Experience in Descartes

Abstract

ABSTRACT I will focus on Anik Waldow’s reading of Descartes as contributing towards a specific form of human experience and the related capacity for self-determination. I discuss how this notion of experience relates to what is often taken to be the crux of Descartes’s Meditations. I conclude by noting that three elements are central to Waldow’s interpretation: Descartes’s intellectual metaphysical pursuit for epistemic certainty about essences of things, the specific kind of experience of our selves that arises out of the embodied state of the mind revealing ourselves as both active and passive, and a resulting new capacity for self-determination. The moral of Waldow’s reading is that we should not read the Meditations as an account of what the mind is but as an account of what the mind can do and how we can upraise ourselves not as metaphysicians but in our interactions with the world and others.