Man and World 16:003-023 ( 1983).

1983, Martinus Nijho

ff
Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
DESCARTES AND THE ONTOLOGY OF SUBJECTIVITY
BERNARDCHARLESFLYNN
Empire State College, SUNY
"Descartes begins the completion and consummation of Western metaphysics."1
In the same essay Heidegger writes: "The whole of modern metaphysics taken
together, Nietzsche included, maintains itself within the interpretation of what is
to be and of truth that was prepared by Descartes."2 The following essay will be
an exploration of these remarks of Heidegger. Without writing an history of modern
philosophy, I will attempt to see in what sense Descartes prepares the completion
of onto-theology - completion in the Heideggerian sense that "it has gone through
the sphere of prefgured possibilities."3 Of course, the problem upon which my re
flection will focus is Subjectivity. However, subjectivity will not be conceived of as
an idea that occurred to Descartes and which subsequently "influenced" other
thinkers; rather it will be described as a path which once embarked upon takes us
in its own direction. The force of this problematic, its power to lead in one direc
tion, will not be viewed as an immanent teleology; rather it will be shown to have
more in common with the force of a conversation which once begun refuses to be
ended on anything less than its own terms.
In his essay "Eye and Mind"4 Merleau-Ponty speaks of looking at a pebble at
the bottom of a pool. He tells us that what one sees is not a distorted pebble nor a
pebble in spite of the water. One does not think the water away in order to imagine
what the pebble is "really" like apart from the distortions that the water imposes
on one's vision, rather the pebble is seen through the water. Analogously, in this
essay on Descartes no attempt will be made to discover the "true" Descartes, that
is, Descartes as seen apart from the tradition of philosophy based upon his texts
- a tradition of three hundred years of philosophical reflection which separates us
from Descartes as the water separates the pebble from one's eyes. It is Descartes as
seen through this tradition, as founding it, and as being made intelligible by it,
that will be of interest to us. Our aim will be neither to discover which of his texts
are "sincere" and which are "dissembling," nor to think through his texts back to
what he meant - what he really "had in mind." Such a reading would be a pro
foundly Cartesian reading of Descartes.
What Descartes "had in mind" is of less interest than what became of his texts
as they entered in to an intertexuality, a network of interwined texts and interpre-
4
tations. For example, H. Caton in his book Te Oigin of Subjectivity: An Essay
on Descartes5 has rigorously and fairly convincingly argued that at least large sec
tions of Descartes' Meditations of First Philosophy6 were written to bamboozle
the clerics on the Faculty of Theology at the Sorbonne. Taking no position on the
accuracy of Caton's argument, let us suppose that it is true. Nevertheless, it is the
Meditations that Heidegger calls the fundamental text of modern philosophy. lt is
this text that Husserl uses in both Te Crisis of European Science and Transcenden
tal Philosophy 7 and evidently in the Cartesian Meditations8 not only to interpret
Descartes, but to situate his own phenomenological project in reference to Car
tesianism; furthermore, it is precisely to an aspee of the Mediations which Caton
perceives as a mask - the hyperbolic doubt - that Husserl relates his own practice
of the epoch. Hegel makes extensive use of the Meditations in his Lectures on the
History of Philosophy9 and it is to the Meditations that Kant turns in Te Critique
of Pure Reason. 10 One could go on. The point is not to deny the historical and bio
graphical interest of the type of argument made by Caton, it is simply this: If it is
the case, as Caton maintains, that the philosophy which Descartes believed, "had in
mind," was a form of metaphysical materialism with a bit of subjectivity thrown in
(quite incoherently according to Caton11 ); then one must ask, which is the real
Cartesianism, is it the position which entered into the intertexuality of Western
thought, a position, which Merleau-Ponty has argued in Te Phenomenology of
Perception12 has become an institution in the West, or is it the one that Descartes
secretly believed, even on the assumption that one could fnd out what he believed.
For our argument it must be the former. As Derrida has shown,1
3
a text even at the
moment of its inscription escapes the authority of its author. A text is not a cipher
through which one could arrive at what the author means to say (vouloir dire). lts
meaning is generated through its relationship to other texts. The meaning of a text
is not only compatible with the absence of its author, it demands it.
In general, this essay will oppose itself to any kind of hermeneutical enterprise
which envisions the task of interpretation as being the production of coherence.
This view of interpretation attempts to read Cartesian philosophy as a coherent
statement of what Descartes might have really believed; thus "apparent" contradic
tions are resolved in the direction of coherence, of what one person - Descartes -
could have believed without entertaining blatant contradictions. The coherency of
mind becomes a model for the coherency of the text. In his Archaeology of Knowl
edge, Foucault describes this hermeneutical style:
The history of ideas usually credits the discourse that it analyzes with co
herence. If it happens to notice an irregularity in the use of words, severa!
incompatible propositions, a set of meanings that do not adjust to one an
other, concepts that cannot be systematized together, then it regards it as
its duty to find, at a deeper level, a principie of cohesion that organizes the
discourse and restares to it its hidden umty. This law of coherence is a
heuristic rule, a procedural obligation, almost a moral constraint of re
search: not to multiply contradictions uselessly .... 14
5
"Analysis must suppress contradiction as best it can." I opposition to this her
meneutic ethic Foucault presents a type of analysis in which "contradictions
are neither appearances to be overcome, nor secret principles to be uncovered.
They are objects to be described for themselves, without any attempt being made
to discover from what point of view they can be dissipated ... . "15 While this essay
makes no commitment to either the Foucaultian conception of an archaeology of
knowledge, with its successive but radically disjunctive episteme, or to the geneal
ogical analysis as elaborated in Te History o[ Sexuality, 16 it nonetheless is in
agreement with Foucault concerning the treatment of contradiction. Our analysis
will not suppress contradictions but exacerbate them, not, to be sure, because one
believes Descartes to have been a particularly irrational person who consistently
held contradictory positions, but because our interest is not in the cohesion of
Descartes' mind but in the dispersion, multiplicity, and contradictions of his text.
Descartes' texts shall be viewed less as a testament of his thoughts than as a place
bristling with tensions - a place where problems overflow and even contradict his
stated intentions.
