Difficulties with Descartes in the Orient

I shall remember to ask my Mongolian friends about this when I next see them

I wonder if Mr Lévi-Strauss spoke Japanese well enough himself to know this - or if he was not, as a fear, the victim of a whimsical translator?

It seems somewhat contentious to me that a culture with a rich history of the philosophy of Zen Buddhism would be unable to express simple concepts about the self?

[/i]" . . . [/quote]
Herefrom arise so many important points! I shall attempt to discuss some of them in an orderly fashion, little by little (as the proverbial Bishop put it). Let us commence with two arising from:

"Je pense"

1: It does not mean "I am thinking." It is not, that is to say, the present continuous tense. It is in fact the simple present tense, just as are "I play cricket" and "I write books."

2: "Je pense" - "I think" - does not mean that any thought is taking place at the present moment. Indeed what is taking place at the present moment when some one utters this phrase is (we find) simply that some one is uttering this phrase. The "thinking" to which it refers has taken place in the past and is not known to be taking place in the present. In other words, it is only after a period of reflection (thought about thought etc.) that one discovers or realizes that one thinks. And the same can in turn be said of one's discovery that one remembers - which is why I added the words "we find" above. We can have absolutely no direct knowledge of or experience of the present. For us there IS no present in any direct sense; everything is recollection. (Enter jolly old Proust - only the past is real.) That reflection - or remembrance - may or may not also be "thinking" but one thing we can definitely say is that it differs from that "thinking" which our reflection is about.

Next time: much more on "je" and much more on "pense."

Hmmmm.... it's been a while since I spoke much French, although I studied it quite rigorously many years ago.

I am not sure that there is an equivalence of "je pense" and "I think" that excludes an English translation in the present continuous?

The richness of tense expression in English offers both

"I am thinking" (at the moment I am speaking to you about it)

and

"I think" (as a general habit)

It's a distinction one becomes acutely aware of if living in countries like Russia or Greece. Their languages have "moods" in which one must be entirely precise about whether the action is finite or continuous... because quite different verbs are used in each case.

What if their "uses" are identical with their "meanings"? Is not jolly old Ludwig drawing a distinction there where there is none to be drawn?

The personal pronoun "I" derives from the Old English "ic" which in turn comes from the Gothic "ik," as do even the Greek "ἑγώ" and the Latin "ego" and the French "je".

It was only with the introduction of printing that Middle English "ic, ik, icc, ich, yk, or ych" settled down as "I".

Both "i" and "ich" were often written in combination with the verb, as in "idude" I did, "icham" I am, "ichill" I will; these last were often erroneously divided by later scribes and printers as "I cham", "I chill" and so on.

The Latin "ego" was for the most part used only for emphasis; the more usual expression of its significance being by way of a verbal suffix or inflection. I do not regard that function as essentially different from the "I" prefixes in "icham" et cetera above.

And again, the French "je" is the same word ("ik") in origin: "ÉTYM. 1080, Chanson de Roland; eo, io, 842, Serments de Strasbourg, puis jo et je; lat. class. ego." (Grand Robert again.)

As a preliminary probe, we may note the O.E.D.'s suggestion that the meaning of "I" is "The subject or object of self-consciousness; that which is conscious of itself, as thinking, feeling, and willing; the ego." And it adds a helpful citation from E.B. Bax: "The I which we think of when we say "myself" is not the true I, the I that is thinking, but merely a pseudo-I, a synthesis of thoughts and feelings reflected in this I, which are immediately or intuitively identified with that I." Are we any further forward?
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The member is right to draw attention to this phrase, particularly since it relates to the important - nay supreme - question of time, one already adumbrated above and to which I intend to return in further discussion of "je pense."

Some years ago I did a little research in this area. We might begin with Schelling's exposition of the relationship between mythology and religion. "Consciousness," says Schelling, "cannot break away from the mythologicality of the facts related in Genesis until it recognizes the true god as not only the god now merely apparent, but at the same time as the god who at some future time shall be. Seen from this aspect the religion of Abraham is pure and authentic monotheism, but for him it is not the religion of the present - in the present his monotheism is subject to the restriction of mythology - certainly, though, it is for him the religion of the future; the true god is the one who shall be, that is indeed his name. When Moses asks under which name he should proclaim the god who will lead the people out of Egypt, this god answers 'I shall be the I shall be.' Here, thus, where the god speaks in his own person, the name is translated from the third person into the first, and it would be quite inadmissible to find here too the expression of the metaphysical eternity or immutability of God."

Now there ("I shall be the I shall be") Schelling is quoting Luther's version from the German bible: "Ich werde seyn der ich seyn werde." Less literally, perhaps, it might be translated as "I shall be that I shall be."

The Authorized Version (as quoted by our member) has a very significant difference, in that the future tense is lacking:

"And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you."

The New International Version likewise drops any hint of a future:

"God said to Moses, 'I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: "I AM has sent me to you."'"

