Word: cogito
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...chase, a drolly tangible version of the pursuit of happiness and the American Dream. And the French sex farce is logic run rampant, reason carried to an unreasonable and absurd extremity. That is why French sex farces are innately sexless: Descartes wrote them all. They begin with cogito ergo sum, and they rely not on seduction but sophistry, not on rolled-down beds but revved-up minds, not on fervid matings but frenetic misunderstandings...
...views them as "results of a later classification performed by us for particular needs." The classification or categorization is made for its utility, for its survival value; this should recall the influence of Darwin. Animals do not have a sense of self--they live in a state prior to Cogito ergo sum. So do infants. And this leads at last to Freud and his developmental scheme. "The id," Freud writes, "contains everything that is inherited, that is fixed in the constitution--above all, therefore, the instincts, which originate in the somatic organization and which find their first mental expression...
Assumed Certitude. Just as religion is necessary to the political life, so is it necessary to the intellectual life of modernity, which "has largely lost the way to ripen the fruit of its own genius." When Descartes announced his famous Cogito, ergo sum as the basis for a philosophy, neither he nor his successors realized that he actually was assuming that "his private certitude was everyman's certitude in kind." Modern men, taking him at face value, not only plunged "into his subjective depths"; they also tended to accept his belief that the physical universe is merely a mathematical...
...Modern Fallacy. Theologian Van Dusen bases his case on a fundamental disagreement with French Philosopher Rene Descartes (Cogito; ergo sum), the symbol of modern skepticism, who believed that each man must start alone and anew to find the truth. Descartes' assumption that each individual must find truth in his own way is one of the great modern fallacies, Van Dusen argues. On the contrary, the correct assumption is "that youth of 17 to 20 years of age is not competent to decide the essentials of his own education...