Descartes began his philosophical enterprise amidst the debris of late Scholastic
philosophy. The degeneration of Scholasticism into dialectics conceived of as a set
of logical garues reached that point at which it lent itself to the parody of Erasmus
who wrote in his Encomium moriae:
Could there be severa! sonships of Christ? Is the proposition possible that
God the Father hates the Son? Might God not have also taken the form of
a woman, or have passed into the devil? Might He not also have appeared in
the frm of an ass or of a pumpkin? In what manner would the pumpkin
have ?reached and wrought miracles, and how would it have been cruci
fed?1
Hegel characterized the philosophy of the late Middle Ages in terms of the com
plete disjunction of logic or dialectic fom concrete content and by its unlimited,
"barbarous," extension to everything and anything, human or divine: "Regarding
the apple in Paradise the understanding asks to what species of apple it belonged"
.
1
8
As a response to such logical gares, the "comedy of the higher Iunacy" as Erasmus
refrred to it, Skepticism arose. It arose in two forms. The frst type of skepticism,
which Popkin has discussed in his Te History o[ Skepticism: From Erasmus to
Descartes, 19 whose course will not be developed in any detail here, proposed
reasoned arguments for the liitation of the human intellect. It orchestrated itself
primarily in terms of a rebirth of Greek skepticism in either its Academic or Pyr
rhonian form. Academic skepticism insisted on the total ipossibility of knowl
edge, while Pyrrhonian skepticism argued for an essentially agnostic position. It
based its agnostic conclusions on the arguments of Sextus Empiricus whose works
resurfced in sixteenth-century Europe. I its most simplifed form Pyrrhonian
skepticism consists of the argument that every statement making a claim to truth
would have to satisfy a criterion by which truth could be distinguished from flsity.
If this criterion were stated as a truth - it is true that one can distinguish the true
6
fom the flse by such and such qualities, etc. - it would also have to meet a cri
terion by which its truth could be distinguished from falsity. Thus an infnite re
gress is opened indicating the incapacity of the human mind to fnd a criterion by
which to separate the true fom the flse, a criterion which would not in its turn
require a further justifcation. For this frm of skepticism, certainty - the justif
cation of a truth claim by a criterion - is asserted as a necessary condition for
truth, but in fct the possibility of attaining this certainty is denied.
The second type of skepticism arase as a response of piety to the "barbarous"
or even blasphemous manipulation of divinely revealed truth. Clearly this pious
skepticism did not extend to the truths of religion but only to the farfetched
theological speculations that erected themselves on the basis of scripture and the
traditional teachings of the Church. This type of skepticism did not advance ar
guments to support the incapacity of the human mind to arrive at truth. lt was
rather a moral response, a protest, to the depth of lunacy into which late Scholas
ticism had fllen, for indeed, once logc became completely detached from content
quite literally anything could be said. The theological sophistication itself, which
erected barbarous speculations, was already, without relationship to the veracity
of such speculations, an afont to Christian piety. This pious skepticism did not
oppose to Scholasticism a theory according to which the mind would be ill-suited
for theological speculations; rather it confonted Scholasticism with a baste Chris
tian attitude of belief in the scripture and the traditional teachings of the Church.
Erasmus was willing to admit that he could not tell with certainty what was
true, but he was, per non sequitur, willing to accept the decisions of the
Church .... Since he was unable to distinguish truth fom falsehood with
certitude, he wanted to let the institution that had been making this dis
tinction for centuries take the responsibility
.20
What is of interest in this pious form of "skepticism" is that it did not erect
certainty as a criterion for belief; it was possible to believe without certainty.
A certain type of skepticism was not incompatible with belief. The "justifcation"
of one's belief, if one can even use this language, consisted not in an experience of
certainty but in the inherence in a tradition, in a "form of life." lt was through
one's relationship to tradition and institutions - the Church - that one's salvation
was insured. This skeptical credulity was not based on a subjective experience.
For it, to believe was not to have a subjective experience of what one believed,
rather it was to live in the truth, to participate in institutions whose truth was not
of the predica ti ve order. The teachings of the Church were not true because there
existed somewhere an intricate argument by which all propositions could be justi
fed or proven. They were true because the Church was true, that is, because it
was created by God. Truth was neither the evidence of self-certainty, nor a quality
of a proposition. Truth was a quality of being in terms of its relationship to God,
which is to say, its character as created by God. The teachings of the councils of
the Church were true because it was the true Church which promulgated them.
Reality, being, was true in its relationship to God. Truth was not fundamentally a
7
character of propositions but of being; however not as it was for the Greeks, for
whom according to Heidegger, trutlJ is alethei - the unconcealment of Being.
For the medievals, truth was a transcendental quality of being. Being was true in
that it was present to the Divine Intellect. As Heidegger writes: "What is truly real
is God."21 lf what was really true was God and if God in the person of Jesus in
stituted a Church which comes to have a tradition and a history, then one can see
that the truth of one's fith is not founded on an experience of certainty; thus
skepticism and belief would not be necessarily mu tually exclusive.
Nevertheless, if this belief divorced from certainty were to continue, it would be
necessary that the frm of lf to which it was attached would continue to exist in
a more or less untroubled and unself-conscious manner. This, however, was not to
be the fate of either the institution of the medieval Church or of the epoch in
which the truth of being was given as created being - that epoch of metaphysics
in which, according to Heidegger, the relation of being to Being was conceptualized
as the relationship of creature to Creator. The die was already cast when Luther
could write:
.. .I saw that the Thorst opinions, whether they be approved by pope or by
council, remain opinions and do not become articles of faith, even if an angel
from heaven should decide otherwise. For that which is asserted without the
authority of Scripture or of proven revelation may be held as an opinion,
but there is no obligation to beleve it."22
It was not simply the position of the Thomists that had become "opinions," since
in another work Luther wrote: "I put no trust in the unsupported authority of the
Pope or of councils, since it is plain that they have often erred and often contra
dicted themselves."23 In fct all of the traditional teachings of the Church had to
be submitted to the law of contradiction and if they were found lacking in this
respect, or not based on "proven revelations," they would become "opinions."
