” (Dasein) in the world, is recognised can it be restored to its fullest, most authentic form, and the “forgetfulness of Being”, “the homelessness of man” and “the Fallenness of the world” overcome.

I actually don't see that "cogito ergo sum" and Heidegger's "thrown-ness" are so contradictory. Descarte wanted to find a claim irrefutable by logic on which to found his subsequent thought. And he did. The fact he went on from there to separate mind and body in a way that Heidegger's thrownn-ness doesn't require doesn't mean the ideas aren't compatible.

The problem with Descarte's thought is not the first but second therefore: I think therefore I am therefore my mind is separate from my body.

No, Heidegger explicitly attempts to refute and attack Descartes's supposition "cogito ergo sum" (the first therefore). And one can read all of Heidegger's early philosophy as an attempt to undo the errors started by Descartes: Heidegger faults Descartes with stymieing all of modern philosophy with a false first presupposition.

Heidegger's fault with Descartes lies in the very first two words: "I think." Heidegger does not believe that the "I" (Dasein/Being) is the thing that thinks (directly at least). In Descartes' world, humans are "res cogitans" ("thinking machines"): the "I" is that which thinks. For Descartes, there is some thing that is doing the thinking. In Heidegger's world, there is not some mysterious being that thinks, but rather the "I" is the experiencing/thinking itself (the "thrown-openness"). This is why Heidegger always uses verbs/gerunds to describe Being.

For Heidegger, the simple statement "I think" cannot possibly be true because there is no "I" behind the thinking. For Heidegger, the analog basic first-claim would instead simply be: "there is thinking" (the "ego"/"I" as we think about it is the "thinking" itself for Heidegger).

I agree. That is why Heidegger says that dasein, which roughly speaking means human being, is being-in-the-world, rather than a metaphysical substance outside the world that posits ideas about the material world.

The people who think Heidegger's philosophy is compatible with the Dartesian ego are reinterpreting his concepts to fit their own ways of thinking.

Eh, there's a lot of issues with the cogito, in that the statement Descarte arrives at is nowhere near as fundamental as he seems to think it is. It presumes an "I", subject of language, capable of evaluating its own thought, a system of language, etc, and presumes a mode of being, but then the being comes after the identification of the being itself, and so on...

It's all so much more confused than most folks, including Descarte, think it is.

He does identify something worth naming, but gets the cause and effect all mixed up. It'd be more sensible to say that I am, therefore I have the possibility of thought, and the possibility of using thought to identify my own being.

Thought being a material process which occurs in-and-of the world.

>It'd be more sensible to say that I am, therefore I have the possibility of thought, and the possibility of using thought to identify my own being.

Would it be? You're already positing that "I am" which there isn't a reason to believe if you were deceived about everything your senses tell you. At best, to start with "I am" simply re-raises the common objection to the cogito which is that Descartes assumes the "I" to begin with. It doesn't get you out of that bind.

Nevertheless, there are contemporary defenses of the cogito, e.g. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41501714?seq=1

Maybe the article is wrong? The two concepts address two entirely different issues and I don't see how the book could be a refutation with that description.

No, read the parent's (inesprimibile) comment for an explanation.

>I think therefore I am therefore my mind is separate from my body.

That wasn't the inference (at that stage) of the process. He contends that he can imagine himself without a body, but firstly even if his senses deceived him he could still be sure that he exists because he thinks. This isn't such a huge leap, considering, for instance, people with phantom limb syndrome or people delusional about how their body really is.

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