我的奮鬥

Introduction

 When René Descartes determined to present his Meditations on First Philosophy in a certain kind of manner, he might not have realized how profoundly this determination would change the landscape and process of Western philosophy for the hundreds of years to come. However, in an epoch when pluralism permeates, every day we witness ideas, fashionable or archaic, arise and fade in a blink of an eye, and people delight in arguing against each other in the name of various kinds of “-isms”, whereas the substance of Descartes’ philosophy, as he presents in the Meditations, is not immune as well to the fate of being reduced to some over-simplified “-ism” – just take a few examples all too familiar to us, the so-called epistemic foundationalism, the mind-body dualism, or even, the most ludicrous of all, Cartesianism – and therefore appears as no more than one opinion among others, I believe, it is first of all Descartes’ way of presentation of his philosophy, his style, that is responsible for his enduring influence upon us, that keeps haunting us and hence renders Descartes relevant even nowadays. In other words, we may reject at will Cartesian dualism as scientifically ungrounded, and we may also regard Descartes’ proof of the existence of God as outmoded in the age of internet, but none of us can remain unmoved on the first sight of his writing. Descartes addresses us in a tone just like our neighbor. We instantly have the feeling that we understand him well, despite the fact that the words we are reading come from a man who lived more than three hundred years before us. Indeed, how did he achieve that? What is the secret of Descartes’ writing?

One thing must be clarified immediately. By the terms “a certain kind of manner”, “way of presentation” and “style”, I do not mean the well-known method Descartes professed to adopt in the construction of his philosophy. For the method, too, is so familiar to us that it seems no more than a platitude in the eye of a contemporary reader. According to Part Two of Descartes’ Discourse on the Method, this method comprises of four rules. They are, first, never accepting anything as true if the evidence of its truth is lack; second, dividing the problem to be solved into as many parts as possible and as required to solve it; third, directing the thought according to an order, beginning from the simplest and most easily known, to knowledge of the most complex; last, that in the process of investigation, the enumeration of hypotheses must be complete, and the review exhaustive, so that nothing uncertain is left. As we can see, even though Descartes does follow this procedure strictly in the composition of his philosophy, there is basically nothing special in these rules, which calls for an elucidation, if we want to understand the peculiarity, the unique quality of Descartes’ writing. The magic consists in somewhere else.

 There is a prolonged debate among philosophers on the possibility of a first-personal approach to any philosophical enterprise whatsoever. And Descartes stands, and always will stand, undoubtedly at the center of this dispute. This is because one of the striking features of his monumental philosophical work, Meditations, is precisely that it is conspicuously written in the first person. Certainly, Descartes never invents this way of presenting philosophical reflection (We may think of Augustine’s Confessions as a precedent.), but it is him who brings this technique to such full play that a whole tradition of the first-personal approach to philosophy can be seen as established single-handedly by him, of which phenomenology, one of the most important philosophical movements initiated since the last century, is the latest magnificent resurrection. Now, while this style of Descartes’, this first-personal presentation does explain, to a large extent, the extraordinary allure and the sense of connection we feel between Descartes and us, and therefore, together with the tradition it decisively founds, constitutes the most significant and refreshing part of Descartes’ legacy – for all of us is invited, in virtue of the first-personal presentation, to set out ourselves on the journey Descartes had once travelled over and over again with great ease, still more prodigious is the fact that Descartes actually adopted this style deliberately. He did write in that way with full self-consciousness. And here, as an introduction to what follows in this thesis, our task is to explicate his reasons. Why is the first person so favorable to him? And more importantly still, what has already been allowed us to see, what is promised readily, however implicitly, in the first-personal approach?

 As a matter of fact, Descartes never discusses the rhetoric of personal pronouns definitely. Nevertheless, we find some passages in the second set of replies in Objections and Replies of Meditations, where Descartes gives the most detailed account of how Meditations is supposed to be written and what considerations pertain to this project. In response to the proposal that he sets out his arguments in “geometrical fashion”, Descartes believes that “It is worth explaining here how far I have already followed this method, and how far I think it should be followed in the future”. This explanation then begins with what Descartes calls the “order” and the “method” of demonstration, which are the two things he believes to be involved in “the geometrical manner of writing”.