But one must ask, what is an opinion? It is a proposition, a belief, something "in"
someone's mind for which there is no certain evidence. For Luther, it is the popo
sition which is properly true or false, and the place of the proposition and thus of
truth and falsity is the mind - subjectivity. Indeed Heidegger has argued that long
befare Luther Wester philosophy had prepared the position according to which
truth is the correctness of a proposition whose place is in the subject. In his essay
"Plato's Doctrine of Trut"24 Heidegger situates the turing point in the history
of the concept of Truth foni aletheia (unconcealment) to correctness - agreement
of an idea with its object, adequation of intellect and thing - in the allegory of
the cave in Plato's Republic. 25
It is in the epoch in which Luther wrote that the idea of truth as correctness
became explicit. What does Luther propase as evidence? Popkin writes: "Luther set
forth his new criterion of religious knowledge, that what conscience is compelled
to believe on reading Scripture is true."26 Evidence here is subjective certainty,
but this subjectivity is phrased in a language of compulsion, an evidential proposi
tion is a truth to which one is compelled to give accent. Luther must be taken quite
8
literally when he states at the Diet of Worms: " .. .I cannot and will not recant any
thing, for to act against our conscience is neither saf for us, nor open to us. On this
1 take my stand. 1 can do no other. God help me. Amen [emphasis mine] ."27 This
new sphere of inwardness - of subjectivity - represented, in relationship to the
authority and power of the Church, a realm of absolute feedom. The new Christian
alone with his Bible constituted a sphere from which all external compulsion was
excluded. But this inwardness did not constitute a sphere in which being and
knowledge coincide, since inner persuasion - conscience - was a compulsion,
exercised by God through grace, to believe. Grace existed as an opacity within
the heart of subjectivity, a moment of compulsion within the realm of feedom.
A absolu te fact remained within the heart of su bjectivity, namely, that one had
been chosen by God to have grace and therefre could read the scripture correctly.
Luther wrote against Erasmus, "The Holy Ghost is not a Skeptic, and He has not
inscribed in our hearts uncertain opiniqns, but rather, afrmations of the strongest
sort. "28 Against Erasmus' skeptical credulity Luther insisted on certainty, an in
ward certainty - a compulsion to believe. Calvin continued and in a certain sense
extended Luther's doctrine. In the Institutes of the Christian Religion, he worte:
Such, then, is a conviction that requires no reasons; such a knowledge with
which the best reason agrees - in which the mind truly reposes more securely
and constantly than in any reasons; such, fnally, a feeling that can be bor
only of heavenly revelation. 1 speak of noting other than what each believer
experiences within himself - though my words fall far beneath a just explana
tion of the matter [ emphasis mine] .29
It would be possible to develop a number of similarities between the theo
logical positions which gave rise to Protestantism and the philosophical position of
Descartes. They both wished to annul the power of tradition: Luther by disrupting
the tradition of the Church as a so urce of religious knowledge, Descartes by the
doubt which he believed destroyed the power of his former education and all forms
of historical inherence. They both insisted on certainty as a criterion of truth,
both attacked skepticism - sacred and profne. Nevertheless, it is not these similari
ties that will be particularly emphasized in this essay. It is rather the presence of
the Divine within subjectivity that will be stressed. Indeed, fr Luther, the sub
jectivity of the believer was radically fnite - cut of from tradition and eccle
siastical institutions, alone with the Bible; nonetheless, it was the place where the
Divine spoke, where God compelled belief. It was God Himself who elicited fom
the elect the correct reading of the texts of scripture. But one might ask, if the
elect's belief, his experience of himself believing, is compelled by God, in what
sense is it his? In this doctrine is there not a tendency for the subjectivity, at least
the subjectivity of the elect, to become infinite or to be inhabited by God? For
Descartes as well, certainty is what one cannot help but believe. Nevertheless there
is a diffrence between them; using the language of another century, one could say
that Luther's conception of certainty i psychologistic - certainty is the factual
inability to do anything other than believe. This fctual inability to disbelieve is
9
interpreted by Luther as a sig of election by God. A Husserl characterized the
concept of certainty in Mill's logic as psychologistic, in a similar manner one could
call Luther's concept of certainty "theologistic," since fr him the Divine and the
mundane are both lodged within subjectivity. On the other hand, although Des
cartes does not maintain such an irrational view concerning Divine election, and
although his concept of certainty cannot be called either psychologistic or "theo
logistic," nonetheless, as this essay will demonstrate later, for him also, because of
the near convergence of his conception of subjectivity and God, the Divine ul
timately resides within the heart of subjectivity.
Subjectivity, born in the seventeenth century, must be thought both in its dis
junction fom and its continuity with the tradition of Western philosophy. Any con
ception of perennial philosophy which views diverse philosophies as different
responses to the same problems - the set of problems being thus an invariant -
must be rejected. "Problems" as well as "solutions" must be seen as taking place
within a certain openness of Being, and they will not be intelligible outside of
their configuration. The claim that Descartes' philosophy initiates a genuine novelty
might be challenged by conceiving of Cartesianism as a response to reborn skepti
cism, indeed the importance of the resurfacing of the texts of Sextus Empiricus
has already been indicated. Nevertheless, our position will be that the rebirth of
an interest in Greek skepticism in the seventeenth century is not in fact a reenact
ment of Greek skepticism. The skepticism of the seventeenth century means some
thing diferent than it did in Greece. Heidegger argues in "The Age of the World
Picture" that Greek sophism, and one could include also Greek skepticism, was
possible only within a world where Truth was revealed as aletheia - unconceal
ment. He contends that when Protagoras states that each man is the measure of
all things what he means is that Being reveals itself differently for each man, that
revelation would be true fr each man but not communicable to other men. The
consequence of this is that each man would be profoundly separated fom every
other man but not separated from the truth of Being. This is quite a diferent
matter fom positing the possibility that each man is shut up with his own re
presentations and opinions, none of which correspond to anything other than
themselves. The modern problem i that the representations in our subjectivity
might not correspond to anything other than themselves. Acknowledging the
force of this type of skepticism, Kant remarked that the scandal of philosophy is
its inability to prove the existence of an "outside" world. There arises the pos
sibility of being stranded in subjectivism - subjective idealism; but there can be
no possibility of subjective idealism before the advent of the subject.
