Olavo de Carvalho gathers in this book the essentials of what he has taught about René Descartes in his courses and conferences. Convinced that philosophy does not arise from a taste for abstract reasoning, but from the impulse to apprehend and express the universal meaning of accessible experience, the author leads us to a return from Descartes’s ideas to the real experiences that originated them. This method does not aim to provide a psychological explanation of a philosophy, but to clarify the effective meaning that the ideas had in the individual consciousness of the philosopher who conceived them, beyond – and beneath – the formal and dictionary sense they acquired throughout the philosophical tradition. For Olavo de Carvalho, Descartes’s philosophy is not an abstract system of ideas, but a cognitive drama.

Epigraph

En mi soledad
he visto cosas muy claras
que no son verdad.

ANTONIO MACHADO

(In my solitude,
I have seen very clear things
that are not true.)

Introduction and Acknowledgments

RUSHEDLY STITCHED with transcriptions of lectures and other fragments that I have been spreading among my students over the years, this book is certainly not the masterpiece of organized exposition that I would have wished to make if I had spare time. However, this does not prevent it from containing the essence of what I have been teaching about René Descartes’s philosophy, following a method mainly absorbed from Paul Friedländer’s Plato¹.

This method involves the conviction that philosophy does not arise from a mere taste for abstract reasoning, but from the urgent and profound impulse to apprehend and express, to the extent of individual possibilities, the universal meaning of accessible experience. Returning from “ideas” to the real experiences that originated them is not, therefore, an attempt to “psychologically explain” a philosophy, but simply to clarify the effective meaning that these ideas had in the personal consciousness of the philosopher who thought them, beyond or beneath the formal and dictionary meanings they acquired later in the philosophical tradition.

For example, when I know that Hegel saw in Napoleon Bonaparte the living incarnation of the “World Soul,” I understand more concretely what he meant by speaking of the “self-realization of God in History.” When I know that Machiavelli almost always bet on the losing side, I understand that his amoral view of power games was not the result of cold scientific observation, as many have claimed, but rather a poetic idealization of evil².

The mere psychological investigation of a philosopher’s biography can lead to understanding their philosophy as the profile of an individual consciousness taken as a mere historical fact, but Friedländer’s method reveals what this consciousness has universally as an exemplary manifestation of high human cognitive possibilities, as they were realized in an individual and particular situation. Thus, the construction of a philosophy takes on the form of a drama, not psychological, but cognitive. That is why I defined philosophy as the “search for the unity of knowledge in the unity of consciousness and vice versa.” I believe that this approach neutralizes and surpasses the antinomy formulated by Martial Guéroult in the introduction to his monumental Histoire de l’Histoire de la Philosophie: if philosophy consists of universal, in principle eternal and immutable truths, how can there be a history of philosophies that succeed each other in time? The human individual consciousness, whether that of the philosopher or anyone else, does not “contain” universal truths, but only symbolically reflects them in its own singular form. Philosophy, in short, is a symbolic form, like art, religion, or science itself. The succession of philosophies, like that of religious experiences, artistic styles, and scientific theories, derives from the very nature of the symbol, which does not depart from or exhaust the symbolized, thus always needing to be begun again and again as the passage of time makes opaque what originally seemed translucent.

The thesis I present in this small book can be summarized as follows: The “Evil Genius” referred to by Descartes is not a literary device or a “psychological instrument” (a term used by Martial Guéroult) employed to give more credibility to the certainty of the cogito ergo sum, but rather the true central theme of Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, the philosopher’s magnum opus. Descartes’s project there is not to overcome mere theoretical doubt about the possibility of knowledge, but to appease the fear of the “death of the soul” without resorting to faith or any theological arguments. Three centuries later, Edmund Husserl would resume the same project, summarizing it as a supreme effort to “arrive at God without God.”

These two moments in the history of philosophy reflect one of the most intense and formidable dramas of modern thought and can only be understood from the perspective of the personal cognitive drama experienced by the two philosophers.

A study of Husserl, which I have been working on for several years, must therefore follow this book, sooner or later, as its natural complement.

I thank Fernando Manso, Luciane Amato, Marcela Andrade, Silvio Grimaldo, the Transcriptions Group of the Philosophy Seminar, my wife Roxane, my daughter Leilah Maria, and all the others who helped me preserve the fragments that compose this book. I also thank the editor César Kyn and his wife Adelice for their intelligent and helpful collaboration. I am especially grateful to Rodrigo Gurgel for the important observations and corrections he sent me after a careful examination of the text.

Richmond, VA, October 2013

Part 1 – The Descartes Enigma

I. The Thinking Self and Consciousness

AS RENÉ DESCARTES PRESENTS the core of his philosophical conceptions in the form of an autobiographical confession, I thought it would be advantageous to roughly follow his example when discussing him. Instead of a formal study, I will present here a simple and somewhat anarchic evocation of some reactions that the reading of his “Meditations on First Philosophy” aroused in me. I say “evocation” instead of “narrative” because I do not reconstruct them in chronological order; I only extract from them the essence of what remained in my memory, some parts of which I have presented in fragments over time, in courses, lectures, and articles. Others appear here for the first time.

In addition to the “Meditations” and the “Objections and Replies” that complement them, I also studied the “Rules for the Direction of the Mind,” the “Discourse on the Method,” the “Treatise on the Passions,” and parts of the “Treatise on the World.” I confess that, besides these, I have not read any other lines authored by the philosopher, although I have studied a considerable number of excellent books about him, such as those by Martial Gueroult, Alain, Henri Gouhier, Jean-Luc Marion, Maxime Leroy, Richard Watson, Lívio Teixeira, Ferdinand Alquié, John R. Cole, Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, Denis L. Rosenfield, Jorge Secada, Antonio Negri, Benjamín García-Hernández, and countless others. My knowledge of Descartes’s philosophy spread throughout his correspondence, as well as his writings on mathematics and natural sciences, is therefore entirely second-hand, albeit from reputable sources. But of everything I have read by Descartes, nothing has impressed me as much as the “Meditations,” undoubtedly his magnum opus. It is from them that the essential experiences to which I refer have arisen. I turned to the reading of the other works—whether by Descartes himself or his interpreters—only to ensure that I had understood the spirit of the “Meditations.”

Therefore, I have no pretense of presenting the entirety of the Cartesian system here, nor of revealing its essential structures, much less of judging accurately the legacy it left in history.

All I wish to do is sincerely expose the reactions that the philosopher’s words have awakened in the soul of a reader. These reactions are strictly personal, specific, and limited. They do not pertain to the system as a whole but only to certain parts and aspects that caught my attention during the reading and have continued to pique my curiosity over the years. At times, more than curiosity: unease and anguish.

The study I recently published about Machiavelli³ reconstructed the sequence of different visions that the thought of the Florentine secretary had aroused in his interpreters over time. The title of this book may suggest something similar, but it is a false impression. The works of the various and illustrious interpreters of Cartesianism are only mentioned here in passing. Only two types of “visions of Descartes” interest me in this account: those he had and those I had of him.⁴

These latter, notwithstanding the personal nature of the testimony, are not, of course, an arbitrary design, that dares to reconstruct the philosopher’s opinions according to a hierarchy of interests that is mine, not his. Those aspects and parts that I highlighted are generally recognized as important and decisive by the most learned interpreters of Descartes, and I am therefore certain that the course of my focus of attention, if it did not cover the entire territory of the subject nor can boast of having discovered the quintessence of Cartesianism, also did not stray to anything marginal and irrelevant. Where our questions differ, I make this very clear, without passively accepting the formulation he gave them or imposing my own as if it were his.⁵

I do not know to what extent my observations can or cannot contribute to a reinterpretation of Descartes’s philosophy. I do not know and, to be frank, I am not even interested in knowing. With the exception of the time I devoted to Aristotle, for educational and training purposes, I never studied a philosophy to know that philosophy as such, but rather to know, through it, something of reality, destiny, life. In other words, I never took any philosophy as an object of study, but always as a tool to help me see better the true object of my concerns. I followed Alain’s lesson in this, learned, in turn, from Descartes himself, that each one must philosophize not to advance an academic discipline, but “pour son propre salut”⁶. The general rejection of this lesson, in these times, gives a good measure of the state of mental corruption in which our country has sunk. In Brazil, influenced by the “generation of predators” that I referred to in a 2011 article,⁷ only those who adhere to the conventional ends, themes and methods of increasingly deficient academic teaching⁸ or those who, possibly distancing themselves from them, do so with the aim of “transforming the world” in a sense that has to be, of course, the one desired by the teachers. Those who philosophize like Alain, like Socrates, like Augustine or – even more so – like Descartes are relegated to the outer darkness of “belles lettres”, “amateurism” or “essayism”, even though they reveal, as was the case with the late Mário Ferreira dos Santos (I do not claim it to be my case), a mastery of academic disciplines far superior to their “professional” competitors. In this paradoxical picture, the real philosophers – a Miguel Reale, a Vilém Flusser and the two Ferreiras, Mário and Vicente – are officially non-philosophers; and, in turn, the non-philosophers, the bureaucrats of philosophy, are called philosophers precisely because they have no philosophy at all and instead, in lieu of it, the state license to teach it. The comicality of this state of affairs did not escape some foreign visitors, Enzo Paci and Luigi Bagolini among others, nor will it escape anyone who reflects on the warning of Nicolás Gómez Dávila: “The greater the importance of an intellectual activity, the more ridiculous is the pretension to certify the competence of the one who practices it. A dentist’s diploma is respectable, but a philosopher’s is grotesque.”

This book risks being expelled from the field of Brazilian philosophy precisely because it is not merely a schoolwork, but rather a work of philosophy stricto sensu. It takes as its starting point the work of a distinguished philosopher, not as an object of study, but as an occasion and stimulus to discover something that is neither in it nor could be.⁹

As I was saying, the interest that led me to read Descartes was not the desire to know “Descartes’s philosophy,” but rather to obtain some help from it in addressing three problems that seemed important to me and which, in part, but only in part, coincided with those that it raised: What is the path that leads to certain knowledge, appropriate to the order of being? What are the fundamental certainties (assuming they exist and are more than one) on which all others depend? What is the criterion for truth and error?

Of these three questions, as I later recognized, only the first had a similar meaning in my mind as it did for Descartes. In the second, I never expected, like him, that derived and secondary certainties would have the simple relationship with the fundamental ones that, in the deductive order, consequences have with premises. Initially spontaneously and vaguely, which gradually became more precise, what I understood as fundamental certainties were not indubitable universal propositions from which everything else could be deduced. They were only organizing principles that gave meaning to the whole of accessible experience (accessible to me, of course), even if they could not, or not always, logically justify each part, as Descartes expected his principles to do.

As for the criterion for truth and error, which Descartes believed to find in “clear and distinct ideas” and in the certainty that the thinking self has of itself, it was a problem that seemed infinitely more complicated and fearsome to me from the beginning.

Right from the start, I was warned of the danger by the verses of Antonio Machado that I placed here as an epigraph. At the age of fifteen, I believed I had discovered the Law of the Three Stages, which shone before my eyes with dazzling clarity. Shortly after, I found out that it belonged to Comte and was wrong. The clearest and most distinct of ideas, even when true, can only be a logical-formal truth, detached from any specific content, therefore only a possible, hypothetical truth, like all truths of logic. For example, I say that all tyrants who were not bad were good or neutral in some way. It is an indubitable logical truth, since there is no other alternative between the good, the bad, and the various possible degrees of mezzo a mezzo. But when I search through history for a tyrant who was not bad, I find none. Therefore, that proposition is only true in the purely logical realm, but logic only investigates the relations between propositions, not between propositions and “reality” (unless you reduce reality to a logical concept, but in this case, it will no longer be reality but just a concept).

Secondly, Descartes, who professed to doubt everything, never showed a moment’s doubt about his sincere and honest desire to discover the truth. He proclaims this desire with absolute certainty and explicitly makes it the driving force of his life. To what extent could I do the same? What guarantees did I have that I wanted the truth and not just some flattering illusion, “clear and distinct”? The criterion for truth and error, which for Descartes was summed up in a simple logical method of investigation, had for me, before that, a terrifying psychological and moral dimension. While logically truth is only the opposite of error or falsehood, and everything can be resolved with tables of true and false propositions, in the human soul, it has a more powerful enemy, charged with an energy that the cold and crystalline impassivity of logic is unaware of: lies. Worse than all, the inner lie, the camouflage we extend over what we know, to deny it or make it appear as something else. This is not an obstacle that can be easily overcome, presuming that everything that stands between us and the truth is a methodological difficulty. Descartes, feigning boldness, even raises the hypothesis of universal deception, but in this scenario, he only plays the role of an innocent victim, deceived by the superior force of the Evil Genius. When I reached this part of the Meditations, it seemed surprisingly naive to me, even with a hint of psychotic vanity. No matter how much I tried to find myself beautiful, I could not imagine myself as an island of sincerity surrounded by lies and pretenses on all sides. On the contrary, I knew myself as the author of some pretty hairy inner lies, sometimes hiding from myself like a rat in its hole. No one is born after Freud and Nietzsche with impunity. To see myself as a pure victim of an Evil Genius, I would have to ignore an undeniable fact: the fact that many times I had been my own Evil Genius, engaged in deceiving myself with remarkable persistence and inventiveness. The hypothesis that “everything” in the world was a staging, a macabre theater designed to deceive me automatically placed me outside and above the falsified scenario, not only as an innocent victim but as an accusing witness of universal deception. But how could I position myself in this way, play this role, without, at the same time, establishing myself as the sole point of truth shining alone in the infinite and dark ocean of deceptions? Clearly, the proclamation of cogito, the affirmation of the thinking self as the sole foundation of knowledge of truth, was already given from the beginning as the hidden premise of the Evil Genius hypothesis, which without it could not even be formulated. But wait a minute: later, isn’t it precisely from the certainty of cogito that Descartes will obtain the refutation of the empire of the Evil Genius? How can the premise that underlies a hypothesis also serve as the basis for its radical challenge? The experience of any self-aware adult shows that there are no precise boundaries between the inner autonomy of individual consciousness and the action of the Evil Genius: they mingle and confuse. The naive faith, genuine or feigned, that Descartes places in the sincerity of his search for truth compartmentalizes the thinking self and the Evil Genius, unilaterally casting blame on the latter that the former shares, and already establishes as certain and unshakable premise, long before the affirmation of cogito ergo sum, the self as the sole abode of universal truth, leaving only the task of finding the appropriate rules of method to fulfill this exalted destiny. All the universe of doubts that Descartes claimed tormented him remained external to his thinking self, not compromising him in any way and could thus be easily neutralized by a “method.” And this, in turn, only served to retroactively reaffirm the premise of the incorruptibility of the thinking self, postulated in shadows from the beginning.

Knowing myself as I did, I could not engage in this game. The method I needed was not that well-oiled machine manipulated by a sovereign self with the confidence and skill of someone who already imagines himself, from the outset, as the possessor or privileged deserving of fundamental truth. On the contrary, what I needed was not a “method”: it was an incessant struggle against the inner lie which, with or without the help of an Evil Genius, made me an enemy of the truth at the very moment I proclaimed to seek it, to the point where I suspected, in the worst moments, that I myself was the evil genius, engaged in falsifying everything. Would there be a “method” that would forever guarantee me against myself? For that, I would have to freeze myself in a repetitive circuit, always activating the same buttons of the method to constantly neutralize the same lies. But I have already confessed that my inner lies, like everyone else’s, were inventive, self-renewing in various forms and unforeseen pretexts.

The most troubling thing of all was that Descartes thought he could guard against deception by resorting to questioning everything until he obtained rationally unshakeable evidence. But how could doubt defend me against self-deception, if one of my preferred forms of self-deception – as, indeed, those of the rest of the human species – consisted precisely in diluting in a murky potion of doubts that which I knew perfectly well?

John Calvin, who was a detestable fellow but a fine psychologist, defined conscience as that which within us inhibits the temptation to deny what we know. What I needed was not a logical method that allowed my thinking self to challenge some propositions and prove others, but something, a force, an element, a drive, an x, that would prevent my thinking self from stifling the voice of my deepest conscience. What I needed was the opposite of what Descartes sought: not a method by which my thinking self affirmed its sovereignty, but an active discipline that subjugated thought to the demands of conscience.

This conscience, in turn, was not a stable and fixed point of light, but a vague luminosity, trembling and intermittent, that only shone in the fleeting moments when it achieved some victory, temporary and uncertain, over the rebellious darkness that surrounded it, sometimes impetuous and terrifying, sometimes numbing and seductive.

Combined and articulated, conscience and darkness constituted my “soul” or person, and in this assembly, the thinking self was nothing more than a servant of the conscience, but an inconstant and rebellious servant, treacherous in the highest degree, who from time to time proclaimed its independence and turned against the owner, adorning the lie with the pomp of rational certainty or camouflaging it under the intellectual prestige of Cartesian doubt.

Of the “passions of the soul,” which according to Descartes the thinking self should clarify and tame, none was more powerful and threatening than the thinking self itself. What lustful rapture, what onset of fear, what mad jealousy, what explosion of anger compares, in its destructive force, to the reasoning impulse when unchained from moral restraints, when free from sentimental obstacles such as piety, compassion, love for others, humility, fear of displeasing God, not to mention simple modesty and a bit of aesthetic sense?

In a few months, the cult of reason, in France, killed ten times more people than the Spanish Inquisition had killed in four centuries. The lethal ideologies that made genocide the usual practice of many governments won over the people on the basis of emotional appeal, true, but they could not do so before winning the adhesion of entire hordes of leading intellectuals, thanks to the scientific-rational prestige of the notions that underpinned them. It is easy but useless to argue that this was “pseudoscience” and not science. Even assuming that the distinction between the two is in all cases simple and unproblematic, which it is not at all, the fascination of pseudoscience comes from the same source as that of genuine science: both appeal primarily not to any of the gross passions of the human soul, such as sexual desire or greed for money, but to the cognitive ambition of the thinking self, to the impulse to know the truth and through it to control, if not the physical universe, at least the masses of naive people who live in illusion. Francis Bacon’s saying, “knowledge is power,” became the inaugural maxim of modern scientific civilization. And Descartes himself sees no greater virtue in his philosophy than its ability to give men the power to control nature.

