[MD] Thinkers and Rainers?

[david buchanan]

It seems that Hagen could just as well be borrowing this critique of the Cartesian thinker from William James.

‘‘If we could say in English ‘it thinks,’ as we say ‘it rains’ or ‘it blows,’ we should be stating the fact most simply and with the minimum of assumption.’’ (James, 1890, p. 220)

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Fri, Oct 18, david buchanan wrote:
I think, therefore I am? The most famous certainty isn't at all certain.
"The absurdity of this assertion becomes clearer once we switch subjects. We’ve all used the common expression “It’s raining.” But would we say, “It is raining, therefore it is”? What is raining? Do we suppose there is some entity corresponding to the word “it” which is doing the raining? No, of course not!" -- Steven Hagen in "Ergo Sum?"  http://dharmafield.org/resources/texts/ergo-sum/


But I think Hagen is borrowing this criticism from Nietzsche. As Wiki says...


"That is, whatever the force of the cogito, Descartes draws too much from it; the existence of a thinking thing, the reference of the "I," is more than the cogito can justify. Friedrich Nietzsche criticized the phrase in that it presupposes that there is an "I", that there is such an activity as "thinking", and that "I" know what "thinking" is. He suggested a more appropriate phrase would be "it thinks." In other words the "I" in "I think" could be similar to the "It" in "It is raining." "