2Philosophical Emotion

Descartes and the Aesthetics of Thought

Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback

CARTESIAN THOUGHTS ON aesthetics and the aesthetic of Cartesian thoughts are primarily understood as the aesthetics of Descartes’s philosophical writing. The literary qualities of his writing are the common way to address the question about the relation between Descartes’s philosophy and aesthetics. But there is still another dimension, which perhaps only Paul Valéry, the most Cartesian of all French poets, has addressed. It is the question about the sensibility of the intellect, or to use Valéry’s expression, the “emotion” that a thought produces and is produced from.¹ This question is unfamiliar and strange; thus, it presupposes that there is a kind of sensibility and emotion that belongs to thinking, not only to how the senses and the body affect the soul or the mind but also to how the mind or the soul relates to the body of senses and the senses of the body. In Paul Valéry’s readings of Descartes, one discovers the possibility of an unknown portrait of Descartes, which is at the same time an unknown portrait of philosophy itself: the image of a philosophical emotion, of a specific philosophical sensibility. The present chapter aims to proceed from the inspiration by Valéry and extract from a reading of Descartes the features of this philosophical emotion and sensibility. To Descartes’s visceral aesthetics presented and discussed by Cecilia Sjöholm in the former chapter, I will add a discussion about Descartes’s philosophical emotion.

How to Conceive a Philosophical Emotion

Descartes gives us an indication to answer to this question. In The Passions of the Soul, he speaks about “emotions of the soul,” “interior emotions of the soul,” and “intellectual joy.” In article 27, the passions of the soul, which differ from other affections, are defined as “emotions”: “After having considered in what respects the passions of the soul differ from all its other thoughts, it seems to me that we may define them generally as those perceptions, sensations or emotions of the soul which we refer particularly to it, and which are caused, maintained and strengthened by some movement of the spirits.”² Descartes’s concerns here are about the “emotions of the soul,” and he conceives of the soul as the thinking soul, not merely the living principle or the principle of movement in living beings. He believes he is presenting something completely novel in the treatment of emotions or passions insofar as his aim is not to conceive bodily emotions but to examine how the body acts on the soul rather than how the soul imprints life and movement in a body, as the ancients have discussed.³ Descartes writes in Passions that “an action and a passion must always be a single thing which has these two names on account of the two different subjects to which it may be related.”⁴

What Descartes proposes here is the need to investigate how the soul is acted upon by its actions, how it is affected by the way it affects, how it refers to itself in a way that it provokes an emotion, a passion that is entirely of the soul, albeit acting on the body, as he himself puts it: “I note that we are not aware of any subject which acts more directly upon our soul than the body to which it is joined.”⁵ Reading Passions of the Soul from the perspective of this being a thing of simultaneous or reflexive action and passion, and considering that the “emotions” of the soul are and arise from the being acted upon by its own actions, it is in relation to this “reflexivity” of action and passion that the meaning of a “philosophical emotion” and sensibility should be developed.⁶

The starting point for discovering the vestiges of a philosophical emotion and sensibility—the meaning of the baroque aesthetics of thought in Descartes’s philosophy we are proposing here—is careful attention to the new foundation of philosophy he presents, departing from this “reflexivity” of being acted upon by the action. Thus, this “reflexivity” is at the core of the novelty of Descartes’s philosophy.

What is the novelty of Descartes’s philosophical foundation? How does Descartes describe this novelty? He was very aware not only of his novelty but also of the moment he seized upon this novelty, his eureka moment. He reflects on this in his notes about the famous dreams from November 10, 1619, when he was in Germany in the Neuburg neighborhood alongside the Danube. According to Discourse on the Method, it was at this moment that he made the decision to elaborate anew the whole system of human knowledge and conceived the foundations of his method.⁷ Descartes wrote down these dreams and was very careful to preserve these notes insofar as they were part of the notebook containing various early writings, probably written during the years 1619–1622 while he was traveling in Europe. He lost the notebook, but the well-known philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had copied the notes, which were found and published in 1859 with the title Cogitationes Privatae (Private thoughts). Following the account of Descartes’s biographer Adrien Baillet (1649–1706), the notebook was divided into sections that included the Praembula (Preliminaries), the Experimenta (Observations), and the Olympica (Olympian matters).⁸ Descartes’s dreams are part of the Olympica.⁹

It is worth reviewing some of the passages in the narrative of Descartes’s dreams found in Adrien Baillet’s biography The Life of Descartes from 1691,¹⁰ but these passages cannot be found in the English translation of Descartes’s Complete Philosophical works.¹¹ This narrative is Baillet’s rendition of what is presumably Descartes’s account:

On November 10, 1619, Descartes had three consecutive dreams “after going to bed full of inspiration and completely absorbed by the thought of having that very day discovered the foundations of marvelous knowledge.”¹² In the first dream, he saw some phantoms who frightened him so much that he, walking in the dream, was forced to leave the left side of the street to get to the place where he wanted to go, even though he was feeling weak on the right side of his body. He tried to stand but felt “a windstorm” that, carrying him along in a sort of whirlwind, made him make three or four turns on his left foot. Trying to reach the college chapel, he realized that he had passed a man of his acquaintance without greeting him. He tried to return to address him properly but was violently hurled back by the wind. In the middle of the courtyard, someone else called him by name and asked him to give something to another person. Descartes thought it was a melon imported from some foreign country. “What surprised him more was to see that the people gathered around this man were erect and steady on their feet, while he remained bent and staggering.” Descartes woke up, feeling a sharp pain, and thought it might be some evil spirit that wished to captivate him. “Immediately, he turned on his right side, for he had gone to sleep and had the dream on his left side.” Descartes recalls that he then prayed to God to ask for protection “against the evil spirit of his dream and to be preserved from all the misfortunes that could threaten him as damnation for his sins.” He went to sleep again “after an interval of nearly two hours of various thoughts on the blessings and evils of this world.”

He then had another dream in which he believed he heard the strong noise of thunder. Frightened, he awoke and perceived sparkling lights scattered about the room. He wanted to be helped by explanations taken from philosophy, making observations by alternately opening and closing his eyes, about the quality of the sensible forms that appeared before him.