Among Dostoevsky’s characters, the most dangerous madmen do not express their madness in emotional explosions, but in philosophical-ideological speeches. Albert Camus distinguished between crimes of passion and crimes of logic – and who would deny that these, more than the former, have spread violence and cruelty in the world in unbearable doses? In Eugenio Corti’s tragedy, Trial and Death of Stalin, the Soviet dictator, responding to his companions who impute to him a list of heinous crimes, calmly and methodically demonstrates that everything bad he did was only the logical and rational application of the principles of Marxism-Leninism. And I see no way to contest Victor Frankl’s warning:

It was not just a few ministries in Berlin that invented the gas chambers of Maidanek, Auschwitz, Treblinka: they were prepared in the offices and classrooms of nihilist scientists and philosophers, among whom were and are some Anglo-Saxon thinkers awarded the Nobel Prize. That’s because if human life is nothing more than the insignificant accidental product of some protein molecules, it doesn’t really matter if a psychopath is eliminated as useless and a few more inferior peoples are added to him: all this is nothing more than logical and consistent reasoning.¹⁰

No, the thinking self is definitely not the seat of conscience, in the sense that Calvin gives to the term. What is, precisely, the relationship between these two domains, as it appears in Descartes’s Meditations?

II. The Psychology of Doubt

La verdad es lo que es
y sigue siendo verdad
aunque se piense al revés.

ANTONIO MACHADO

(The truth is what it is,
and it continues to be true
even if it is thought in reverse.)

DESCARTES ASSURES US that the sequence of the Meditations, which takes us from questioning the external world to the discovery of the cogito, is not just a logical scheme or a hypothetical articulation of thinkable thoughts, but a lived experience, a faithful account of thought thoughts. However, several clues in the text suggest that this statement should not be taken too literally. I noticed them from the first reading, but I had to return to them many times, unable to avoid the question: to what extent did that narrative correspond adequately to the facts, and from which point did it become an invented model, designed to give order and meaning to experiences that would have actually happened in a much more imprecise and nebulous manner, if not entirely different?

To make matters worse, that sequence of thoughts presented itself as a model, a paradigm that should repeat itself in an equal or similar way, with similar or identical results, in every person who undertakes to reexamine the foundations of their beliefs. Edmund Husserl, in his Cartesian Meditations, which bear this title precisely for that reason, affirms that things are really like that. At least once in life, he says, every aspiring philosopher must wipe the slate clean of their belief system and, like Descartes, rebuild everything from ground zero, the self-awareness of the thinking self.

In order to learn how to do that, I had to deeply immerse myself in Descartes’s lesson before I could learn Husserl’s, which extended and radicalized it.

A simple analytical rereading of the author’s main texts was unnecessary and insufficient for this purpose. Unnecessary because in this type of investigation, the essential work had already been done by Martial Gueroult, whom I had no pretensions of surpassing. Insufficient because if the philosopher had kept any secrets, I could not find a trace of them in the texts unless I had first glimpsed them in my imagination. And the fact is that, at that moment, I didn’t glimpse a thing.

So I decided to start from the beginning: to reenact in my own mind the succession of the Meditations, from methodical doubt to the discovery of the cogito ergo sum as the absolute foundation of all certainty. But it was not just a matter of repeating, in order, a series of “thoughts.” Thoughts presuppose perceptions, memories, feelings, fantasies. What I wanted was not only to repeat a sequence of reasoning: I wanted to mentally reconstruct the inner experiences that Descartes condensed in that reasoning. As one extravagance deserves another, I resorted to a method that no philosophy teacher would deem very respectable, but that seemed most appropriate in that situation: the method of “affective memory,” with which the great Russian actor Constantin Stanislavski – whose works I had been studying under the direction of Eugênio Kusnet – built his characters by evoking situations from his own life that were analogous to those he was to represent on stage.

This method seemed even more appropriate because Descartes himself, as I just mentioned, asserted that his Meditations were not an intellectual construction but an account of lived experiences. Much later, when studying Paul Friedländer’s Plato and the works of Eric Voegelin, I confirmed that my decision was not as crazy as it seemed: with these two illustrious authors, I learned that understanding philosophical ideas cannot be obtained solely through the analysis of texts or the reconstitution of the cultural atmosphere from which the texts emerged; it requires the meditative tracing of the real experiences from which the ideas were born.

So I began to reread the Meditations as if they were a play, in which I should play the role of René Descartes in the imaginative reconstruction of his cognitive experiences, using the Stanislavski method.

To my surprise, I discovered that this was much more difficult than I could have ever imagined! Descartes summarizes everything in a few pages, giving the impression that the sequence of meditations flowed through his mind as naturally as running water. But the effort to draw from my affective memory some analogue of methodical doubt, the Evil Genius, and the absolute certainty that the Thinking Self has of itself encountered so many obstacles and contradictions that I could not avoid the conclusion that, as an account of lived experiences, the Meditations were not very reliable. Descartes simply could not have experienced those experiences exactly as he narrates them.

The possibility of doubting our sensations, our imaginations, and our thoughts is something that any one of us can witness. It is also possible to place the entire realm of our representations in parentheses, reducing the “world” to an evanescent hypothesis.

But after having performed these operations, Descartes assured us that he found, at the core, the certainty of doubt: doubt is a thought, and in the instant I think it, I cannot doubt that I think it. The self-confidence of the thinking ego in its own metaphysical solidity emerged as a powerful psychological compensation for the loss of belief in the reality of the “world.”

However, as meticulous as he is in describing the thoughts that lead him to a state of total doubt, he is strangely evasive about the state itself. In fact, he doesn’t even describe it; he only affirms that it happened and, immediately jumping from description to deduction, begins to draw the logical consequences that the recognition of this state imposes on him.

To give some plausible consistency to my performance in the role of Descartes that I intended to portray in my inner theater, I needed, therefore, to do what he did not do: examine and describe not just the mere content of some particular doubts, but the very act of doubting, the state of doubt.¹¹

And so, the first undeniable realization that imposed itself on me was as follows: doubt was not properly a “state” – a static position in which I could remain, like being sad or absorbed, immobile or lying down. It was an alternation between a yes and a no, an impossibility to settle on one of the terms of the alternative without the other coming to dispute its primacy. For as soon as the yes or the no were accepted as definitive, they would immediately eliminate doubt, which is made up of their antagonistic coexistence and nothing more.

In order to give some plausible consistency to my performance in the role of Descartes, which I intended to represent in my inner theater, I therefore needed to do what he had not done: examine and describe not merely the content of some particular doubts, but the very act of doubting, the state of doubt.

And then the first realization that struck me as undeniable was the following: doubt was not exactly a “state” – a static position in which I could remain, as one remains sad or absorbed, still or lying down. It was an alternation between a yes and a no, an impossibility of stopping at one of the terms of the alternative without the other coming to dispute its primacy. For the yes or the no, as soon as they are accepted as definitive, would immediately eliminate doubt, which is made of their antagonistic coexistence and nothing more.

But this antagonism, as I soon came to perceive, is not static: it is mobile. The doubting mind incessantly moves from one of the terms to the other, without finding a point of support where it can rest and “stay”.¹² Only, as each of the terms is the negation of the other, the mind could not stop at it without, for an instant, denying the other: and, precisely at that instant, it is not in doubt – it is affirming or denying, affirming one thing and denying the other, even though it cannot persevere in the affirmation or denial without finding a thousand and one reasons to abandon it. At the moment it denies or affirms, doubt suppresses itself as doubt, arguing in favor of one hypothesis and against the other, struggling to stabilize in affirmation or denial; but it fails, and it is in this failure that doubt precisely consists. The inevitable conclusion followed: it is impossible for a doubt that does not doubt itself, a doubt that, suspending the alternation, imposes itself as a “state” and remains. By taking doubt as a “state”, omitting that it was an alternation between two antagonistic moments, Descartes reified it and made it a certainty: the famous assertion “I cannot doubt that I doubt at the moment I doubt”, which Descartes takes as an expression of the most patent obviousness, nevertheless expressed a pure psychological impossibility. It would be more accurate to say that, when I doubt, I put everything in doubt, including the doubt itself. Doubt is not a state: it is a succession and coexistence of antagonistic states, it is an inability to stay.¹³

What was happening there was that Descartes confused doubt with negation, more precisely with hypothetical negation. I can effectively produce a hypothetical negation and repeat it indefinitely. I can even expand it – hypothetically, of course – until it encompasses everything I believe to know. But I cannot “doubt” what I believe without simultaneously reiterating it, to the extent that only in this way can I interpose its respective negations with its successive affirmations, and with these, its affirmations, and so on, whose vicious circle constitutes doubt.

Now, hypothetical negation is not the same as doubt, but it is its logical counterpart, its reduced, conceptualized, and disembodied version, separated from the living experience of the antagonism that constitutes the psychological substance of the experience of doubt. Hypothetical negation is the “doubt” as it appears in the thinking self, not in consciousness, not in the soul. Descartes always uses the term “doubt,” but in fact, he is only talking about hypothetical negation, therefore only about the thinking self, not consciousness or the soul. When, in the Second Meditation, he recounts the emotions he felt when he found himself unable to contest the negations he had made the day before, he speaks again of the soul, for sure, but not as the active center of doubt, but as the passive victim of the effects provoked in it by the thinking self. In other words, by giving hypothetical negation the dimensions of “doubt,” Descartes substitutes the soul for the thinking self and, by speaking of the latter, believes he is speaking of the former. But if the thinking self has such primacy over the soul, how can it not also have it over everything the soul knows? The priority of the cogito, which will later be affirmed as the conclusion of the sequence of thoughts, is already given from the beginning in the mere formulation of “doubt.” The reasoning in the Meditations is entirely circular, offering only as an answer what was already contained in the question.

Put in these terms, Cartesian cogito merely repeated Socrates’s argument against the skeptic, that one cannot deny without affirming negation, without affirming something, therefore. But, seen in this way, the Cartesian discovery amounted to very little: far from having established a new foundation, critical or negative, for the world of knowledge, it had only demonstrated, through the tortuous paths of a rather imprecise psychological self-description, the logical primacy of affirmation over negation. The recognition of this primacy was, in the same act, the negation of doubt as a founding act.

However, if doubt, as such, could not serve as a critical foundation, it remained to ask what foundations make it possible. And this was the decisive point because if there was something “behind” doubt, it would be that something, and not doubt, that Descartes sought as a firm support, and which he believed to have found in the observation of doubt.

Descartes states that doubt is a certainty the moment it is thought. But this is false: what is certain is the subsequent reflection that affirms the reality of the experience of doubt. At the very moment of doubt, what exists is, as we have seen, an alternation between affirmation and negation, and therefore the very impossibility of affirming any state, if by state we understand, as we should, the coincidence between a judgment of fact and the feeling that negatively or positively values it, as occurs in sadness, anger, hurry, hope, etc. Doubt is not a state, for the simple reason that in it the feeling, which could be of anxiety, hope, curiosity, etc., does not coincide with a determined judgment, but stems precisely from the inability to affirm or deny a judgment. It is rather a moment of suspension between states, a turbulent void that contains in germ various possible states – at least two – and does not resolve in any of them without suppressing itself. The mind, therefore, never “stays” in doubt: it merely passes through it, precisely as a transition between states. It is only when doubt ceases to be a present experience to become an object of reflection that this retrospective and narrative certainty arises: “So far, I have not managed to stabilize myself in denial or affirmation”. Therefore, there is not only a logical distinction but also a factual separation between doubt as a present experience and doubt as an object of recollection and reflection – and it is this latter that is certain and indubitable,¹⁴ not the former, even though Descartes takes one for the other and passes on to us as direct intuitive evidence what is the result of subsequent reflection. It is only this reflection that, by giving a name to the recently experienced alternation, artificially confers the unity of a “state” on what is in truth a succession of states that mutually suppress each other or a coexistence of purely potential states, each of which can only actualize at the expense of the exclusion of the others. By conferring on the void of alternation the positive consistency of a state, Descartes simultaneously transforms doubt into mere hypothetical negation, then taking as an effective psychological state what is only the logical concept of a possible state.

To make matters worse, the reflective affirmation of the reality of doubt presupposes two beliefs: the belief in the continuity of consciousness between doubt and reflection, and the knowledge of the distinction between truth and falsehood.

1st) One who reflects on doubt knows that they are still “the same” as the one who had the doubt; and if the act of doubting is formally distinct from the act of reflection, the conscious self, upon reflecting, knows that it is itself the subject of two distinct acts – distinct logically and distinct in time. It follows that this self is logically and temporally prior to the two acts and independent of them: it is not the act of doubt that establishes the certainty of the self, but, on the contrary, the certainty of the continuity of the self is the sole guarantee that doubt was truly experienced. For doubt, if it did not receive from subsequent reflection the name that gives it the apparent unity of a state, would end up being reduced to mere succession of unrelated negations and affirmations, successive hallucinations of a schizophrenically plural subject, devoid of self-control and dissolved in the atomistic flux of its states.¹⁵ In order to be an object of reflection, doubt acquires the artificial unity of a name. And if soon afterwards the mind forgets that this unity is a mere entity of reason and takes it as substantial unity, then it is one of those cases of retrospective self-hypnosis in which the name magically produces, a posteriori, the reality of its object.

2nd) Being formally distinct, the two acts are also empirically distinct, that is, in time: first I doubt (that is, I go back and forth between successive affirmations and negations), then I reflect that I doubted (that is, I unify under the name “doubt” this multiplicity of antagonistic experiences). But the unity of the self, which is implied in this very reflection, and therefore in the certainty of doubt, is temporal continuity, it is memory and recollection: memory, being presupposed as an indispensable condition of reflection, is logically and temporally prior to it. Far from being able to establish the trust we have in memory, doubt depends on memory to become psychologically possible.

However, if doubt depends on the assurance given to it by the self and memory, then it has no founding power. It is a founded thing, a secondary and derivative certainty, a mere disguise of a deeper and unquestionable agent.

3rd) Yet, doubt implies something more. How is it possible to doubt? The possibility of doubt rests entirely on our power to conceive that things may be otherwise than they appear to us at a given moment. Doubt is based on a supposition; it requires and presupposes the power to suppose. Now, since things have presented themselves to the subject in a certain way, and not in another, this other supposed way can only appear to consciousness as the subject’s own invention, as a product of imagination or conjecture. In order to know that one doubts, it is therefore necessary for the subject to know that one has supposed; to recognize oneself as the subject not only of two acts, but of three: the act of doubting, the act of reflecting on doubt, and, prior to both, the act of supposing or imagining.

4th) However, if the subject perceived no difference between things as they present themselves and things as they suppose them to be, they could not become aware that they have supposed, for there would be no difference between supposing and perceiving. Thus, the consciousness of this difference is also a requirement and foundation of the possibility of doubt. In order to doubt, I need to distinguish, within representation, the given and the constructed, the received and the invented, that which comes to me ready-made and that which I do and propose. Therefore, the consciousness of the difference between the objective and the subjective is presupposed, and hence the belief in the objectivity of the objective and the subjectivity of the subjective.

5th) Moreover, if the subject were to confuse these two domains, believing that they have supposed what they have perceived and perceived what they have supposed, they would have lost the continuity of consciousness and memory, which is, as we have seen, a condition of the possibility of doubt. Thus, doubt about the reality of the world cannot present itself as a simple choice between two possibilities of equal value and identical origin, but always as a choice between a given and a supposed, between the received and the invented.

6th) Therefore, it is not possible to doubt the reality of the world without knowing in advance that this doubt, and the supposition that underlies it, are mere inventions of the subject itself, and that this invention is formally and temporally distinct from the perceptual act, as well as from the perceived content. Doubt is the supposition that an invented world is more valid than the perceived world, a supposition that is in turn based on the awareness of inventing, supposing, and pretending. Doubt regarding the reality of the world is always and necessarily a pretense, and the more the pretender strives to take this doubt seriously, to make it increasingly plausible, the more the very brilliance of the performance will attest to the difference between the plausible and the true, just as in the theater we applaud the actor precisely because we know that he is not the character.

7th) But this awareness of pretending would be impossible if it were not based, in turn, on the awareness of the difference between thinking and being, imagining and acting. For, given the awareness of the difference between supposing and perceiving, alongside the consciousness that the self has of its own actions, there would be no way to deny that the thinking self is aware of the difference between a supposed action and an actual action, since the actual action is not only thought but also physically perceived, just like the beings of the sensible world. Therefore, I cannot cast doubt on the beings of the sensible world without at the same time casting doubt on the physical actions that I find myself performing, such as the movements of my hands and legs, for example. But at the same time, I cannot cast doubt on them without questioning, at the same instant, the continuity and unity of the self, which, however, is presupposed, as we have seen, in the very act of doubting anything. This is another reason why Cartesian doubt, being inherently ambiguous, could only establish itself by also putting itself into doubt, that is, by knowing that it is founded on a supposition and a voluntary pretense. This is also why Cartesian doubt is so rare and difficult: it implies a movement that contradicts itself, that questions the very conditions that make it possible.¹⁶

8th) Finally, doubt is only possible when one knows that something, whether in the perceived or in the supposed, is unsatisfactory, that it does not meet some fundamental requirement of truth. But how could the doubting subject demand truthfulness from their suppositions or perceptions if they had no idea of truth, even if only as a mere imaginary object of desire? The desire for a foundation presupposes, in the subject, at least the possibility of imagining that their knowledge could be more secure than they actually feel it to be at a given moment, in other words, it presupposes truth as an ideal and the choice for truth. But at the same time, we have seen that the subject knew the truth not only as an abstract ideal but already knew at least a real difference between truth and falsehood: the difference between the given and the supposed, accompanied by the true awareness that the supposed was not given, nor was the given supposed.

Doubt thus arises upon a whole structure of data and assumptions: far from being logically primary, it is an elaborate and refined product of a knowledge machine. Far from having a founding power, it is nothing but the more or less accidental and secondary manifestation of a system of certainties.

However, if this is the case, if the primacy of methodical doubt is only the primacy of an equivocation, then the Kantian primacy of the critical problem, the positivist dogma of the impossibility of obtaining valid metaphysical certainties, and many other beliefs that modern man reluctantly accepts as obvious and evident also come under suspicion.

Part 2 – Consciousness and Wonder

III. Reviewing the Itinerary

I EXAMINED IN Chapter II the initial step of René Descartes’s philosophy, radical or methodical doubt. In the famous lectures he delivered at the Sorbonne on February 23 and 25, 1929, which were later published under the significant title “Cartesian Meditations,” Edmund Husserl categorically affirmed that Descartes’s meditations were not merely a personal matter for the philosopher, "much less a simple literary form he used to expose his philosophical opinions, but on the contrary, they outline the prototype of the kind of meditations necessary for every philosopher who begins his work, the only ones capable of giving birth to a philosophy."¹⁷ In a footnote, he added that this was Descartes’s own way of seeing things.