This last bit - "I AM has sent me to you - strikes me as rather ridiculous, although it might have been "the I am" meaning "I, the one who is". But the New International Version does deign to add an alternative reading in a foot-note:

"I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE", which agrees in tense with Schelling's (Luther's) version. What Schelling means above about the name being translated from the third person to the first is that "the one who shall be" is changed to "I, the one who shall be". (Would it be too simple-minded of me to suggest that the god actually said "I am 'the one who shall be'"?)

T. S. Gregory, in his introduction to Spinoza's Ethics, takes "I AM THAT I AM" to mean that God exists from the necessity of his own nature, and is his own cause.

Vico, in De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia, says that God is saying that each and every thing is not in comparison with him. There is another long and important passage about this divine statement in Schelling's Philosophy of Mythology, where Schelling interprets it in terms of his philosophy of existence, necessity, and freedom; here are two excerpts (note that the unnatural phrase "that itself which exists" is a kind of technical term):

"That which shall be, is admittedly for that very reason not yet existing; it is, however, not nothing, and so that itself which exists, considered purely as such, is admittedly not yet something existing, but for that very reason not nothing; for it is in fact that which shall be. "God is that itself which exists" means, according to what has just been said, the same as: God in and for himself, regarded in his pure essence, is merely that which shall be; and here I again call your attention to how, in the most ancient document in which the true god is mentioned, this god gives himself the name 'I shall be' [only in German!]; and here it is very natural that the very same god who, when he speaks in the first person, thus of himself, calls himself Aejaeh, that is to say 'I shall be', that this god, when it is a question of him in the third person, when another speaks of him, is called Jahwo or Jiwaeh, in short, 'he shall be' . . .

"This ['I shall be the I shall be'] may be translated as 'the I wish to be' - I am not that which necessarily exists (in this sense), but am Lord of existence. You will see from this how, simply from the fact that God is stated to be that itself which exists, he is also at once characterized as spirit; for spirit is precisely that which can either exist or not, can either express itself or not, which is not obliged to express itself, like the body (which has no choice about filling its space and is obliged to fill it), while I for example, as spirit, am entirely free to express myself or not, to express myself in one way or another, to express one thing and not something else. You will also see, for that very reason, how a philosophy which goes back to that itself which exists and starts out from there, how this philosophy leads immediately, and simply of its own nature, to a system of freedom, and has freed itself from the necessity which weighs down like an evil spirit on all systems which remain with mere existence and do not raise themselves to that itself which exists, however much they may go on about 'movement.' To go beyond existence, and even to gain a free relationship to it, this is the true endeavour of philosophy. That itself which exists is simply of its own nature also that which is free from existence and in respect to existence, and that itself which exists is all that is important for us. In existence there resides
nothing, existence is in every case only an accessory, something being added to that which is."

On a lighter note, possibly, there exists an amusing scrap in Schelling's hand (published in 1989 with his "Introduction to Philosophy"), as follows:

Ich bin der ich war.
Ich bin der ich sein werde.
Ich war der ich sein werde.
Ich werde sein der ich bin

(I am the I was.
I am the I shall be.
I was the I shall be.
I shall be the I am )

We hope the member will before long expand upon that!

But let us to-day return to René the Maps. When he used the word "je" what did he understand it to mean? Three points:

1) It was that "je" that for instance studied, shut himself in a stove, and received his three visions from a divine spirit that revealed to him the idea of applying mathematics to philosophy. All that history and much much more went to constitute his "je." His "je" WAS "that which did" all those remembered things, and certainly did not only "pense."

2) My own "je" may pense, and kleines c's "je" may also pense, but they are very far from being the same "je." What is it that penses? A different "je" in each case, with its own distinct history, which serves to define it. (And in fact no person can have direct experience of more than one "je" - that the others exist in the same way can - strictly - in the nature of things and by definition be no more than a theory.)

3) Nothing about any one's "je" is physical. René's "je" - and our own - are constructed entirely out of remembrances. Of course these remembrances - some of them - may refer to the natural world, but they occupy a different space, and there is no possibility that the twain could ever meet. All our awareness of, and knowledge of, the physical world, even, occupies a space different from that occupied by that physical world.

Next time: more about "pense" and reading other people's pensées.

It might also well be the case that thinking and communication with other people are intimately connected. For example, I could not possibly write this cogent reply without first having read and understood what Neil has just written.

To the best of my knowledge, Neil and kleines c have never met, and yet for the best part of ten years we have understood one another perfectly well online. Of course, we both realise that we hold very different views of the world, and of ourselves, but that is, in a sense, the mark of our maturity. We can accept each other for what we are!

My own opinion, too, is that the pronoun is ultimately irrelevant. It does not actually matter who is doing the thinking. It may not even matter that the thinking, whether individual or collective, is irrelevant. In the beginning was not the Word, but the Deed. The Word, an abstraction, came later!