Shortly after, he had a third dream in which he found a book on his table. He opened it and felt delighted to see it was an encyclopedia (Dictionnaire). At the same instant, he felt under his hand another book, an anthology of poems by different authors called the Corpus Poetarum.¹³ In one of the verses he read, Quod vitae sectabor iter? (What path of life shall I pursue?).¹⁴ Then someone handed him a piece of poetry beginning with “Est et Non,”¹⁵ which Descartes knew as one of Ausonius’s poems. Still in the dream, Descartes came upon several small copperplate portrait engravings (gravez en taille douce), which made the book very beautiful.¹⁶ In his account of Descartes’s dreams, Baillet considered that “the remarkable thing to note here is that, while wondering if what he had just seen was a dream or a vision, he not only decided in his sleep that it was a dream, but he had interpreted it before he awoke.” Descartes decided then that the encyclopedia symbolized all the branches of learning and that the anthology of poems symbolized philosophy and wisdom joined. “Indeed, he did not believe that one should be so very astonished to see that the poets, even those who write nothing but twaddle, were full of sayings more serious, more sensible, and better expressed than those found in the writings of the philosophers.¹⁷ He attributed this marvel to the divinity of Inspiration and to the power of Imagination, which produce the seeds of wisdom (which are found in the spirit of all men, like sparks of fire in pieces of flint) with much greater ease and even much greater brilliance than Reason can produce in philosophers.” Descartes continued to interpret his dream in his sleep and judged that the verse Quod vitae sectabor iter? was the good advice of a wise person or even moral theology. He then woke, and “with his eyes open continued the interpretation of his dream,” wrote Baillet. “By the poets collected in the anthology he understood the Revelation and the Inspiration by which he did not despair of seeing himself favored. By the poem Est & Non, which is the Yes and the No of Pythagoras, he understood Truth and Falsity in human understanding and profane learning.” He then concluded that “the Spirit of Truth had chosen to use this dream to reveal the treasures of all the disciplines of learning to him.” All that remained for him to explain were the little engraved portraits that he had found in the second book, and he no longer sought their explanation after an Italian painter paid him a visit no later than the next day.¹⁸

According to Descartes’s own interpretation, the last dream referred to his future, whereas the two earlier dreams were related to his past life. The melon he received in the first dream, he said, “signified the delights of solitude, though presented by purely human appeals.” The wind was the evil spirit that tried to force him into a place that he wished to go by his own free will (a margin note by Descartes read, “A malo Spiritu ad Templum propellebar”—I was driven to the church by the Devil). The fear he felt in the second dream indicated, in his opinion, his “synteresis, that is, the prick of conscience concerning the sins which he could have committed up to that point in his life.” He understood the thunder he heard as a sign of the spirit of truth taking possession of him. According to Baillet’s account,

the last imaginative interpretation surely smacks of Inspiration, and it would easily lead us to believe that M. Descartes might have been drinking the evening before he went to bed. It was, indeed, the eve of Martinmas, an evening when it was customary in the place where he was, as in France, to devote oneself to revelry. But he assures us that he had passed the whole day and the evening in complete sobriety, and that it had been three months since he had last drunk wine.¹⁹ He adds that the spirit that excited in him the inspiration that he had felt, which had affected his brain for several days, had predicted these dreams before he retired to bed, and that his human spirit had no part in it.

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These dreams have been the topic of extensive discussion and interpretation.²⁰ Even Freud has written about them, confessing that he did not have a lot to say since, for him, Descartes’s dreams could not be very much distinguished from a state of consciousness; thus, the most interesting thing in them was the fact that the dreamer interpreted the dreams during the dreams.²¹ Apart from this “hermeneutical” central feature of the Cartesian dreams, there is a further astonishing aspect. According to Baillet, Descartes writes in these notes that these dreams happened on the night in which he was filled with enthusiasm for having found that day “the fundamental principles of a wonderful science,” of a mirabilis scientia fundamenta.²² The enthusiasm preceded the dreams; the dreams followed the enthusiasm of a discovery that had happened suddenly in a moment that very same day. What the “fundamental principles of a wonderful science” are is never described in these notes, even though Descartes establishes himself as the interpreter of his own dreams.²³ This will be “told” eventually, and the self-interpretation will be revisited in Descartes’s later writings.

In the second part of Discourse on the Method, a text written originally in French and published 1637, eighteen years after the eureka moment and the dreams generated by the enthusiasm of his discovery, Descartes refers to this journey in Germany but does not mention the dreams. He mentions the situation in which he might have discovered the fundamental principles. He wrote, “Finding no conversation to divert me and fortunately having no cares or passions to trouble me, I stayed all day shut up alone in a stove-heated room, where I was completely free to converse with myself about my own thoughts.”²⁴ Throughout this part of Discourse, Descartes claims there is a need to reform the intellect in such a way that it could come “so close to the truth as the simple reasoning which a man of good sense naturally makes concerning whatever he comes across.”²⁵ His plan, as he continues, “has never gone beyond trying to reform my own thoughts and construct them upon a foundation which is all my own.”²⁶ “Uprooting” (déraciner) old views, learned thoughts, the doctrine and dogmas of the schools and of tradition is the verb Descartes uses repeatedly in Discourse. He describes the method of this “foundation which is all my own” in four rules that he should never fail to observe:

The first was never to accept anything as true if I did not have evident knowledge of its truth: that is, carefully to avoid precipitate conclusions and preconceptions, and to include nothing more in my judgments than what presented itself to my mind so clearly and so distinctly that I had no occasion to doubt it; the second, to divide each of the difficulties I examined into as many parts as possible and as may be required in order to resolve them better; third, to direct my thoughts in an orderly manner, by beginning with the simplest and most easily known objects in order to ascend little by little, step by step, to knowledge of the most complex, and by supposing some order even among objects that have no natural order of precedence; and the last, throughout to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so comprehensive, that I could be sure of leaving nothing out.²⁷