A subjectivism is impossible in Greek sophism, for here man can never be
subiectum; he cannot become subiectum because here Being is presencing
and truth is unconcealment.3
0
The advent of subjectivity is irreducible to preCartesian philosophy. Nonethe
less, it will be argued that by a series of displacements and transpositions Descartes'
10
thought continues the history of metaphysics conceived of as onto-theology. I fact,
as was stated above, Descartes not only continues but "begins the completion and
consumation of Western metaphysics" - with Descartes, man becomes Subject. In
his Te Search After Truth he has Eudoxus, clearly the voice of the author, say:
"We must commence with the human soul because all our knowledge depends on
it.. .. "
31
It is Descartes' refections on the "soul" that must be investigated. In his
Meditations, as is well known, he arrives at the thinking self by a process of univer
sal doubt. This doubt has stages. At the beginning the data of the senses is subjected
to doubt by means of the principie that one shall not " ... trust entirely to any thing
by which we have once been deceived."
32
In fct, one must treat as flse anything
that emanates fom a source which has once deceived us. Illusions, madness, and
dreams all attest to the fct that there are instances in which what one perceives or,
more properly, what one thinks one perceives, is not there in truth. In order to
render dubious the truths of mathematics which seem to be true even if one is mad
or dreaming, Descartes evokes the hypothesis of an evl genius as powerful as God
who "has employed his whole energies in deceiving me .... "
33
Given this hypothesis
even the calculations of arithmetic and geometry are dubious, since the evil genius'
power to deceive is infnite. In the Second Meditation, Descartes asks hiself
whether he has by his strategy of doubt - his extravagant hypothesis of an evil
genius - perhaps conviced hiself that he does not exist?
Not at all; of a surety I myself did exist since I persuaded myself of some
thing (or merely because I thought of something). But there is sore deceiver
or other, very powerfl and very cunning, who ever employs his ingenuity
in deceiving me. Then without doubt I exist also if he deceives me, and let
hi deceive me as much as he will, he can never cause me to be nothing so
long as I think that I am something. So that after having refected well and
careflly examined all things, we must come to the defnite conclusion that
this proposition: I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time that I pronounce
it, or that I mentally conceive it.
34
Thus Descartes discovers the Archiedean point by which with his lever, his
method, he will move the world. But one must ask, in what does the certainty of
the cogto consist. The idea that it is a syllogistic inference of the sort - "Al
thing that think are, I think, therefre I am" - must be rejected since the major
premise would simply be asserted and therefore the conclusion would remain
problematic. Rather it must be argued that the certainty of the cogito rests on the
absolute correspondence of being and thought. My existence is absolutely certain
each time that "I pronounce it, or that 1 mentally conceive it." The cogito is that
place where being and thought coincide, a place where to exist and to think I exist
is the same thing. Descartes extends this certainty to what might be called, using
an anachronistic phrase, the whole phenomenal feld consdered as a feld of re
presentations "in" consciousness. In the Second
M
editation he writes,
1 1
... since in truth 1 see light, 1 hear noise, 1 feel heat. But it will be said that
these phenomena are false and that 1 am dreaming. Let it be so; still it is at
least quite certain that it seems to me that 1 see light, that 1 hear noise and
that 1 fel heat. That cannot be false; properly speaking it is what is in me
called feling; and used in this precise sense that is no other thing than
thinking.
35
Apropos to the thinking subject and all its representations, one can apply - with a
thoroughly altered meaning - the line of Parmenides: "For thinking and Being are
the same." The condition for doubt and uncertainty is the noncoincidence of
thought and being, the contingency which situates itself between "to be" and "to
be thought." A subject who exists without this space of contingency, of noncoin
cidence, is a subject who exists absolutely. In the section of the Ideas: An /ntroduc
tion to Pre Phenomenolog
36
entitled "the hypothetical destruction of the
word ," Husserl shows that the Ego and all its intentional objects withstand the
destruction of the contingent world; he calls this mode of being proper to the Ego
absolute. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel writes of Descartes'
cogito: "The thinking subject as the simple immediacy of being-at-home-with-me is
the very same thing as what is called Being; and it is quite easy to perceive this
identity ."
37
In the thinking subject there is an identity between the thought that
1 exist and the fct that 1 exist.
Having established the exstence of the thikig self, Descartes then presents
proofs for the existence of God; these proofs are well known. One of them is the a
posteriori argument for God's existence: fom the fact that 1 have an idea of God
in my mind - an idea having more formal reality than 1 have objective reality -
Descartes, invoking what will later be called the principie of sufcient reason, con
cludes that 1 cannot be the cause of this idea, that it requires a cause with as much
formal reality as the idea has objective reality, thus God Himself. Another proof
repeats St. Anselm's argument for God's existence. lt proceeds a priori from the
idea of a most perfect being, the existence of such a being follows because existence
is a perfection and a most (infnitely) perfect being must have all perfections in
cluding existence; thus God exists. Hegel notes that what is arrived at in the con
clusion of both the a posteriori and the a priori arguments is a being, God, the idea
of which involves existence. He writes:
In the form of God no other conception is thus here given than that con
tained in Cogito, ergo sum, wherein Being and thought are inseparably
bound up - though now in the forro of a conception which 1 possess within
me. The whole content of this conception, the Almighty, All-wise, etc., are
predicates which do not make their appearances until later; the content is
simply the content of the Idea bound up with existence.
38
What is extremely striking in the Meditations and in Hegel's refections on them
is that for Descartes the defnition of the thiking subject and the defnition of
God converge. Of course, this is not to suggest for a moment that Descartes wished
to identify the thinking subject and God. On the contrary, Descartes goes to great
12
lengths to show that the thinking self i s fnite. In fact he argues i the Third Medi
dation that if I could have produced the idea of an infnitely perfct being, I would
not sufer fom doubt or fom the gradual accumulation of knowledge - both in
dications of limited knowledge - and I would in fct be perfect, all-knowing, etc.,
this however is not the case, thus I am a fnite subject. But let us recall Hegel's
contention that what really follows from this argument is "simply the content of
the Idea bound up with existence" and that "the Almighty, All-wise, etc ... do not
make their appearance until later." What Descartes has shown by his assertion of
contingency and limitation is that the thinking subject is not the Jude, o-Christian
God. Indeed as Pascal has pointed out, the God of the philosophers is not the God
of Abraham, Isaac, and Job. Descartes' God is simply a being in whom being and
thought coincide, an infnite being. One notes here an equivoca! sense of the word
"God." As was stated above, Heidegger has shown that the relationship of beings to
Being in the Middle Ages was a relationship of creatures to Creator. The primary
"function" of Descartes' God, however, is not to have created the world. In Le
Monde as Descartes tells us in the Discourse, 39 he short-circuits the problem of the
creation of the world by proposing to explain the origin and functioning of a hypo
thetical world not necessarily the real world in which we live. Although Descartes
ends by posing a doctrine of continuous creation, it seems clear that the primary
role of God is not to create the universe but to guarantee the veracity of our
knowledge. God has been displaced fom being the Truth or Being of things and
has become the guarantor of the certainty of the truth of subjectivity.
