The rationalistic dualism
05
Jun
The basis of all Western rationalism lies in Cartesian dualism, its most essential
foundation being in res-extensive and res-cogitans, at bottom is the idea that there is a “thinking” and a “bodily” substance, mistranslated as body-mind dichotomy, in fact in terms of current philosophy is the idea that separates corporeity from historical consciousness.
Gadamer treated this in a very thorough way, first separating romantic historical consciousness, analyzing Dilthey, and then the question of theory and practice, commending the theory, against the “practitioners” who are basically modern empiricists.
Extensive Rex is what we call a thing as a material substance, while res cogitans is the thought substance, or thinking thing; in fact, the body-mind dualism is the psychophysicist, which can also be thought in present terms as body-consciousness.
The Cartesian code then what is it? is something that does not suspend the ego, the self of contemporary individualism, so it may also be called ego cogitans, as some authors do, case of Husserl and Gadamer.
The ideas that Descartes have phenomenological roots are mistaken, the reading of Husserl’s text: “from naive objectivism to transcendental subjectivism,” thus finding the “absolute rational foundation” of all positive sciences is a hasty interpretation, since they will be questioned and “included at a single stroke in the parenthesis of the epokhé,” it being known that the epokhe, as well as prior to Cartesian thought, had for ancient philosophy a complete “emptying” of categories and of the ego itself to penetrate a-letheia.
So the being of the cogitans is not, to be essential, but only residual; , not because of the transcendental reduction to “every conceivable entity for me and every sphere of being of such a being” to the absolute ego, but through logical and mathematical abstraction, having nothing to do with the transcendent.
Husserl is clear in pointing out that in § 10 of Cartesian Meditations entitled “How Descartes lacked transcendental guidance,” it is possible to grasp the pure self and its cogitationes.
The cogito ergo sum is therefore not an epokhé, for it does not suspend its own ego and its preconceptions and the tabula rasa which will be an addition of Kant will also have problems.