The decisive shift here is how the I can have evident knowledge of the truth of something and how to include what is presented to my own mind in my own judgments so clearly and distinctly that I have no occasion to doubt it. It is only then that thoughts can be directed in an orderly manner, that they can follow the path from the simplest to the most complex and can then make complete enumerations and comprehensive reviews without omissions. The evidence of the knowledge of the truth of something depends on how something is presented to one’s own mind so clearly and distinctly that there can be no doubt about the truth. What kind of presentation must that be? What kind of vision is at play here? This presentation must be a direct and immediate one. It is as immediate as the knowledge of God and of the infinite.²⁸ Descartes is, after all, the philosopher who introduced the modern concept of immediacy and the immediate.²⁹ It cannot, however, be the immediacy of the perception of anything external to the mind insofar as the knowledge of its truth can always be doubted. To define this presentation that is so clear and distinct that no doubt can remain, Descartes proposes to “reject as if absolutely false everything in which I could imagine the least doubt, in order to see if I was left believing anything that was entirely indubitable.”³⁰ He then rejects the immediacy of the senses, the immediacy of demonstrative reasoning, and even those of accomplished thoughts insofar as they can “occur” (venir) equally during wakefulness and sleep: “I resolved to pretend that all the things that had ever entered my mind were no more true than the illusions of my dreams.”³¹ Descartes describes this most clear and distinct presentation to the own mind as the one that cannot occur from abroad, either through the senses, syllogistic demonstration, or whatsoever way a thought can “enter” the own mind. But in doing so, he “immediately” noticed that “while I was trying thus to think everything false, it was necessary that I, who was thinking this, was something. And observing that this truth ‘I am thinking, therefore I exist’ was so firm and sure that all the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were incapable of shaking it, I decided that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was searching.”³² The immediacy that Descartes discovers is indeed the one of an action and a passion being the same thing: “I am thinking, therefore I am, I exist.” It is what could be called the immediate reflexivity of thinking and being, one immediately reflected in the other. The philosophical emotion and sensibility are, somehow, connected to the immediate reflexivity of action and passion at stake in the Cartesian “identity” of thinking and being.

Dominant Views on the Immediate Reflexivity of Thinking and Being

Descartes’s phrase has been considered a “proper name”³³ or a “magic formula,”³⁴ and has replaced, or perhaps served as a modern translation of the Delphic-Socratic γνῶθι σεαυτόν, know thyself.³⁵ In this “translation,” the relation between thinking and being is considered the discovery of the firm ground provided by an identity only granted through reflection. What we call the reflexivity of thinking and being here has been understood in post-Cartesian tradition in terms of reflection. What does reflection mean? Reflection means literally bend back, turn back something to itself, hence thinking back to itself. It has currently two main significations. It has the “material” signification of a wavefront—either of light, sound, or water—that upon reaching a surface turns back into the medium from which it originated, but reflection also has the “spiritual” meaning of a deep meditation on some subject or matter. Descartes is considered the founder of the modern philosophical signification of reflection insofar as his ego cogito ergo sum (“I am thinking therefore I am, I exist”) has been predominately interpreted as the thought that thinks that it thinks, meaning both a thought that turns away from any consideration of objects and the external world of experience and thereby turns back to itself, thematizing the subject of thought and rendering this turning back—reflection—the principle of philosophical thought. In reflection, the subject of thought turns away from the immediate experience of the world and turns back to itself, immediately becoming the object of thought. In this view, modern Cartesian philosophical reflection means self-relation, self-mirroring, and self-foundation.³⁶ Whatsoever sense the sum (“I am, I exist”) might discover, it should then derive from the “I think that I think,” which is condensed in the cogito—that is, in the “I think.” It is from this main line of interpretation of the Cartesian cogito that Leibniz defines reflection in Nouvelles Essais de l’entendement as “attention à ce qui est en nous” (nothing but attention to what is within us),³⁷ an attention that Alexander Baumgarten further considers to be “attentio in totis perceptionis partes successive directa,” an attention successively directed at the parts of a total perception.³⁸ Kant translates the Latin word reflection to the German Überlegung, defining it as that which does not have to do with objects but solely with the subjective conditions to reach concepts of the objects,³⁹ being the consciousness of the relation between representations. Reflection relates to an internal or interior movement of the mind, through which thought becomes object for thought, representation for representation, which allows Kant to discuss “transcendental reflection” (die transzendentale Überlegung). For Kant, this is a state of the spirit, Zustand des Gemütes.⁴⁰ As Martin Heidegger interprets Kant’s account of the Cartesian cogito and his critique, the expression of this interior reflection, accomplished by the cogito, is a cogito me cogitare,⁴¹ literally “I think myself thinking,” from which the knowledge of the world and of the things and bodies of the world should be deduced. For Kant, Descartes’s biggest error was not in identifying the cogito with reflection—Kant believed this was, indeed, Descartes’s greatest achievement—but in conceiving that from the simple proposition “I think” a whole new philosophical science could be deduced, which includes the deduction of the substantiality of the soul, its simplicity, its unity through time, and its relation with the bodies—that is, with all possible objects in space. According to Kant, the “I think,” the cogito, comprehended as cogito me cogitare, can only assure a “formal unity” that follows all my representations, but it is not enough to serve as the foundation for a whole system of philosophical knowledge. With the “I think,” I can only know my thoughts and representations but nothing about what I am or can be outside my representations.⁴² Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason aimed to show that if this phrase laid the foundation for representation as such, it is not enough to serve as the foundation for the representational knowledge of things and of the world.

These very brief remarks indicate a main line of interpretation of the cogito, of the “I think,” as immediate reflection that occurs when I think myself thinking, cogito me cogitare—indeed, when I think that I think. Moreover, it has been from this interpretation of the cogito, as reflection, that the substantiality of the cogito has also been defined. The capacity or ability of the cogito to think that it thinks reduces it to a thought of thoughts, which includes of thought things. But understood in this way, things become reduced to thoughts—that is, to representation—and thought to a “thing” that can be thought. Still, within the framework of an understanding of the cogito as reflection, the “I think” appears to enunciate a reification of thinking, through which the “I” that thinks appears as a thing that thinks in such a way that it turns everything it thinks into a “thing.” Turning the subject of reflection into an object for reflection, the cogito as cogito me cogitare would therefore reduce the “I” into a thinking thing, res cogitans, and thinking to a pure act of objectification and reification. Some of the phenomenological critiques by Edmund Husserl and Heidegger directed against Descartes focus on this meaning of reflection, on the substantiality of the cogito and the reification of the subject, grounded on this immediate reflection.