 There should be no difficulty in understanding what Descartes means by the order of demonstration. According to him, it consists in that in a series of demonstration, nothing is to be accepted at the present stage of reasoning if it is derived from what must be derived at a later stage of reasoning, and the derivation of any conclusion must depend solely on what has already been established. Now obviously, there are plenty of reasons to follow this order of demonstration. To mention just one: the demonstration would certainly fall prey to a vicious circular reasoning if that order is violated. So, it is as comprehensible for Descartes to adhere to this order in writing Meditations as for us.

 Now, apropos of the method of demonstration, a further distinction is introduced that pertains much more directly to our question. That is the distinction between method that proceeds by analysis and by synthesis. To be sure, by referring to the difference between analysis and synthesis, Descartes never anticipates Kant’s celebrated distinction between analytical and synthetic judgments, and by labeling the method of demonstration in Meditations “analysis”, Descartes’ certainly would not dream of writing a treatise of philosophy in measure of the monotonous style of what we call “analytic philosophy” today; rather, the use of the two terms here is peculiar, if not perplexing. In any case, a name is just a name, and there is no point in imposing our habit of terminology upon Descartes. We had better concentrate on what he intends to express. For Descartes, “Analysis shows the true way by means of which the thing in question was discovered methodically and as it were a priori, so that if the reader is willing to follow it and give sufficient attention to all points, he will make the thing his own and understand it just as perfectly as if he had discovered for himself. But this method contains nothing to compel belief in an argumentative or inattentive reader; for if he fails to attend even to the smallest point, he will not see the necessity of the conclusion”. Moreover, “Now it is analysis which is the best and truest method of instruction, and it was this method alone which I employed in my Meditations”. Now, as far as our concern goes, this characterization of the method of analysis may sound unfortunately abstract and ambiguous, and it brings up more questions than it has answered. Precisely, what does it mean to show the way things are discovered? Why is the method of analysis incapable of compelling belief? And finally, in what sense is the method the best for instruction?

 Nevertheless, it is my belief that all the above questions can be answered satisfactorily, if only we remind ourselves of the fact that one of the best illustrations of the method of analysis is Meditations itself, a book written, as we have emphasized, in the first person. So, starting from the first question, what is the connection between the first-personal presentation and “showing the way things are discovered”? Let us take an example. If you ask me to show you the way a handsome waterfall deep in a valley can be discovered, it would be odd on my part to reply that “Swim upstream till dawn. And you will get what you want”. This is because, so long as I am not a salmon, swimming upstream cannot be my way of discovering the waterfall. Rather, it is the salmon or the brown bear’s way to the waterfall. I may follow the traces these animals left to reach my destination, but this very “following” as a way of discovery remains nonetheless mine. Now, the point is, if in response to your request, I refer you to any way of discovery other than mine, a suspicion always lingers that the way in question is unavailable, that the way to the discovery is not shown in the genuine sense, for my only guarantee that you will be led to the same destination consists in my own experience and my own experience alone. In this sense, we may say that to show others the way things are discovered amounts to giving a first-personal report which describes the point of departure, the process and the result achieved completely, so that others, if they follow the same pattern, will be able to find exactly what one has found previously. In light of this, it is also immediately clear why the method of analysis, taken as the first-personal approach to philosophical investigation, is the best for instruction. Whereas other methods may fail to provide a model for the novices to imitate, a concrete process to gain knowledge, so that they will not go astray and get lost by themselves during the course of their pursuit, it is the method of analysis that is the most profitable to them.

 However, no method is meant to be perfect. As a means of instruction, the method of analysis runs the risk that, depending so heavily on the authenticity of the reporter’s first-personal experience, it necessarily lacks the force of necessity, the kind of persuasion that reason, and reason alone, can afford us. As Descartes had foreseen, there were, and there always will be, those so-called “argumentative or inattentive” readers; they can never be satisfied, however complete and adequate description is provided. For example, to discover the waterfall, I tell somebody that, he must listen very carefully to discern the sound of the brook, and that is how I discovered the waterfall. Now, when we trudge together, hearing the sound, to my surprise, this pupil maybe so argumentative or inattentive that he goes so far as to deny the existence of that sound (inattentive), or he seeks to refute the reliability of the sound by questioning whether it is the sound of the brook or not (argumentative). Given the circumstance, I might try further to describe to him how the sound of the brook is like, how it is given to me with evidence, how the waterfall is intended in my hearing such sound. But, as Descartes had already observed, none of these is of any help if the pupil has determined never to believe in first-personal reports. With respect to each and every detail I reveal to him, therefore, a corresponding doubt persists. By disregarding the authenticity of the instructor’s first-personal experience, the objector is always in a position to win the argument with the price that absolutely no genuine knowledge is to be obtained by the objector. Indeed, that is what troubles Descartes most.

