Fido the Yak

Marion sums up Heidegger's critique of the ego cogito:

There where the ego gives to be thought, or rather to make itself be thought (or even to make itself simple thought) without ever giving Being in a determinate and determining sense, Dasein gives Being by determining the way of Being of the other beings, because it itself, in advance and according to its privilege, determines itself to be according to its own way of Being. To be sure, the ego is, but it is without thinking about it, since it thinks only about thinking its thinkable things, whose respective ways of Being it does not establish any more than it is itself determinied in its own way of Being; in thinking itself as being only through and for the exercise of the cogitatio, it masks, through the epistemic evidence of its nevertheless ontologically loose existence, and then through the certitude of the other subsistent truths, the total absence of decision concerning the Being of beings, which are reduced to the level of pure and simple cogitata.

(Reduction and Givenness, p. 93)

Marion says "the total absence of decision concerning the Being of beings" like that's a bad thing. I'm yet to be convinced. The real crux of the issue is how or whether the ego cogito thinks about its own existence. It's obviously not unthinkable fullstop. How is it unthinkable then for the ego cogito? Or why would the thinking of its existence not be a cogitatum?

Labels: cogito, Descartes, Heidegger, Marion, phenomenology

posted by Fido the Yak at 12:10 PM.