The point of departure for Husserl’s phenomenology and Heidegger’s critical development of phenomenology is, indeed, the deconstruction of the Cartesian cogito. The central critical point is the distinction between subject and object, the separation between the interiority of consciousness and the exteriority of the world or reality, and the consequent isolation, encapsulation, and reification of the “ego.” For a phenomenologist, consciousness is not a thing encapsulated in itself, a separated sphere from the world that has the capacity to know the world from outside or above. Consciousness, the thinking subject, is in fact not at all a thing but a life, a way of being, which is of the world in the world. Ideas can therefore not be innate, and the transcendental viewpoint is rather immanent for it is always situated in the world. The reification of the cogito, of the “I think”—namely its explanation as a “thing,” res, whose substantiality is totally independent from the substance of the world and of the world of things—is, from the viewpoint of phenomenology, a principle mistake of Cartesian philosophy. But the central target of, for instance, Heidegger’s critique is also the reification of the sum, of the “I am,” “I exist,” that leaves the sum, the “I am,” the “I exist” totally undiscussed (unerörtet) and unclarified, even when positioning the sum as original as the cogito.⁴³ The principle should be inverted—and expressed rather in terms of “I am, I exist therefore I think”: ego sum ergo cogito. As Heidegger says: “the first statement is ‘sum,’ in the sense of I-am-in-a-world. As such a being, ‘I am’ in the possibility of being toward various modes of behavior (cogitationes) as ways of being together with innerwordly beings. In contrast, Descartes says that cogitations are indeed objectively present and an ego is also objectively present as worldless res cogitans.”⁴⁴

It is the isolation of the sum, of the “I am,” “I exist,” its wordlessness, that is for Heidegger the most critical point. Descartes’s ontological ground, which is the understanding of being as thing—hence, as reification and objectivation—not only falsifies and misunderstands the meaning of Being qua being but also the meaning of a thing, what Heidegger will develop in his later essays about the thinghood of things (das Dinghafte des Dinges).⁴⁵ Leaving the sum undiscussed, reified, isolated, and worldless, Descartes can only behold a thought on thinking that thinks whatsoever from the model of introspective reflection, as I think that I think, a cogito me cogitare.

Husserl sees the problem of the Cartesian cogito mostly as an inaccurate understanding of reflection. According to Husserl, Descartes failed to account for how the I think that I think is a thinking myself thinking, and hence, what expresses rather the experience of thought than the contents of the cogito.⁴⁶ At stake are the experiences (Erlebnisse) of thought and their unity and continuity in the flow of consciousness, which renders the subject not merely conscious of him/herself thinking but a presence to him/herself. According to Husserl’s critique, Descartes could not account for the experience of experience. Reflection is, for Husserl, the way consciousness gives itself as phenomenon to consciousness—that is, how it is experienced as consciousness by and through consciousness. This means that phenomenologically, consciousness is a realm of experience and not only of thoughts about experiences; it is attention to the experience of thoughts and not of things, and, indeed, the possibility to experience experience. In this Husserlian sense, reflection is rather reflexivity in a sense that is not much of a departure from immediate reflexivity as in Descartes, conceived as the being one of action and passion, of being acted upon by the action.

Following the phenomenological critical position in relation to Descartes, but departing from a critique of both Husserlian and Heideggerian critical standpoints, Maurice Merleau-Ponty proposed in the Phenomenology of Perception the notion of “true cogito,” defined as follows: “The true Cogito does not define the subject’s existence in terms of the thought he has of existing, and furthermore does not convert the indubitability of the world into the indubitability of thought about the world, nor finally does it replace the world itself by the world as meaning. On the contrary it recognizes my thought itself as an inalienable fact, and does away with any kind of idealism in revealing me as ‘being-in-the-world.’”⁴⁷ Merleau-Ponty’s intention was to restore what he called the “temporal thickness”⁴⁸ of the Cartesian cogito, and thereby to reveal “yet there is consciousness of something, something appears, there is a phenomenon—such is the true cogito.”⁴⁹ The true cogito is the appearing of things from themselves and hence fundamentally prereflexive, immediate reflexivity.

Whether the sum should precede the cogito, or the cogito should be understood as the experience of thought, or further as the prereflexive appearing of things from themselves, the framework to understand the “identity” of thinking and being enunciated in Descartes’s formula ego cogito ergo sum remains the reflexive structure of thinking as the capacity of self-reference, self-relation, self-foundation, and even self-revelation that is present even in the notion of a prereflexive true cogito. But does ego cogito ergo sum really mean ego cogito me cogitare? Is the relation of thinking and being expressed in this “magic formula” a reflection, a reflexive identity, or an immediate reflexivity understood as being acted upon by the action?

Ego Cogitans Existo

How would Descartes respond to these contemporary objections, he who developed his thoughts dialogically, either in the style of soliloquies or in letters and by presenting responses to objections? Indeed, Descartes never wrote the Latin phrase “cogito me cogitare” (“I think that I think”) that Heidegger attributed to Descartes and in which he saw the main critical point of Cartesianism. This is actually Heidegger’s formulation.⁵⁰ In a letter to the theologian and mathematician Antoine Arnauld from July 29, 1648, Descartes writes: “Being conscious of our thoughts at the time when we are thinking is not the same as remembering afterward. Thus, we do not have any thoughts in sleep without being conscious of them at the moment they occur, though commonly we forget them immediately.”⁵¹ The main response would be the “thickness” of this “at the same time,” of thinking while thinking, indeed, of the I am thinking, and not the reflection operating in “I think that I think,” a thickness that before being restored still needs to be stored. The core of his answer resides neither in the cogito (I think) nor in the sum (I am, I exist), and even less in the res (the thing). It lies in the cogitans, in thinking, used by Descartes in the gerundive mode, which is the mode to express an ongoing action. In fact, Descartes did not fail to write an even more precise formula for the experience he discovered to be the principle for his marvelous science: thus, instead of ego cogito ergo sum, he once also wrote ego cogitans existo (thinking I exist),⁵² a formula that is to be read in its double meaning: thinking I exist, and, while thinking, I exist.