Descartes' texts can be viewed as the place of tensions and oppositions that
furnished the motor frce of modern philosophy. The most fundamental opposi
tion is that between fnite and infnite - contingent and absolute. In his important
article on Husserl, "Husserl's Concept of the 'Absolute' ," Rudolf Boehm makes a
distinction between two senses of the absolute. He writes, "The absolute of meta
physics is that which exists absolutely (das absolut Seiende). Phenomenology's
absolute is that which is absolutely given."
4
Boehm contends that Husserl, the
author of the Cartesian Meditations, distinguishes between, on the one hand, ab
solute givenness - the type of experience opened by the phenomenological epoch
and introduced, as was noted above, by the hypothesis of the destruction of the
transcendent world which leaves intact the transcendental ego and its entire feld
of experiences - and, on the other hand, a being whose existence is absolute. It
could be claimed that the frst sense of the absolute is produced by certain method
ological operations, and takes no position concerning existence as it might be apart
from the methodological procedures of the phenomenological reduction. If this
were the only sense in which Husserl employed the concept of the absolute, then
there would be no idealism in his thought, in fact there would be no metaphysics
or First Philosophy. Boehm argues efectively that this is not the case and that in
fact the "being" that is given to itself absolutely - transcendental subjectivity -
comes also to be thought as the being which exists absolutely; thus situating Husserl
as an absolute idealist. For our argument, it is not the role that this distinction
plays in Husserl's thought which is of interest, but rather the distinction itself.
1 3
As Hegel has noted, for Descartes the cogito and God have virtually the same
defnition - beings in whom idea and existence coincide. Of course, Descartes does
not identify thinking subject and God, since these beings which are indeed both
absolute are absolute in different ways. The cogto is absolute in the sense that its
existence is gven to itself absolutely without any contingency intervening between
its existence and its thougt of itself, it is indubitable and certain. On the other hand,
God's existence is absolute in the sense that nothing limits it. God cannot not be.
For Descartes' God, not only does his own existence and self-knowledge preclude
contingency, but his relationship with all beings also precludes any contingency in
the sense that everything that exists exists in virtue of his continuous creation;
thus nothing is simply there - given. (One can see that there is a sense in which
for Descartes' God everything is contingent because for Descartes the laws of nature
and even of logic and mathematics exist through an act of God's will which cannot
but be called arbitrary - arbitrary in the sense that they follow from nothing since
God is not even constrained by the laws of logic. To this "irrational" universe Spi
noza will take strong objection.) Boehm argues that it is not possible for Husserl to
keep these two senses of the absolute separate - that the absolutely self-given be
comes the absolutely existing. We might ask if this separation is possible for Des
cartes. Or perhaps, since it certainly is not our intention to claim that Descartes
himself ever became an absolute idealist, it is better to ask how Descartes' concep
tual feld, the conceptual field he bequeathed to modern philosophy, is structured
in terms of the relationship between these "two absolutes." It is not remarkable
that the two great idealists, Hegel and Husserl, both claim to discover in Descartes'
thought tensions which lead them to their own positions. Husserl remarked that
phenomenological idealism was the "secret longing of modern philosophy ." It is
even less striking that the last great Cartesian, Jean-Paul Sartre, committed as he
was to a philosophy of radical finitude - a conception of the situated subject -
and a critic of Husserl's idealism from the very beginning, nonetheless, according
to Merleau-Ponty in Te Vsible and the Invisible, 41 ends up with a conception of
an absolute subject, a subject which although it does not constitute or "create"
being is all the same coextensive with being - a pense de survol (a high-altitude
thinking), a being everywhere and nowhere.
In the following pages it will be argued that the concept of subjectivity, from its
birth in the texts of Descartes, is inherently linked to a secularized version of the
Christian God. Subjectivity will show itself as a concept which "strives" to shed its
fnitude and to "recover" its Divine status, a status it fully achieves in the philoso
phy of Hegel. What is subjectivity for Descartes? Explicitly Descartes speaks of sub
jectivity as the kind of being that I am, which along with the other kinds of being
- extended matter in motion and God - exhaust the types of beings that exist.
According to Heidegger's reading of Descartes, subjectivity is not simply one type
of being among others; rather its advent installs a new epoch of Being, that is, an
altered relationship between Being and beings - a new relation between a being and
the horizon, or feld, in which it can appear as a being. In the Middle Ages, the rela
tionship between beings and Being was a relation of creatures to Creator: to be was
14
to have been created by God and to remain in existence by the continuous act of
God's creation. To be certain of one's salvation was to dwell in the Church estab
lished by Christ, the true Church. Descartes, according to Heidegger, establishes
the threshold of our modernity. The gesture which establishes the cogito as the
basis of philosophy constitutes a irretrievable liberation from the revelational
certainty of the Church and the medieval epoch of Being .
... liberation from the revelational certainty of salvation had to be intrinsically
a feeing to a certainty (Gewissheit) in which man makes secure fr himself
the true as the known of his own knowing (Wissen). That was possible only
through self-liberating man's guaranteeing for himself the certainty of the
knowable. Such a thing could happen, however, only insofr as man decided,
by himself and for himself, what, fr him, should be 'knowable' and what
knowing and the making secure of the known i.e., certainty, should mean.