If Descartes had been, in the words of Charles Péguy, “ce chevalier français qui partit d’un si bon pas” (“that French knight who set off with such good pace”),¹⁸ then all those who followed in his footsteps should imitate his example and style.

However, Husserl made it clear that some aspects of Descartes’s undertaking had “an eternal reach,” implying that others did not. The eternal aspects in the Meditations, which made them the exemplary model for all philosophy, resided in two points:

a) The aspiration to find universally valid, self-evident principles that could serve as the foundation and ultimate criterion of validity for all scientific knowledge.

b) The discovery that in order to find these principles, the philosopher, instead of examining the world around them, should turn inward, to the core of their own consciousness.

Neither of these two points was new in Descartes’s time. The second echoed the words of Augustine spoken eleven centuries earlier: “Noli foras ire, in te ipsum reddi: in interiore hominis habitat veritas” (“Do not go outside, return within yourself: truth dwells in the innermost being of man”).¹⁹ The first was Aristotle’s very definition of philosophy.

What remained truly Cartesian in the proposal was the method adopted to achieve this dual aspiration, namely, the method of doubt. Husserl did not speak against this method but confessed to finding it “very strange,” and after summarizing it in two paragraphs, he retreated from the requirement of total doubt to a modest “vow of poverty in matters of knowledge.” Without returning to the subject, he then went on to explain his own phenomenological method, which instead of doubting everything, simply refrained from pronouncing on the existence or non-existence of anything and contented itself with describing objects as they appeared in consciousness.

The kinship, the deep affinity that Husserl claimed to see between Descartes and himself did not reside, therefore, in what was most characteristic of the Cartesian method, but in generic traits that Descartes’s philosophy shared, on one hand, with that of Aristotle, and on the other hand, with that of Augustine. It was, therefore, a merely peripheral affinity, or a “simple literary form” used to capture the benevolence of the French audience? None of that. Husserl himself never clearly explained in public the true bond of profound spiritual sympathy that connected him to Descartes, a bond that went far beyond any similarity of methods and rose to the dimensions of a community of destinies. The case is one of the most intriguing, but as it is impossible to unravel it without delving a little deeper into the Descartes enigma itself, I see no alternative but to leave the reader in suspense until the final chapter, in which both mysteries will be solved at once.

For now, I must briefly review the journey taken and assess the conclusions reached so far.

In the sequence of thoughts that he summarized under the title Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes begins, as everyone knows, by challenging all those truths he had learned since childhood, in which he did not see a sufficient foundation.

He noted, for example, that the five senses, in which we generally believe, are not foundations of themselves, they do not bring with them the certainty of the information they provide. To challenge the reliability of the senses, he uses a series of arguments that, in fact, are not his own, they are quite ancient, they are from the Pyrrhonian school, which consists of pointing out the usual mistakes of sensory knowledge – the famous story of the stick that, when placed in water, seems to be broken, or the perspective effect that makes distant things appear smaller than those closer. These common illusions show that the bodily senses can be a source of knowledge, but not a reliable one. Moreover, there is the fact that during dreams we also have sensations and we do not always have proof that the dream is just a dream.

Next, Descartes criticizes memory, imagination, and common sense beliefs, always in search of the Archimedean point,²⁰ the secure point that could serve as the foundation for the construction of a valid philosophical system.

As he only describes the conclusions he arrived at in the exercise of methodical doubt, but at no point does he describe the internal state of his own doubt, I then began to examine this state from the standpoint of its logical structure, trying to ascertain the elements of certainty that are necessarily embedded in every doubt, the presuppositions that have to be accepted without discussion so that a doubt may come to be formulated.

One of these assumptions is the temporal continuity of the self between the question and the answer. René Descartes says that, when he asserts “I cannot doubt that I doubt at the moment I am doubting”, this is not the conclusion of a logical reasoning, but an intuitive act, an instantaneous perception. However, this perception, even if it is instantaneous, refers to the same self who was doubting before. Therefore, there is a continuity of the self in time that elapses between these two experiences: the state of doubt and the subsequent intuitive certainty of doubt. Not that this certainty is not potentially contained in the first state, but the fact is that it only actualizes in consciousness after the reflexive step back, the shift of attention that deviates from the initial object of doubt to the doubt itself as a state.

In a more general sense, every doubt, in its logical structure, presupposes the continuity of the self between the first alternative conceived and the second alternative that contradicts it. If I have a doubt, it’s because I see a contradiction there, and if I see the contradiction, it’s because I have considered two mutually exclusive hypotheses, and I remained the same while perceiving the first and the second. Therefore, the temporal continuity of the self is a presupposition of doubt: it’s not possible to have a doubt without asserting, in the same act, the continuity of the self.

Another presupposition of doubt is the identity of the object about which I have the doubt, because if I say something about object A and the opposite about object B, the two assertions do not necessarily contradict each other, and their confrontation does not necessarily give rise to doubt. Only two opposing predicates of the same subject can contradict each other. If someone tells me that José is fat, but Antônio is thin, that is not a contradiction; however, if they say that José is both fat and thin, then I enter into doubt. Therefore, there is no possibility of doubt without the prior acceptance of the identity of its object, and this acceptance, in turn, is beyond doubt.

Furthermore, the very foundations of logical reasoning are also presupposed in doubt. If there is no principle of identity, non-contradiction, and excluded middle, I cannot form doubt.

The continuity of language in which doubt is transmitted is also presupposed in doubt. I couldn’t formulate a doubt without the aid of my native language, and this language, evidently, I know that I am not inventing it at the moment I formulate the doubt, I know that I am using preexisting grammar rules, and if I hadn’t received them, I wouldn’t be able to produce them in that moment either.

Finally, the very conclusion that René Descartes will draw from this part of the examination – that while we are doubting, we cannot doubt that we doubt, and therefore, the act of doubt itself would be the first unshakable philosophical certainty – is also not unshakable because if doubt is an alternation between two opposing convictions, it not only admits doubt about itself but demands it. In the end, it is not possible for someone to doubt without doubting that they doubt because if certainty, even if hypothetical, were excluded from the horizon, there would be no more doubt, there would simply be denial.²¹

In short, beneath the act of doubt, nominally a radical doubt from which nothing escapes, there is a whole mountain of certainties. This conclusion, which we reached in Chapter II, shows that, strictly speaking, there is no radical, total, or comprehensive doubt. Cartesian doubt cannot be realized as an actual act or state of a thinking mind, of an existing and concrete human self. It can only be conceived as a hyperbolic hypothesis, as the unlimited expansion – and precisely because of that, unrealizable – of the normal state of doubt that questions one thing while affirming another. At most, expanded doubt would approach total doubt as an asymptote, never being able to reach it. This means, in short, that no human being has ever had total doubt. Not even René Descartes himself.

However, if total doubt does not exist and cannot exist, it is an imaginary evil that does not threaten human beings in the least. And therein lies, I believe, the strangeness that Husserl saw in the Cartesian method. On one hand, total doubt seems very much like what rhetoric calls a “straw man”: an imaginary scarecrow purposely conceived to be demolished with two or three blows and give its author the easy glory of triumph obtained over a nonexistent adversary. On the other hand, it appears with a more horrifying and threatening aspect than any other cognitive challenge that has ever presented itself to the human mind. After all, the complete absence of certainties would correspond to the total deprivation of knowledge and the terrifying solitude of a self isolated from everything, even from itself. Why, among so many possible paths to achieve the two ultimate goals of philosophy, did Descartes choose this one, so exaggerated, so forced, so hyperbolic?

Note that if radical doubt is unrealizable as a concrete operation of the thinking mind, it is perfectly conceivable as an imaginary hypothesis, as the ultimate limit of a kind of idealized unconsciousness. It is a fantasy, a bad dream, whose content cannot be expressed logically but can only be known through emotion, through the fear it arouses in the human heart. In other words, radical doubt is not the formulation of a problem but an imaginative experience that can have a greater impact on the human mind the less it can formulate it in “clear and distinct” terms (to use Descartes’s own terms). It is not surprising, therefore, that the philosopher, relinquishing all clarity and distinctness, resorted to the sinister phantom of the Evil Genius to describe it. In fact, he does not describe this cognitive void at all, nor could he. The very fact of having arrived at the cogito shows that, ultimately, the deprivation of all certainty is impossible, is, even by definition, a supposition without cognitive content. Nevertheless, it remains an experience, but recognizable only by the reaction of astonishment and horror in the face of the expectation of a bottomless and formless abyss.

The question that inevitably follows is: How did Descartes come to this experience? How did he come face to face with the Evil Genius?

IV. Transition to a New Approach

IF RADICAL DOUBT is not achievable as a logical operation of the thinking mind, if it is only the imaginary anticipation of an unattainable state, the question now is how this experience is possible and how and why René Descartes came to desire it as a way to achieve certainty.

Let’s start with a banal observation: even if we cannot doubt everything in a Cartesian sense, we can doubt many things. Although incomplete in its content and not fully realized, the state of doubt is a fact of human experience. However, since no doubt is possible without preexisting certainties, the hypothesis of total doubt is self-contradictory at its core, which raises a rather uncomfortable question: Did Descartes truly believe that he was in a state of total doubt when he began the Meditations, only to emerge from this state upon finding the certainty of the cogito, or, on the contrary, did he already know the impossibility of total doubt from the beginning and constructed a game of hide-and-seek to later reveal the triumphant solution that he had hidden up his sleeve? In this hypothesis, the method of the Meditations, contrary to what Husserl claimed, can be reduced to a literary artifice. In that case, we must admit that Descartes took, as his starting point, not a reasonable question but an emotional state of fear and uncertainty created by the sheer force of imagination. The hypothesis of artifice would empty the Meditations of all philosophical relevance and reduce the impact it had on modernity to a collective deception. I am not going to bet on that. The almost hypnotic attraction that the Meditations aroused in some of the greatest minds in humanity is not due to any trick, but to a genuine mystery contained within them.

For a long time, the popular image of Descartes as entirely rational, clear, and distinct has lost credibility among scholars, and it is not my intention to flog a dead horse. However, those same individuals who emphasized the ambiguous and nebulous elements of René Descartes’s career and thought have generally tried to keep them separate from the central framework occupied by the “system,” thus preserving its status as a rational construction, even though it was born, like almost everything human, from secret and unfathomable motivations. To me, on the contrary, the unresolved and insoluble mystery lies precisely at the heart of this system.

We will see in the end.

For now, what we have to ask is: how could René Descartes, or how could anyone else in his place, imagine themselves in a state of total doubt and come to believe, even if only for a few days, that they were actually in that state?

How could a person imagine that they were placing the “whole” world in parentheses if their consciousness has never been devoid of an external and internal “world”? How is it possible to doubt “all” knowledge if no one has ever experienced total ignorance and if, as Aristotle said, all knowledge comes from some previous knowledge? We do not truly experience being “outside” our senses, our memory, our imagination, let alone our own thoughts—we simply do not have that experience. If we don’t have it, where did we obtain the possibility to conceive it and to try to put ourselves in that imaginary state? Clearly, no other animal, apart from humans, experiences this. You can see that sometimes an animal can be perplexed between two alternatives, but you will never see an animal paralyzed by Cartesian doubt.

The first and most obvious victim of Cartesian doubt is the “external world.” But far more interesting than the old problem of how we can be certain about the external world is how we can come to doubt it if we have never had the experience of being outside it for even an instant. We can, of course, take refuge from it in our own thoughts, but since thoughts do not occupy space, the very notion of exterior and interior ceases to make sense there. Escaping into an inner world is not “denying” the external world; it is simply diverting our attention from it and thinking about something else.

In the introduction to the Philosophy of Right, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel states that one of the essential capacities of the human ego is the ability to mentally suppress any external or internal given, whether it imposes itself as a physical presence or through any other means—the ability, in short, to deny the entire universe and make self-consciousness the only reality. Without this faculty, he says, we would be trapped in the circle of immediate stimuli, like animals, and would not have access to higher degrees of abstraction. The negation of the given—the “unrestricted infinitude of absolute abstraction or universality, the pure thought of itself,” according to Hegel—is one of the peculiar glories of human intelligence. But this is evidently an exaggeration. What human intelligence can do is to deny this or that given in isolation or negate the mere abstract concept of totality, not totality itself. To deny totality not as a concept but as a concrete presence would require, on the small scale of human intelligence, the actualization of quantitative infinity. Every negation of totality is merely hypothetical and categorically affirms what it negates in hypothesis.

The strangest aspect of René Descartes’s experimental solipsism is precisely that the philosopher imagines entering it despite knowing that, even during this period of radical isolation, he will still need a “provisional morality” to manage in one way or another in that very external world which he is currently denying. Wanting to cast doubt on all his knowledge but knowing that he will continue to live, act, converse with people, make decisions, pay his debts, etc., Descartes asks himself: how will I navigate the world while I am in doubt about everything? Thus, he conceives the principles of what he calls “provisional morality,” which he will follow without questioning or legitimizing it during the period in which he is conducting this interior experiment.

The function of provisional morality in the Cartesian method is more complex and ambiguous than it may seem at first glance. At a superficial examination, it appears to suggest only a division of labor between pure reason and practical reason, with the latter affirming what the former denies or suspends. This would seem to be nothing more than a precaution of common sense, and that is indeed how most interpreters have understood it. However, upon closer examination, the question arises: why would Descartes need to formulate explicit practical rules in order to continue orienting himself in the world during the experiment if he did not fear that it could profoundly affect his psyche and conduct to the point of leaving him completely disoriented? The first of these perspectives indicates that Descartes was aware from the outset of the logical inconsistency of total doubt to the extent that he knew he should not allow himself to be carried away by it in real-life actions. The second, on the contrary, shows that total doubt, as an imaginative experiment, could be something deadly serious and dangerous.

This not only leaves the question unresolved but seems to have made it even more difficult. Therefore, we must examine it from another angle.

Knowledge begins with wonder.²² The first step of philosophical investigation is to put ourselves in a state in which we can perceive or conceive the wonder of something. Usually, we don’t notice this wonder, but, when we pay more attention, the wonder can appear. When we are reading René Descartes, we slide over the text and don’t remind ourselves to ask: but how did he manage to imaginatively transport himself to a state of total doubt at the same moment that, by provisional morality, he admitted that this doubt was only partial?

Almost everything that philosophers have discovered over the millennia was by wondering at things that usually do not seem [strange or wonderful] to us. To wonder, we have to mentally place ourselves “outside” of direct engagement with the object and look at it as if we were a tourist from another planet. After three centuries, we have already become accustomed to the idea of methodical doubt, but, if Descartes believes he can advance in knowledge by mentally placing himself “outside” of the world, why should I try to involve myself in this proposal, jumping into it and soaking it up like a sponge, instead of placing myself outside it and looking at it with the same wonder with which Descartes looked at the world? The nature of the Cartesian proposal is such, that we cannot accept it without being unfaithful to it at the same moment: if I accept radical doubt as a natural and unproblematic act, I stop applying it to the very act of doubting and, thus, I arbitrarily make this act an exception to the method, reducing my subsequent affirmation that I cannot doubt the doubt to a mere petitio principii.

If Descartes explicitly demands that we look at the world with wonder, I know that this same demand is being formulated in the world and must also become a target of wonder.

Please note that throughout the exercise of methodical doubt, Descartes knows that he is thinking; he brackets not the thinking, but the knowing. He is thinking, but what he knows seems dubious to him, therefore, he does not assume what he knows, he only assumes that he is thinking. Now, how can we do that? Note well that an animal cannot do it: everything that an animal thinks, it believes; it cannot think one thing at the same instant in which it refuses to believe in it. A computer also cannot do this, it “accepts” all the information we put into it. It can even, if programmed for it, classify certain information under the label of “doubtful”, but it cannot personally doubt them. Then, Cartesian doubt is a very peculiar state and we can say that it is an exclusively human state. Perhaps we could even define man as the animal capable of imagining himself in Cartesian doubt. Other animals cannot experience this state, angels cannot and neither can God.

Even if we never manage to achieve total doubt, the capacity to mentally deny without existentially denying is one of the strangest properties of being human. It is more enigmatic, of course, than our certainty of the outside world, which we share with other animals and to the discussion and grounding of which many hours and books have been dedicated.

V. The Condition of Possibility of Cartesian Doubt: The Anti-Vital Dynamism

THE CARTESIAN DOUBT can only arise upon an entire edifice of certainties; it is not, therefore, a beginning, as it has been claimed for a long time, but a mere dialectical stage in the internal movement of a machine of certainties. Radical doubt is nothing but the hypothetical negation of something that is simultaneously categorically affirmed.

Nevertheless, as a psychological state elicited by imaginary foresight, this doubt is a fact. It happened to Descartes, and it can happen to any one of us, even if only for a few moments. It matters little that it carries its own negation within itself. If Descartes was mistaken in describing his state as the “certainty of doubt,” if there can be no certainty of the state of doubt precisely because it is nothing but an oscillation between two possible and contradictory certainties—and the certainty of doubt is, therefore, a negation of itself—all of this does not prevent this state from existing somehow as an imaginary experience. It is the logical and existential possibility of this experience that constitutes a problem. We can imagine that we doubt everything—but how on earth can we do that?

This possibility assumes, in the human being, a capacity to momentarily sever the ties between the faculty of thought and concrete personal existence, which is living and of which that faculty is nothing but a manifestation and a function.

On the one hand, we know that we are alive, that we are in the world, that we are interacting with people, that we eat, sleep, work, etc., and it is precisely because we do all of this that we can engage in philosophical inquiry. If we were not alive, we would neither think nor philosophize. We all know this, and thus we can say that thought is the exercise of a vital faculty, that it therefore presupposes life. How is it, then, that being the exercise of a vital faculty, being a kind of manifestation of life, it can at the same time negate life, even if hypothetically?

So unnatural is this operation, so opposed it is to the powerful psychophysical dynamism that desires to live and that must, furthermore, be alive to carry it out, that we must admit that it would not be accomplished without the dynamism being able to be “suspended”—mentally, of course—by the action of an opposing dynamism endowed with equivalent power, although certainly discontinuous. It was in this sense that Fichte said, “to philosophize is not to live; to live is not to philosophize.”

