Culture of the self

Descartes

“The terrible consequence of “equality” - finally, everyone believes he has a right to every problem. All order of rank has vanished.” (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §860) 

In Descartes you always find the advice that not everyone should undertake the questioning of all given opinions, the route of questioning that is supposed to lead to the certainty of cogito. This questioning, this doubt, it is a type of will for Descartes. As we read, doubting is only a mode of willing. And willing is a mode of thought. And so, we doubt, which gives us the certainty of our willing, which in turn gives us the certainty of what the philosopher calls thought. The truth ‘I think’ is much closer to ‘I will’ than to what we generally take to be thought, understood as the understanding. Before ‘I think’ means thought, it means will. Ultimately, it means consciousness. It is about doubt becoming aware of itself as being thought.

This will, Descartes tells us it is infinite and unlimited, whereas the understanding is always finite and limited. This is why he says that in our understanding we are only mortals, but in our will we are made in God’s image. It is also the cause of error; by force of our will, we can go beyond what we know for certain. And so a major part of Descartes’ ‘ethics’ will be the advice to restrain your will to only affirm or deny what you know for certain to be true or false. In this way, you safeguard yourself from error and you can “walk with confidence through life.” But, the will’s infinity should not only be limited by the understanding, it should also be affirmed. It is because of this that we can act in circumstances where we only have probable knowledge. Furthermore, because our will is much greater than our understanding, we can expand our knowledge. We are not doomed to stick to what we know, forced to repeat the same clichés over and over again. No, we can go beyond and wonder at what is still unclear and obscure. Eventually, we might get accustomed to the dark, and our knowledge will be expanded. The pursuit of truth is creative. The will is the possibility of creativity. We can question the opinions that stand before us, go beyond, and discover something new. Now, it follows from what has been said that when the will does go beyond the limits set by the understanding, it is blind. Going beyond the understanding, there is no understanding that could guide the will. And so all creative expansion of our knowledge is based on a certain daring. Going beyond the understanding, this is where discovery lies, but also where the risk of error exists. And so, for most, it is better to stick to what we know for certain. But, for some, why not spend at least one moment in one’s life consciously and actively questioning everything that one holds for true? Who knows what one will find beyond the limits of opinion? Descartes found his cogito, a discovery that would mark all subsequent thought. Going on this route of absolute questioning, Descartes himself even found God. 

As much as there is a great conservative tendency in Descartes; to never go beyond the limits set by the understanding, it is paralleled by an equally great creative tendency. Cogito is consciousness, awareness. This awareness, it is passive in a way, but through the will it becomes active. And it is through this activity that this awareness gains awareness of itself. I doubt everything that exists, meaning I exert the power of my will against everything, until nothing remains but this power itself. This is then of what I am certain, this ability to go beyond what is ‘known’ by the understanding, the senses, and so on. What am I then? Not this, and not that, but the ability to always put forth this ‘not this’ and ‘not that.’ This power to question, doubt, and will, and my awareness of it. But the question is always: “Who is thinking?”, “Who is questioning?”

“My plan has never gone beyond trying to reform my own thoughts and to build on a foundation that is all my own. If I’m pleased enough with my work to present you with this sketch of it, it’s not because I would advise anyone to imitate it. Those on whom God has bestowed more of his favours than he has on me will perhaps have higher aims; but I’m afraid that this project of mine may be too bold for many people. The mere decision to rid myself of all the opinions I have hitherto accepted isn’t an example that everyone ought to follow! The world is mostly made up of two types of minds for whom it is quite unsuitable. There are those who, believing themselves cleverer than they are, can’t help rushing to judgment and can’t muster the patience to direct all their thoughts in an orderly manner. So that if they once took the liberty of doubting the principles they have accepted and leaving the common path, they would never be able to stay on the straighter path that they ought to take, and would remain lost all their lives. And there are those who are reasonable enough, or modest enough, to think that they can’t distinguish true from false as well as some other people by whom they can be taught. These should be content to follow the opinions of those others rather than to seek better opinions themselves.” (Discourse on Method, II)