Descartes' metaphysical task became the fllowing: to create the meta
physical foundation fr the feeing of man to feedom as the self-determina
tion that is certain of itself.42
In Descartes' thought, the subject, the 1, becomes the transcendental ground of
the known and the knowable. What can appear is determined in advance as what
can be represented to a subject, a subject whose self-representation is the ground
of ali that it represents to itself. The relationship of Being to beings is no longer
that of Creator to creatures but rather one of representation to a subject for whom
this representation appears, a subject which also appears to itself - represents itself
representing. "To represent means here: of oneself to set something before oneself
and to make secure what has been set in place, as something set in place."4
3
lt is
this "setting before" that constitutes the being of the object, this object has certi
tude because it is set before a subject which sets itself before itself, a subject whose
being is coextensive with its consciousness of itself. It is the action of "setting be
fore ," of presenting, or objectifying, of proposing, that constitutes the being of
both the object and the fnite ego. lt is the act of proposing that we wish to call
subjectivity. As Heidegger understands the cogito, its sense is not to have returned
to sore sort of interior experience - a domain of "raw fels," e.g. the incom
municableness of a toothache - rather it marks the point where Being becomes
that which is pro-posed by a subject who pro-poses itself to itself. "As far as Heid
egger is concerned, the Cartesian formula (the Cogito ergo sum) says effectively
that: .. .'the presentative function, which essentially is rendered present to itself
(in self-consciousness), poses Being as present-edness .. .'."4 Richardson then con
tinues: "Every being, then, is either object of a subject or 'sub-ject' of a subject:
in either case it is what it is only in reference to the self-conscious subject."45
The subject befre whom a being is either an object or a subject is the activity of
proposing, or one might say, the subjectness of the subject. lt is the representing
as such that forms the horizon of finite being, either object or subject.
Thus fr Heidegger, Descartes is primarily a metaphysician; his philosophy
responds to the question: What is it to be? For Descartes, to be is to be represented
- the horizon of Being is the activity of representing or proposing.
15
Only where thinking thinks itself, is it absolutely ratheratical, i.e., a taking
cognizance of that which we already have. Insofr as thinking and positing
directs itself toward itself, it fnds the following: whatever and in whatever
sense anything ray be asserted, the asserting and thinking is always an '/
think.' Thinking is always an '/ think,' ego cogto. Therein lies: I ar, sum.
Cogito, sum - this is the highest certainty lying irmediately in the proposi
tion as such. In 'I posit' the 'I' as the positor is co- and pre-posited as that
which is already present, as what is. The being of what is is deterrined out
of the 'I ar' as the certainty of the positing.
4
Seen fror this point of view, Descartes' accorplishrent is not the transforration
of ontology into episterology, as Richard Rorty contends,
47
whereby the proble
ratic of representation becores an episterological probler inasruch as the on
tological probleratic which subtends it is occulted away. As an espiterological
issue the probleratic of representation could be posed in the fllowing ranner:
if what the subject, the ego, has in its rind is a representation of the exterior
world - a representation which at least in sore respects claims to correspond to
the "exterior" world - then the probler, no doubt insoluble, presents itself as an
atterpt to fnd sore way to justify this alleged correspondence. The "probler"
is insoluble because there is no corron reasure between the "interior" represen
tation and the "exterior" world whch it allegedly represents. Viewed for this
perspective, the history of rodern philosophy is a chronicle of the various atterpts
to discover a solution to this probler, or to lve wthout a solution, or to dissolve
the probler. Fror our point of view, this reading is not false, the episterological
intentions of a Kant or a Hume are indubitable. Rather we would say that it is a
retaphysical reading of a retaphysical text.
What is for Heidegger a retaphysical text, or a retaphysical reading of a text?
On the one hand, retaphysics is generated, according to hir, by the ontological
difference; on the other hand, retaphysics is defned by him in terrs of its in
ability to think the ontological difference. To put it sirply, the ontological dif
frence is the diference between beings and Being. At this point one hopes that
it is no longer necessary to defend Heidegger against charges of rysticisr, religious
obscurantisr, etc. Indeed, Being, even with a capital letter, is not God, or the ob
ject of sore obscure rystical intuition granted only to those who live in the Black
Forest. Being, fr Heidegger, is the horzon in which beings - things, persons,
animals, syrbols, etc. - revea therselves as things, persons, animals, syrbols,
etc. In the preceding pages we have spoken of objects and egos as beings, and re
presentation as their Being. Thus Being was viewed as the process by which objects
and egos are posed as beings. The notion of Being is in no way intrinsically con
nected to rysticisr or religion. The ontological difference is the difference be
tween the Being process and the beings which are posed as beings in this process.
Heidegger considers the ontological diference as constitutive of retaphysics
properly so-called, while, at the same time, retaphysics is consttuted by the for
getfulness of Being and also by the forgetfulness of the ontological difference. If
Being - the Being process, Being as horizon - is forgotten, then the ontological
16
diference is also forgotten by being transfrmed in to a hierarchy of beings. In me
taphysics, the relationship of beings to Being is thought of as the relationship of
one type of being to another "higher" or "lower" type of being. Metaphysics as
the thought of beings as beings was constituted for the frst time in the thought of
Plato where the ontological difference was forgotten and transformed into the
hierarchy of sensible being and super-sensible being - mundane thing and super
sensible idea. This transfrmation of the ontological difference into metaphysical
hierarchy is not sore sort of mistake or error made by Plato. lt was, according to
Heidegger, prepared fr in pre-Socratic thought and is itself - this forgetfulness of
Being - a moment in the history of Being. Now let us return to the texts of Des
cartes with these Heideggerian reflections in rnd. According to Heidegger, Des
cartes' cogto installs an epoch of Being in which the relationship of beings to
Being is the relationship of object, be it either thing or ego, to the activity of pro
posing. Thus the ontological diference asserts itself as proposed to pro-posing, this
ontologcal diference may not be thought as such within metaphysics; instead it is
transformed in to a metaphysical hierarchy, whereby the texts of Descartes are
read, for example by Descartes himself, as involving fundamentally the relationship
between two types of beings - thinking being, the Ego, and extended being, the
World.
lt is our contention that Descartes' identification of the individual ego with
pro-posing as such - the subjectness of the subject - both within his own texts
and within the conceptual apparatus that he bequeaths to modern philosophy,
generates a tension. Within metaphysical discourse this tension will be resolved by
the identifcation of the proposing as such with a subject which can no longer be
considered as individual or finite, a subject which must be absolute in both senses
of the term evoked above - given to itself absolutely and existing absolutely. This
tension first reveals itself in the conflict between the autobiographical form of Des
cartes' Discourse on Method and its metaphysical content - Descartes' literary and
philosophical projects. The autobiographical intention of Descartes is clear; in part
one of the Discourse he writes:
In this Discourse I shall be very happy to show the paths I have followed,
and to set forth my l ife as in a picture, so that everyone may judge of it for
himself.. .. My design is not here to teach the Method which everyone should
follow in order to promote the good conduct of his Reason, but only to show
in what manner 1 have endeavoured to conduct my own [Emphasis mine] .4
8
lndeed, Descartes begins to give us a chronicle of his fascinations and subsequent
disillusions with various discourses: the study of antiquity, mathematics, ethics
(''which praises virtue but often practices patricide"!) theolog, philosophy and
all the sciences which draw their first principles fom philosophy. The cause of his
disillusion is in each case the same: lack of certainty. None of these discourses are
funded on certain and indubitable principies.
