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Docta Ignorantia XVII Descartes We were discussing Descartes at the table here, mentioning my intuitive feeling that his Cogito ergo sum is not a low (e.g., dualistic) view as is usually assumed, but a high (e.g., non-dualistic) one. I was ruminating that whereas Descartes is often taken for the father of modern science, or, one of the main fathers thereof, if my intuition is correct about his epigram, there is much more to it than that. I was just reading Tillich saying that Descartes is in the line of Plato, Augustine, Hegel and Spinoza (also, Tillich and Graham) rather than the line of Aristotle, Aquinas and Abelard. This confirms my intuition, which was compelled by Descartes' epigram, above. There are, in general, two lines of thought in Western Civilization. One derives from Plato and is called Realism. The other derives from Aristotle and is called Nominalism. Modern science is solidly in the line of nominalism. This is the view that nothing exists excepting what one experiences, and, what is real is the individual cognition and experience only. The only esssence is existence. There is nothing excepting this existence, no essence qua essence that can be distinguished from existence. Reality is what you experience through the five senses and their mechanical intensifiers and nothing else. Realism is the view that what exists are the ideas of things, what Plato calls essences. Only these essences or ur-types, which share a common essence, ontos, are real in the sense of immutable. What is experienced through the senses (existence) is transitory and therefore not real. It has operational phenomenology, but it does not have permanence so it does not have reliability, which is the nature of truth. Without realiability -- shades of Gödel -- there is no ultimate reproducibility, and therefore, no reality. Therefore, only essences are real, the ideas of things. The things themselves are mere shadows of these essences. They are not real. Interestingly, Descartes gets billed as a scientist, based on his mathematical and other contributions. But Tillich says he is a realist, not a nominalist (scientist), which is what I was intuiting in other terms by pondering Descartes' famous epigram, Cogito ergo sum. I felt and now feel the more strongly this formula is of the logical type, non-dualism. As you know, I cannot manipulate Cartesian mathematics well enough to be able to show that the quadrant system is a non-dualistic syntax, but the tendency of this line of thought would be to induce just such an effort. Could it be done? Can Cartesian mathematics be claimed as a non-dualistic syntax? Would Descartes have claimed it as such? Did he intend it as a sadhana? As a mahavalkya? The epigram is a mahavalkya and he must have known that it is. One does not want to claim too much in cases such as these, but the genre always raises the question of whether what we have all-along assumed is one thing might also be another. Realism and Nominalism are not exclusive views. Individuals favor one or the other but employ both. The epistemological typologies represented by these views are primal, not culture-specific.
Adwaitha Hermitage
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