3 - The sensations of the present moment

Summary

I tried to show in the preceding chapter how the modifications Simone Weil introduced into Descartes's original method of inquiry were leading her right away from the Cartesian conception of method as, so to say, radically creative, towards the idea of criticism. Now the whole point of this movement is to insist that thinking must start with some material: it cannot, as Descartes's cogito argument claimed to do, create, or even constitute, its own material. Furthermore, the difficulties with which “Science et perception dans Descartes” tries to deal, but in the end gets bogged down in, show that the “material” on which thinking must work cannot be an inarticulate splurge of passive sensation. If methodical thinking is critical in character, its object must be of such a form that it will make sense to speak of “criticizing” it. It must express a positive claim and have an articulate order. That means that it must at least purport to be a coherent, ordered thought; criticism will take the form of investigating this thought. All this, at least, is involved in Spinoza's observation, with which I associated Simone Weil, that thinking must start with “a given true idea.”

And so the first chapter of Lectures on Philosophy contains the important remark

When we are on the point of giving birth to thought, it comes to birth in a world that is already ordered.

The “materialist point of view” which that first chapter elaborates is designed to show how such a thing is possible.