In the Discourse Descartes tells us autobiographically what he shows us sys
tematically in the Meditations, namely, that each of the constituted discourses is
subject to doubt and thus disqualified fom serving as a true beginning for philoso-
17
phy. In the Discourse as in the Meditations, this disillusionment with constituted
science leads Descartes to the self, " ... .I one day formed the resolution of also
making myself an object of study ."49 Thus ends the first part of the Discourse;
part two begins in an explicitly autobiographical manner, "I was in Germany, to
which country 1 had been attracted by the wars which are not yet at an end."50
It situates Descartes in time and place, its tense addresses a contemporary reader.
What fllows is an attempt to give an autobiographical discourse. lt begins by
elaborating a chronicle of the decisions made, the positions taken by Descartes'
"I"; decisions and positions which ultimately will destroy the very possibility of
autobiographical discourse. An autobiography is, among other things, an history
of the "I" - e .g., the circumstances in which 1 found myself, how I transformed
these circumstances and was transformed by them, etc. The positions taken by
Descartes in part two of the Discourse are various strategies by which the "I"
disengages itself from all frms of historical inherence. Far from being a recon
struction of the history of the "I," i is rather a chronicle of the process by which
the "I" is dehistoricized.
Descartes begins his chronicle by telling us of his preference for things planned
by one man.
One of the frst of the considerations that occurred to me was that there is
very often less perfection in works composed of severa! portions, and car
ried out by the hands of various masters, than in those in which one in
dividual alone has worked ... .In the same way also, those ancient cities which,
originally mere villages, have become in the process of time great towns, are
usually badly constructed in comparison with those which are regularly laid
out on a plain by a surveyor who is free to follow his own ideas mphasis
mine].51
Which is to say that Descartes fnds more perfection in cities which architecturally
have no history. Next he turns to the subject of political constitutions.
Thus 1 imagined that those people who were once half-savage, and who have
become civilized only by slow degrees, merely forming their laws as the dis
agreeable necessities of their crimes and quarrels constrained them, could not
succeed in establishing so good a system of government as those who, fom
the time they first care together as a communities, carried into efect the
constitution laid down by sore prudent legislator. 52
For Descartes, the constitution of Sparta is praiseworthy even though many of its
laws considered individually were "strange and contrary to good morals." The
Spartan constitution i admirable because "being drawn up by one individual,
they (the laws) all tended towards the same end."5
3
All of which is to say that
Descartes prefers societies which have no constitutional or juridical history. At the
end of his chronicle Descartes reflects on the misfortune of having had a childhood.
18
Again 1 thought that since we have all been children before being men, and
since it has for long fallen to us to be governed by our appetites and by our
teachers (who often enough contradicted one another, and none of whom
perhaps counselled us always for the best), it is almost impossible that our
judgents should be so excellent or solid as they should have been had we
had complete use of our reason since our birth, and had we been guided by its
means alone.
54
Descartes would prefer to be a man without a personal history. Of course, it
will be said that such a desire is impossible, but is it? It shall be argued that at
least for Descartes it is not impossible. Methodological doubt is his strategy for
annulling the efects of his inherence in history - natural, educational, and personal
- namely, his opinions. "But as regards all the opinions which up to this time 1 had
embraced, 1 thought I could not do better than endeavour once and for all to sweep
them completely away .... "
55
As is well known, methodological doubt leads Des
cartes to his fmous "I think, therefore I ar
i
".
5
6
Remembering the frst sentence
of the second part of the Discourse which read "I was in Germenay .... " one must
ask whether the "I" of the "I think" or of the "I am" is the same "I" who was in
Germany? It is our contention that they are not the same. The "I" of the "I think"
or the "I am" is an "I" emptied of all fnite determinations; it is the "I" in which,
as Hegel noted, the identification of being and thought parallels the definition of
God. This "I" is not simply an ego, or a subject; it is rather the subjectness of the
subject, through which both ego and extended things come to be posed as objects.
As Heidegger has shown, this "I" is pro-posing as such. Therefore, it cannot have
been in Germany, since this "I" - the subjectness of the subject - is the very pro
cess of pro-posing, of re-presenting, by which both Germany and the "I" who
visited there are posed as objects (egen stand). Moreover, it is not possible to
reconcile this apparent disjunction in terms of a simple process of epistemological
abstraction, whereby all aspects of the existence of the "I" other than its capacity
to represent have been abstracted - the "I" insofar as it thinks has never been to
Germany. This is an important objection since indeed it has been claimed that,
with Descartes, philosophy has been transformed into epistemology.
This claim has been made most recently by Richard Rorty in his Philosophy and
the Mirror of Nature.
57
In fact Rorty characterizes Cartesian and post- Cartesian
philosophy as one prolonged and tortured effort to construct and justify the nature
of mind as a mirror of nature - the real. It is not possible to contest the epis
temological character of modern philosophy; however, there is reason to suspect
that this epistemology is founded on a deeper level by an ontology. As the psycho
analytical theory of Lacan has shown, mirrors are very curious things. The mirror
which is of no interest fr the four-month-old child becomes an object of delight
and fascination for the eight- or nine-month old. According to Lacan, the being
of the child has been transformed during this interval. In a like manner, it is the
transformation within the history of being that changes the status of the mirror.
