DeKoninck: Sense of Touch, First Principle of Our Knowledge
http://www.goodcatholicbooks.org/dekoninck/certitude/sedeo-ergo-sum.html
Of touch we have said that it is the sense of existence and of our presence in place and time. We do not say with Descartes: “Cogito, ergo sum,” “Je pense, donc je suis”; on the contrary, instead of basing ourselves immediately upon the operation which is proper to the highest of our faculties, we rest first of all and with great assurance in the experience of touching, in which we have at the same time an experience of existing. To be sure, this consciousness is not without thought, but it is a thought which depends upon touch and which does not as yet reveal itself as thought. It is the tangible qualities which are to us first principles of thought and action. If we had to venture an Aristotelian counterpart to Descartes’ “Cogito, ergo sum,” we would say without hesitation: “Sedeo, ergo sum”: I am sitting, therefore I am.
Our opinion is of course very much down to earth, and yet there is ample proof of the fact that a philosophy which pretends to seek its first principles in the realm of pure thought soon degenerates into a philosophy of the spirit and winds up in the most terrestrial crudeness and a nihilism that is only too tangible. We could not have Marx without Hegel, nor Hegel without Kant, nor Kant without Hume and Descartes. The beginning was apparently a very noble one, but it has led, quite logically, to a senseless liquidation of the human substance.
Of touch we have said that it is the sense of existence and of our presence in place and time. We do not say with Descartes: “Cogito, ergo sum,” “Je pense, donc je suis”; on the contrary, instead of basing ourselves immediately upon the operation which is proper to the highest of our faculties, we rest first of all and with great assurance in the experience of touching, in which we have at the same time an experience of existing. To be sure, this consciousness is not without thought, but it is a thought which depends upon touch and which does not as yet reveal itself as thought. It is the tangible qualities which are to us first principles of thought and action. If we had to venture an Aristotelian counterpart to Descartes’ “Cogito, ergo sum,” we would say without hesitation: “Sedeo, ergo sum”: I am sitting, therefore I am.
Our opinion is of course very much down to earth, and yet there is ample proof of the fact that a philosophy which pretends to seek its first principles in the realm of pure thought soon degenerates into a philosophy of the spirit and winds up in the most terrestrial crudeness and a nihilism that is only too tangible. We could not have Marx without Hegel, nor Hegel without Kant, nor Kant without Hume and Descartes. The beginning was apparently a very noble one, but it has led, quite logically, to a senseless liquidation of the human substance.
posted by martin at July 14, 2015
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home