Why can’t everyone ‘doubt’? There are idiots, simply unable to distinguish the true from the false. These are uninteresting to Descartes and only mentioned in passing. But for the others, they “can’t help rushing to judgment and can’t muster the patience to direct all their thoughts in an orderly manner.” Now, we have seen that on this route of doubt, there is no understanding as such to rely on. The questioning of everything we hold true, radicalized in the hyperbolic doubt with its hypothesis of a Malin génie, it entails an incapacity to take anything as true. And this is precisely the domain of error; if, in this zone of indeterminacy, we were to claim knowledge of something, even as knowledge is impossible in this domain, we are lost —error. The problem is these people, when there is no knowledge to guide them, have no way to guide their thought or will except through feigning knowledge. These are the confused spirits who judge beyond what they know to be true. The question is, if the understanding can’t guide us through hyperbolic doubt, then what can? And what can be affirmed as certain, even when all possible knowledge has been put between brackets? What is it that the ‘clear thinkers’ like Descartes possess and what those who “remain lost all their lives” don’t? What is this patience to direct thought in an orderly manner, when there is no understanding to offer direction? For lack of better words, this will be a type of intuition, and a strong will that can guide itself without needing the limits imposed on it by the understanding. What we are looking for is a type of person that can still be confident in his knowledge of certain things, even when he doesn’t know anything. Quite the paradox. 

This means, someone who doesn’t fall into an extreme skepticism of knowledge as such and who doesn’t claim something to be certain that isn’t. 

We are looking for a type of direct knowledge that has no need of the understanding, that is, of the interpretation or opinion about something. Descartes’ favoyrite example; for some, ‘I think’ can serve as a certain axiom of sorts, because it is perfectly evident that we are thinking. But there are some who will ask, “but what then is thinking?” The problem: you don’t need to know what thinking is to conclude that you are thinking, because you are thinking. You have perfect ‘knowledge’ of thinking because you are thinking, in fact, a type of self-knowledge, totally robust. So it takes an ability to know without language or conceptual knowledge. Those who can’t go beyond this and always get lost in further questions about what thinking means and such, these will remain lost all their lives. They are a kind of “theorycel.” Always stuck up in words and more words, never able to affirm anything positive on its own, least of all themselves. If the laws of logic or language can not explain it, then it doesn’t exist! And this is the crux of Descartes’ attitude; he sees these people as cripples, always needing crutches to base their knowledge on; if it isn’t the opinions of someone else, then at least let it be some “universal  values” or “logical rules” that we can all agree on. But to put one’s trust in “I think”, on the basis of the mere fact that one is thinking, never. One would trust everything, as long as one doesn’t have to trust oneself. And so, with a lack of better words, when going on this route of extreme doubt, it takes a certain ability for intuition. Also, a certain strength of will. We should remember the truly radical nature of Descartes’ “doubt.” It is a doubt in which everything is deceiving, truly everything. And so this certainty of ‘thought’ needs to be equally radical. When we think about something, we can doubt the veracity of this thing. When we will something, we can doubt the veracity of this thing. But the fact that we are thinking, we can not doubt this. That is, thought, in relation to something that isn’t thought itself but that is being thought, is dubitable. Thought considered in itself, is certain. Thought is always a going out of itself, a type of intentionality. In so far as it is this, it is dubitable. But in so far as one can still be confident in one’s thinking even as nothing is thought, even as thought has nothing outside of itself to hold onto, in so far as one is capable of this, we can be certain. Similar to how we say someone has a strong will when he needs nothing except for his own will to affirm his will and act. And it is this capacity that Descartes suspects is not available for everyone. Some are too stupid, others rush to conclusions too quickly when faced with the abyss of doubt. When they can’t think about something given to them, or by way of some logical rules given to them, they can’t think at all. We say with Descartes there is this method; doubt, and at the end of it we ‘find something which escapes it, which is certain.’ But this view sets us up for failure. Nothing is found at the end of doubt, the certainty of thought doesn’t appear ‘after’ doubt. Doubting is a mode of willing, and willing is a mode of thought. And all that happens in Descartes’ reasoning towards cogito is an extreme doubt taken to its very end, until nothing is left to doubt. Truly nothing, except of course, thought. It is doubt doubting so hard that it becomes conscious of itself as will and thought. The problem is, some don’t arrive here, and they could not possibly do so. It is not that they doubt too much and therefore remain lost all their lives, unable to escape the Cartesian form of skepticism. No, the problem is that they can not doubt hard enough, that is, their will is too weak to truly and radically doubt.

