Abstract
It now happens that my own thoughts are turned towards the Cogito through a chain of events and present circumstances that continue the cultural life of the Cogito enriched for me by the gentle and persistent reflections of Merleau-Ponty to whom lowe much of my philosophical and literary culture.2. At this very moment, I too write upon a cool page across which the winter sunlight falls; the trees outside my window stand dark against the blue sky and my neighbours' houses seem to nudge closer against the cold. This moment of peace was not there at the start of this work; it has arisen only now as the shape of what I may have accomplished needs defiant assertion to make itself a beginning , But I must set aside the naughty genius of fiction, of plans and of logic. I have worked on this essay without a study, away from home, with few books, at other times with many. My thoughts have not always been my own, were rarely clear and, like myself, have had to settle for their present circumstance and predicaments. I have made several journeys and rebuilt my home in the past year whose time in my life I cannot tell. Rather than separate me from my task, as at times it seemed, these travels have drawn me to myself; and whereas the task of rebuilding a home might have made this work impossible, it rather revealed to me, as to Descartes, those anxieties that arise with things to be torn down and has shown me those hopes from whose roots things may grow up.
I am thinking of the Cartesian cogito;I want to finish this work; I can feel the coolness of the paper under my hand and I can see the trees of the boulevard through the window. My life is constantly thrown headlong into transcendent things; it passes wholly outside of me. The cogito is either this thought which took shape three centuries ago in the mind of Descartes, or the meaning of the texts he has left for us, or else it is an eternal truth which breathes through them; in any case, it is a cultural being to which my own thought reaches out but does not quite embrace, just as my body, in a familiar surrounding, finds its orientation and makes its way among objects without needing to have them expressly in mind.1
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Notes
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). p. 423; Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 369.
John O’Neill, Perception, Expression and History: The Social Phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
Chaim Perelman, ‘Analogie et Métaphore en Science, Poésie et Philosophie’, in his Le Champ De l’Argumentation (Bruxelles: Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles, 1970), pp. 271–283.
John O’Neill, ‘The literary production of natural and social Science inquiry: issues and applications in the social organization of Science’, Canadian Journal of Sociology 6(2) 1981: 105–120; ‘A Realist Model of Knowledge: With a Phenomenological Deconstruction’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 16(1) 1986: 1-35.
For a classical quarrel on this see, Michel Foucault, Folie et déraiaison: Histoire de la folie à l’age classique (Paris: Libraire Pion, 1961) and Jacques Derrida, ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’, in his Writing and Difference (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 31-63.
René Descartes, Discourse on Method and The Meditations, translated by F. E. Sutcliffe (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 96; Descartes, Meditationes De Prima Philosophia, Méditations Métaphysiques, Texte latin et traduction du Duc de Luynes (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1070), pp. 19–20.
John O’Neill, Making Sense Together: An Introduction to Wild Sociology (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1974); Walter Benn Michaels, ‘The Interpreters’ Self: Piece on the Cartesian “Subject”’, in Reader-Responce Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. Jane P. Tomkins, (Baltimore: The John-Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 185-200.
Jaakko Hintikka, ‘Cogito, Ergo Sum: Inference or Performance?’ in Descartes: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Willis Doney (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), pp. 108–139, also Hiram Caton, The Origins of Subjectivity: An Essay on Descartes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 140-143. For critical positions, see F. Feldman, ‘On the Performatory Interpretation of the cogito,’ Philosophical Review LXXXII (1973), pp. 345-363; Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1978), Chapter 3, Cogito and Sum.
See the papers in Descartes: A Collection of Critical Essays; L. J. Beck, The Metaphysics of Descartes: A Study of the Meditations (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1965); Anthony Kenny, Descartes: A Study of His Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1968).
John O’Neill, Essaying Montaigne: A Study of the Renaissance Institution of Writing and Reading (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982).
Robert Champigny, ‘The Theatrical Aspect of the Cogito’, Review of Metaphysics 12 (1959), pp. 370–377; Ralph Flores, ‘Cartesian Striptease’, Substance 39 (1983), pp. 75-88.
Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Larvatus Pro Deo’, Glyph 2 (Baltimiore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 14–36; and his Ego Sum (Paris: Flammarion, 1979).
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 401.
Merleau-Ponty, p. 402.
Merleau-Ponty, p. 383.
Timothy J. Reiss, ‘Cartesian Discourse and Classical Ideology’, Diacritics 6, no. 4 (Winter 1976), 19–27; also his ‘The concevoir Motif in Descartes’, in La cohérence intérieure: Etudes sur la littérature française du xviie siècle, présentées en hommage à Judd D. Hubert, edited by J. van Baelen and David L. Rubin (Paris: Jean-Michele Place, 1977), pp. 203-222; and his The Discourse of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); as well, Michel Serres, ‘Knowledge in the Classical Age: La Fontaine and Descartes,’ in his Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. by Josue V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 15-28.
Iago Galston, ‘Descartes and Modern Psychiatric Thought’, Isis, Vol. XXXV (Spring 1944), pp. 118–128; Stephen Schonberger, ‘A Dream of Descartes: Reflections on the Unconscious Determinants of the Sciences’, International Journal of Psychology XX (January, 1939), pp. 43-57.
Nathan Edelman, ‘The Mixed Metaphor in Descartes’, The Romanic Review XLI (1950), pp. 167–178; G. Nador, ‘Métaphores de chemins et de labyrinthes chez Descartes’, Revue d’Histoire de la Philosophie CLII (1962), pp. 37-51; Sylvie Romanowski, L’llusion Chez Descartes: La structure du discours cartésien (Paris: Klincksieck, 1974).
Oeuvres de Descartes, publiées par Charles Adam et Paul Tannery, Volume VII, Méditationes de Prima Philosophia (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1964), p. 7.
Henri Gouhier, Les Prémières Pensées De Descartes: Contribution à L’Histoire De L’Anti-Renaissance (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1958); Norman Kemp Smith, New Studies in the Philosophy of Descartes: Descartes as Pioneer (London: Macmillan, 1966), pp. 3-39.
The Philosophical Works of Descartes, translated by Elisabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1934), Volume II, Ojections VII, Third Question: Whether a Method can be Devised Anew, pp. 325–344.
René Descartes, The Meditations, loc. cit., p. 130; Meditationes De Prima Philosophia, Méditations Métaphysiques, pp. 51-52.
The Meditations, loc. cit., p. 113; Meditationes De Prima Philosophia, Méditations Métaphysiques, p. 34.
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O’Neill, J. (1986). Mecum Meditari: Demolishing Doubt, Building a Prayer. In: Golden, J.L., Pilotta, J.J. (eds) Practical Reasoning in Human Affairs. Synthese Library, vol 183. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4674-3_7
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