“for even supposing that I was dreaming” (Descartes)

"for even supposing that I was dreaming" (Descartes) Colette Brooks We have now not merely explored the territory of pure understanding, and carefully surveyed every part of it, but have also measured its extent, and assigned to everything in it its rightful place. This domain is an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits. It is the land of truth-enchanting name!-surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion . Before we venture on this sea, to explore it in all directions and to obtain assurance whether there be any ground for such hopes, it will be well to begin by casting a glance upon the map of the land which we are about to leave, and to enquire, first, whether under compulsion to be satisfied, inasmuch as there may be no other territory upon which we can settle; and, secondly, by what title we possess even this domain, and can consider ourselves as secured against all opposing claims. -Kant, Critique of Pure Reason Develop a mind which alights upon no thing whatsoever. -Diamond Sutra Emergent cultural and intellectual eras in societies characterized as western are shaped by exhaustive reworkings of the past; new claims to knowledge crystallize around questions, vocabularies and practices that serve, if compelling, to recast the very terms upon which thought and culture are conducted. Though such remapping is, by dint of its extremity, aggressive, one finds a plaintive edge to work burdened by such ambition, a fear that "farther shores' will tempt future "seafarers" to reworking in turn. 21 These concerns, of course, are well-founded. Knowledge is continually reconstituted, its nature and range newly-defined, as each age fashions its own arduous image of "truth." Only the impulse itself remains recognizable ; regardless of its guise, the western need to determine how many angels can stand on the head of a pin persists, urgent as ever, each age convinced that it will be the one finally to fathom the mystery. Since the seventeenth century, western conceptions of the knowing self have revolved around the defining notion of consciousness, a Cartesian construct that served, when introduced, to transform the prevailing medieval concept of mind. The medievals had declared the mind to encompass only the intellect; for Descartes, however, the catalogue of mental entities that comprised "thought" was to include "all that of which we are conscious as operating in us"-not simply intellect but sensation, perception and emotion as well. Thus enfranchised, the mind was to emerge as an absorbing field of inquiry in itself, a radically interiorized reality that took no warrant from the external world. The very status of that world, and of the "other minds" within it, had become problematic; only the existence of the isolated mind itself was certain. Mental phenomena were declared to be private, accessible only to the individual, and introspection deemed the only means to certain knowledge. Consciousness, thus indemnified against the rival claims of both the body and the world without, took title as the very essence of human being, hidden, worthy of infinite regard. The Cartesian image of interiority as paradigmatic of one's life in the world retains considerable general currency, but the very intelligibility of its constituent concepts-such as the privacy of experience and its corollary, selfknowledge -has come under challenge, particularly in the influential work of Wittgenstein. The conviction that thoughts or sensations are private, yet can be named and thereby communicated or ascribed to others, depends for its sense upon the creation of what Wittgenstein termed "private language": language through which the individual's inner experiences, though hidden from the scrutiny of others, can be converted into terms publicly intelligible to all. For Wittgenstein this desire is doomed, by definition . Language is a social practice, an expressive tool that derives its authority from criteria arrived at by common agreement, and agreement as to the meaning of expressions that only introspection can validate...