After Descartes, there were ‘Cartesian’ philosophers who saw in Descartes’ cogito the germ of a sort of feminism. Cogito, they said, identified as pure awareness, is without sex. And thus, Descartes shows that man and woman are equal. This might be a good example of what Descartes imagines with people who shouldn’t follow his philosophy. At the ends of hyperbolic doubt, cogito is found as the self-certainty of awareness, but at this point of the search for truth, what would it even mean to speak of man or woman? Everything we would say about ‘man’ or ‘woman’ is already dubitable at this point; the bodily differences or similarities, the supposed capacities in the domain of understanding, action, or work. All of this has disappeared along with the world and all the knowledge gained by the senses. How would the mere recognition of the fact of thought or awareness lead to saying that man and woman think and are aware in the same way? Cogito is so far beyond anything that would relate to the specific way in which man, woman, or both, are constituted, that it has nothing to say about man or woman. And neither do man or woman have anything to say about cogito. Cogito is not ‘of this world.’ And the mistake is in applying the unity of cogito to the psycho-physical domain of individual differences. And so it is a type of category mistake characteristic also of the ‘hippie’; those who say that because God is total unity and love in which everything is ‘one’, this world too is total unity and love and we are all equals. It is true; cogito is without sex or gender, but merely because these things do not relate to it at all, not even as possibilities.

Important is that with cogito, there is nothing outside of doubt, as if embarking on a sea voyage we discover a little island: cogito. No, cogito is merely the voyage becoming conscious of itself. And in this way, it is an entirely different project than Kant, who everywhere seeks to limit thought, dispel illusions, and find an island of reason, with houses and trees, populated with all sorts of categories. Descartes’ discovery is not like this at all, it is much more radical, and much more empty. Nothing is ‘discovered’, except this power of discovery itself: will and thought, and the realization that, ultimately, it depends on nothing but itself. That is, thought depends on nothing but itself. And this thought is intimately connected to free will, this ability to always and everywhere go beyond the limits set by the understanding. This capacity of going beyond, this is all that it is.

Sure, from the perspective of material genesis thought and will depend on the body and so on and whatever it is that might ignite thought. Of course it does. And most people can only consider themselves as an effect that finds its foundation elsewhere. But this is the most common sensical and base truth there is. Descartes is simply not interested in these people and their opinions, at least in metaphysics. Read the responses to the replies to the Meditations. He is interested in those kindred souls who are willing to entertain this radical doubt in which their own thought appears in an entirely new way, no longer as a mere thing among things, a single link in an infinite chain of causes and effects, but as its own foundation (leaving God aside for the moment). It is the discovery of a new way of appearing, that, to be sure, doesn’t appear to everyone. 

To be able to consider yourself as your own origin, this is the idea. And not everyone can do it. Fichte will say it is because some don’t like the idea of freedom and responsibility. Who knows.

Today, many see this idea as the cause of great evils —man’s forgetting of nature and tradition, his forgetting of ancestry, and so on. But to bring this up against Descartes, in a way it is similar to our ‘Cartesian’ feminists; a fact of the world —psycho-physical genealogy— is brought in against the fact of ‘pure awareness’ —cogito. And so, two domains are confused. Looking at the state of the world, one thinks one has found an argument against metaphysics. Descartes would not deny that he had parents that brought him into being and that to a great degree determined who he was, he was not an idiot. See what he and later Cartesians say about traces in the brain for example. But in what way would this most banal of facts make a different way of thinking impossible? A more exciting and thrilling adventure still awaits for thought, in which we think and doubt much more radically, and we consider ourselves as our own origin, as an essence, against the order imposed on us by circumstance, for an order to come. Against a culture imposed on us by the basest and most materialist forms of thinking for which all that is possible is what is already determined, and towards a culture based solely on man’s will for what is greater. The future is not determined by the past, but by the degree to which we can become an origin. We cease explaining ourselves away by reference to an infinite chain of causes and effects, and consider ourselves as a soul. This is not to say that Descartes had no eye for something like a material genesis of man, of course not. He was a ‘dualist’ after all, and this is all about being true to all the ways in which reality is and appears. Both as body, soul, and as a unity of both. Both as essence and as existence. It also means being able to entertain the ‘deterministic' idea on the domain of the body, without letting this being an argument against freedom, of which we have a very real experience. Similarly, entertaining the absolute reality of the soul and God, without falling into a pure idealism that has no eye for the world. What determines man? Is he free to determine his life, or is he merely an effect of a series of material causes over which he has no control? The answer is both: dualism. As Nietzsche says: discipline and breeding.

