Who Are We? Old, New, and Timeless Answers from Core Texts by Anderson Robert D.;Flynn Molly Brigid;Lee Scott J.; & Molly Brigid Flynn & J. Scott Lee

Author:Anderson, Robert D.;Flynn, Molly Brigid;Lee, Scott J.; & Molly Brigid Flynn & J. Scott Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UPA
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Works Cited

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Joe Sachs. Newburyport: Focus, 2002.

---. On the Soul. Trans. J.A. Smith. In The Complete Works of Aristotle I. Ed. J. Barnes. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984.

Spaemann, Robert. Happiness and Benevolence. Trans. Jeremiah Alberg. Notre Dame: U Notre Dame P, 2000.

Two Meditations on the Nature of Self

Roosevelt Montás

Columbia University

“Who am I?” is about as basic a question as one can ask. But, in the spirit of Descartes’s attempt in the Meditations to dismantle all assumptions about his own knowledge and reduce his attention to the most elementary level of inquiry possible, we might propose the more fundamental question “What am I?” The relative pronoun “who” already carries in it a set of assumptions – ultimately metaphysical assumptions – about the nature of the kind of thing that can answer the question. Specifically, the pronoun “who” carries ontological presuppositions – embedded in the logic of human languages and perhaps in the cognitive structures of our brains – about personal identity and agency. Not just anything can answer the question “who?” Only a discrete, personal – or personalized – agent can answer to that pronoun. The notions of unitary identity and agency are so indispensable to the way we interact with the world that their metaphysical foundations are virtually invisible. In the technical sense of “taking for granted what one sets out to prove,” to ask “who am I?” is already to beg the question at the most elementary level. So, to think about this subtlest of questions in Descartes and Marcus Aurelius, I want to shave it down to elementary form, “What is the self?” That is the question that I want to, as it were, thread through the two texts called Meditations.

Descartes is closer to us than Marcus Aurelius both in time and in the metaphysical worldview he assumes. His ontological assumptions are very much like our own, despite the fact that, as we all know – and Nietzsche made explicit – God did not survive the epistemological revolution Descartes himself helped launch in the seventeenth century. So let us look first at Descartes and at the answer we get to the question “What am I?” in his brilliant Meditations on First Philosophy of 1640/41.

Descartes begins his Meditations with a mental exercise in which he tries to doubt everything – and he means everything. To help this exercise, he imagines an all-powerful evil genius that can deceive him about everything – even about mathematical truths: he grants that he can even be deceived in “counting the sides of a square” (61). But Descartes quickly tells us that the one thing he cannot bring himself to doubt, even with this evil genius working on him, is his own existence. And he cannot doubt his own existence because the very act of doubting – that mental operation – immediately establishes existence. So he declares that “this pronouncement ‘I am, I exist’ is necessarily true every time I utter it or conceive of it in my mind” (64). This is a very compelling argument.

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