CARTESIAN MOMENT. NEW DISCOURSE ON STYLES AND METHODS IN THE OLD-FASHIONED MANNER OF DESCARTES
Authors:   INION RAN, Ilyin Mikhail 
Published: April 2021

The author explains the purport of the article. He intends to emulate the style of Descartes to the extent possible in the contemporary setup. In his 10 meditations the author attempts to grasp vital capacities of Descartes’ method and to that effect to better understand his intellectual achievements and their current relevance. Cartesian moment or creative impact of Descartes upon dynamics of intellectual advancement is a key moment (point in time) that separates old scholastic ways of reasoning from modern ones as Martin Heidegger amply affirmed in his «The Age of the World Picture». Modern way not only relies on ratio but also on individual creative abilities and personal authorship of an investigator. Hence the author explores creative capabilities of a modern researcher typified by Descartes. The author defines Cartesian methodological practice (style, manner) as distinctly personalized and to that effect subjective or self-centered. This novel methodological artifice of Descartes is coupled with typically modern distinction between subjective (personally biased) and subjectival (pertaining to an independent agency of emancipating personality or subject). Investigating self of Descartes intentionally exploits typically modern cognitive and social property of being a free cognitive agent. It may be called cognitive agency or subjectness ( субъектность , subjectnost’ ) as a counterpart to subjectivity ( субъективность , subjectivnost’ ). Respectively Heidegger while discussing unique Cartesian achievement introduces along a casual notion of subjectivity self-coined terms of Subjektsein (subject-object relations, Subjekt-Objekt-Beziehung) and Subjektität (resolute self-awareness, unbedingtes Sichwissen). It is characteristic that Heidegger carefully discriminates spontaneous personally biased Ichheit and Egoismus from consistently individually conceived Ichhaft. The article examines two epitomes of subjectness: the initial Cartesian archetype and recent Wittgensteinian prototype. While Descartes instrumentally uses it to reshape scholastic thought into a modern metaphysics (cf. «Meditationes de Prima Philosophia» of 1641 or its authorized French translation of 1647 «Les méditations métaphysiques» ), Wittgenstein respectively elaborates his own brand of philosophy of logic (cf. « Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung » of 1921). With Descartes his actual person is nothing but ‘being on his own’ ( ens per se ). Pragmatically this difference transmutes into operation of the actual whole self of the researcher ( me totum ) with development of polar metaphysical abstractions of non-bodily and non-extensive res cogitans and bodily and non-thinking res extensa . With Wittgenstein the equally pivotal personality of researcher reduces into an intermediator (border, Grenze ) between the world and the transcendental logic. As a result, metaphysical subject (metaphysisches Subjekt) or solipsist me (Ich des Solipsismus) shrinks into a non-extensive dot (Punkt) or eye (Auge) observing the world from outside. While new-born Cartesian cognitive agent has to split within itself into res cogitans and res extensa Descartes’ disciples and followers simply ignore bodily dimension. They radically reduce the investigating self to a detached all-powerful Reason turning subjectival Cartesianism of its founder into a non-subjectival version of Cartesianism, supposedly objective and rational. Wittgenstein helps the investigator (his personal self) come back again but at the expense of limiting himself to a border between the logic and the world able to reconstruct both the logic and the world with incessant language games. In his fifth meditation the author emulates both the style and the way of reasoning typical for Descartes. He remembers his student years in Moscow Lomonosov University. First he has mastered phonological principle of distinctive features and then successfully extended its use beyond linguistics into social studies and political science. Being taught dual - fast and slow reading he learnt to skip and then to restore details. The third personal cognitive discretion utilized in investigation of any scholarly issue is the focus on its emergence, further metamorphoses and evolution. The first two have clear Cartesian formation, while the third helps them both to gain dynamism and discretions. Next meditation deals with Descartes’ idea of the (definite article) method and specific rules for applying inherent inventiveness ( rēgulae ad directionem ingenii ). This Cartesian link implies essential affinity between universal instrumentality (organon) of scientific exploration and fundamental (primeval and primitive) cognitive abilities of humans and other species. Such a polarized dual distinction has helped the Center of advanced methodologies to identify three complex transdisciplinary organons (metretics, morphetics and semiotics) rooted in the elementary cognitive abilities to tell intensity of sensations, to recognize patterns and to grasp functional relevance, potentially meaning. Simplex-complex transformations devised by the Center are instrumental in linking the utmostly complex phenomena to equally simple ones through the range of intermediate manifestations and forms. The results of the analytical transformations can be revealed in the sequences of modules related to a master prototype model. The concluding two meditations deal with cognition and its modes as well as the issue of overcoming of Cartesian dualism. The author insists that cognitive scholars’ ambitions to overcome Cartesian dualism are vain. It is Descartes’ method and style - as far as we can grasp them - that can help to overcome fatal schemes ascribed into notorious mind - body problem. The core of Descartes’ thinking is the continuous preoccupation with embodiment of the rational and emotional aspects of his whole self (total me) and disembodiment of its material aspects.