Truly, the democratization of ‘cogito’ has been a disaster. As has been the fact that everyone thinks himself worthy of critiquing Descartes, Kant, Plato, and every other great philosopher. In truth, we barely comprehend the problems they were struggling with.

The most powerful yet simple critique against Descartes has been given by Nietzsche, who says that ‘I think, I am’ explains nothing and that it is idiotic to believe in anything being given as immediately certain. How could it be “immediately certain” what ‘I think’ means? As it presupposes that there is an ‘I’ doing the thinking, and that we know what thinking means, and so on. But who knows this? And so, cogito is not immediately evident at all. At best, we can say: ‘something is thinking’, or ‘thought is happening’, but even then, we don’t know what ‘is’ means, what ‘thought means, and so on.

Now, what Nietzsche seems to be critiquing in Descartes is the apparent logocentrism of his statement; as if the words ‘I think’ and ‘I am’ mean anything. At least concerning this aspect of his critique, Descartes would agree: ‘I think’, ‘I am’, these words mean nothing, if you are not thinking and being. As to what ‘thinking’ is, do you really think some definition of ‘thought’ would give any more clarity? It would do precisely the reverse, Descartes says. The understanding drags you further away from thinking and being, not closer to it. The understanding or imagination is the type of thinking that creates fictitious models like the ‘machine-man’ through which we try to grasp the world, it is not the domain of certainty. Cogito is not grasped through words, it can not even be grasped in any ordinary claim to knowledge; it is precisely what is left when nothing is known whatsoever; this intuitive awareness of a violent subterranean power that can always go beyond the limits set by the understanding and ‘the world.’ From a certain perspective, Nietzsche did the most for unearthing the ‘real’ cartesian Cogito. At least on what is crucial, Descartes and the most violent critics agree. (The most kind-hearted sympathizers often agree much less.) 

The ways in which man can be chained and domesticated by thought are infinite, and so are the ways in which thought can be utilized to free man. These things change, and an idea that at some point in time served to make man impotent, can at some other time be re-vitalized to achieve a certain freedom. And the reverse is true too, of course, where an idea that at first expressed a certain power is turned into a means to contain. This is one meaning of ‘perspectivism.’ And it is one possible meaning of philosophy; everywhere man is, thought is used to keep him docile and weak. In many ways, this is the natural direction of thought as opposed to action. But the philosopher, he tries to turn thought into something positive and affirmative, he tries to take thought and turn it from something that makes action impossible into something active and life-affirmative. What this is precisely, this changes, and this is dependent on so many different circumstances. What ideas will save us? What philosophy is best? This, in any case, is not given; as if all one had to do was read through the major philosophies of history and one could see which one was the best. No, and some ideas which at some point could have given great power to man could lead to the greatest weakness when adopted today. And so it takes a certain capacity for perception, a certain ‘paideia’, an education of the instinct to see when thought is working in the service of life, and when it is turning men into caged animals. It takes a certain creativity, a will. In short, an ability to think, a superior intuition that can put doubt in the service of life and lead us to an affirmation of being, and not to an abyss of endless logo-centric questioning like some underground man.

In short, with little explanation, we could read Descartes’ end as nothing but thought becoming conscious of itself as this power that eventually leads to man’s domestication, and the simultaneous awareness that thought can be ‘cultured’, that it can be taken control of, made active, and put back in the service of life. The dialogue The Search for Truth shows this, if man thinks and only thinks, if thought is left to itself, it turns blind, and leads to the worst type of scholasticism where we stare ourselves blind on all sorts of insignificant problems, without it ever leading to anything. Not to the confidence needed for action, and least of all to knowledge. We come to think that asking ‘what is thinking?’ or ‘what is being?’ is the same as thinking and being. This is why ‘method’ is needed. But before method as such, there is doubt —the total destruction of everything we know in which thought realizes, rightfully or wrongly, that it need not be a mere effect, but is entirely itself. In its aspect as will, infinite like God. This idea that thought need not be a slave to anything, but always has the capacity to doubt, to say no, and to choose again in freedom. This ‘thought’, it makes all ‘system’ impossible.

