İlahiyat Akademi

Abstract

The self-consciousness of a person's own existence is also beyond doubt for himself. So much so that, as expressed by Descartes, I cannot doubt my own existence even when I doubt everything sensible, therefore, if I doubt, "I think, therefore I am." In other words, while perceiving, thinking, or wanting something, I am most clearly and distinctly aware of myself, and from this, it follows that I exist. Because it cannot be accepted that a thinking thing does not exist, and therefore it is sufficient to think in order to exist. This requires my thinking being to be a different substance from the sense objects I suspect, such as the body. Because of the fact that I cannot doubt myself while doubting everything sensible shows that I am not one of the things that are doubted. In short, what is doubted and what cannot be doubted cannot be of one and the same nature. This means that the most basic form of my being is a thinking thing, that is to say a soul or a mind. However, the existence of such a soul or mind poses a serious problem for empiricist epistemology. Since the soul or mind is not available to us, especially in external experience. For this reason, some empiricist thinkers like Hume reject the substantive existence of a self that produces self-consciousness and reduce it to the sum of perceptions or sense experiments, like a theatre stage in which events take place. Some empiricist thinkers go even further and argue that things perceived do not require the existence of a substance that perceives them and is called the self. However, the fact that the self cannot be represented as an object in the experiment is not enough to prove its absence. Because if there are perceptions but there is no perceiving subject, questions such as what or who the perceiver is or where the perceptions are cannot be answered. Whereas “I” is the idea of an active subject, and all mental operations such as thinking, knowing, or wanting require the existence of this active subject who performs them. Without a subject, it cannot be accepted that the events in question have arisen by themselves. Therefore, “I” is not just a collection of perceptions, like a theatre stage. Accordingly, empiricist epistemology cannot give a full account of the existence of the self. Therefore, although it is true that the self is not an object of experience according to empiricist epistemology, it does not seem possible to deny its active role and existence in all mental processes. So much so that, as expressed by Kant, the formation of knowledge is unthinkable without the existence of consciousness. However, according to Kant, although the existence of consciousness is necessary for the emergence of knowledge, consciousness does not have the value of knowledge. Because consciousness does not contain intuition. Therefore, I cannot have knowledge of myself like knowledge of intuition objects. It follows from this that I am not a sensory/material entity like the objects of perception of the world. However, according to Kant, it cannot be known that I am a soul or a mind since it has no intuition. In this way, Kant qualifies both materialism and spiritualism as unknowable. However, Kant’s double-sided agnostic attitude is not enough to satisfy the human being about the nature of his own existence. Because the human being who knows sensible objects is left as ignorant of his own nature by Kant. In other words, Kant says that we know the sensible objects, which Descartes doubted, but we cannot know the nature of our own being, which Descartes found beyond doubt. However, unlike Kant, the absence of knowledge about the materiality of the self can be considered as knowledge of its spirituality. Because the absence of intuition of our own existence, that is, our inability to grasp and see ourselves, proves that we are not material, and this means that we are a spirit or a mind. In fact, the concepts of spirit and mind actually refer to the type of non-material being.