Saturday, December 02, 2006

Does the Cogito Sleep?

Dylan Trigg's latest post (Night of the Il y a) prompted me to look at Descartes' Meditations to see about the question of whether the cogito sleeps. Decartes makes a leitmotif of the experience of sleep, in particular dreaming. Rumor has it that Descartes was himself a prodigious sleeper, but the question of whether the cogito sleeps arises almost of its own from the nature of Descartes' discovery.


In the First Meditation, Of the Things We May Doubt, Descartes says that "there exist no certain marks by which the state of waking can ever be distinguished from sleep." This really bugs him, and by the Sixth Meditation, Of the Existence of Material Things, and on the Real Distinction between the Mind and Body of Man, he comes to the view that: "I ought to reject all the doubts of those bygone days, as hyperbolical and ridiculous, especially the general uncertainty respecting sleep, which I could not distinguish from the waking state: for I now find a very marked difference between the two states, in respect that our memory can never connect our dreams with each other and with the course of life, in the way it is in the habit of doing with events that occur when we are awake." Personally I don't find this persuasive. I find that my memory can connect my dreams to each other and to the course of my life. In the same way as with waking events? That I don't know. In any case, Descartes' argument here does say something interesting about the cogito, namely that it has a course of life.


Is Descartes' a thing who thinks, as in the Second Meditation, or is he a man in the habit of sleeping, as he admits to being in the First Mediation? I don't see that this distinction between the habitual sleeper and the thinker is adequately resolved by Descartes. His anxiety about the interruption of the stream of consciousness is revealing, and the fact that he associates this phenomenon of the stream of consciousness with the course of life shows his bias. Do we have here the beginnings of a phenomenology of insomnia? Does the cogito sleep?

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posted by Fido the Yak at 11:01 AM.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Fido,

What a great title for a book:

A phenomenology of insomnia

- and also a great question: Does the cogito sleep?

Descartes is of course famous for being non-corporeal so the cogito cannot sleep, only a body or a physical organism can.

And when you interpret Descartes as implying that the cogito has a course of life I think you are mistaken.

But then again it depends on the definition of the cogito. Is it consciousness, is it rationality, is it indeed a metaphysical category, the mind, or....?

I appreciate your questions, Fido.

Let me ask you one. When you write,

His anxiety about the interruption of the stream of consciousness is revealing, and the fact that he associates this phenomenon of the stream of consciousness with the course of life shows his bias.

Which bias?

Orla Schantz

December 02, 2006 4:06 PM  
Blogger Fido the Yak said...

I mean his bias towards Descartes the thing that thinks and against Descartes the sleeper, the man in the habit of sleeping. I don't believe I'm mistaken about the course of life, because if it were not there for memory to connect events to it there would be no way for Descartes to know the difference between waking and sleeping, and yet he does--by his own argument of course. This will have to be understood as a special definition of "course of life" because it apparently doesn't include things like the experience of sleeping, but I don't see how it cannot be there as either some kind of quality or concommitant of the cogito. But if you're not seeing it perhaps you can explain how that passage from the Sixth Meditation makes sense to you without the cogito having a course of life. I'm open to the possibility that I'm making a completely wrong assumption, but I need to have it shown to me.

December 02, 2006 8:31 PM  

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