Now, I do not think Descartes can be inscribed in some enlightenment project to make everyone ‘think for themselves.’ Descartes was driven by the idea of generosity, but he was not an idiot, and he knew that concerning those things most foundational in his philosophy, not everyone will benefit. “Some remain lost all their lives.”

There is an aristocratic element in Descartes. Be it a firm belief in an ‘aristocracy’ of spirit, never of blood. The noble man is the free and generous man, not the other way around. But contrary to the intellectualism of someone like Spinoza, true freedom doesn’t depend on rising up to some higher type of thinking for Descartes, it is more simple in that it is based on the mere recognition of thought as such. Be conscious of your own freedom, and have the will to be resolute in carrying out what you deem to be best.

It is all too easy to be blunt with this and associate certain philosophical ideas with certain effects on those who hold them, and so one says that everywhere where a notion of the soul exists man is enslaved and weakened by religion, or alternatively, that its absence is the cause of all evils. Or one hears that monotheism is the ultimate cause of all religious war, whereas everywhere where polytheism reigns there is peace. Blunt characterizations that totally forgo basic observation. Nietzsche should be taken extremely seriously when he says the question “Who speaks the truth?” is more important than the question “What is the truth?”. “This idea leads to so and so”; does it? In the hands of whom? What about this case where it didn’t?

Mere philosophical pluralism means nothing without a recognition of real pluralism and difference. The same idea in the head of two different people is not the same idea, because the people are different and ideas are not separate from people. If they are great ideas, maybe they attain some level of independence. Like a great work of art lives on even as the artist dies.

There are times when an idea leads to strength and beauty, and there are times when different people use the same idea for the creation of a great ugliness. Is it then still the same idea? From an abstract perspective it is, but from the perspective of the powers invested in the idea, it is entirely different. 

Man thinks, for himself or through given opinion, he lives through this mode of thinking which he develops unconsciously. And before he knows it, he is trapped in a net of words that sucks the life out of him. The idea of the philosopher; he who consciously intervenes and puts thought back in the service of life, as a tool of liberation. Not just for the attainment of some nirvana or a utopia at the end of history, for precisely these ideas too can serve to enslave, as can all ideas. But merely to free man wherever he is chained, against everything that makes thought impossible, so that higher life at least has a chance of emerging. It is a totally modest aim, and it attempts to ‘save’ as much as it attempts to hurt. It is an artistic vision of thought, which we see very much in Descartes; the philosopher doubts the world that is given, and on the basis of nothing but his own self-certainty and the recognition of God, he constructs a new and better world, one that is more affirming of his own freedom, his own will, one that expands man’s powers even further. Is this then, always at the cost of nature? Maybe it can only appear as such if you think man’s ends can be reached without nature, or if you think it is a good idea to build ideals on sad passions, to build a world on making man less and less powerful. I have a hard time believing weakness ever leads to anything good, both for self and other. There is no generosity without an affirmation of the will.

Ferdinand Alquié writes: 

“A ne vouloir philosopher que dans les limites de la certitude, on risque de ne découvrir que soi.” (Alquié, La Découverte Métaphysique de l’Homme chez Descartes, 342) 

If you only want to philosophize within the limits of certainty, you run the risk of discovering only yourself. He succinctly grasps Descartes’ problematic. But in Descartes, the discovery of the certainty of the self is at the same time the discovery of the fake and illusory character of everything else, the malleability, the perspectivism inherent in reality and the possibility to, if one wanted to and was capable enough, create a new world. You can not go ‘beyond’ Descartes, because the power with which you critique him, with which you shatter the house of knowledge he built, this very power —however you might want to call it— this affirmation of this power is the essence of his philosophy. Descartes also calls it freedom, and what I am is nothing but this power to always go beyond what is known and towards the intuition of thought, an intuition that makes possible any thought, creation, critique, or destruction whatsoever.