Cogito ergo sum: Descartes, der Begründer des Rationalismus (German Edition)

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Does this experiment entail that human knowledge serves as the law-giver of nature and that our understanding contains structural features preceding our experience? This is what traditionally was designated as what is a priori to experience, that is, what precedes experience.

Kant did not hesitate to affirm the claim that there are a priori elements of human understanding making possible our knowledge of reality. The position assumed by Kant is an attempt to reconcile the extremes of assigning priority to human thinking or assigning it to sensory experience. An important element in the tradition of rationalism is found in the conviction that there are cognitions that are not derived from the senses since they find their origin purely within conceptual human understanding.

Traditionally the basic opposition was between rationalism and empiricism, where the latter gave priority to our experience. This applies first of all to what Kant called the forms of intuition time and space and secondly to the 12 categories of human understanding distinguished by Kant. His view that human understanding creates its laws a priori not out of nature, but prescribes them to nature Kant Because this view elevates the human subject to the level of law-giver it is also designated as subjectivistic.

However, such a view appears to contain an untenable circularity, aptly captured by Roy Clouser: In post-Kantian freedom idealism Fichte, Schelling and Hegel elaborated the rationalistic element by ascribing to human thought the capacity to conceptually bring forth the content of the world independent of experience.

According to Hegel the idea is the unity of concept and reality Hegel Cassirer remarks that it appears as if the circle of philosophical contemplation found its closure and reached its aim in identifying reality and reason: The one option is to juxtapose thought and experience thinking and sensing - when the former acquires priority it is designated as rationalistic and when the latter is given priority it is known as empiricistic.

Windelband mentions Hobbes De corpore, Ch. This opposition may also be explained with reference to the alternative views of Descartes and Hume. In a typical rationalist mode of thought Descartes holds: The contrasting view of Hume is: Either sensing is reduced to thinking or thinking and everything else is reduced to sensing. Although Greek philosophy already gave prominence to reason nous the term rationalism was not employed yet. Anaxagoras characterised the eternal and immaterial form origin of the world as the Nous, which has all knowledge and the greatest power.

This illustrates the influence of Anaxagoras and Socrates, nous and dynamics: Thomas Aquinas held that the unity of ideas cannot be obtained by assuming just one idea in God. Rather, he holds, the multiplicity of ideas is constituted in such a way that the Divine Mind, as first form, observes the multiple possible ways according to which it can be copied Questiones Disputate de Veritate, IB, 2 in MacKenna The first time the word 'rationalist' rationaliste was explicitly used was apparently in when it was already employed in opposition to experience the empirical: A rationalist was seen as a person who assigned a greater value to pure thought than to experience.

For some time, since the beginning of the 17th century, the term rationalism acquired a more specific theological meaning. At the time when the term rationalism was liberated from its theological use, it opened the way to describe the great philosophical systems of the 17th and 18th centuries. Simultaneously, atheists and those liberated in their thought introduced the term rationalism during the 19th century as a slogan against the superstition of traditional religions, whilst believing that they had reason and science on their side.

Historians now also extrapolate the meaning of this term by generalising it mainly into the epoch of the Enlightenment. Perhaps this insight may help us also to understand why Habermas, in his desire to make an ongoing plea for the dignity of rationality as it is embedded in communicative action, does not really want to transcend this essential trait of modernity, although he is willing to let go of the optimistic utilitarian spirit that marked its emergence in the period of Enlightenment: The concept of modernity no longer comes with a promise of happiness.

But despite all the talk of postmodernity, there are no visible rational alternatives of this form of life. What else is left for us, then, but at least to search out practical improvements within this form of life? Earlier in the 20th century we find a remarkable trust in human rationality. After Heidegger moved beyond the rationalism of Husserl, the latter experienced it with a sense of hopelessness positioned by him within the broader context of a crisis of Europe and of the academic disciplines.