 So, as we can see, the temptation to giving up the first-personal approach that will always be threatened by the argumentative and inattentive is tremendous. Nevertheless, Descartes does have something to offer, and he seeks to construct something positive. In this vein, he eventually chose to write Meditations with the method of analysis rather than synthesis. Now, what, comparatively, is the method of synthesis anyway? According to Descartes, “Synthesis, by contrast, employs a directly opposite method where the search is, as it were, a posteriori (though the proof itself is often more a priori than it is in the analytic method). It demonstrates the conclusion clearly and employs a long series of definitions, postulates, axioms, theorems and problems, so that if anyone denies one of the conclusions it can be shown at once that it is contained in what has gone before, and hence the reader, however argumentative or stubborn he may be, is compelled to give his assent”. Apparently, based on our understanding of the method of analysis, synthesis for Descartes is precisely the opposition of analysis for there is simply no room for any description of first-personal experience in a space composed of definitions, postulates, axioms and theorems. More importantly, Descartes considers it quite definitely to be inappropriate as a means to present his philosophy: “As for synthesis, which is undoubtedly what you are asking me to set out here, it is a method which it may be very suitable to deploy in geometry as a follow up to analysis, but it cannot so conveniently be applied to these metaphysical subjects”. So, clearly, except for the sake of education, there is one other consideration which led Descartes finally to abandon the method of synthesis. That consideration has to do with the subject matter he wants to present. And it is metaphysics.

 But, exactly what is the difference between geometry and metaphysics such that they deserve totally opposite treatment? Descartes explains: “the difference is that the primary notions which are presupposed for the demonstration of geometrical truths are readily accepted by anyone, since they accord with the use of our senses. Hence there is no difficulty there, except in the proper deduction of the consequences, which can be done even by the less attentive, provided they remember what has gone before”. That is to say, for Descartes, by building itself on the ground of the notions we acquire naturally within our daily experience, our natural attitude toward the world, geometry under the operation of the method of synthesis does not demand us to see, to refresh our view, to clarify what we preconceive, for everything we need there has been offered us and taken for granted.  All we have to do is to manipulate in a certain manner. For example, to define a circle, we can operate in the following manner. First, we take a cord and fix one end of the cord to some point. Then we move the cord around the fixed point without bending the cord. As a result, the trajectory left by the other, unfixed end of the cord can be defined as a circle. Obviously, nothing during the process is unfamiliar to us, and no first-personal experience need be involved. But this is not the way metaphysics should be studied. Because “In metaphysics by contrast there is nothing which causes so much effort as making our perception of the primary notions clear and distinct. Admittedly, they are by their nature as evident as, or even more evident than, the primary notions which the geometers study; but they conflict with many preconceived opinions derived from the senses which we have got into the habit of holding from our earliest years, and so only those who really concentrate and meditate and withdraw their minds from corporeal things, so far as is possible, will achieve perfect knowledge of them”. So, accordingly, in so far as in metaphysics the “primary notions” are themselves questionable, in so far as they cannot be perceived clearly and distinctly prior to the investigator’s effort devoted to clarify them, they must therefore be discovered first, they must be rendered visible, before the mind’s eye, or better, before the eye as mind. Thus, the clarification, the “rendering visible” or the “way of discovery” appears to be an indispensable part of Descartes’ investigation into metaphysics. And, as I hope to be clear by now, that part hinges precisely upon the first-personal experience, through which something beyond the ordinary sense can be revealed, is given to us, and the possibility of describing that experience to others, with the highest degree of precision, accuracy, adequacy and completeness conceivable, as Descartes himself and the later phenomenologists would strive to achieve.

