The Distaste Descartes Leaves in My Mind

| By Lauren Taglienti |

In light of my recent praise of the great Margaret Atwood, I would like to change the pace of that by asserting a brief attempt at disproving a couple ideas of Rene Descartes that I have studied.

Firstly, as someone who was not able to think for an extended period of time due to recovering from a Traumatic Brain Injury and the subsequent brain injuries that followed that, the idea of “I think therefore I am” is preposterous to me. Because I could not think, was I not? Was my existence not valid because I could not think? I prefer to believe that I did still exist, and that my existence was valid, even though I could not think, even if Descartes doesn’t think so.

I have to wonder, too, what does it mean to think? Is it to be able to ponder things completely freely? Or is to have ideologies one is force-fed growing up swirling around in their head? I believe that to think is to be able to form one’s own thoughts, something that I did not do until after being in recovery from my TBI and perhaps even the subsequent concussions, as prior to that, I had acted and thought in whatever way a religious organization told me I should act and think, as to reduce my chances of going to hell, even though I was damned to hell from the moment I was born, according to them, because of who I am. I couldn’t have formed a conscious thought prior to my TBI even if I wanted to. Being pressured to think and act in such a way by way of fear of eternal damnation and insecurity of worthiness of eternal life is not conscious thought. It’s living in fear. It’s having one’s thoughts controlled. My first completely conscious thought was perhaps at the infantile age of 21, which was when I was in recovery for the sixth out of six diagnosed head injuries I have had at the time of writing this.

Combining Descartes’ logic and my own, I would not have come into existence until after my 21st birthday. That doesn’t make literal sense to me, as I have existed since my birth, regardless of my ability to think, but it does make metaphorical sense to me, as I came out of the recovery from my brain injuries an entirely new, re-educated person.

Another facet of Descartes’ process that does not logically make sense to me is that in his Meditations, he claims to have erased all memory to see if he had the intrinsic idea of god. He then proceeds to discuss how he thought through that meditative practice. However, language is memory-driven, not instinctual or intrinsic, and one can think coherent and organized thoughts with language. If Descartes had erased all memory from his mind, he would not be able to think coherent thoughts because he would not have had any sense of language. If he had really erased all memory and had no language to form thoughts with, then how could he think through his meditation or process what occurred during it? By his own logic, how would he have then existed?

Such is the short-winded version of my disproval of two of Descartes’ assertions. Perhaps a more long-winded version is on the horizon, but this shall suffice for now.

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