Cogitation and Cognition

Links
https://rationemspe.blogspot.com/2024/08/st-clare.html

https://rationemspe.blogspot.com/2024/08/st-laurence-258.html

Yesterday:

Rod Dreher on Dante -- basically, his story of making boullabaisse for his family, which haunts him and has become kind of an emblem for him of several things, and how reading Dante helped bring him out of the slough.  

I started reading T Merton, Echoing Silence, a compilation of thoughts on writing and art, up to page 56 which was about art as counterpoint to society, and the ambivalences in that, when art should be what the artist is creating.  

Continuing to read Thomas Aquinas by E Feser.    Finished chapter 2 on being and essence.   He showed how some of the modern understandings of Aquinas and Aristotle are distorted by their modern presuppositions which are very different from Aquinas's.  

I'm reading the PDF of this article by R Buttiglione on Edith Stein and Descartes by way of Husserl.    He says that Cogito ergo Sum should be reframed as Cogito;sum because the "ergo" relies on  logic that Descartes only establishes later with the trustworthiness of God.    I don't know -- that seems unsatisfactory.  What is Cogito or "je pense" except a confession not only of consciousness, but of cognition, and what does cognition rely on besides logic?   This is only a side element in the paper of RB's main description of Husserl's project, which was dependent on Cartesian doubt.  

Further qualms for me:   Cogito seems too much of a statement for the consciousness of a newborn or preborn, yet they are alive and existent in their own perception.    I didn't become conscious of my own consciousness until I was 3, at least according to my memory, but there was no sense of discrepancy with earlier mode of thought -- the new thing was my awareness of my awareness.   Recognition.   

RB does make the point that the "I" implicit in cogito is a difficulty, too -- who is this "I"?  

I thought phenomenology was an attempt to deal with this "cogito" and "ergo" problem by going back to what's essential in human consciousness, but apparently not.   Perhaps Edith Stein gets there with empathy.  I haven't read that far.   

An article by Larry Chapp led me in a different direction -- to synodality and the "People of God" and how the term is sometimes distorted.    In what I have seen, Pope Francis generally uses the term correctly and the new Instrumentum Laboris does so as well, the way Lumen Gentium uses it.  But as in early postconciliar days (Ratzinger wrote about it in his article on communio) the "spirit-of" people tend to strain it in sociological directions that it doesn't seem to bear.