Everything we do, think, remember, etc., is certainly an expression of our impulse to live and to persevere in existence. This is what I call dynamism. Now, the act of casting everything into doubt contradicts this vital impulse to such an extent that we would not be able to carry it out unless we relied on an equal and contrary impulse, not permanent (for we would then be permanently paralyzed), but temporary. This means that the vital impulse can be halted momentarily. If it can be halted, it is by a force capable of stopping it. What force is that?

If someone desires and can imagine themselves devoid of all knowledge, putting for that purpose all vital functions in parentheses, it means that, at that moment, they are driven by a motivation that is not the same as that which makes them think, dream, feel, live, etc. It is a “different” and opposing motivation to all of that, and this motivation must be very strong. Thus, our initial question—"How is radical doubt possible?"—transforms into another question. This mutation of questions is one of the fundamental elements of philosophical technique: the conversion of one question into another, one that is more explicit, detailed, and easier to examine. The second form that our question assumes is as follows: from our living being, where do we draw the strength to twist our consciousness from the attitude of natural belief or ordinary doubt to the Cartesian denial or Husserlian suspension?

Husserl will render Cartesian doubt a much more precise and detailed process. Comparing Cartesian doubt to suspension, as Husserl terms it—the epoché, with which he places everything in parentheses—is like comparing an hourglass to a Swiss quartz watch: the machine has become much more precise, but the function remains exactly the same. This analysis carried out here would apply to some extent to both Husserl and Descartes. Husserl went as far as saying that the “phenomenological attitude,” as he calls it, is not only different but radically opposed to the natural attitude. The natural attitude is to believe in what one thinks, believes in what one feels, believes in what one imagines. To believe or not to believe: we either affirm or negate, but in both cases, we believe—we believe in the affirmation or in the negation. Now, the phenomenological attitude neither affirms nor denies; it simply describes what is happening before our consciousness, that is, the intentional content of the cognitive act is observed there, without affirming or negating it. It is not even a matter of “introspection” because what we observe in the cognitive process through phenomenological technique are not the actual acts of thinking; it is simply the phenomenon as it is given to consciousness, without asserting its truth or falsehood, reality or unreality. Of course, this same attitude can be adopted to study the cognitive process itself, considered as a phenomenon present to consciousness. Even in this case, it is not personal observation but transcendental. This attitude is indeed very strange, as strange as the Cartesian method. Husserl said that it is so unnatural that it must be trained: the phenomenologist needs to undergo special training of consciousness. One of Husserl’s disciples, Raymond Abellio, said that phenomenology was an ascetic school, an initiatory sect. Why? Because the necessary training for the disciple to adopt the phenomenological attitude is a self-mastery of the spirit. In this exercise of self-mastery, in which we disidentify from natural sensations, from memory, etc., and acquire the position of a phenomenological observer, we place ourselves “above” ourselves. We begin to think on another stratum, on another floor, on another level, which is the level of universal validity, and there we are fully established in the transcendental Ego. Abellio compared this to an initiatory process. From where do we draw the strength to engage in the experience of this process? Certainly, this strength cannot be the mere vital impulse, for it would impel us to do precisely the opposite.

VI. A False Explanation: The Desire for Knowledge

IN THE FACE OF these adventures of the mind, experienced by daring men like René Descartes and Edmund Husserl, we turn to the desire for knowledge to explain them. When we ask the question: “How is it possible for someone to want to put themselves in such a difficult, unnatural, and ultimately painful position?” we can appeal to the most readily available answer: they do it out of a “desire for knowledge.” This is the first answer that comes to mind. Therefore, we will say that the desire for knowledge is not a function of a simple generic vital impulse; it is a specific desire of the human being. What makes us desire knowledge is not simply the impulse to live; after all, in order to obtain knowledge, we may sacrifice a great deal of our psychophysical being, our life. When we see, for example, a Buddhist ascetic depriving themselves of food and sleep to gain knowledge, we say that this is an impulse for knowledge, but not a mere vital impulse: it is something more, a different impulse from the vital impulse.

The first hypothesis, then, would be this: René Descartes or Edmund Husserl can enter into a state of radical doubt out of a desire for knowledge. And we are satisfied, as if we had found a terminal and self-evident explanatory principle. “All men, by nature, desire to know”: this is the opening sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. And he offers as proof of this the pleasure we take in the exercise of our senses, even when they do not serve a utilitarian purpose, the immediate interests of our organism. Therefore, if this desire to know is in human nature, it is only natural to heed its call, even if it costs us sacrifices or loss to our vital organism.

If Husserl and Descartes act according to this nature, then there is apparently nothing strange about it. Thus, we consider the question resolved, only to realize that we have not solved anything for the following reason: “the mere natural desire cannot, on its own, lead man to an unnatural experience.”

Note well that if the desire for knowledge is as natural in man as the desire to live, to eat, etc., the fact remains that, being different desires, they can clash with each other, and we will have to choose, for example, between continuing with ascetic exercises or stopping to eat. But in the case of René Descartes, there is something more than the desire to know. This becomes obvious when we formulate the question in the following way: “Can the mere desire to know lead us to deny all our knowledge?”

According to Aristotle, who claimed that knowledge begins with wonder, he investigated the world and the soul, but he never wondered at how the soul could know the world.

Therefore, one thing is Aristotelian wonder, another is Cartesian wonder. The former leads us to ask questions: "how is it possible?", "why does this happen?", "what is this thing?". When we wonder at something and it prompts a question, what is the next step? To seek the answer, obviously. But none of this, by itself, could lead us to the general and radical doubt about all our knowledge. On the contrary, the Aristotelian impulse of knowledge naturally leads us to restrict the question to that specific aspect we are investigating at the moment. Then, we do not ask all the questions at once because it would paralyze us. So, if we are investigating, for example, the physiology of a rabbit, we do not simultaneously ask a question about the structure of the state, much less about the relationship between the two things. We can deal with one thing and another, but we do not mix them in the dissolving potion of universal doubt. Therefore, in the pursuit of knowledge, there exists a principle of efficiency that guides us to formulate the question in the best possible way. None of this would drive us towards total doubt. Hence, we understand that even the desire for knowledge, no matter how deep and compelling it may be, does not explain the will for total doubt. Descartes himself, in the “Discourse on the Method,” states that when we face a question that is too large and complex, the best thing to do is to break it down into simpler questions. Apparently, this rule could never lead to total doubt about the universe of human knowledge.

Furthermore, to cast “everything” into doubt in order to find the founding principle of all knowledge implies that the principle can be found outside of that “everything” – an idea that never occurred to Aristotle and that is indeed unnatural. Natural curiosity seeks an explanation for a thing within that thing or in something else around it. The idea of distancing oneself from everything to know the explanation of everything would never occur to a person through simple natural impulse.

When the desire for knowledge opposes in us the desire to live, both desires are natural. It is natural for a person to want to eat, and it is natural for them to stop eating to engage in ascetic exercises and acquire knowledge. This is a conflict that occurs within nature. However, even there, we are far from the impulse that can lead us to deny all knowledge.

VII. Is it Natural to Generally Know the Truth or is it Natural to Generally Err?

IF MODERN PHILOSOPHY begins precisely with the investigation of something that Aristotle considered unnecessary to investigate, then it is clear that what seemed natural to Aristotle no longer appears natural to the first modern philosophers. They begin by wondering at what Aristotle, the philosopher of wonder, had seen nothing to wonder at.

Aristotle conducts many investigations and puts himself in a position of wonder in the face of many things, but not everything at once. He admits that we always have some knowledge, that some knowledge is valid, and going even deeper, he says that it is more natural for humans to think about truth than to think about falsehood. He says that we generally know the truth, although we make mistakes from time to time. Now, if René Descartes goes as far as to doubt everything, it is because he feels exactly the opposite: that we generally make mistakes and occasionally get things right. Furthermore, he seems to consider error as universal, and he sees himself as the first exception, the first one to perceive the truth. And since René Descartes inaugurates the entire modern philosophical cycle, then we understand that for all modern philosophers, error begins to seem more natural than knowledge of the truth. And the philosopher, in turn, instead of being only the one who deepens and clarifies the knowledge shared with the rest of the human species, becomes the pioneering revealer of truths that everyone ignores. This is a fundamental change.

The method of methodical doubt would seem radically strange and unacceptable to Aristotle. However, nowadays this method seems so natural and unproblematic to us that some of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, such as Husserl, say that it is the paradigmatic and obligatory beginning of all philosophy. This means that, for modern philosophy, knowledge, far from being natural as it was for Aristotle, is almost an exception, almost an abnormality.

What caused this change? It is necessary to note the abyss of difference that exists here. I have had this question in my mind for thirty years. From the first time I read René Descartes, the question arose: how is this possible? As I continued reading, I saw that I was more or less following Descartes’s line of thought and going where he was leading me. However, at the same time, I had the sensation of walking without feet and asked myself: How am I managing to do this? How is it possible for the mind that knows to wonder at itself as a knower?

We can always wonder at what goes on in our minds. We have all had [strange or wonderful] ideas, [strange or wonderful] impulses that we will never put into practice. There are no limits to the strangeness that can pass through our minds. That is why we can wonder at ourselves, wonder at our own minds, and wonder at our own “self” under various circumstances. However, in the present case, René Descartes is wondering at himself not as the subject of [strange or wonderful] acts or [strange or wonderful] thoughts; he is wondering at himself as the subject of the very act of knowing, which is precisely the act he is performing at that very moment. There is an enigma here, and that is why I ask: how can the subject that knows wonder at itself as a knower? Let us resort to the method of converting the question. Unable to answer this question directly, we will convert it into another, just as we do in algebra when the teacher gives us a huge equation and we transform it into simpler ones or deal with it in parts. We thus arrive at wondering at wonder. Consequently, we must now ask ourselves: what is “wonder”?

VIII. Phenomenology of Wonder (1) – Methodological Precautions

“WHAT IS IT?” QUID EST? This is the fundamental philosophical question. A nominal definition of the object is not enough to answer it. The nominal definition merely declares what we mean by a certain word, but to know what something “is,” we have to make present the very thing we are talking about and try to see what it imposes on us as its nature, what it presents to us as its identity, its quid, its own mode of being and revealing itself. Now, words are at our disposal; they are instruments for expressing what we desire. We use them as instruments of self-expression, but things are not quite the same. Things resist us more than words, and it is precisely in this resistance that they show us that they are something in and of themselves, independently of what we project onto them from our own inner state.²³ Therefore, it is precisely this resistance of things that the philosopher seeks, because they know it is precious; it is the aspect of things that transcends our subjectivity. However, the word “things” here does not only refer to material entities but also to facts and situations, everything that is “real,” including in our inner experience considered as factual reality, as a psychic fact. When I ask "what is it to wonder?", I can define the word “to wonder” as I please, but that will not tell me what actually happens when someone wonders at something. To know what it is to wonder, I will have to translate into verbal content the internal experiences of the act of wondering, which I did not concern myself with at the very moment of wondering. For example, if someone I know suddenly appears painted green, naturally I wonder at it, but precisely because of that, I do not wonder at wondering. So, at that moment, I will not ask myself, "what is it to wonder?", "what goes on in my mind when I wonder at something?". Wondering at wondering does not usually coincide in time with the act of wondering. If I wonder at something, it is because it seems [strange or wonderful] to me, and therefore, I do not find anything [strange or wonderful] about wondering at it. Asking “what is wonder?” requires something more than natural wondering; it requires a second-degree wondering, a wondering about wondering. When we ask, "what is it?", quid est?, we must indeed make present that which we are asking about, whether it is a physical object, an inner state, etc. But this making present is not a direct reliving. To investigate what sadness is, I do not need to become sad, but I need sadness to be present to me in some way; I need to have an effective and sufficiently complete remembrance of sadness so that I can say what it is. I am not sad, but my sadness is present. I could ask myself, for example, what fear is. Now, we can only ask what fear is at a moment when we are not afraid because if, in the moment of fear, we were able to intellectually distance ourselves from fear to the point of wondering at it and asking "what is fear?", fear would dissolve as a direct experience and reappear as an object of reflection. There is a difference and an affinity between living a certain experience and philosophizing about it. The difference is that we are not reliving existentially that state; the affinity is that this state has to be present, as present as if we were experiencing it, but in a different way from how it presented itself in direct experience. In direct experience, the state, in a certain sense, possesses us and envelops us, whereas in reflection, it is “before” us, and we allow ourselves to be affected by it only to a very limited extent. The difference arises from the fact that, in addition to this state being present, there is another state that is also present, which is the questioning state, which was not present when we were living that situation in an existential sense. So, if I ask, "what is fear?", fear has to be as present as it is when I feel it, but now it is somehow neutralized because there is also a curiosity that dominates or at least softens it. It is this coexistence between curiosity and a specific inner state that allows me to question it. However, if we content ourselves with the definition of a word or with the first answer that appears, driven by a spontaneous impulse to express what we feel, then we do not allow that object to be present again: what is present is our impulse to speak, to communicate, and this impulse obscures the object we wanted to talk about, diverting the focus of our attention to our own speech. It is a dispersing mechanism. To overcome it, we must call the object back again and again, as many times as necessary, until we are certain that it has become the focus of our attention once more.

Well, we have transformed our question of “how is the act of doubt possible?” into “what motivated the act of doubt?” or "why would someone want to be in doubt?". Then we further transform this last question into an even more precise one: "how is it possible for us to wonder at not just any of our states but that very present state which is the act of knowing?". How does the cognizant mind wonder at itself as cognizant? And finally, we convert this question into another, more general one, the investigation of which must precede that of the other questions: "what is wonder?".

IX. Phenomenology of Wonder (2) – Wondering and Admitting

WONDERING AT AN OBJECT or a state is to disidentify ourselves from it, to look at it from a distance from which it appears unjustified, devoid of foundation, unreasonable, absurd; to wonder is to refuse to admit something as natural, obvious, customary, unproblematic.

Wondering is the opposite of admitting. We admit something – a burden, a duty, an idea, a love, a person – when we consider it justified, grounded, endowed with value and reason for being. How can the mind that knows, at the moment of knowing, refuse to admit that it knows?

The question now becomes even more precise: I know, but I do not admit that I know – this is Cartesian doubt. Then, I cease to be the executive subject of the act of knowing and place myself outside the field of my own action, saying, “I know, but it is not properly I who know.”

All this operation takes place in thought. It is through thought that we know, it is through thought that we admit or do not admit. So, by the same means – thinking – we will disidentify between the subject who knows and the subject who thinks.

At this point, we encounter a most formidable difficulty: if I disidentify from the one who knows within me, if I separate from my cognizing self, where precisely am I “located” in that moment? Who, within me, speaks and thinks if it is not the cognizing self? In other words, if I place myself outside that area which is illuminated for me, and if I do so precisely for the purpose of seeing the very light that comes from me and not the objects it illuminates, but at the same time refuse to admit that this light is light, that it is mine, and that it illuminates something, then I have to look from the darkness. I become unconscious to examine consciousness, like a man who plucks out his eyes to examine them. But, at the same time, since the illuminating focus of what I know is the attention itself that I project onto objects, that is, since the cognizing self moves with me wherever I go, I have only the illusion of entering into darkness to see the light because in fact, I have carried the light with me and projected it onto that other light which is myself. The reflective self, doubly cognizant, illuminates the simple cognizing self and simultaneously illuminates the object of knowledge. If I know, I know that I know, and if I know that I know, I know that I know that I know: the darkness resolves into a play of lights and mirrors.²⁴ The result seems splendid, at least from an aesthetic point of view: the attempt at wonderment resulted in an approximation, the disidentification in intensified identification.

This is the question: here is the object of knowledge, here is the self that knows, but I disidentify myself and place myself outside the relationship between them. Now, there are two ways to do this. One of them can be formulated as follows: here is the object of knowledge, there is the subject that knows, and within or above me, there exists a third that says, “I know that I know, I become aware that I know.” Now, if before me there is the object and the act of knowing is within me, the consciousness of knowing cannot be solely within me; it is within me, but in a certain way it transcends me because it shows me the relations I have with an object that is not myself. This is the first way to reflect on the act of knowledge. So, here, it is not that I disidentify from myself; I rise one level above myself and look, from a higher plane, at what I am doing. Therefore, I know, and I know that I know. It is clear that the function of knowing is in itself more elementary than the knowing that knows because the latter encompasses the former. However, this is not what Cartesian wonderment is about: it does not look at the act of knowing from a higher perspective but places itself “outside” the act of knowing; it does not admit the act of knowing. The first operation that I described, the reflection that leads us to the conclusion that we know that we know, far from disidentifying from the act of knowing, intensifies and deepens it. It identifies itself so much with that act that it says not only: I know, but also: I know that I know; that is, it doubly admits knowledge. Here, we are not just experiencing the act; rather, so to speak, we are undersigning it, acknowledging it, recognizing it. Now, Cartesian wonderment is not that, it is precisely the opposite. It also places itself “outside” the act of knowing, but this outside is not above, it is an “outside” in the strict sense. It does not admit the act of knowing, it disadmits it, it rejects it. How is this possible? For now, we have no solution. We only have problems so far. We have succeeded in converting one problem into another problem, and another, and we are in the middle of formulating the equation.

X. Complete Reflection and Cartesian Doubt

THE FACT IS THAT the Cartesian meditator, when surrendering to methodical doubt, is not exactly reflecting. A reflection consists of an object, subject, act, awareness of the act, and awareness of the cognitive validity or invalidity of the act, therefore also awareness of the relative reality or unreality of the object, culminating in what the Scholastics called reditio completa subiecti in se ipsum – the “complete return of the subject to itself”, as observed, for example, in Plato.²⁵

My late master, Professor Stanislaw Ladusãns, insisted that “complete reflection” is the only critical foundation of the credibility of knowledge. It retraces the entire journey of the cognitive act, and it is evident that, while we practice it, we are not disidentifying from knowledge, but, on the contrary, we are admitting it more and more. Cartesian wonder is not this, it is the opposite of this: it disclaims knowledge at the very moment of the cognitive act.

Immediate intuition is the act of knowledge by which attention illuminates a particular object and distinguishes it from others. In complete reflection, in addition to keeping this object illuminated, I also illuminate the scenario, but I did not turn off the light that illuminates us all: me, the object, the scenario, and the very act of reflection.

