Hume Meets Descartes

Now the question becomes: is the concept of a conscious self a relation of ideas or a matter of fact? The answer by now should be clear: the concept of the conscious self is both a relation of ideas and a matter of fact. The Cartesian self is based on clear and distinct perception of a God with arbitrarily set properties (and everything that entails) that in of itself is not clear and distinct. Thus all our experience is possibly false. This melds heavily into the concepts of matters of fact. Since a Cartesian self is, it has ‘clear and distinct’ perceptions of its experience. The notion then, that we do not have a clear and distinct perception of anything at all makes us weary of the nature of the universe if there is such a thing. The lack of a clear and distinct perception means that all our beliefs are fallible and we do not actually understand anything. Just as the Cartesian self assigns arbitrary properties of ‘goodness’ and ‘perfection’ to God, it anticipates nourishment out of the aforementioned pie! Everything the Cartesian self learns from experience itself is contradictable just like a matter of fact. The Cartesian self anticipates that the sun will rise the next day since God will make it. The self does not, however, know at all if the God makes the sun rise or if there even is such a God. All the ideas implied by the cogito related to experience alone are contradictable and are never deductively proven.

The Cartesian self does learn certain indubitable ideas as well with its ‘clear and distinct’ perception. As soon as one sees any object that is the root of a relation of ideas, relations of ideas can be developed. The moment the Cartesian self sees a line and angle, it can build a triangle and deductively obtain proofs about said triangle that stand outside space and time. In this manner the Cartesian self is able to acquire reasonings that are relations of ideas. Note that once again, the relations of ideas are rooted in experience, regardless of the nature of the experience. The Cartesian self can never, again, know that a triangle exists if it has never seen line or angle. The degree to which the cogito implies relations of ideas depends entirely on the self. One can undertake an infinitely long discourse in relations of ideas or choose to take none at all. The cogito simply gives one the option of both relations of ideas and matters of fact, the latter of which is necessarily present.

I argued in the beginning for the claim that “I think, therefore I am” as being constituted of both relations of ideas and matters of fact. This may have seemed erratic and confused in the beginning based on a concrete idea of the cogito, but it may seem clearer now that when working definitions are derived of such vast ideas that it may be the case. Such lengthy discussions of the principles being appealed to were necessary for clear boundaries of the distinction and simple classification of the cogito. Once the classification becomes so simple, the reasonings for the classification are almost evident. The cogito then sets up a path for the self to be able to be made of relations of ideas and matters of fact. The moment the Cartesian self comes into existence, matters of fact are most prominent. Relations of ideas may or may not follow depending on the self.