According to him this crisis is rooted in a misguided rationalism 'einem sich verirrenden Rationalismus': In order to comprehend what is wrong in the present crisis the concept Europe once again has to be viewed by means of the historical directedness towards the infinite aims of reason; it must be demonstrated how the European world was borne from reason-ideas, that is, out of the spirit of philosophy.

The crisis will then clearly emerge as the apparent failure of rationalism. The basis of this failure of a rational culture, however, The crisis of European existence provides only two options: The position of Husserl points in the direction of the other option open to an understanding of rationalism, which surfaces when we consider the connection between understanding and the difference between what is universal and what is individual.

The problem of what is universal relates to the nature of concepts, for our argument is that concepts are bound to universal features. Yet in our everyday experience we always find universality and what is individual side by side this horse is a horse. Since we do have knowledge of what is individual we know ourselves in our uniqueness , the restriction of knowledge to conceptual knowledge is clearly problematic.

The historically significant lines of development outlined below will elucidate this issue. Traditionally, reason is said to be focused on the universal scope of conceptual knowledge. Already Aristotle had to switch from his purely individual proten ousian primary substance to the secondary substance, namely the universal substantial form of individual entities. By tradition, concepts are believed to be 'blind' to what is individual, explaining why Aristotle holds that knowledge is only possible of the universal essence of things, the just-mentioned secondary substance, the to ti en einai De Anima, b 16; cf.

Nicolai Hartmann nonetheless points out that Aristotle does not have a concept of a concept Hartmann As general form knowledge, true knowledge cannot be obtained from matter. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle first eliminates all determinations of being and then concludes that matter as such is unknowable. He explains that when it comes to individual 'concrete thing[s]', 'of these there is no definition'.

Whatever is known 'are always stated and recognized by means of the universal formula [secondary substance]. But matter is unknowable in itself' Metaph. Aristotle therefore ultimately holds that knowledge is restricted to conceptual knowledge, made possible by what is universal. It is precisely that which every child but no computer achieves: For this reason, so he concludes, a pure science of what is individual is impossible Cysarz Medieval Scholasticism continued this view by assigning universality to the human mind or intellect and what is individual to what could be sensed.

What is individual is considered to be inexpressible omne individuum est ineffabile. A well-known South African philosopher captures this legacy in a work on logic and epistemology and highlights the 'individual delimitation' De Vleeschauwer Regarding what is individual, he holds that our intellectual capacities must fail because 'knowledge of what is individual is simply impossible' according to De Vleeschauwer, philosophy had clarity about this issue since its inception, De Vleeschauwer Within the development of modern philosophy one may see the 18th century, the era of Enlightenment, as a period in which conceptual rationalism dominated the scene.

It echoes the new spirit of rational criticism, exemplified in what Kant said in the Foreword to the first edition of his Critique of Pure Reason: Our age is, in every sense of the word, the age of criticism and everything must submit to it. Religion, on the strength of its sanctity, and law on the strength of its majesty, try to withdraw themselves from it; but by doing so they arouse just suspicions, and cannot claim that sincere respect which reason pays to those only who have been able to stand its free and open examination.

The rise of historicism during the transition from the 18th to the 19th century made possible a new appreciation of what is unique, individual and contingent as an attempt to escape from the grip of conceptual knowledge and its entailed universality. In the Third Part of the Fourth Volume of his work on the problem of knowledge within philosophy and the modern sciences, Ernst Cassirer dedicates the first chapter to the emergence of historicism and the second one to the ideas of B. Cysarz characterises the 19th century as the era of individuality Cysarz He could have added the issue of continuous change, with reference to Darwin's theory of evolution.

During the 19th century, the tension between the general nature of concepts and what is uniquely historical could not be reconciled.

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Habermas mentions that, analogous to. Peirce, Dilthey also struggled with the relationship between universality and what is individual see Habermas He explains that hermeneutical understanding must grasp an inexpressible individual meaning in categories that are unavoidably general Habermas Yet, as Cysarz correctly remarks, every professional practice must proceed in an individual manner.