But – I repeat – if I “wonder” at the act, if I place myself outside of it, if I do not admit it, I am not illuminating it, I am denying it. I deny it and look at it at the same time. Then, from where am I looking at it? I placed myself outside of the illuminated zone and I am looking at the object, so to speak, from the darkness. But it happens that, as the illuminating factor in this whole process was my own consciousness, as it was my own attention that illuminated the object, the act, and everything else, how can I withdraw into darkness and continue at the same time seeing the object, the act, etc.? Every time I go into the darkness and pay attention to what I just did, I will be reilluminating everything again. But, if I reilluminate the whole process again, then I am implicitly affirming “I know that I know”, which means that I return to complete reflection and I do not make any Cartesian doubt. It seems that there is no escape: I cannot pay attention to something and say that I am not seeing it, at least I cannot perform these two acts at the same time. And yet, this is what methodical doubt does; it indeed happens; and it, indeed, is impossible. It is the imaginative anticipation of an impossible cognitive situation. So, if it was already [strange or wonderful], now it has become diabolically [strange or wonderful].

Disidentification is only possible when the act of knowledge is not effective, present, but future and hypothetical. For example, you are in love and thinking about getting married, but, fearing making a mistake, you mentally disidentify from the “marriage” hypothesis to see if without it your life would not be better. This is possible precisely because you are only thinking of marriage as a hypothesis, not as a real and present desire, much less as a fact. At the moment you are getting married, you may think it is the biggest mistake of your life, but for that you have to admit that you are getting married. In reflection on the present cognitive act, the more we jump out of the relationship with the object, the more deeply we become entangled in it. Cartesian doubt has a problematic structure, not to say self-contradictory.

But this, in fact, only complicates our problem: we try to disidentify ourselves from our cognizant self, but we cannot. If, as Aristotle intended, knowing is natural in human beings, no reflective stop will have the power to suspend knowledge, only to intensify it.

Between the natural attitude and the philosophical one that reflects, there is not a difference in nature, there is a difference only in intensity. The natural man is the one who knows; the philosopher is the one who, through reflection, recognizes that he knows.

But, if it is so, why did we want to enter the experience of integral doubt? And where did we get the hypothesis to go into darkness in order to see the light, if nothing, neither in our natural experience nor in the doctrines of the ancient philosophers, suggested this possibility which we later found to be non-existent? Why did we want to try this?

Methodical doubt suppresses itself because it spontaneously transforms into complete reflection. But if that is the case, why did we want integral doubt? Could we not simply have done complete reflection? There is interference from another element, totally unrelated, it seems, to the natural impulse to know. Of course, sometimes nature contradicts itself, because it encompasses contradictory impulses, but it contradicts itself within the naturalness of both impulses: we have the impulse of anger, but we have that of pity as well; we want to run away, but we want to attack at the same time; however, in this case we are talking about an impulse that is not only not natural, but that cannot be met through natural means.

The desire to know, as we have seen, does not explain this, because the natural does not explain the unnatural. We must seek the explanation, it seems, in this “anti”. What is it, in man, that opposes nature, the desire to know?

Here is the crucial point of this entire journey: total wonder cannot happen only out of a desire to know, because the desire to know impels to natural reflection and not to total denial. However, total denial exists as an imaginative possibility, and needs to rely on a force capable of stopping the natural course of thought at least temporarily. Now, if it is a matter of a stoppage or disidentification of the act of knowing, and if this cannot be explained by the dynamics of the act of knowing itself, then it is because it is an impulse opposite to the act of knowing. Just as in life there can be a desire to live and a desire to die, there also exists a desire to know and – let’s put it this way – a desire not to know. This is the first positive conclusion we have reached. There must be another impulse, which has nothing to do with the desire to know and which supports the possibility of integral doubt.

XI. At the Bottom of the Pit

LET’S START WITH a simpler example. A lion feeds on meat. It is natural, then, for it to seek an animal to eat – a zebra, a deer, a sheep, at least a rabbit. Feeding on these animals, composing its blood and muscles with their proteins, growing and moving at their expense is in the lion’s nature. Therefore, it is not natural for the lion to stop eating these animals. However, if it is deprived of this type of food, it loses energy, starts to conserve movements, and eventually wastes away and dies. Imagine that we take a lion, lock it in a cage, and only give it bananas to eat. Even if it accepts this humiliation of living on bananas, it will waste away. By its nature, by itself, it will never stop eating other animals to prefer bananas. A vegetarian lion does not exist, but if, due to some factor beyond its nature, it is deprived of the appropriate food for its nature, from where will the decree come that under such circumstances it must waste away and die? It will come from its own nature, which does not sustain life unless it is under conditions that are conducive to the exercise of the lion’s natural gifts. So, the nature of the lion contains not only the commandment regarding the things it will do, but it already contains this alternative program that will decree its wasting away and death if that very nature is contradicted beyond a certain point. This is part of nature itself, which means that nature has not only the positive decree but also the negative one. In this sense, pathology is foreseen in physiology: the organ functions in a certain way, but if it is attacked, it will function in another way. Nature prescribes not only what an animal will do in life but also under what conditions it will be condemned to die. I do not mean that under such conditions the lion will “want” to die, unless the verb “want” here has a different meaning from when the lion “wanted” to eat a sheep or, with a belly full of sheep meat, “wanted” to play with the other members of the pack to expend excess energy. We deprive the lion of its specific food, it begins to waste away, and then we say that it “wants to die.” However, the verb “want” has a different meaning here. It is not that it “wants” to die in the same sense that it “wanted” to eat a rabbit. It is a different wanting, a negative wanting, which Miguel de Unamuno called, to contrast it with “voluntad,” “noluntad.” The fact is that, after a certain limit of deprivation, the lion will “no longer want” to live or will “allow itself” to die. This negative wanting corresponds to what, among humans, is “ill will.” Ill will is not wanting to do something that would be good to do. If circumstances repeatedly prevent us from fulfilling our positive will, we end up developing a contrary will, an “ill will.” We take revenge on ourselves for a harm inflicted on us from outside.

In Woody Allen’s movie “Take the Money and Run,” there was a frail and unlucky boy who wore glasses. When he went to school, the other kids would take his glasses and break them. Until one day, he is going to school, and the gang of boys comes to break his glasses, and what does he do? He takes off the glasses himself and breaks them. In other words, he has already entered the negative cycle. This happens: it is preventive masochism. It is ill will, the inversion of wanting, which is foreseen, as an alternative program, in the very structure of wanting.

Analogously, the lion’s organism, deprived of what gave it the will to live, enters a kind of ill will and conspires against itself to die. In the end, it will be futile to offer it a rabbit, a sheep, or even a zebra. It no longer wants to eat; it is marked with the sign of death, and the course of its destiny can no longer be changed. Now, this inversion of the natural impulse in situations where it can no longer manifest itself is as “natural” as the impulse itself.

Suppose a young and well-fed lion could imagine, years in advance, this fearful situation. A little of its death would already enter its horizon of vital experience in advance. And if it imagined that in the near future, for some reason, the deprivation of food would occur in a fatal and inescapable manner, it would start to waste away at that very moment out of fear, concern, and sadness. Some of this future suffering would already become present in imagination. Now, how many times do we ourselves – we all have this experience – deprive ourselves of something out of fear of failure or fear of losing things we never had? We enter this attitude not only because of painful experiences we have had but also because of possible experiences we have not had but anticipate through imagination. The lion does not do this. But if it did, the idea of having to eat only bananas would begin to kill it at that very moment.

Fortunately for them, lions only concern themselves with daily sustenance and do not consider long-term provisioning. Humans, on the other hand, are inclined to such considerations, and for this very reason, they are distinguished by their capacity to suffer, in imagination, evils that have not yet arisen and may never arise. It is a common experience that sometimes we have the foresight of a possible evil that weighs us down more than the actual realized evil.

Now, if it is natural for humans to desire knowledge, it is also natural that, deprived of the possibility of knowing, they suffer, and that, just by imagining this possibility, they feel as if they are prisoners in an infernal prison. The most basic form of knowledge is sensory stimulation. Scientific experiments have shown that the deprivation of external sensory stimuli leads a person to despair after a few hours.²⁶ We can endure deprivation of food for about forty days, deprivation of sleep for four days, but we cannot be without sensory stimulation even for a single day.

XII. More Problems

IN THE CASE OF Descartes’s method, we are talking about an experiment of deprivation carried out imaginatively. Deprivation of what? We cannot say that, materially, it is a deprivation of knowledge because the act of knowledge is there. It is a deprivation, first and foremost, of the recognition of that knowledge, deprivation of the identity between the thinking self and the knowing self. It is as if I am looking at myself knowing, but this observer does not recognize what that same self knows at that very moment. Now, there is no situation of intellectual suffering more intense than this. Because then I look at myself, but I do not feel that the one who looks at me is myself. Can we call this schizophrenia? To a certain extent, yes, but it is a limited, controlled schizophrenia because it does not compromise Descartes’s conduct outside the strict domain of his epistemological investigations. It is a kind of intellectual schizophrenia. Now, what if I were looking at my own consciousness and, at the same time, could not be conscious of the contents that this same consciousness is being aware of at that very moment? This situation is not humanly livable. It is only imaginable as a hypothesis, and it is fearsome, even if it is only imaginary.

In the second place, it is an imaginary experiment of deprivation of certainty. Deprived of any element of certainty, no knowledge is possible: all hypotheses cancel each other out, all thoughts merge into a dark mass of uncertain possibilities, and even doubts become wavering and slippery in meaning. To know any object is to know the degree of certainty of what one thinks about it. If you cannot discern whether the knowledge you have about this or that is absolutely true, probable, plausible, or merely possible, it means that you do not know anything rigorously about it. Certainty is the measure of uncertainty and of itself.²⁷

Described in this way, the experience poses two unsettling problems before us:

a) The rupture between the thinking self and the knowing self

How can the first, deprived of its own identity, the recognition of the unity between the thinking self and the knowing self, then believe that the mere act of admitting that it is thinking has any cognitive value to the point of constituting a certainty, even the most undeniable of certainties? If mere thinking does not have any valid or reliable cognitive content in itself, there are two possibilities: either the realization of “I am thinking” is an immediate intuition whose certainty transcends mere thought and determines it, or it is just another thought and, therefore, provides no certainty. In this hypothesis, the cogito is one hundred percent invalid. In the other hypothesis, the unity of the thinking self and the knowing self is instantly restored, and it must be confessed that integral doubt never existed or can exist, being nothing more than a temporarily frightening fantasy and not a sensible method for attaining truth.

b) The ego and God

Descartes believes that the certainty of the cogito is valid and unshakeable but admits that from there nothing can be concluded regarding the existence of the external world and everything else; that, therefore, this certainty, in itself, cannot be the sole foundation of the system of sciences. The self-assured ego is enclosed in a solipsistic prison, unable to know anything beyond itself.

To escape from this predicament, Descartes appeals to the notion of “God.” God will bridge the gap between the ego and the world. Hence, the three famous Cartesian “proofs” of the existence of God. As A. D. Sertillanges demonstrated,²⁸ these three proofs ultimately reduce to one: the Cartesian subject has within itself ideas such as infinity, eternity, etc., which, transcending it limitlessly, could not have been created by itself and could have entered it only from outside, from God Himself. Since God is infinitely good and could not have intoxicated the ego with lies and illusions to deliberately lead it into error, it follows that these ideas are true and ensure the ego’s contact with the rest of the real world.

This seemingly simple and persuasive reasoning, however, is one of the most puzzling enigmas of the Cartesian system.²⁹

First and foremost, the fundamental certainty, the certainty of the cogito, was achieved by the initiative of the self itself, without divine help and without mentioning God. This automatically made the thinking self, rather than God, the essential source of certainty. Historians of philosophy have not ceased to emphasize the revolutionary importance of this one-hundred-eighty-degree turn from transcendence to immanence and from God to man, as the inaugural act of modernity, and I see no need to insist on that. It is also unnecessary to say that from the sovereignty of the cogito arises Descartes’s doctrine of human freedom, which he sees as practically unlimited.³⁰

Descartes was so fascinated by this discovery that he exclaimed: “Although God’s will is associated with a material power incomparably greater than mine, it is not spiritually greater than mine, to the extent that my will is the power to do something or not do it, to affirm or deny,” etc.³¹

Having no spiritual power greater than that of the human will, it is understandable that God also has no relevant participation in the discovery of fundamental certainty. Endowed only with superior material power capable of creating the physical world, the only remaining function for God is to connect the thinking self, the possessor of fundamental certainty, to that world.

This is clear in itself but blatantly contradicts Descartes’s subsequent proof of the existence of God. If it was God who instilled in the thinking self eternal ideas such as infinity, eternity, etc., how could He have failed to instill in it also the idea of identity, without which the self could not recognize itself and without which the other eternal ideas cannot even be thought? After all, as Schelling said, “do not despise the principle of identity, for it is God.”

However, if the self owes its own identity and the ability to recognize it to God, then it is evident that the cogito is not, in the order of being or of knowing, a first principle or an inaugural certainty, but a simple conclusion that inevitably follows from the eternal ideas, and thus from God. The sovereignty of the cogito is only a provisional false impression created by its role as the triumphant outcome of methodical doubt and by the fact that the first two Meditations, being the easiest and most attractive, have left a deeper imprint on the readers' minds than the subsequent ones, in which the certifying force of the cogito is reduced to much more modest proportions.

The famous turn from transcendence to immanence, in short, simply never happened. Descartes himself acknowledges this in the end, stating: "In some way, I have within myself the notion of the infinite before that of the finite, that is, of God before that of myself."³²

But if it was to arrive at this conclusion that Plato and Aristotle would subscribe without hesitation, then why choose the tortuous and uncertain path of total doubt, with the risk of seeming to confer almost divine sovereignty upon the cogito, a denial that many interpreters of Descartes seemed to overlook? After all, Descartes is either “the philosopher of the cogito,” as the popular image ingrained even in educated people suggests, or he is the philosopher of eternal ideas who, without divine influence, cannot assert either “I think” or “I exist,” much less “I think, therefore I am.” He cannot be both at the same time. It is evident that he is the latter, but why did he want to appear—or imagine—that he was the former, even at the price of fostering misinterpretations of his ideas? Alain aptly observed that, in Franz Hals' portrait of Descartes, the ironic expression in the philosopher’s gaze seemed to say to the reader, “Here comes another one who will be deceived.”

Leaving aside the discussion of intentional pretense, which seems to have played an important role in Descartes’s life and work, I draw only the inevitable conclusion from what I have just presented and say: at this point, the adoption of universal doubt as a starting point and method seems less justified than ever.

XIII. The Second Death

IF UNIVERSAL DOUBT is self-contradictory and logically impossible, if it does not correspond to any content of rationally expressible consciousness, if it can only be indirectly alluded to through this or that particular doubt without ever managing to unify them all, and if, furthermore, it opens a false trail that leads to the illusory realm of the thinking self, which is soon dethroned in favor of the good old divine source of certainties, none of this prevents, as we have seen, it from being, as an emotional and imaginative experience, perfectly real.

The presence and strength of an imaginative or emotional state do not depend in any way on the reality of the object that arouses it. The irrational fear of an imaginary danger is as real, in the mind that experiences it, as the reasonable fear of an actual and imminent threat. Descartes himself declares that he experienced and felt universal doubt, and we have no reason to question him. However, the source and origin from which he obtained the idea is not as certain. He claims that it spontaneously arose from lived experience, from the state of uncertainty in which the teachings he received since childhood left him. But this is simply not true. He found the argument of universal doubt already prepared, with the Evil Genius, cogito, and everything else, in a comedy by Plautus written seventeen centuries before, which was among his bedside books and which he never cites. This revelation may be as shocking as one wants, but I do not believe that the evidence gathered by Benjamín García-Hernandez in its favor can ever be refuted, nor will the belief in the absolute originality of the Cartesian hypothesis ever be restored. ³³ The argument of universal doubt is a complete plagiarism, but that does not solve, of course, the problem of why Descartes decided to commit it, not being foolish enough to imagine that it would go unnoticed forever.

The philosopher’s taste for concealment and pretense is well known to historians. The motto he adopted as a rule of life says it all: larvatus prodeo, “I walk masked.” He completed this motto with a second maxim: “He who has hidden well has lived well.” In the midst of a colorful social life, he always found a way to remain hidden for long periods and to erase the traces of his footsteps so skillfully that to this day scholars have been unable to decipher some essential enigmas of his biography, such as whether this professed Catholic was a secret ally of the Protestants in Holland or a spy in the service of the Jesuits. There is also no idea whatsoever about the origin of the financial resources that allowed him to maintain the lifestyle of a grand seigneur without any regular employment, and without the sale of his family properties coming close to sufficing for it.

It is also remarkable, in the same vein, that precisely the work in which this pioneer of modern science explains his scientific conception of the universe, the Treatise of the World, is constructed as a work of fiction, an imaginative speculation, and that it dealt not with the physical cosmos accessible to experience, but with a hypothetical universe that God would have or should have built if He were René Descartes; so that to this day we do not know exactly whether Descartes believed in his cosmological conceptions or merely enjoyed constructing them.

However, this does not explain why Descartes chose the device of doubt, which in Plautus' play appeared as a demented farce. Universal doubt has nothing, in fact, of a mere philosophical hypothesis. It is the frightening anticipation of a state that, strictly speaking, no human being can experience in the earthly world, but can only conceive imaginatively through the hyperbolic amplification of an irrational fear. Especially when deprived of the comic dimension it has in Plautus, it becomes the fearsome image of eternal damnation, of the deprivation of all contact with the source of certainty. The Bible describes this state as the “second death.” ³⁴ It is the fate reserved for those who, in life, became unrepentant disciples and followers of the “father of lies.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that this state is essentially defined by eternal separation, by irrevocable deprivation of all vision of God, ³⁵ and therefore also by the irreparable forgetting of eternal ideas, by the shipwreck of the mind in a frenzied, sterile, purposeless, and endless turmoil, aptly summarized by the image of hell as lightless fire. The total uncertainty to which Descartes alludes at the beginning of the Meditations can only be understood with the terrifying imaginative anticipation of the “second death.” Descartes had reasons to fear it, but it would be hard to believe that they came from remote experiences lived in school, for the most important and creative part of Descartes’s adult life unfolded in circumstances that were more conducive to religious uncertainty and fear of eternal damnation than anything that might have happened to him in his youth.