In French, Descartes’s famous formula reads in the present tense: “je pense, donc je suis.” The English translation, “I am thinking, therefore I exist,” renders the meaning of this present tense even clearer: thus, at stake here is nothing but the thinking act, being conscious “at the time” of thinking, thinking while thinking, indeed, the immediacy of this experience, which is the experience of a unique kind of immediacy.⁵³ This is what Descartes could accept, “without scruple,” as “the first principle of the philosophy” he was seeking. The emphasis on the kind of immediacy of the experience of thinking while thinking shall give a “firm” direction to seize the meaning of philosophical emotion and sensibility we seek. Thus, it does not have to do with the pleasure that rational intellect may experience when arriving at a true conclusion, or with the beauty of a rational proof, or with the feeling of harmony and order rationality can produce. Indeed, very decisive here is to behold a crucial distinction between the thoughts produced by a rational intellect and the act of thinking; thus, it is the latter that Descartes accepts as the first principle of philosophy. And it is from this principle of the act of thinking that the meaning of the “I” and of the “subject” brought to philosophical language by Descartes might become more “clear” and “distinct.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel envisioned this meaning, at least to a certain extent, in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Acknowledging Descartes as the founder of modern philosophy in these lectures, he observed: “We come now for the first time to what is properly the philosophy of the modern world, and we begin with Descartes. Here, we may say, we are at home and, like the sailor after a long-voyage, we can at last shout ‘Land ho.’ Descartes made a fresh start in every respect. The thinking or philosophizing, the thought and the formation [of reason] in modern times, begins with him. The principle in this new era is thinking, the thinking that proceeds from itself.”⁵⁴

Reading Hegel’s words more carefully, one can observe that what Hegel recognizes as “the principle of the new modern era” is not properly the dominance of rationality and science upon reality, the encapsulating of the intellect and of the human in its subjectivity and egoism, but “thinking,” “thinking that proceeds from itself.” Nor does he speak about reason but rather about Bildung, “formation,”⁵⁵ pointing out the activity of thought and its autonomy. Hegel sees not only that the Cartesian novelty is the one of beginning with thinking, “um erst vom Denken aus auf etwas Festes zu kommen”⁵⁶ but also that it is “das Denkende,” the thinking that for Descartes is the “I.” Hegel’s reading is very attentive to the distinction between think and thinking, das Denken and das Denkende, and shows that what Descartes calls “I” is not a subject that is first in itself and then thinks or has as its main attribute the capacity to think, but the thinking act itself is the subject. The “I” is the thinking, he says. It opens the path to consider that it is while thinking that the “being” thinking becomes immediately clear and distinct in its inseparability of this act. In Hegel’s words: “As subject, thinking [das Denken] is the being-thinking [das Denkende] and this is the ‘I’; thinking is the inward being-in-myself, the immediacy in myself—this is proper simple knowing. Immediacy is however the same as what is called Being.”⁵⁷

Therefore, it can be said that “Ich ist gleich Denken,” “I is equal to think.” The subject, the “I,” is nothing but the thinking, which shows the immediate identity of being and thinking. The “donc,” “ergo,” “therefore,” “also” as Hegel points out is not the “Also des Schlusses,” the “therefore of the syllogism”⁵⁸ but only the connection [Zusammenhang] of being and thinking. It expresses the immediacy of the belonging together or identity of being and thinking in the act of thinking. In his brief but insightful summary of Descartes’s new foundation of philosophy, Hegel touches upon the core of the Cartesian eureka—namely, the seizing, in the instant, all of a sudden, of the being thinking while being thinking, a flash moment in which being and thinking are the same, presenting itself to the thinker in pure immediacy. Hegel does not develop his insight on Descartes’s insight, but he understood quite clearly that the first principle of philosophy is the one of departing from the immediate awareness of the belonging together or identity of being and thinking that is given in the moment the being thinking presents itself in the act of thinking. This moment of seizing the being thinking in its own act might have been the source for Descartes’s enthusiasm the night of November 10, 1619, an enthusiasm followed by dreams interpreting dreams and by a new foundation of philosophical wisdom. It is also from this immediate “identity” or belonging together, when thinking “sees” itself thinking while thinking that the meaning of a philosophical emotion and sensibility can gain more clarity. What is at play here is the attention to the cogitans and not to the res cogitans, to the thinking while thinking and not to the thing (the subject, the “I”) that thinks. In so many centuries of responses and objections to Cartesian philosophy, a more thorough examination of Descartes’s ars cogitans⁵⁹ is still lacking—to his way of thinking, to the way he seizes the act of thinking in its very action. It therefore seems legitimate to reread his Meditations on First Philosophy, using a focus on the cogitans as our point of departure, on the way he writes down the thinking while thinking, in short, on the act of thinking while it is taking place and time.

Rereading Passages from Meditations

Descartes had some clear ideas about how to read his texts. In the letter he wrote to the translator of Principles of Philosophy, his friend Abbé Claude Picot, he says that the truths he included among his principles “have been known all time by everyone” even if up to now “no one has recognized them as the principles of philosophy.”⁶⁰ This explains why he still has to “prove that they do indeed qualify as principles of that sort.”⁶¹ But surprisingly, instead of proposing a doctrine that should be learned, he considers that “the best way of doing this is to get people to see by experience that this is so, that is to say, to invite my readers to read this book.”⁶² Descartes considers that the experience needed to follow his thoughts is the reading experience, not rational or intellectual skills or any sort of intellectual “experience.” He adds some lines about how to read Principles that can be extended to his other books as well:

I should like the reader first of all to go quickly through the whole book like a novel, without straining his attention too much or stopping at the difficulties, which may be encountered. The aim should be merely to ascertain in a general way which matters I have dealt with. After this, if he finds that these matters deserve to be examined and he has the curiosity to ascertain their causes, he may read the book a second time in order to observe how my arguments follow. But if he is not always able to see this fully, or if he does not understand all arguments, he should not give up at once. He should merely mark with a pen the places where he finds the difficulties and continue to read on to the end without a break. If he then takes up the book for the third time, I venture to think he will now find the solutions to most of the difficulties he marked before; and if any still remain, he will discover their solution on a final re-reading.⁶³

