“Effect of Mirror” and damaged thought. Article two. Paradox of perception. Material object and its twin

The article is devoted to the analysis of a polemic between Descartes and Hobbes and its consequences for philosоphical thought. The author points out that a special mechanism has worked here and he calls this mechanism as “effect of mirror”. Hobbes’s critique of Cartesian project pointing to insubstantiality of a concept “intelligence” as a separate thinking substance, offers (as an alternative) a model of autonomous, “self-correcting” perception. Hobbes also makes reference to a phenomenon of reflection (he does it to demonstrate the process of such correction) – and this time – a reflection of an object of perception on the mirror surface. But the matter is not limited to a simple illustration: like in the case with a reflection of Cartesian subject – a mirror bifurcation is indispensable and is of structural character.

Thus, the author concludes that at some stage thinking comes across a bifurcation of the cognition perspective and, consequently, an impossibility of authentic choice – either at the level of the subject (in Cartesian reflection) or at the level of cognizable object (in Hobbes’s cognition theory).

And the very situation of the dispute between Descartes and Hobbes is determined not by substantial differences, but it is a direct consequence of the “effect of mirror”.

Thus, all the perspective of “philosophy development after Descartes” is under the question: as a matter of fact no fi for actual innovation is opened here, but there is a functional failure of thinking, where every thinker, following Hobbes, works to no purpose on anti-Cartesian position in a repeating polemic script.

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