A. C. Grayling defends the hypothesis that Descartes was a secret agent of the Society of Jesus, and therefore of the Habsburg family, which ruled Spain and sent him to Holland as a spearhead of a comprehensive project to convert Protestant countries back to Catholicism. ³⁶ This would suffice to explain why Descartes spent such long periods away from his homeland: not only did he have a mission to fulfill, but due to his connection to the King of Spain, he had become persona non grata to the French royal family. However, his involvement with the Protestants in Holland was much more serious and profound than one would expect under such circumstances. Virtually his entire circle of friends and the intellectuals with whom he discussed his ideas were Protestants. He even participated, as a volunteer, in military operations under the command of the Protestant Prince Maurice of Nassau (without prejudice to the fact that a year later he also enlisted in the Catholic army of the Duke of Bavaria). To top it all off, he baptized the daughter he had with a servant in a Protestant church. This information is certain: the baptismal record exists. But it is also stated that in the same church he secretly married the mother of the child; there is no documentary evidence of this, but it is obvious that the pastors must have imposed marriage as a condition for baptism.

Throughout this time, Descartes publicly affirmed the orthodoxy of his Catholic faith, but whether due to his work as a secret agent or by personal choice, the fact is that he lived for years on the border between two enemy religions, cultivating an ambiguity that was conducive to nurturing more uncertainties than any poorly grounded lesson he may have received decades earlier from his Jesuit teachers at the College of La Flèche. As if this dose of ambiguities were not enough, in 1619 he left Holland for Germany, where he became associated with the esoteric organization of the Rosicrucian Gnostics. This compressive accumulation of spiritual tensions would eventually explode in the three dreams he had on the night of November 10 to 11 of that year, in which he would see an illuminating revelation that would finally decide the course of his inner life.

At this point, the enigma of Descartes seems to be becoming somewhat more understandable. Divided between Catholicism, Protestantism, and Gnosticism, plagued by the fear of eternal damnation and the loss of all contact with the divine source of certainty, Descartes was not dealing with a merely intellectual problem but with a profound existential drama from which he could not escape through mere formal adherence to one of the three currents—and rejection of the other two—without making enemies everywhere and without abdicating the coefficient of truths he believed he had obtained from each of them. With the possibility of a theological-doctrinal solution excluded from the outset by serious external and internal obstacles, what was left for Descartes but to transfigure the drama into a philosophical problem and try to solve it through natural reason, by seeking a purely epistemological “Archimedean point” independent of any religious stance?

Plautus' comedy provided him with the ideal metaphor to give the infernal fear of the second death the appearance of an epistemological problem that could be addressed through pure rational analysis, without resorting to religious faith.

If this strategy leads to the vicious circle of the ego proclaiming itself as the autonomous source of certainty while admitting the divine origin of eternal ideas without which the possibility of certainty—and indeed doubt—would not exist, that is less the failure of a philosophical investigation than the implicit confession that it was not genuinely a philosophical problem but rather a religious drama disguised, with the help of plagiarism, as pure philosophical speculation.

However, it would be a mistake to see this camouflage as a mere trick or, as Husserl would say, a “literary form.” The religious solution to the religious problem was blocked from the outset by very serious external and internal obstacles. Descartes had no choice but to try to defend himself against the fear of the second death through natural reason, outside of any commitment to a confessional stance.

The mystery and hypnotic allure of the Meditations lie precisely in the immeasurable distance between the fundamental problem and the means used to solve it: from the point of view of the Christian religion, which Descartes professed in one way or another, attempting to preserve oneself from eternal damnation through pure logical argumentation is as out of place and utopian as trying to divert a tsunami by drawing it in another place on the map. As the fundamental problem only appears in the idealized form of an epistemological question, the mystery remains latent behind the “clear and distinct” treatment given to this question.

If we read the Meditations with Guéroultian eyes, focusing solely on the “order of reasons,” we understand the figure of the Evil Genius as a “resolutive device or psychological instrument” used by the philosopher to present his philosophical argumentation. ³⁷ If, following the advice of Paul Friedländer, we search behind each philosophical idea for the real experience that originates it, then the confrontation with the Evil Genius becomes the living center of the Meditations, camouflaged as an epistemological argument through a “device” found ready in Plautus' Amphitryon.

The central problem of the Meditations can thus be summed up in this question: “How can I, through pure human rationality, guard against the death of the soul?” This is the true problem of Descartes.

Part 3 – Conclusions and Additions

XIV. The Three Dreams³⁸

IT IS, EVIDENTLY, an illusion to believe that the “explanation” or “cause” of a philosopher’s thoughts can be found in external biographical elements, but it is also clear that the act of thinking them was, in fact, a lived experience and a chapter of an inner biography. Beneath every philosophical thought, there is a background of impressions, visions, and emotions that constitute an integral part of its meaning. And sometimes, the reference of this background to external events is so clear that disregarding it would deprive us of the mere possibility of understanding what the philosopher is saying. For example, can we isolate Plato’s conception of the philosopher’s mission from his encounter with Socrates? Would it be the same if this conception were purely invented, without inspiration from the example of a living master? Mutatis mutandis, how can we understand Aristotle’s philosophy of nature without mentioning his experience as the son of a physician and a keen observer of animals, plants, and places, who even invented zoos and botanical gardens?

Furthermore, it is obligatory to take this background into account when the philosopher himself presents his thoughts to us in the form of an autobiographical narrative and assures us that they are not mere hypotheses but lived experiences.

The three dreams that Descartes had in Germany on November 10, 1619, are a fundamental document whose analysis sheds much light on the meaning of the Meditations. Even the greatest admirers of Descartes – such as Charles Adam, who produced the great edition of his works, or Henri Gouhier, or Gustave Cohen – tend to pass quickly over these dreams, which do not seem to fit well with the established image of Descartes as a thinker entirely devoted to reason and hostile to anything related to occultism, mysticism, and the like. However, Descartes himself affirms that the dreams were decisive in shaping his philosophical thought. We have no right to ignore such an explicit testimony.

Descartes left a firsthand narrative of the three dreams in a notebook he called Olympica. Although this notebook has been lost, there are two transcriptions: one made by Adrien Baillet,³⁹ who was Descartes’s first biographer, and a second one made by Leibniz, who found the notebook during a visit to a house where Descartes had lived.⁴⁰ We have these two sources, and they roughly agree. Baillet’s version is quite detailed and allows us to go a little further than Descartes himself did in interpreting the dreams.

In the 20th century, Maxime Leroy, another biographer of Descartes, sent a transcription of the dreams to Dr. Freud and asked for an interpretation.⁴¹ Freud took the problem suggested very seriously and sent a kind and thoughtful response to Leroy. He said that it was very difficult to provide an interpretation without other data, which only the living patient could provide (his technique had been developed entirely for use in a clinical situation, not for interpreting historical documents). However, Freud made some very important observations about dreams.

Freud immediately notes that certain dreams are transparent and immediately reveal their meaning – he calls them “dreams that come from above” (“from above” does not mean they are divine revelations, but that they come from the higher floors of intelligence). He then makes two observations about possible meanings of certain elements that appear in dreams, which I will come back to in a moment. In any case, Freud did not provide a complete interpretation. Many decades later, John R. Cole published a book that carefully reconstructed all the documentation of the episode and offered a psychoanalytic interpretation of the dreams, which I will also come back to later.⁴² First, let me tell you how the dreams unfolded.

The three dreams occurred on the same night. It was an interrupted sleep: Descartes would fall asleep, have a dream, wake up, fall asleep again, and have another dream that referred to the first one, and this happened three times.

In the first dream, Descartes sees himself walking down a street. There is a storm, a strong wind that terrifies him. The wind is so strong that he cannot walk upright: he walks bent over, leaning on his left foot – he feels that the wind is somehow weakening his right side, so he leans on his left foot. Suddenly, he sees a school that he identifies as the College of La Flèche, where he had studied with the Jesuits. Inside, there is a chapel where he wants to seek shelter and pray for God’s protection from the surrounding danger. But as he is walking towards the church, he realizes that he passed by someone, perhaps an acquaintance, and forgot to greet them. He then turns back to apologize to the person. At the moment he is turning back, the wind becomes even stronger, pushing him towards the church, and at that instant, he encounters another passerby who calls him by name and informs him that he has brought him a melon sent by someone from another city. And that is where the dream ends.

Descartes wakes up, startled. He feels that the dream has some reference to the sins he had committed during his life and begins to pray for God’s forgiveness. He does not specify what these sins are, and Baillet comments that apparently Descartes did not have many sins; he led a rather devout life. At that time, in fact, Descartes had not yet had his affair with the maid, and except for a brief period of worldly life about which little is known, there is no major external sin in his biography that could instill in him a permanent feeling of guilt, without which it would be inexplicable for him to attribute to the dream, immediately and almost reflexively, the sense of an imminent divine punishment. Therefore, when he speaks of his sins, it is more plausible to consider them as internal faults, a state of spiritual confusion that puts his religious faith at risk.

Then Descartes falls asleep again and has a second dream. He hears an explosion and sees that it comes from the same strong wind, the same storm as in the previous dream. However, now he is inside the room and feels that the storm cannot reach him, cannot harm him. And at the moment he realizes this, several lights appear and illuminate the entire room. This was the second dream.

In the third dream, Descartes is in the same room and sees, on the table, an encyclopedia. Just as he is about to touch it, the encyclopedia is no longer an encyclopedia but an anthology of Latin poems, the Corpus poetarum, in which he discovers a verse by the Roman poet Ausonius that says “quod vitae sectabor iter” ("which path of life should I follow?"). Further on, he sees the title of another poem, Sic et non (“Yes and no”), by the same author, which he immediately understands as a reference to the Pythagorean oppositions between truth and error. Then he looks back at the encyclopedia – the Corpus poetarum has once again transformed into an encyclopedia – but it is no longer as complete as before. And then, he wakes up.

Reflecting on the meaning of these dreams, Descartes understands the wind as an evil spirit that was pursuing him. As for the offering of the melon, he thought it represented the meditative solitude in which he would like to live. Although Descartes also had a sociable side, being a man of the world (knowing many people, receiving friends, etc.), he greatly enjoyed solitude and keeping his activities secret. Hence the two mottos: “I walk masked” and “he who hides well, lives well.” There are many studies on these dreams nowadays. The early interpreters of Descartes, who were apologists for Cartesianism, did not know exactly what to make of those images because, primarily, Descartes interpreted them as divine messages, which seemed a bit strange since at other times he had shown extreme hostility toward all mystical and esoteric activities, etc. Not knowing what to do with that material, these interpreters quickly passed over the subject and moved on. It was Maxime Leroy who changed the whole panorama in 1929.

The biography of Descartes, as reconstructed by Leroy, is full of mysteries and ambiguities, to the point that the Catholic faith of the philosopher, which was resolutely affirmed by all his biographers and admirers, became somewhat doubtful after Leroy. There are many heterodox elements in his attitude, in which, above all, the marks of a surprising religious indifference appear. One of them – it is incredible that no one before Leroy noticed this – is the famous “provisional morality,” according to which Descartes says that while he is doubting everything and seeking truth, he will act as if certain rules prevailing in his society are correct, even when they are not. This means – Leroy observes – that, according to Descartes, for a good conduct in life, truth is not necessary; good conduct can be entirely based on pretense or hypothetical belief. This method already violates religious morality, whether Catholic or Protestant, to such an extent that Leroy speaks in favor of the ambiguity of Descartes’s professed Catholic faith.

Returning to the dreams, Descartes interprets them as divine messages showing him the path to follow, what he should do with his life. Based on psychoanalytic theories, John Cole says that the dream reveals Descartes’s break with his father because his father was a judge and wanted his son to pursue the same career: the dream would mark Descartes’s declaration of independence from his father and, at the same time, from all existing authority. For this interpretation, Cole relies, among other indications, on the fact that in the dream, Descartes feels the fragility of his right side (le côté droit). It turns out that droit is both the right side and the law. Similarly, Freud himself, in his response to Leroy, says that universally, the left side represents what is forbidden, sinful, wrong, etc. So, when Descartes walks leaning on his left foot, he would have broken not only with the legal profession but also with the norm of law in general, and would therefore have the feeling of doing something that, according to this norm, would be wrong.

As for me, I took Freud’s suggestion that Descartes’s dreams were “dreams from above” very seriously. I have to dismiss the hypothesis of divine revelation, but the hypothesis that they were “dreams from above” is very plausible – dreams that carry their own evident meaning within them, not requiring interpretation, but only a phenomenological description for their sense to become clear. When I examined the dreams from this perspective, I saw that indeed their meaning is self-evident as soon as we treat them as aesthetic wholes, connecting the elements of the dreams with each other.

John Cole is a materialist author, modern and scientificist, and for him, there are only two hypotheses regarding dreams in general: either it is a divine revelation (which he does not believe in), or it is a kind of unconscious thought, a thought that comes in a more or less encrypted form, according to all those processes of concealment and rationalization that Freud was the first to study with some success. However, for those who are familiar with Christian doctrine, the Holy Spirit is a permanent function of God, which not only brings us revelations but also sustains our intelligence in its usual operations. Human intelligence thus has a permanent divine foundation, and its mere functioning already presupposes this: human intelligence cannot be fully explained by natural factors alone.⁴³ Therefore, it is normal that the perception of certain realities, certain fundamental truths, is inspired in us by the Holy Spirit without the need for a special revelation. In other words, it is not that the dream is a divine revelation, as Descartes says, but it contains something of a remote divine source. Ironically, this self-evident divine sense is precisely what escapes Descartes’s understanding in his interpretation of dreams, at the very moment he understands them as a message from God.

The first thing that seemed doubtful to me in this self-interpretation is that the wind necessarily represented an evil spirit. After all, if the wind frightens him and compels him to go to church, it may simply express the fear that the soul has of its own sins (as Descartes himself will confess upon waking up) and which spontaneously leads it to seek divine protection. The wind does nothing wrong to Descartes; it only suggests that he go to church. Notice: the impulse to go to church comes from within Descartes himself, but it is reinforced by something that frightens him from the outside. It is worth remembering that famous “Timor Domini principium sapientiae” (the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God) – the internal impulse to go to church is reinforced by the fear of a superior force that moves the elements of nature.

Now, just as Descartes is about to enter the church, he remembers that he forgot to greet someone on the street and turns around to look for them. Look: the man who is oppressed, anguished by the sense of his own sins that come to his mind thanks to the fear he feels of a natural phenomenon, suddenly forgets all of that and responds to another call, which is a fortuitous call of purely worldly order, and he responds to that call out of sheer human respect. Greeting a passerby cannot be an obligation or necessity as pressing as praying to ask for forgiveness for sins and invoke God’s protection, especially at a moment when the individual is distressed and afraid because his sins have taken on the aspect of natural forces that threaten him. If the consciousness of sins appears in the dream in the form of an external threat, that alone shows the “repression of moral consciousness” mentioned by Igor Caruso,⁴⁴ in which a soul absorbed by worldly occupations loses the habit of deep self-examination, so that the appeal of moral consciousness recedes into the unconscious and materializes in the dream as an external threat. The dream itself then shows the division of Descartes’s soul between the appeal of deep moral consciousness and the attraction of worldly obligations when, instead of entering the church, he turns to apologize to the passerby he had failed to greet: the inner impulse of the soul in search of salvation is concealed under the appeal of a duty of worldly politeness.

At this point, what happens? The wind, initially, had only suggested that Descartes go to the church; now it begins to push him towards it. It is as if the desire to go to the church to pray – which had emerged from within Descartes himself, as an inner necessity symbolized by the wind precisely because it had been forgotten or neglected – now appears in the form of a command from authority, something that orders him, from the outside, to follow the same inner impulse that he had just abandoned. The inner voice, which he refused to listen to, is now imposed upon him from above, as a disciplinary obligation. And for the second time, Descartes is distracted from the received command and his attention is drawn to another person who calls him by name.

Note: if the wind, in the beginning, only suggested that he do something, and now it has started giving him an order, an imperative command, in turn, the distraction factor has also become more intense: it is no longer just a person whom Descartes passed by and failed to greet; now, it is someone who calls him by name and offers him something. The divine calling has become stronger, and likewise, the distraction factor has become stronger. Hence, Descartes yields for the second time and definitively. Freud, quite pertinently, says that the melon could not represent in any way the simple solitude that Descartes aspired to in order to be able to study, meditate, etc., but it definitely represented some object of desire, with or without sexual connotations.

We see that Descartes, in his interpretation, reverses the factors, and he reverses them in an entirely implausible way: what could be malign in a wind that impels him to perform the most innocent action in the world, which is to pray? Descartes alleges that the wind was an evil element because it was forcing him to do something that, in the first place, he wanted to do on his own, but the fact is that he did not want it so much, because he allowed a banal distraction to deviate him from the path, which makes the justification he offers for considering the wind an evil force unacceptable. This shows that he evaded the appeal of the inner conscience four times: first, by repeatedly ignoring it in everyday life, to the extent that its content became unconscious and appeared in the dream as an external threat; second and third, in the dream itself, when twice he deviates from the path to the church to attend to worldly interests; fourth, after waking up, by interpreting the wind in an inverted sense.

For us, nowadays, it is very difficult to understand what a melon could represent at that time, but not by coincidence, Descartes was born in a region that produced the best melons in France, and numerous examples from that time depict melons as a symbol of everything that is most delicious in life. Freud is right to point out that the melon must represent an object of pleasure, but this does not prevent Descartes from finding genuine pleasure in solitude, since it did not mean to him simply the necessary peace and quietness to read and meditate, but the condensed symbol of overwhelming intellectual ambition, as we will see shortly. If Descartes thought that the most delightful thing in life was to be enclosed in a room, undisturbed by anyone, where he would have the freedom to give free rein to his own thoughts, that is exactly what happens in the second dream when he is locked in a room and the wind can no longer reach him. He is aware that this wind is the same as in the first dream. Lights appear inside the room and the whole room illuminates, that is, Descartes breaks away from the call of the Spirit and closes himself within his own mind, where he finds satisfaction and security. In order to do this, he cuts off the channel with the “heart,” understood as the traditional symbol of the seat of intuitive and immediate perception of truth. When we want a person to become aware of the reality of their life, from which they defend themselves through rationalizations, don’t we tell them to “listen to their own heart”? What is the difference between “cardiac” intellection and cerebral intellection? Cerebral intellection is thought, it is created, it is constructed by the mind itself, whereas cardiac perception is entirely passive and spontaneous. Perception of the heart is simply the recognition of things that you have always known, that have always been there.