What will be pursued here is certainly not a “final rereading” of the Meditations, but a rereading of certain passages that proceed from the attention to the movement of thinking in the text and not merely from the thoughts here expressed or from the rational chain of arguments. Descartes employs the term Meditatio, which was used before Descartes to translate Marcus Aurelius’s Greek title Τὰ εἰςἑαυτόν, “things to one’s self,” into Latin. The use of this term links Descartes with a tradition that runs through St. Augustine’s Confessions, to Teresa of Avila,⁶⁴ Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, and more recently, to Jacques Derrida⁶⁵ and Jean-François Lyotard.⁶⁶ This tradition considered meditation to be writing down thoughts that are drawn away from the presence of any listener or exterior influence or contact and are thought inside oneself, in reflexive introspection. In Discourse, Descartes describes the insight he experienced on the “wonderful science” when he withdrew from the company of and conversation with other people and went into the solitude of his poêle, his stove-heated room, an image that can be seen, for instance, in Rembrandt’s well-known painting of the Philosopher in Meditation, also called Interior with Tobit and Anna, that hangs today at the Louvre Museum. Even if Descartes can be read in the lineage of ancient and medieval meditations and confessions, his aim was not so much to write down his thoughts but much more the movement and flow of thinking; indeed, he wanted to record the act of thinking taking place and time.

Figure 2.1. Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, Le Philosophe en contemplation, longtemps appelé ausso Philosophe en meditation, 1632, Louvre Museum.

The first Meditation begins by revisiting a central motive from the early Discourse on the Method, which is the purpose of uprooting old ideas and beliefs, the need to accomplish the “general demolition” of current opinions and views. “I am here quite alone, and at last I will devote myself sincerely and without reservation to the general demolition of my opinions.”⁶⁷ In order to perform this demolition, he must find in what he until now considered to be “most true” “at least some reason for doubt.” Whatsoever reason to doubt of the truest is enough to throw the belief away until he finds what cannot be doubted. Descartes does not seek what is false in a judgment but what can be doubted in what is most true. Senses are the first source for what is “most true.” But they also deceive. To show that the realm of sensual truths must be left behind for the sake of finding the first and undoubtable principle of this marvelous science, Descartes proceeds in an unusual way. He does not describe or discuss sensual-perceptive illusions as he does in other texts and contexts. He does not discuss optical illusions due to distance “when stars or other very distant bodies appear to us much smaller than they are”⁶⁸ or how “sometimes towers which had looked round from a distance appeared square from close up; and enormous on pediments did not seem large when observed from the ground.”⁶⁹ Here he neither talks about physical deceptions provoked by physical harm or disease, such as the phantom limb,⁷⁰ or those who, because of “jaundice, see everything coloured yellow.”⁷¹ He departs quite unexpectedly from the truest perception, in a sense, namely that “I am here,” which continues, “sitting by the fire, wearing a winter dressing-gown, holding this piece of paper in my hands,” and so on.⁷² The condition of all truth brought by or through the senses is the being here, and it is from this being here that the truest fact, that “these hands or this whole body are mine”—that is, the truest fact perceived in self-perception and self-sensation—relies upon. But even this truest fact—which is related to self-perception and self-sensation and not to the perception and sensation of something else, or exterior to the perceiver and “sensor”—can be doubted; thus, the self or subject of perception and sensation could be a madman, “whose brains are so damaged by the persistent vapors of melancholia that they firmly maintain they are kings when they are paupers, or say that they are dressed in purple when they are naked, or that their heads are made of earthenware, or that they are pumpkins, or made of glass”⁷³ (Descartes sketches so many fairy tales in just this sentence!). The whole discussion here is about the belief of being what one is not. The madman presents the possibility of doubting the most undoubtable, even in any deceptive sense perception—namely, the being here, indeed, being. How can we relate this specific mode of deception—namely, insanity—to the question about sense-perceptual illusions? Why does Descartes not discuss illusions produced by the senses but rather the insane that takes not being for being, “being king when they are paupers,” “being dressed when they are naked,” believing that their hands and body are not their own? These confusions are not at all common illusions produced by the senses. What renders these beliefs “mad” is that in them the senses doubt themselves—which they otherwise never do. It can be said that the argument of illusion or of insanity in the Meditations, as a matter of fact, is rather a sensual doubt, the way senses doubt themselves, the way senses do not trust themselves, or the way senses do not trust their overwhelming self-evidence that allows the insane not only to say but to feel that “his hand is not his.”⁷⁴ This argument tries to bring to light how the sense of a “here” doubts itself, also indicating the possibility of a here that is not here, a now that is not now. This is, indeed, a very important aspect of the time-sense of thinking, insofar as the “I am thinking” is here and now, but nonetheless, not here and not now in the common spatial-time we are accustomed to using and experiencing for these terms. After the presentation of the argument of illusion and madness, the argument that presents the sensual doubt of the senses, a small leap occurs in the movement of thoughts. Recognizing how people who believe they are what they are not, who mix being and not-being, are insane, and that he, the thinker, would also be insane if he took anything from them as a model for himself, the thinker acknowledges ironically “what a brilliant piece of reasoning,” and continues: “as if I were not a man who sleeps at night.”⁷⁵