 Having justified the significance and relevance of the first person for Descartes’ enterprise and how it bears on philosophy in general, as a preliminary of the study of metaphysics, we are now in a position to return to the second question we have posed for ourselves above. We have asked: what, then, will the first person promise us? What will it reveal, commit us to seeing? What would philosophy be like, if, once in our life time, we determine to take our first-personal experience, our subjective point of view, our own perspective, seriously and put everything we are told to be so aside, at least temporarily? What happens if we start to learn to trust ourselves?

 Here, in this introduction, I shall attempt no more than a sip of what is going to confront us in the realm of the first person because that confrontation is exactly what I undertake in my thesis, through a zigzag reading that oscillates between phenomenology and Descartes, to disclose. Therefore, what follows can be viewed as an illustration that would be sufficient to give us a glimpse of the beautiful outlook we are about to see.

 “The world is in accordance with my perspective in order to be independent of me, is for me in order to be without me, and to be the world”. So wrote Maurice Merleau-Ponty, near the end of the last article, “Eye and Mind”, he had published before he died. In these last few words the philosopher left for us, everything is contained. To be sure, this sentence is elegantly simple, while extremely condensed in its form, to the degree of poetry. Nonetheless it is philosophical claim; it states and describes the relationship between the subject and the world. More precisely, its circle begins with the world, by way of a detour of the subject, and returns to the world itself. In other words, it seeks to justify, to validate, to illuminate what the world is and how it is in terms of the subject. That is the reason for the repetition of the phrase “in order to”. In order for the world to be the world, it must first be given to me. And it is nonetheless the world itself that is given, not my private and personal construction, invention or even hallucination. But how do we know this? How do come to a conclusion like this? Do we know it by means of inference? Do we know it by adopting a view from nowhere so that we observe objectively that it is us who are interacting with the world?

 “When through the water’s thickness I see the tiling at the bottom of a pool, I do not see it despite the water and the reflection there; I see it through them and because of them. If there were no distortions, no ripples of sunlight, if it were without this flesh that I saw the geometry of the tiles, then I would cease to see it as it is and where it is – which is to say, beyond any identical, specific place. I cannot say that the water itself – the aqueous power, the sirupy and shimmering element – is in space; all this is not somewhere else either, but it is not in the pool. It inhabits it, it materializes itself there, yet it is not contained there; and if I raise my eyes toward the screen of cypresses where the web of reflections is playing, I cannot gainsay the fact that the water visits it, too, or at least sends into it, upon it, its active and living essence”.

 Now this is a piece of first-rank phenomenological description delivered from the true master, and it is impossible to ignore the glittering quality of it, an unusual quality which cannot escape Virginia Woolf’s notice in one of her comments on Jane Austen: “There is Jane Austen, thumbed, scored, annotated, magnified, living almost within the memory of man, and yet as inscrutable in her small way as Shakespeare in his vast one. She flatters and cajoles you with the promise of intimacy and then, at the last moment, there is the same blankness. Are these Jane Austen’s eyes or is it a glass, a mirror, a silver spoon held up in the sun?” Similarly, there are Merleau-Ponty’s eyes, situated among the things he has seen, as we can see. His eyes reflect ours, and ours his, so that we also see the thickness of water, the ripples of sunlight, the aqueous, the sirupy, the shimmering and the reflections – in a word, the living elements all by ourselves. Indeed, nothing is capable of hindering one gaze from meeting the other. We see what Merleau-Ponty sees precisely because we have our own first-personal experiences, experience of the weight of the thick water, of the blaze of the shining sun and the dizziness it brings, of the warmth of light and the coldness of shadow and so on, to the point where we know what it feels like to encounter these objects and what Merleau-Ponty conveys to us apropos of them is meaningful, is comprehensible, no matter how exquisite it is. Thus comprehended, these elements therefore find their entrance into, once again, our own experience, become part of it, and as such they allow us to situate ourselves in the scene, to see us there, in the world, just like Merleau-Ponty tells us: “In principle all my changes of place figure in a corner of my landscape; they are recorded on the map of the visible. Everything I see is in principle within my reach, at least within reach of my sight, and is marked upon the map of the “I can.” Each of the two maps is complete. The visible world and the world of my motor projects are each total parts of the same Being”.