What is healed in medical praxis is not illness, but the individual sick person, even though this cannot happen outside the matrix of general norms standards Cysarz This remark highlights an important fact, namely that whatever is universal is always accompanied by what is individual and vice versa. An individual sick person shows, in its being sick, that it shares in the universal feature of sickness.

A succinct way to capture this situation is to say that this sick person individual side has an illness universal side. Clearly, sickness, even in its abnormality, displays universal abnormal traits. Disorderliness depends like a parasite on what is normal. The challenge facing a systematic account of rationalism. Our preceding analysis made it clear that an account of the nature of an ism such as rationalism cannot avoid taking into account the relevant historical perspectives.

In pursuing this avenue particular distinctions emerged, such as that between the 'rational' and the 'empirical'. Poser relates this distinction to the difference between Descartes and Leibniz in his discussion of what he calls the 'rationalistic ideal of science'. Leibniz criticised Descartes by introducing his concept of a scientia generalis general science. However, he articulated a distinction between necessary truths of reason and contingent truths of fact Leibniz A similar distinction is found in the thought of Locke, namely that between empirical factual knowledge and knowledge of the necessary eternal relations between ideas Locke This distinction contradicts his empiricist orientation because with the aid of intuitive demonstration one can arrive at a kind of knowledge that 'is the clearest and most certain human frailty is capable of' Locke The position assumed by Leibniz anticipated the views of Kant: Now reflection is nothing but an attention to what is in us, and the senses do not give us what we already bring with us.

This being so, can we deny that there is a great deal that is innate in our mind, since we are innate, so to speak, to ourselves, and since there is in ourselves being, unity, substance, duration, change, activity, perception, pleasure, and a thousand other objects of our intellectual ideas? And since these objects are immediate to our understanding and are always present, On the verge of anticipating Kant's criticism of Hume's empiricism, Leibniz, more than 30 years before the first appearance of Hume's A treatise of human nature , wrote as follows in his New Essays: Now all the examples which confirm a general truth, whatever their number, do not suffice to establish the universal necessity of that same truth, for it does not follow that what has happened will always happen in the same way.

Paul Bernays, the co-worker of the famous German mathematician David Hilbert, points out that rationality cannot be understood apart from concepts: This view supports what we saw above, namely that in general rationality is crucially connected to conceptual knowledge and to universality. Universality, in turn, cannot be understood apart from its connection to what is individual.

Note that we rather speak of 'what is individual' than of 'individuality' because the latter is still a universal feature. In being an individual every individual, in a universal way, evinces its uniqueness. We noted that in our everyday experience we fully understand the difference between a chair a universal feature and this chair its individual side.

From a historical perspective we have directed our attention to the opposition of thought and experience which, owing to an over-emphasis of the one or the other, may lead to rationalism or to empiricism. Yet, this juxtaposition does not say anything substantial about rationalism as such. For this reason we extended our investigation in order to reflect on the context within which rationalism is positioned. This reflection pointed at the connections between rationality, conceptuality, universality and what is individual.

The tradition of reformational philosophy provides the starting point for an understanding of these issues. For this reason we briefly look at points of connection in this regard in order to advance an alternative approach in terms of the distinction between conceptual knowledge and concept-transcending knowledge. Within the tradition of reformational philosophy, the emphasis on making sound distinctions created an equally important sensitivity with regard to reductionism in all its negative variants.

Both Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven articulated their views in terms of well-thought-out systematic distinctions and they both attached specific meanings to terms capturing those philosophical stances in which a distorted account is given of universally accessible states of affairs. Interestingly, Vollenhoven explicitly mentions that rationalists from the 18th century, such as J. Walch in his introduction to philosophy of , maintain 'that what he and those who thought like him - the rationalists - had to say was built on the state of affairs' Vollenhoven He briefly discusses the slogan of Descartes, cogito ergo sum I think therefore I am , by pointing out that some are of the 'opinion that this "therefore" denotes a connection of identity'.