Indeed, what a “brilliant” or rather strange piece of reasoning! What was being called into question was: from where the thinker should take the model for his scrutiny, if madness, meaning to believe that one is what one is not, cannot be a model. But why should it follow the observation, “as if I were not one that sleeps?” The figure of speech that calls attention here for the leap is “as if.” Descartes does not connect the “as if” with the dreams but first with the sleep. In sleeping, one is “as if” awake. In sleep, one is dreaming “as if thinking”; hence, when thinking, it could also be said that one is “as if” dreaming. Thinking thinks things awaken, whereas dreams dream sleeping. How can this distinction between being awake and being asleep help distinguish these two actions in the present—thinking and dreaming? Descartes proceeds using the “as if” as a kind of method, one that, more than conjecture, is an index for all kinds of illusion and what could also be used in relation to an “idea.” Thus, there is something in ideas that is “as if” a dream. This something has to do with the temporal and spatial features of both. My claim here is that the distinction between awake and asleep does not introduce only a “criterial problem,” as the important Descartes scholar Martial Gueroult discussed it,⁷⁶ but a criteria to describe the strange sense of place and time in the act of thinking, of the taking place and time of thinking. To describe the way thinking is real and present, he introduces the “as if” as an index of illusion, meaning unreality, not being here and now. Therefore, Descartes reasons as if the I am thinking, the gerundive mode of thinking, cogitans, could be taken either for insanity or for a dream. And why could it be taken for one or another? Because the “reality” of thinking, its mode of presence, is enigmatic and intriguing, because it is the most present and real but in a totally different way than any reality. It could be taken for insanity insofar as the I am thinking is present here and now but not as things are present here and now; it could be taken for what it is not. And it could also be taken for a dream: “for how do we know that the thoughts which come to us in dreams are any more false than the others, seeing that they are often no less lively and distinct?”⁷⁷ Nevertheless, there is a difference that seems more intense: “Although sometimes our imaginings in sleep are as lively and distinct as in waking life . . . our reasonings are never so evident or complete in sleep as in waking life.”⁷⁸ Indeed, the reality of “I am thinking” reveals another sense of reality that exceeds the real but is not confounded with the unreal. The chain of arguments circles around the being here in dreaming and thinking, believing I am here—that is, standing or sitting, when in fact I am lying down. And dreams, where do they take place? In sleep. Do we think while dreaming? Does one think like one dreams? Thinking shares with dreaming a here and a now that is and is not here and now and hence a place and a time so confusing to describe that the meditative thinker feels “dazed” (obstupefeam). Thus, how do we grasp the event or act of thinking and dreaming if both are here and now, not being here nor now? Descartes continues by analyzing what can be seized in dreaming, which is an act that is ungraspable as much as thinking. He knows that in dreaming, one can dream of dreaming. This is an important characteristic of his own dreams from 1619. But one also dreams of things and events that could be “here and now” in the way things do, although dislocated to the obscure here and now of the act of dreaming, of the taking place and time of dreaming.

Descartes moves then to a discussion about “dreams” and no longer about dreaming. But he does so in a surprising way; for him, “the visions which come in sleep are like paintings.”⁷⁹ In the movements of thought that follow Descartes’s famous dream argument, it is possible to find a theory of painting, something I will discuss later. In the different kinds of dreams, indeed of “paintings,” Descartes discusses three different modes of relating to real existence: dreams that “have been fashioned in the likeness of things that are real”; dreams that show imaginary things, that “create sirens and satyrs with the most extraordinary bodies” but only “jumble up the limbs of different animals”; and last, dreams that “manage to think up something so new that nothing remotely similar has ever been seen before—something which is therefore completely fictitious and unreal.”⁸⁰ But even so, there must be some connection to the real existence, “at least the colours used in the composition must be real.” In the whole sequence of the arguments, it is the reality of existence, the very certainty of existence, that is under scrutiny. Even the “facts” that are furthest from real existence still are real, because the fact and act of madness, the fact and act of sleeping and dreaming, are real facts and acts. Indeed, they are all factual acts though they may produce unreality and fictions. Maybe Descartes would agree with the French writer Maurice Blanchot, that dreams are the work of resembling not merely things and realities but resemblance itself.⁸¹ But what seems implicit in Descartes’s dream argument is how these degrees of resemblance to reality accomplished in these three kinds of dreams can respond to the question about the specific place and time of dreaming as such, and hence as a gateway to responding to the main question, which is the kind of question that relates to real existence of the thinking while thinking, that the thinking act exposes.

Descartes continues his meditation, which flows from one move to another organically and always through unexpected moves. Arriving now in the realm of colors, of pure images—that is, of the shape of extended things, the quantity, or size and number, in short, the realm of ideas—he discusses their way of being real and present, the place they may exist, the time they may endure. He is now in the realm of abstract ideas, which naturally follow the senses and dreams. Here, the sense of here and now becomes even more dazzling, even more obscure and stupefying. He observes that even the most sure and certain abstract ideas and foundations can be put in doubt because ideal rational entities, such as extension, shape, size, and place, may not exist; thus, maybe “an omnipotent God who made me the kind of creature that I am . . . has brought it about that there is no earth, no sky, no extended thing, no size, no place.” Maybe God is a deceiver, and in this case, the ideal existence of rational entities appears to be nothing but fictions, nonexistent. And moreover, God itself, maybe “God is a fiction,” so that even the certainty one might have about metaphysical matters, about the necessary existence of a God, a cosmic order, a reason for the existence of existence itself, these metaphysical certainties can also be doubted. When in all these certainties—those provided by the senses, those by the state of consciousness, those by rational reasoning and presuppositions, and those by metaphysical views—all that seems “most true” can be doubted, what sense of reality can remain? Senses delude, reasoning can fail, God can deceive, and a malicious demon can employ all energy to misguide. Descartes—the thinking existence—can suppose that a malicious demon used its utmost power to deceive him; he can think “that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment”⁸²; he may consider himself “not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things.”⁸³ But what is left? The rest is not silence for Descartes; rather, “I shall stubbornly and firmly persist in this meditation.”⁸⁴ Even without having the power to know any truth, he should continue to meditate, to go along with thinking. And what remains true? In the second meditation, he asks this question and says, “Perhaps just the one fact that nothing is certain.”⁸⁵ It is the doubting itself that remains true. Thus, if nothing exists for certain, not even the sky and the earth, not even the minds and the bodies, the doubting—rather than the doubts—exists, and in such an immediate way that it follows that I exist. If there is a deceiver of supreme power who is continuously deceiving me, “let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something.”⁸⁶ From all that, he can conclude that the proposition “I am, I exist” is necessarily true.