Here, while the pair of the “I see” and the “I can” is certainly reminiscent of the hoary distinction between mind and body, the reputedly irreducible difference between thought and extension, the “I see” and the “I can” are never meant to oppose each other. On the contrary, they are meant to overlap each other, as “total parts of the same Being”. To put it another way, they, as necessary parts, constitutes each other. More importantly, this reciprocity can never be affirmed otherwise than in the first-personal experience. Considered in the abstraction of third-personal perspective, the distinction between mind and body, between thought and extension, seems plausible, at least conceivable. We treat, quite naturally, cognition and movement as two separate things. However, as soon as we turn to our own experience, the relationship between the “I see” and the “I can” will be given immediately to us with evidence. For example, when I am jogging on a treadmill, under the assumption that insofar I do not change my place, and what I see remain always the same, therefore I do not need to see, I close my eyes. What happens next? I fall down from the treadmill. And even if I do not, I shall find it extremely difficult to maintain my sense of balance as soon as I close my eyes. Given such experience, evidently, then, the “I see” is an indispensable part of the full potency of the “I can”. On the other hand, the “I see” is even more obviously influenced and limited by the “I can”. Walking on a country road, I raise my head and notice a bulletin board afar covered with red pattern. I find it quite amusing because the pattern looks pretty. And I keep going, staring at the board. As I proceed, with a bolt of blue I realize that the red pattern on the board is not meaningless picture at all. Rather, it reads “Danger! Bears Around!”. Unfortunately, it is too late. A brown bear suddenly stands in my way, and the next place I am heading to is the bear’s belly. Now, what is the moral of this lovely story of the first-personal experience of mine? Noticeably, before an appropriate distance is set, there is no way for me to discern the message on the bulletin board, even though I keep looking at it. In a strict sense, I do not see what I am looking at if I cannot move myself near enough to the object. Meaning appears gradually along with the movement I make. Or we could say that my movement changes the meaning of the things I see. And this is how the “I can” constitutes the “I see”. Hence, we have explicated the overlapping of the “I see” and the “I can”, the connection of the two. What, then, is implicated by the fact that I fall off the treadmill or the fact that I end up in a bear’s belly?

According to Merleau-Ponty, “The enigma is that my body simultaneously sees and is seen. That which looks at all things can also look at itself and recognize, in what it sees, the other side of its power of looking. It sees itself seeing; it touches itself touching; it is visible and sensitive for itself. It is not a self through transparence, like thought, which only thinks its object by assimilating it, by constructing it, by transforming it into thought. It is a self through confusion, narcissism, through inherence of the one who sees in that which he sees, and through inherence of sensing in the sensed – a self, therefore, that is caught up in the things, that has a front and a back, a past and a future…”. Up to this point, at last, the sense in which we say that we situate ourselves in the scene is clarified. To understand this, we can rely on a distinction between ego and self. Let us say, the ego is what I think I am, and, by contrast, the self is what I actually am. Thus distinguished, we see immediately that while ego, as an object of thought, a construction in the abstraction, does not require any first-personal experience as its condition of possibility, the self that I am can never be constructed in this way. Rather, it is situated. It emerges out of our own experience, our perceptions, emotions, even our feelings; it reveals itself to us through the inter-weaving of the “I see” and the “I can” and so on. And precisely it is by this character of emergence, of the deep “rootedness” in first-personal experience with evidence that the very self in question merits the name “actuality”, and deserves to be called real. In this way, the first-personal approach brings us face to face to our real situation, as we are, in the world. And this leads us directly to a final question. That is: where exactly do we situate ourselves in the first-personal experience? What is that place we call “the world”?

 In what follows, beginning with a problem and the task phenomenology sets for itself, I will first try to explicate and clarify what Husserl means by the conceptual pair “immanence” and “transcendence”. This pair is introduced by him, under a thorough examination of the first-personal approach to philosophical investigations, for the first time in his The Idea of Phenomenology, which must be considered as the threshold of Husserl’s “transcendental turn”. Next, with the clarified distinction between immanence and transcendence in mind, I will re-examine, and moreover, re-interpret the two most significant statements － Cogito, ergo sum and “God exists” － and Descartes’ demonstrations of them in Meditations. Finally, to turn round, I will illuminate the sense in which Descartes’ God is a necessary amendment to transcendental phenomenology if we want to prevent phenomenology from lapsing into a transcendental idealism and accordingly diverging from its original call to a “return to the things themselves”. Through this process, I believe, some light could be shed on the last question we have left unanswered above, and we may eventually achieve a better understanding of the relationship between man and the world.