It is not uninteresting that, in the same week that I was studying this, a DVD by Roy Masters, a famous German hypnologist who lived in the United States, came into my hands. He was initially called Reuben Obermeister, but as it was a very difficult name, he simplified it to Roy Masters. In this DVD, he teaches a meditation technique that consists of focusing your attention on the circulation of blood in your right hand. Your thoughts disappear, and you enter a state of tranquility in which you simply become aware of what you know. He says, “Do this a certain number of times and you will see that the solution to many problems appears on its own, without you thinking.” In this state, there is no element of deliberate construction, which is typical of the thinking self. On the contrary, to enter this state of calm and evidence, you need to stop the consequentialist impulse of thought, which constructs syllogisms, forms, figures, etc.

Note that Descartes’s interpretation of the wind is truly inverted, forced; it denotes the desire to break away from this intuitive knowledge and close himself within the constructive mind, the thinking self, the ego. In my course The Consciousness of Immortality, I divided the human self into several layers: we have a bodily self, a social self, a biographical self (your history, as you know it), the reflective self, which operates on the material of the biographical self, and the substantial self, the one that you truly are beneath and beyond everything you know or think about yourself. This true self is not accessible to your thought, simply because thought is momentary, it unfolds in time, while the substantial self is permanent. Thus, it is clear that the human mind – the biographical and reflective self – cannot apprehend the substantial self; it can only remain silent and allow the substantial self to speak; and that is exactly what happens in Roy Masters' exercise and in many other similar practices.

If, upon awakening from the first dream, Descartes remained calm and let the dream speak for itself, its meaning would become evident: you are deviating from the call of the Spirit due to mere worldliness, and this is your sin. Now, Descartes begins to reason about all the sins he has committed throughout his life, but he does not remember to see the sin he has just committed at that very moment, which he was warned about in the dream, and which he is committing again in the very interpretation he gives to the dream. No one there was accusing him of anything else but that which he had just done. Exploring other sins at that moment was completely irrelevant: the dream did not speak of them, but of a unique and present sin, the evasion of the call of the Spirit. Descartes turns his back on the Spirit and chooses the mind, the thinking self. He closes himself within the thinking self, where the wind – the Spirit – can no longer reach him. Defended from the inspiration of the Spirit, he is now free, locked and protected within his own mind. Descartes always liked to work in a closed and warm environment, which he saw as a symbol of his own thinking mind, and it is within this thinking mind that the lights appear. If “solitude” appears as an object of pleasure, it is because, for Descartes, it represented something more than mere social isolation. What that something more was is revealed in the next dream.

In the third dream, he understands the encyclopedia as the collection, the system of human knowledge – a sign of the universal science through which he could attain, by means of the simple exercise of the thinking faculty, the supreme principles, the fundamental causes of all things, and thus the key to all existing and future sciences. Then he sees the Corpus poetarum and reads that verse by Ausonius. It is very strange that he sees in this an insinuation of universal knowledge, a divine message, because Ausonius is the most prosaic poet that existed in Antiquity; he only spoke of everyday life, agriculture, flowers, etc. There is no depth in Ausonius, and above all, there is nothing Pythagorean in him. Therefore, what matters is not the objective meaning of Ausonius’s poems, but what Descartes wished to see in them.

When Descartes sees the title of Ausonius’s poem – Sic et non (“Yes and no”) – he understands it as the Pythagorean opposition between truth and error. This interpretation seems to me quite forced, precisely due to Descartes’s own desire to close himself off from intuitive knowledge and construct everything within his own mind. It is at this moment that he clearly recognizes his ambition – the true object of pleasure – to deny all received knowledge and reconstruct everything from himself, from his own mind. On the one hand, he believed in divine inspiration; on the other hand, when divine inspiration appears, he rejects it and chooses something else, believing, or rather claiming to believe, that this is the true divine inspiration. A certain demonic confusion emerges there – not the spectacular general confusion that appears in Machiavelli, but something that is, so to speak, the essential confusion, the root of all confusions. In the last dream, at least two levels of meaning can be distinguished: the meaning with which Ausonius’s verse appears as a vehicle of the spiritual message coming from the dreamer’s deep self; the meaning that Descartes attributes to it ex post facto when interpreting the dream. At the first level, both the question “which path of life will I follow?” and the opposition of “yes” and “no” clearly denote a state of doubt, uncertainty, insecurity, inner division. If we ask which alternatives Descartes was divided between, the first dream already clearly answered that: he was divided between obeying the voice of the divine Spirit that impelled him to prayer or yielding to more direct and worldly appeals. The second dream seems to have resolved the issue in favor of the second hypothesis, also clarifying that among these appeals was the intellectual ambition to reconstruct the world mentally and become the head of a school. But the third dream shows that the uncertainty still persisted. Descartes, once awake, rids himself of it by giving this last dream a forced interpretation, introducing into it an external reference (Pythagoreanism) that had not appeared in this dream or the previous two.

Based on the symbol of old cameras, in which the focus of the viewfinder did not coincide with that of the lens, I created the term “cognitive parallax”⁴⁵ to designate the structural displacement between the axis of a thinker’s actual experience and the axis of their theoretical construction. If we compare Augustine’s “Confessions” with Descartes’s “Meditations,” we will see that the difference between these two spiritual autobiographies lies in the fact that in the former, philosophical speculations remain very close to the inner voice of the sinner who confesses his sins, while in the latter, the constructive impulse of the mind takes flight and, as we will see later, ends up far from the immediate, cardiac consciousness of the “hombre de carne y hueso,” as Unamuno would say. The difference is structurally determined by the ideal audience to which each discourse is addressed: Augustine writes for a God whom he knows he cannot deceive. Descartes writes for a scientific audience whom he ardently wishes to persuade of the absolute novelty of his discoveries. There can be no greater contrast than the one that emerges from the comparison of these two voices: the voice of the sinner who confesses with a sincere heart and the voice of the aspirant to the title of schoolmaster. The distance of each of these voices from the “cardiac” center of consciousness is quite different.

That Descartes interpreted the three dreams as a divine message destined to confirm him in his ambition to rebuild the world of knowledge from scratch is something that can only be understood as self-deception or intentional pretense. From the start, due to their murky, frightening, and enigmatic nature, the dreams bear no resemblance to divine messages but rather resemble expressions of internal confusion, not devoid of demonic elements, incompatible with the presence of a God who is “not a God of confusion”.⁴⁶ Simply comparing them with the illuminative experience lived by Blaise Pascal on November 23, 1654, the vision of divine fire culminating in “total and sweet renunciation” and the vow to “never separate [from Jesus Christ] again”.⁴⁷ The most basic notion of discernment of spirits⁴⁸ – a discipline that the former Jesuit student could not be unaware of⁴⁹ – already reveals the difference. Indeed, what divine inspiration can there be in fleeing the obligation to pray in order to attend, instead, to a human social obligation and the pursuit of a pleasure object? “As Descartes gives the melon the meaning of a solitary philosophical speculation, it is obvious that the object of pleasure promised in the first dream is already enjoyed in the second, with the additional advantage that shutting himself in his room protects the philosopher from the wind that urged him to pray. If any restlessness still remained in the third dream, Descartes dispels it through a forced interpretation, and now he is free to pursue his project without paralyzing scruples and reinforced by the illusion of the ‘divine message’.”

The Cartesian project is to overthrow all sciences and rebuild everything through the power of reasoning alone. The “divine inspiration,” as Descartes understood it, functioned merely as a trigger, without any role to play thereafter: it set him on the path he desired, and the path consisted of isolating himself within his own mind and reconstructing all human knowledge there. Descartes’s ambition was evidently to replace the entire Aristotelian-scholastic tradition. It is understandable that he saw in this an object of pleasure that went far beyond mere social isolation.

Leibniz observed very well that Descartes had a serious vocation as a school leader, as the leader of a current of thought. His ambition was nothing more and nothing less than to replace all scholasticism, all Aristotelianism, and even to modify religious education, which indeed happened: during the 18th century, practically all seminaries in France adopted Descartes as the cornerstone of their teachings, in place of scholasticism.⁵⁰

Another extraordinary thing is the fact that the fundamental argument of the Meditations on First Philosophy was entirely copied from a play by Plautus, The Haunted House, in which we find exactly the same sequence of thoughts based on the hypothesis of the evil genius. What is the evil genius? The evil genius is a hidden force that sowed in the human mind a set of false impressions – the image of this world – in order to deceive the mind. The character in The Haunted House escapes from this terrifying hypothesis precisely by discovering the certainty of cogito ergo sum. Benjamín García-Hernández⁵¹ shows that the argument is exactly the same, and this comedy by Plautus was among Descartes’s bedside books, so he could not legitimately claim ignorance of the debt to this illustrious predecessor whom he does not cite. The fact that he manifestly concealed the source of his main argument shows that the desire to impose himself as a revolutionary innovator predominated in his soul over the sincere intention of seeking the truth. If a thinker can hide even a raw material fact like the existence of a historical source under a reasoned construction, how much more easily will he conceal, under that construction, the voice of the inner conscience that shows him the symbols of the truth of his life? Cognitive parallax, which will be much more visibly demonstrated in later cases, already appears here in subtle disguise but with all the power of its distorting potential. This distortion obviously affects not only Descartes’s work but the entire vision that, based on it, Modernity constructed regarding its own origins. Descartes came to be celebrated as the “discoverer of subjectivity,” when in fact what he did was replace the profound and genuine subjectivity of the confessing self with the pseudo-subjectivity, peripheral and artificial, of the constructive mind. Subsequent thinkers, such as David Hume, Kant, and Karl Marx, will demonstrate an even more advanced state of alienation, but the rift between the truth of the soul and mental construction is already fully evident in René Descartes.

It is also characteristic that in The World, where Descartes first presents his scientific conceptions of the constitution of the universe, he does not attempt to explain how the world was created and constructed by God, but rather how God would construct, at the very moment Descartes is writing, another world if He simply found the materials to do so. The entire world described in The World is an artificial and hypothetical world, constructed entirely in Descartes’s mind – and it is constructed exactly like a machine, where everything functions driven by mechanical impulses.⁵² There is a passage by Alain, I don’t remember in which book, where he says that Descartes would look out the window, see people walking on the street, and have the impression that they were mechanical dolls, not human beings endowed with a soul. This means that the mechanical conception he creates of the world is entirely invented in his mind, and he does not affirm that this is the real world – nor does he affirm or deny it. He simply says that if God were to create the world now, He would do it in such and such a way. In other words, he is offering God a universe project. He is not only remaking philosophy, remaking theology, remaking all knowledge, but he is remaking the world itself from his own mind. Needless to say, this entire conception was discredited over time – I believe there is no longer any pure mechanist in the world, especially after quantum physics. However, at the time, it made a great impression, was highly successful, and for about two centuries, it can be said that mechanicism, reinforced by the contributions of Newton and Galileo, became the dominant philosophy in the Western world.⁵³ Even when discredited as an explicit doctrine, mechanicism survived, without a name, through the profound marks it left on European culture. The most characteristic of these was undoubtedly the belief that human conduct can – and should – be purely mechanically controlled through the interplay of impressions and stimuli. This idea was put into circulation by Abbé Dubos in 1740 in his Critical Reflections.⁵⁴ No one remembers the book or the author anymore, but who can deny that the same idea inspires the behavioral engineering that has now replaced pedagogy as the basis for practically all early childhood education programs in the Western world?⁵⁵

There are several disturbing elements here. First of all, the initial step of Modernity was copied from an author of the 2nd century BC, with an enormous chronological leap. It remains to be explained what this discovery of the self may have that is properly modern, if it was already given so long ago. The explanation is that, in Plautus' time, it was given in a context where this self did not have the immense constructive capacity attributed to it by Descartes, a capacity that only emerged with the enormous development of mathematics at the beginning of Modernity, to which Descartes himself made such important contributions. Strengthened by the newly acquired confidence in the power of mathematics, the thinking self proclaims itself as the sole source of knowledge. If the price for this is historical falsification and the fall of the self into a state of existential alienation, it matters little: the enthusiasm that the discovery of the constructive capacity of the mind aroused at the time was boundless. Spinoza – one of Descartes’s disciples and, at the same time, his antagonist – will go so far as to completely deny the validity of knowledge through experience: only the knowledge that is mentally constructed interests him. He gives the example of geometry, in which knowledge of figures consists of knowing how to construct them. For example, you take a line segment, mark any point, use this point as the center, draw a semicircle, imagine the semicircle rotating, and with that, you construct a sphere. You understand a sphere because you are capable of mentally constructing it. For Spinoza, only this kind of knowledge, which is pure mental construction, is valid. Descartes does not go so far as to deny knowledge through experience – on the contrary, he devotes himself to many direct observations of nature – but ultimately, the decisive factor for him is always mental construction.

These two fundamental works, which are the Meditations on First Philosophy and the Treatise on the World, appear to us in an extremely unsettling aspect. The first, as a plagiarism, and an untimely, anachronistic plagiarism, in which the discovery of the certainty of the self by itself is displaced from 200 BC to the seventeenth century, becoming then the great historical novelty that inaugurates Modernity. In the other book, where the expression of Cartesian science of the physical world appears, it is presented to us entirely as a hypothetical construction that has no obligations to reality but is based solely on its own internal coherence of a more or less mechanical nature.

Thus described, the Cartesian world assumes for us the figure of a delusion that stands solely by the force of logical cohesion, which bears a strong resemblance to that mad world of Niccolò Machiavelli. Machiavelli was also a builder of worlds—he constructs the Third Rome, which is an explicit project of a world-state, where the State has control over everything in society and not even the officials of the State have any autonomy because there is an internal surveillance system in which they are always terrified of each other, afraid of losing their jobs or their heads. The machine of the State prevails over any personal power, over any human initiative. There is a certain similarity between the Third Rome and Descartes’s world. In fact, the Treatise on the World is known as The World of Mr Descartes⁵⁶ — that is, it is not “this” world, it is the world invented by Descartes, it is an “other” world.

In Part 2 of this book, I asked myself why someone would wish to formulate a universal doubt if it is an impossible and entirely unnecessary thing. The idea of universal doubt can only have arisen in reaction to a deep state of uncertainty. This state of uncertainty arises precisely at the moment when the mind becomes independent of the cardiac knowledge that gives it immediate certainty, including the certainty of the existence of the ego itself.

The state of uncertainty—which is not universal doubt, but only a very great uncertainty—is precisely the state in which Descartes finds himself at the beginning of his first dream, where he feels insecure and can hardly walk, having to lean on his left foot because the right one is failing. It is an evident symbol of insecurity. The individual is not sure of the ground beneath his feet. In response to this uncertainty, Descartes decides to create a hyperbolic doubt, that is, to apply a homeopathic treatment of doubt. “Since I am uncertain, I will stop to think about what would happen if I were uncertain about everything.” But this is only a hypothesis, he is not uncertain about everything—he is uncertain only about that question from Ausonius: "What path of life should I follow?", that is, should I go to church or should I go back to apologize to that citizen I forgot to greet? Should I heed the call of the Spirit or should I attend to other interests that are exclusively mine and worldly? Should I open myself to divine inspiration or confine myself to the internal operations of my constructing mind? That is Descartes’s true doubt. Perhaps the element of breaking with his father and abandoning the profession of lawyer is also present, but it is certainly not the decisive element. The decisive element is of a moral nature, it is a moral doubt: do I follow the divine message, the divine appeal that comes to me from within and without, or do I simply follow the movement of my mind, the mechanical force of mental construction?

Note well: what does he do when, instead of entering the church, he goes after the person he did not greet? Not greeting the passerby was just a thought he had. Then he has a knowledge that comes to him without the need for thought, that spontaneously comes to him from within and from without at the same time, and he has another path, which is mental, that he constructs as a hypothesis: “Why didn’t I greet that person? I will go there to apologize.” When he meets the second person, this distraction coming from outside promises him a reward, an object of pleasure, a melon.

The real problem that Descartes confronted was the problem of the Evil Genius. He enters into a discussion with the devil to ascertain whether the devil can completely deceive him all the time, whether the thinking self is entirely at the mercy of the devil. He would not ask this question, of course, if he did not suspect that the answer could be “yes”. Descartes decides to confront this devil, not through traditional means—the confession and repentance—but through his thinking, by creating a universal system that defends him against error, against all possible errors. Of course, this is unfeasible, it is only a dream of power. We see this inversion, in René Descartes, all the time: he exchanges the devil for God, and at the very moment he succumbs to the supreme demonic temptation—that is the temptation of pride, of constructing an entire world that is impervious to error—at that very moment, he believes that he is defended and protected against the devil, when in fact he is defended and protected against God—and against the voice of God in his conscience. The analysis of the three dreams clearly shows this.

XV. Descartes and Husserl

FOUR CENTURIES AFTER Descartes, the project of a universal science with unshakable foundations and absolute authority over all fields of knowledge resurfaces with Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). And, just like his predecessor, Husserl believes himself invested with a divine mission at the very moment he constructs the edifice of a method destined to protect him from all uncertainty through pure reason, without the aid of divine intervention. No, this is not an interpretation of mine. It is a confession by Husserl himself:

"I have a mission with which God has entrusted me. I must fulfill it, and that is why I live. Incessantly, every day I continue to work, and my work has been renewed for thirty-five years. Human life is nothing but a path towards God. I try to reach this goal without theological proofs, without theological methods or support; I seek to reach God without God."⁵⁷ I am compelled, so to speak, to eliminate God from my scientific life in order to open a path towards God for those among men who do not have the certainty of belief through the Church.

He made this confession significantly in a letter to a Benedictine nun, Sister Adelgundis Jaegerschmidt, who had been his student.⁵⁸ There could not be a more accurate expression of not only his project but also that of Descartes.

Despite all the merits this project may have as a reaction against skepticism and relativism, the objection it raises is somewhat immediate and self-evident: if man can reach God without God, then the function of God is reduced to that of the creator of the world, without any subsequent saving interference in the life of the human soul. God may have created humans, but they elevate themselves to heaven through apodictic knowledge, through “rigorous science.”

It is evident that the God thus conceived is an idea of God, not a living and active God, present in History, in nature, and in everyday life. The role of God in Husserl’s philosophy is even more external than in Descartes', where He at least had the responsibility of instilling in the human mind the eternal ideas by which the self recognized itself. The God of Husserl suggests to him a philosophical project and then hides in the infinite, passively awaiting the arrival of men brought on the wings of phenomenological ascent.