As Descartes affirms himself in his Responses to the Second Set of Objections, the second meditation accounts for the “abduction” (abducere) of the soul from the body and the senses. Only rarely, Descartes speaks of “separation” between the body and the soul,⁸⁷ more frequently using the Latin verb abducere, to abduct. The movement of the meditations has abducted the thinking existence from sensual perception, from rational truths, from metaphysical beliefs, from different levels and realms of immediate certainty about existence as planted in the here and now. The only certain existence that remains is the existence of the one who doubts—that is, of the one who is thinking. The only true and certain existence is that I am, I exist, not as a thing among other things and bodies, earthly or cosmic, but as a thinking thing: res cogitans. In the second Meditation, Descartes continues his thinking movement by revisiting how this “I” should be understood. He proceeds by following his method of demolishing and uprooting former opinions and beliefs by means of seeking the least reason to doubt the truest in these old ideas. The first one would be the certainty that this “I” should be understood as a “man,” a “rational animal.” What would urge him to answer questions of the kind? What is rationality? The attempts to understand the “I” reflecting upon its attributes, the shape of the body, its extension, the ways it can be perceived by the senses, the ideas about the body as what has the power of self-movement, of sensation, of thought—all these known attributes can be put in doubt the same way it was done in the first meditation, when the figure of a malicious demon was brought into play, and everything that one might say the “I” is, a body, a soul, the relation between body and soul, to everything that can be put in doubt for one reason or another, its most certain truths. If sensual, rational, and metaphysical meanings of existence can be put in doubt, what kind of existence is the I am, I exist? What remained from all these meditations was the fact of “I am doubting,” “I am thinking,” ego dubitans, ego cogitans. “Thinking? At last I have discovered it—thought: this alone is inseparable from me.”⁸⁸ I am, I exist—he says, and asks “but for how long?” “For as long as I am thinking.”⁸⁹ Here, the “I” acquires an explicit fundamental temporal aspect, not described in the usual terms of having a short life—that is, of a finitude defined in the realm of a chronological representation of time—but “as long as” (nempe quandiu cogito) I am thinking. How do we understand the meaning of an existence—the “I”—which exists “as long as thinking”? What kind of thing is it, “res”—that is, something that exists? Descartes insists in his answer—this kind is a “thinking thing,” res cogitans, dixi cogitans. And what is a thing that thinks? His famous answer reads: “A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions.”⁹⁰ These lines serve as the opening to the third meditation, where they will also be extended: “I am a thing that thinks: that is, a thing that doubts, affirms, denies, understands a few things, is ignorant of many things, is willing, is unwilling, and also which imagines and has sensory perceptions.”⁹¹ The French version also adds a thing that “loves, hates.”⁹² The meaning of existence and being that emerges here is one determined not by bodily or rational attributes but by the as long as, a sense of “whileness,” of duration, which is not temporal in the sense of something undergoing a chronological chain of events but rather expresses the strange existence of what is solely as long as it acts.⁹³ Even if this is a bit of a departure from the question and the vocabulary addressed in our discussions, it could be said that this aspect is not at all specific to thinking; thus, given both the French mathematician Pierre Gassendi’s and the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s objections to Descartes, I could say that I am walking and therefore I exist—that is, there is no causal relation between thinking and being, as Descartes had assumed. Descartes responded to these objections, claiming that if I say I am walking or going for a walk, this is already thinking. Hegel also commented on these objections, and in Descartes’s response, “When I say ‘I,’ that is thinking,”⁹⁴ I say ‘I am walking,’” what is already in the realm of thinking is related to a bodily function that refers to the current sense of factual existence as existence here and now. Only in thinking while thinking can another sense of being be experienced that enables me to say, “I am, I exist.”

The mode of existence—the “I” that Descartes is trying to define—is “inseparable,” as he says, from thinking. It is as inseparable, we could say, as the lightning is from its flash, as Nietzsche once pointed out; thus, as much as the lightning does not exist first, as something that then flashes, the I does not exist as we usually conceive of existence as something in itself that then thinks. The “I” is thinking; thinking is the “I,” the “subject,” as Hegel clearly saw.⁹⁵ In order to find a way to explain the mode of existence of this “puzzling ‘I,’” which although being “mine” is the most obscure, Descartes considers the things that are most commonly taken for clear and distinct—namely, the bodies. The well-known description of the wax, praised through centuries for its literary qualities, culminated in the Cartesian definition of the body as “rex extensa.” It is also surprising that the substantiality and thinghood of the body is defined as extension, which is the fundamental attribute of a figure. Indeed, the path of argumentation involved in the discussions about the wax is anchored in the problem of imagination and of the distinction made by Descartes between what is perceived by imagination and what is perceived solely by the mind. If imagination is the faculty that produces images and figures, the mind is the faculty capable of perceiving figures without figures, what he calls “extension.” As he says: “It is of course the same wax which I see, which I touch, which I picture in my imagination, in short the same wax which I thought it to be from the start. And yet, and here is the point, the perception I have of it is a case not of vision or touch or imagination—nor has it ever been, despite previous appearances—but of purely mental scrutiny.”⁹⁶ Thus, what is being perceived here is no longer “the wax in itself,” as one can be “tricked by ordinary ways of talking,” but the act of perceiving. The wax is perceived as being perceived as wax. The copious literature about Descartes’s skepticism, about his denial and refusal of the world, the restless debates about his extreme idealism and absolute rationalism, tend to omit how the main question in these read and reread pages of Meditations is how to seize this strange mode of existence that only exists in action, and which expresses correlatively as existing while thinking and existing while being, perceived the being perceived—that is, as perception coming “from the scrutiny of the mind alone.”⁹⁷ Thus, Descartes observes insightfully that the difference between what the eyes see and what the mind perceives, between a realist or materialist and an idealistic point of view, resides in the fact that visual perception forgets that the eyes are seeing and hence are essentially involved in what is being seen, whereas the perception of the mind, achieved by Descartes, is the one of thinking the thinking while thinking, of perceiving the perceiving, of seeing the seeing. The act in its acting, this is what Descartes discovers as a totally different sense of existence, of being, the one that is inseparable from thinking—it is the puzzling, strange existence of what is solely as long as it is acting and performing. Neither corporeal nor intellectual existence, neither sensible nor intelligible, but a thinking sensibility: Descartes’s cogito is the cogito of a performance.