But according to him this is incorrect, 'for Descartes does not identify being and thinking' since besides thinking he 'also presupposes extension'; therefore, for Descartes 'thinking is only a component of being' Vollenhoven Yet Vollenhoven on the same page points out that: Descartes meant this in a rationalistic way, that is, in the sense that thinking is the essence of being; an opinion that we, of course, reject, as much as we reject the division of being indicated here.

This does not entail that Vollenhoven think it is 'rationalistic' 'to subsume thinking and knowing under being, for it makes good sense to speak of a non-thinking and a non-knowing being. There are clearly many things - for example, minerals, plants, and animals - that are but that do not know'.

Vollenhoven therefore concludes negatively 'that knowing is not the same as being' and positively 'that knowing is a component of being' Vollenhoven In general Dooyeweerd refers to the strict correlation of the law side cosmonomic side and factual side of reality in order to explain how he understands both rationalism and irrationalism. In the first Volume of his Magnum Opus, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought NC , he states that in a rationalistic type of thinking 'the subject-side of reality within the special modal aspects is reduced to the nomos-side' Dooyeweerd In the context of his philosophy of time he rejects both rationalistic and irrationalistic conceptions because the former 'absolutizes the cosmonomic side and the latter the factual-subjective side of time' Dooyeweerd However, Dooyeweerd did not properly distinguish between law and law-conformity lawfulness.

He frequently exchanged these expressions. Earlier we remarked that universal conditions ought to be distinguished from the universal way in which individual entities show that they conform to these conditions or laws. By identifying law and law conformity Dooyeweerd strips factual reality of its universal side. For this reason he often explicitly speaks of the individual factual side.

Although concretely existing things and processes function within all aspects of reality, they at the same time transcend the theoretical grasp of anyone of these modal aspects in which such entities and processes function.

We have theoretical access to them through the gateway of the modal aspects which therefore also serve as modes of explanation for our investigations. Concept formation is made possible by the universality of specific logically identifiable and distinguishable features. The universality here involved could be either that of a universal order for, holding for the type of entities subject to it, or it can refer to the universal orderliness of things, reflecting the universal way in which entities show that they are subjected to the applicable order for their existence.

Since conceptual knowledge is tied up with these two forms of universality order for and orderliness of , the individual side of entities simply transcends the possibilities of conceptual knowledge. When we acknowledge that what is individual exceeds our conceptual grasp, it does not imply that we do not have knowledge of what is individual. But if this knowledge cannot be conceptual, it must be concept transcending.

This kind of knowledge may also be designated as idea knowledge. Proper conceptual knowledge of a triangle or a human being includes those universal features found in all triangles and all human beings. Since this kind of knowledge does not preclude concept-transcending knowledge idea knowledge , a balanced and non-reductionist understanding of reality should acknowledge both.

Meaning of "cogito, ergo sum" in the German dictionary

On the basis of this characterisation and distinction we can now introduce a more advanced definition of rationalism and irrationalism: Rationalism deifies absolutises conceptual knowledge. Irrationalism deifies absolutises concept-transcending knowledge. An additional perspective on idea knowledge is obtained when the various ways in which terms derived from the different modal aspects of reality are employed.

The most basic option is to consider modal aspectual terms in their reference to phenomena appearing within the domain of any specific aspect. For example, no one will doubt that our awareness of the 'one and the many' presupposes the meaning of number. Counting a number of things usually follows a sequential pattern that exhibits an order of succession, albeit in a cardinal how many: But when Plato discusses the hypothesis that the One is without multiplicity subsequently further explored by Plotinus , the numerical term 'one' points beyond the arithmetical aspect towards the origin of the universe.

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Synonyms and antonyms of cogito, ergo sum in the German dictionary of synonyms

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