It is significant, moreover, that in abstaining from God, Husserl described his attitude as a mere abstention from “theological proofs.” Every philosopher worthy of the name abstains from theological proofs, but there is an immeasurable difference between attempting to reach God without them and attempting to reach Him without Himself. Husserl does not see this difference. Theological proofs, in fact, have an extremely reduced and secondary role in the religious life of most believers who, without denying them, see them as little more than scholarly curiosities. God is not in the souls of believers as a theory to be proven, but as a presence that manifests itself in two ways: (a) as an object of faith; (b) as the author of miracles.

Faith does not consist in believing in a doctrine but in trusting in an existing and active presence, the presence of the three persons of the Holy Trinity. Proofs can reinforce this trust, but a trust that depends on proofs is not trust at all.

Richmond, VA, December 30, 2011

Appendix: At the Origins of Western Stupidity⁵⁹

ONE OF THE INAUGURAL paradoxes of modern times lies in the deceptive ease with which the thinking part of Europe accepted the two principles of Newtonian mechanics—the eternity of motion and the law of inertia—without pausing for a moment to notice that they were mutually contradictory.

Ancient physics stated that a body, if not moved by another, tends to remain at rest. Newton contested this, affirming that the force of its own inertia keeps each body eternally in its present state, whether at rest or in straight and uniform motion. There’s only one problem: if motion is eternal, it makes no sense to speak of a “present state” except in reference to a living observer endowed with the sense of temporality. In eternal motion, everything is flow and impermanence. There are no “states”—whether of rest or motion. “State” is merely a subjective impression that the observer, himself involved in the general movement, obtains when measuring physical movements through his inner time. The attempt to build a purely mathematical universe independent of human perception ended up making everything depend on human perception itself. Materialistic physics was founded on an idealistic metaphysics.

The contradiction is so glaring that it is scandalous that for so many centuries hardly anyone noticed it, or at least explicitly pointed it out.

However, the blatant absurdity contained within it another, even worse one. All motion is, by definition, a change that occurs within a determined timescale. If you stretch the limits of time indefinitely, there will be no possible difference between change and permanence, between occurrence and non-occurrence. “Eternal motion” is a self-contradictory concept.

They say that Newton was the prototype of the absent-minded genius, that his calculations had to be corrected by assistants, that once he was found in the kitchen boiling a clock and looking attentively at an egg. I don’t know if these anecdotes are true, but it is a fact that he dedicated more time to occult studies than to anything that would be called “science” today. He was a tremendous oddball, and apparently, he didn’t just stumble in the details of calculation and cooking but in the very foundations of his theory.

His three main critics—Leibniz, Goethe, and Einstein—always spoke respectfully of him, but I have the impression that deep down they laughed quite a bit at the old man. The first observed that reducing objects to their “primary qualities” of measurement and motion, as required by mechanical theory, resulted in making them perfectly nonexistent. The second attempted to show that the qualities of light were correlative to human vision; he failed, but at least made it clear that a Newtonian could only reject his thesis by arguing against himself. The third, by limiting the scope of Newton’s principles to a limited domain of reality, proved the total subjectivism of these principles, since the limits of said domain were those of human macroscopic perception.

On the other hand, admirers reached prodigious levels of foolishness in the devotion they paid to the English scientist. Poet Alexander Pope compared Newton’s theory to a new biblical fiat lux. Voltaire didn’t fly as high, but contorted himself in such a way to absolve the guru from the accusation of being the father of modern atheism that he left in the air the suspicion that he was precisely that.

The problem with Newton’s physics is that when someone accepts a self-contradictory thesis as if it were an ultimate truth, the unnoticed contradiction takes refuge in the unconscious and damages the entire logical intelligence of the unfortunate person. Newton not only spread atheism throughout Western culture; he spread the virus of formidable stupidity. A portion of the intellectual elite has already been cured, but the perception of reality by the masses (including the university mass of micro-intellectuals) remains afflicted with Newtonism. The amount of nonsense this explains is as infinite as Newton’s universe.

Plato, transl. Hans Meyerhoff, 3 vols., Princeton University Press (Bollingen Series), 1958-1969.↩
I explained this in Maquiavel ou A confusão demoníaca, Campinas, Vide Editorial, 2011.↩
Machiavelli or The Demonic Confusion, Campinas, Vide Editorial, 2011.↩
Translator’s note: In Portuguese, the word “visões” is used indifferently for “visions” and “views”. Olavo is clarifying this ambiguity by noting that this book, titled “Visões de Descartes”, is not covering several views about Descartes, but visions.↩
Following the publication of this book should be, I don’t know exactly when, the complete transcription of the classes from the Philosophy Seminar that I dedicated to an analytical reading of the Meditations. In this transcription, the interpretative hypotheses sketched here find more extensive textual support.↩
“Les Dieux”, in Les Arts et les Dieux, Paris, Gallimard, 1958, p. 1203.↩
“A generation of predators”, Diário do Comércio (São Paulo), June 3, 2011, reproduced at http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/110603dc.html.↩
“Underdeveloped imitation of a degenerate model”, named it Jean-Yves Bézieau.↩
“Although I have dedicated many years of my life to the study of some great authors of the past, I do not consider myself an ‘expert’ in any of them. I find this peculiar Brazilian invention quite amusing: the philosopher who specializes in another philosopher. Unlike what befalls the mere scholar, erudite, professor, researcher, or whatever else, the philosopher’s obligation is to develop their own philosophy, not that of others, no matter how illustrious and great they may be. They can, as everyone does, make use of elements they have learned from them, but integrating them into the structure of their own thinking and thereby necessarily giving them a somewhat different meaning from what they had in the original texts. There is no infidelity in this; it is only the work of intelligence that moves forward, discovering new difficulties and solutions, without being servile to the letter of what was taught in the past. Even St. Thomas Aquinas is sometimes a poor explainer of his master, precisely at the moments when his own philosophy reaches dimensions that Aristotle had not known. One can doubt the historical accuracy of Heidegger’s Nietzsche, and I myself doubt it; but this does not prevent the book from being an admirable exposition of Heidegger’s thought” (O. de C., “Malditos farsantes,” July 21, 2011, at http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/textos/110721farsantes.html). Once, moreover, I had the following dialogue with a lady of society:

— I heard that you are a philosopher! How interesting! A specialist in whom?

— In myself, dear lady. The others are only general culture.↩
The Unheard Cry for Meaning, trans. Henrique Elfes, São Paulo, Quadrante Publishing, 1989, p. 45. My emphasis.↩
I take advantage, from this point onwards until the end of the chapter, of part of the notes I presented at the Descartes Colloquium of the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy, Faculdade da Cidade, Rio de Janeiro, on May 9, 1996, under the title “René Descartes and the Psychology of Doubt,” an extension of the chapter from my booklet Universalidade e Abstração e Outros Estudos (São Paulo, Speculum, 1983), which bears the title “The Cartesian cogito in light of spiritual psychology.” The wording I gave to these two works seems to me now completely inadequate, as it gives an air of definitive conclusions to observations that were nothing but provisional stages of meditations that would extend over many years. By bringing back these paragraphs from the expository style to the narrative, I believe I correct the perspective somewhat.↩
Translator’s note: Olavo relies on a play of words between the word “estado”, meaning a state, and the verb “estar”, meaning to be, in a sense which he opposes to becoming. This connection is closer than the connection between “stay” and “state” for English readers, but I have nevertheless found it convenient to render these cases as “stay”. The word “stay” never translates any other word throughout this translation.↩
When I say “succession and coexistence”, I seem to be uttering a monumental contradiction. But the yes and no that compose doubt are coexistent in one respect, successive in another. They coexist logically as terms of a contradiction, but they are successive psychologically, that is, they enter the stage of consciousness in a cyclical, rotating way: one enters, the other leaves, like day and night, which coexist in the sky and succeed each other at a point on earth.↩
“Certain and indubitable” or “uncertain and dubious” are predicates that do not apply to the fact as such, but to the judgments we make about it.↩
The posterior dissolution of the unity of the self into the plurality of its states, as it would be carried out by David Hume, was already potentially present in the Cartesian cogito.↩
It is a twist of the human mental apparatus, a painful gesture that self-suppresses, and which few men are capable of enduring for long without serious risk to their psychological integrity. The possibility of taking that risk and overcoming it lies in the existence of a body of beliefs so deeply rooted, so solid, that a person can afford to venture out of it on a mental journey, confident of finding it again upon return. This possibility, in turn, is only fulfilled in highly differentiated and stable societies and cultures that provide thinking individuals with the space for innocent flights of imagination that will not affect their conduct as citizens or as honorable subjects fulfilling their duties; that give them, furthermore, free space to think one thing and do another, to cultivate that defensive hypocrisy which is notoriously absent among primitives and which, for better or worse, is a solid protection of individual consciousness against the tyranny of collective discourse. Hence the peaceful coexistence between the revolutionary audacity of Cartesian doubt and the conservatism of the “provisional morality” that enables it.↩
“Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology” by Edmund Husserl, translated by Gabrielle Pfeiffer and Emmanuel Levinas, Paris, Vrin, 1986, p. 2.↩
“That French knight who set off with such good pace.”↩
“Do not go outside, return within yourself: truth dwells in the innermost being of man.”↩
The expression is from Mário Ferreira dos Santos.↩
There is an aspect that I did not examine there, but it has its importance. The mere suspension of judgment cannot be identified with doubt: it is rather a psychological overcoming of doubt through a distancing from the question.↩
Translator’s note: This translation has rendered the verb “estranhar” as “to wonder at”, and related terms such as “estranhamento” and “estranheza” as “wonder”. This is because the famous quote by Aristotle is well-known in English as saying that knowledge begins in “wonder”. However, the word “estranho” is more closely rendered by “strange” or “weird”, and the verb might have been very literally rendered “to estrange”, since it means to see something as strange. So, I have generally chosen to be more idiomatic, at the cost of a shade of nuance. Sometimes, however, I have rendered “estranho” as “[strange or wonderful]” in brackets to highlight the nuance.↩
Of course, words also resist us, but their resistance is more subtle and only a trained literary sensitivity perceives it. It would not be wrong to say that literary capacity ultimately consists in being aware of the difficulties that language poses to our intention of using it for self-expression, the description of the external world, and action upon other human beings. For the writer, their language of expression is a real entity, endowed with identity and almost a will of its own, with which they must come to terms in order to persuade it to serve them. Language, for the writer, is an objective reality, distinct and sometimes hostile to the inner states they want to express with it, whereas for the non-writer, in general (and barring personal and professional exceptions), language and inner states merge into a nebulous mixture.↩
Let us not lazily appeal, at this point, to the “transcendental self” that Kant and Husserl would speak of. First, because it is merely the most privileged point of observation and most powerfully illuminating to which I retreated, unknowingly, in the instant I imagined receding into darkness. Second, because the same operation that was done with the natural cognizing self can be repeated with the transcendental self – and then with however many transcendental selves one supposes to exist above it –, always with the same result.↩
See Robert E. Wood, “Plato’s Line revisited: the pedagogy of complete reflection”, Review of Metaphysics 44 (March 1991): 525-547.↩
The classic work on this topic is Philip Solomon (ed.), “Sensory Deprivation. A Symposium Held at Harvard Medical School,” Harvard University Press, 1961.↩
See my pamphlet “Intelligence and Truth” (http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/apostilas/intver.htm) for further reference, as well as Aristóteles em nova perspectiva: Introdução à Teoria dos Quatro Discursos, Campinas, Vide Editorial, 2013.↩
Sertillanges, Le Christianisme et les Philosphies, Paris, Aubier, 1950, vol. II, pp. 50 ff.↩
I will not examine here the fact that this proof exposes itself to Kantian criticism in conferring upon the mere idea of infinity the real attributes of infinity itself. Nor will I question whether instilling in the thinking self this or that idea can prove, beyond the fact that God created the thinking self, also the world around it. That can be left for another occasion.↩
See Lívio Teixeira, Ensaio sobre a moral de Descartes, São Paulo, Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras, 1955, pp. 46 ff.↩
Quoted in Société Augustin Barruel, “Descartes et la Foi Catholique,” in Sommaire, No. 9, p. 42.↩
Méditations, ed. Adam et Tannery, vol. IX, p. 36.↩
V. Benjamín García-Hernández, Descartes y Plauto. La Concepción Dramática Del Sistema Cartesiano, Madrid, Tecnos, 1997.↩
Rev. 2:11, 20:6, and 20:14.↩
§1035 in the John Paul II edition of 1992.↩
A. C. Grayling, Descartes. The Life and Times of a Genius, New York, Walker & Co., 2005.↩
Martial Guéroult, Descartes selon l’Ordre des Raisons, Paris, Aubier, 1968, vol. I, p. 39.↩
Aula nº 119 do Seminário de Filosofia, proferida em 20 de agosto de 2011.↩
La vie de monsieur Des-Cartes (1691), New York, Garland, 1987.↩
V. Amir D. Aczel, Descartes’s Secret Notebook, New York, Broadway Books, 2005.↩
Maxime Leroy, Descartes, le Philosophe au Masque, II vol, Paris, Rieder, 1929.↩
John R. Cole, The Olympian Dreams and the Youthful Rebellion of René Descartes, Urbana and Chicago, The University of Illinois Press, 1992.↩
I explained this in The Consciousness of Immortality, a course given between October 11 and 16, 2010: http://www.seminariodefilosofia.org/cursosavulsos/consciencia-de-imortalidade.↩
See Igor A. Caruso, Psychanalyse pour la Personne, Paris, Le Seuil, 1962.↩
Translator’s note: This term, which was created by Olavo and used in several of his works, is not to be confused with “cognitive dissonance”.↩
1Co 14:33.↩
Quoted in Jean Brun, La Philosophie de Blaise Pascal, Paris, P.U.F., 1992, p. 18.↩
“Discernment of spirits is the term given to the judgment whereby it is possible to determine from what spirit the impulses of the soul emanate, and it is easy to understand the importance of this judgment both for self-direction and the direction of others. Now this judgment may be formed in two ways. In the first case the discernment is made by means of an intuitive light which infallibly discovers the quality of the movement; it is then a gift of God, a grace gratis data, vouchsafed mainly for the benefit of our neighbour (1 Corinthians 12:10). This charisma or gift was granted in the early Church and in the course of the lives of the saints as, for example, St. Philip Neri. Second, discernment of spirits may be obtained through study and reflection. It is then an acquired human knowledge, more or less perfect, but very useful in the direction of souls. It is procured, always, of course, with the assistance of grace, by the reading of the Holy Bible, of works on theology and asceticism, of autobiographies, and the correspondence of the most distinguished ascetics.” (Catholic Encyclopedia, available at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05028b.htm).↩
Translator’s note: Olavo preferred to only explain the term by a footnote from the Catholic Encyclopedia, neglecting to mention that the discernment of spirits is a concept that is commonly associated with Ignatian spirituality, which is rooted in the teachings and practices of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits).↩
Interestingly, more recent studies show that Descartes owed much more to scholasticism than he would like to confess. See, for example, Étiénne Gilson, Études sur Le Rôle de La Pensée Médiévale dans La Formation Du Système Cartésien, Paris, Vrin, 1983, and Jorge Secada, Cartesian Metaphysics, The Scholastic Origins of Modern Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000.↩
Benjamín García-Hernández, Descartes y Plauto. La Concepción Dramática Del Sistema Cartesiano, Madrid, Tecnos, 1997.↩
See Jean-Pierre Cavaillé, Descartes: La Fable du Monde, Vrin, 1991.↩
See the “Appendix: at the origins of Western stupidity” later on.↩
See Jean de Viguerie, Itinéraire d’un Historien. Études sur une Crise de l’Intelligence, XVIIe.-XXe. Siècle, Paris, Dominique Martin Morin, 2000, pp. 53 ff.↩
See Pascal Bernardin, Maquiavel pedagogo – ou o ministério da reforma psicológica, Campinas, Vide Editorial, 2013.↩
Translator’s note: “O mundo do senhor Descartes”, where “o senhor” is probably rendering “monsieur” from French. Note that “o senhor”, while it is literally equivalent to “mister” or “monsieur” in use, also literally means “the lord”, so Olavo can be said to have given the title as either “The World of Mr Descartes” or “The World of the lord Descartes” – the latter is certainly not a good translation, but is an interesting shade of meaning.↩
Emphasis added.↩
Reproduced in Gabrielle Pfeiffer, “Husserl devant sa mort,” in La Révue Réformée, No. 104, 1975, p. 150.↩
Publicado no Jornal do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro), 15 de junho de 2006.↩

Thiago’s Translations Blog

Tuesday, June 20, 2023

Visions of Descartes, by Olavo de Carvalho

Epigraph

Introduction and Acknowledgments

Part 1 – The Descartes Enigma

I. The Thinking Self and Consciousness

II. The Psychology of Doubt

Part 2 – Consciousness and Wonder

III. Reviewing the Itinerary

IV. Transition to a New Approach

V. The Condition of Possibility of Cartesian Doubt: The Anti-Vital Dynamism

VI. A False Explanation: The Desire for Knowledge

VII. Is it Natural to Generally Know the Truth or is it Natural to Generally Err?

VIII. Phenomenology of Wonder (1) – Methodological Precautions

IX. Phenomenology of Wonder (2) – Wondering and Admitting

X. Complete Reflection and Cartesian Doubt

XI. At the Bottom of the Pit

XII. More Problems

XIII. The Second Death

Part 3 – Conclusions and Additions

XIV. The Three Dreams³⁸

XV. Descartes and Husserl

Appendix: At the Origins of Western Stupidity⁵⁹

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Tuesday, June 20, 2023

Visions of Descartes, by Olavo de Carvalho

Epigraph

Introduction and Acknowledgments

Part 1 – The Descartes Enigma

I. The Thinking Self and Consciousness

II. The Psychology of Doubt

Part 2 – Consciousness and Wonder

III. Reviewing the Itinerary

IV. Transition to a New Approach

V. The Condition of Possibility of Cartesian Doubt: The Anti-Vital Dynamism

VI. A False Explanation: The Desire for Knowledge

VII. Is it Natural to Generally Know the Truth or is it Natural to Generally Err?

VIII. Phenomenology of Wonder (1) – Methodological Precautions

IX. Phenomenology of Wonder (2) – Wondering and Admitting

X. Complete Reflection and Cartesian Doubt

XI. At the Bottom of the Pit

XII. More Problems

XIII. The Second Death

Part 3 – Conclusions and Additions

XIV. The Three Dreams38

XV. Descartes and Husserl

Appendix: At the Origins of Western Stupidity59

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Post a Comment

XIV. The Three Dreams³⁸

Appendix: At the Origins of Western Stupidity⁵⁹