Trained Ego

Elias challenges the Cartesian method of doubt, arguing that Descartes scrums around to get beneath all he’s picked up and finds, at bottom, things he’s picked up: “he is supposed to penetrate in his meditation, all on his own, to a layer of his own intellect believed, in accordance with the unexamined dogma of the time, to be unlearned and independent of his own or anyone’s experience. In trying to do so he deploys an immense arsenal of learned knowledge, including learned concepts. What he encounters in his descent into the transcendental depths of his own thought and what he brings to light is, in other words, the very conceptual apparatus that has been passed on to him by others, that he uses on his ‘journey into the interior.’ That is, he interprets as unlearned property of his own thinking, and that of all others, concepts which are part of the establishes repertoire of the language and knowledge of his time – but certainly not of all times.” Then, he proceeds to universalize this trained ego as if it were human nature as such.

And, further: Descartes’s case was argued “in languages such as Latin and French and thought out with the help of the tradition of knowledge handed on to Descartes together with these languages. He thus derived from what he had learned from others the very means of discovering something ‘within himself’ which, as he saw it, did not come from ‘outside’ and could not, therefore, be a possible illusion. If, however, everything that is learned from others and is therefore an experience from ‘outside’ can be doubted as a possible illusion, may not the language which one has learned from others also be an illusion and the others from whom one has learned it, too? Descartes’ doubt, as one can see, did not go far enough. It came to a half precisely at the point where it might have jolted the philosopher’s axiomatic belief in the absolute independence and autonomy of ‘reason’ as the seemingly ultimate proof of his existence.”

Elias echoes Hamann’s critique of Kant here, perhaps unwittingly.