As is well known, the mind in Platonic philosophy is not conceptualized as a
mirror which has, or desires to have, a correct copy of reality. Of course, neither
19
does Professor Rorty suggest that this is the case. Nonetheless, it is not as though
the metaphor of a mirror never entered Plato's philosophy. It did, and as one re
calls fom the Republic there are sore people who deal exclusively in copies; how
ever, these people who trafic in correct copies of reality are not philosophers,
rather they are artisans or visual artists. "Then the imitator, I said, is a long way
of the truth, and can do ali things because he lightly touches on a small part of
them, and that part an image."58 The problematic of truth, or wisdom, does not
enter Plato's discourse in terms of correctness, or accuracy, of the copy but in
terms of the distance separating the copy from that which is most properly real.
The plastic artist is denounced not because he distorts or lies, as were Homer and
the tragic poets, but because what he produces is so far from the true reality.
Truth does not exist in the relationship between the copy and the real, rather it
is the real itself.
It is on the basis of a transformation of what it is to be in a transformed on
tology, that epistemology, and in particular an epistemology organized around the
concept of representation, becomes the central focus of modern philosophy. For
Plato, the problematic of truth cannot take the form of a discourse on the ac
curacy of copies because the ancient Greek notion of Being as presencing, truth
as alethei (unconcealment), still operates within his texts. This is the case even
though, as Heidegger argued in "Plato's Doctrine of Truth", the archaic conception
of Being and Truth co-exists with the seeds of what will become the modern con
ception of Truth as correctness. It is in terms of Descartes' implicit ontology that
one must read his transformation of philosophy in to epistemology.
Returning to the question of the intertwining of the ego and what Heidegger
calls the subjectness of the subject, the problematic of the empirical ego and the
transcendental ego, Descartes tells us in the Discourse59 that his text may be read
as a "fable". Profssor Dalia Judovitz in her article "Autobiographical Discourse
and Critica! Praxis in Descartes" refects on the meaning of the fable as a literary
genre and what its use implies in Descartes' texts.
As literary genres (fable or tableau) they both present a conflict of the
didactic vs. the narrative function: they represent or exemplify a subject
within an historical context only to suggest that the true intuition of that
context transcends its narrative dimension .... The Discourse as a fable both
concretizes the 'I' as thinking substance through narrative which must in the
end be abolished .... The moral of the fble aspires through the particularity
of its example to reflect on the nature of the transcendental subject, thereby
"transcending" its own narrative (representative description) as a specific
instance.60
Indeed after one has discovered the moral of the fble, the little fox or the rabbit
who communicated it to us may be forgotten. The story was merely the occasion
through which the moral in its universality emerged. The ego who went to Ger
many, is not the same ego whose self presence serves as the focal poin t of Car
tesian philosophy. The frmer is a real being, the latter is the "being process" -
20
the ontological difference as conceived within metaphysics, the place where the
pro-posing by which ob-ects become ob-jects takes place. Whereas the subjectness
of the subject is the pro-posing as such, the empirical ego is an object proposed.
This relationsip of object, including ego, to the process of pro-posing is not for
mulated as such within the texts of Descartes. It is operative there but cannot be
indicated as such; this is because, as Heidegger argues, within metaphysics the
question of the relationship of Being to beings is "forgotten," only to be replaced
by the question of the hierarchical relationship between diferent types of being.
In the writings of Descartes, it is the role played by God and His relationship
to finite being, both thinking and extended, which occults the subjectness of the
subject. Within this hierarchical way of thinking, the place of coincidence between
being and thought - absolute being - is shared ambiguously by both the Cgito
and God. Likewise the role of object, that which is pre-sented, is shared ambiguous
ly by both the fnite ego and extended opaque things. The ego of the ego cogito,
whose self-representation is the condition fr the presentation of all objects,
6
1
is,
in its relation to God, itself a fnite object. The ambiguity of the role of the subject
in Descartes - as seen in the contrast between the subject whose self-representa
tion is the condition for all representation and the subject considered as an object,
albeit as ego an object of a different kind from extended objects, as a thinking non
extended substance - is generated and sustained by the equally ambiguous relation
ship between the subject and God. As was noted above with reference to the
thought of Hegel, the thinking ego shares with the God of the ontological proof
the status of a being in which thought and being are united; on the other hand,
this ego is to God as a creature - a finite being - is to its infinite creator. In his
Cartesian Meditations , Husserl remarks that Descartes comes to the very threshold
of transcendental philosophy but <oes not cross it.
Descartes introduced the apparently insignifcant but actually fateful change
whereby the ego becomes a substantia cogitans, a separate human 'mens sive
animus', and the point of departure for inferences according to the principie
of causality - in short, the change by virtue of which Descartes became the
fther of transcendental realism, an absurd position ....
6
2
What Husserl means is that Descartes <oes not make a distinction between the
empirical ego and the transcendental ego; and thus Cartesian philosophy arrives
at what Husserl refers to as the "absurd" position of one mundane entity being
the condition of the appearance of all other mundane entities - transcendental
realism. Husserl, however, <oes not ofer any suggestions as to why Descartes
<oes not cross the threshold to transcendental philosophy properly so-called.
Nietzsche, refecting on Darwi
r
's theory of evolution, remarks that even if
one wanted to one could not return to Christian theology because a monkey bars
the threshold. For Descartes, the threshold of transcendental philosophy is barred
not by a monkey but rather by God. It is God who both poses the ego as fnite
being and who also guarantees the veracity of its knowledge - its representations.
As is well known, there is no simple point-by-point correspondence between re-
21
presentation and object. It is clear from Descartes' refection on the wax in the
Second Meditation that only certain types of representations have real counter
parts in the objective world. Having made a distinction between what later will
be called by Locke primary and secondary qualities, Descartes contends that only
our representation of extension corresponds to what exists in the real world. What
is signifcant for our argument is that, at least, this privileged domain of represen
tation corresponds to the world as it exists in-itself; this correspondence is guaran
teed by God's own veracity. Thus for Descartes there is in a certain sense a place
for the distinction between reality and appearance. The tasty, sweet-smelling
wax is an appearance, reality being simply matter extended in space. The relation
ship between "reality" and "appearance" must be strictly of a causal nature: ex
tended being, the real world, must cause our subjective appearances. The concep
tion of subjectivity as constituting is excluded. The ego's active certainty of its
presence to itself in reflection, its self-representation, is the basis of the representa
tion of all other objects; however, its transcendental function must end here - all
"other" knowledge must be obtained by an "objective" scientific method. For our
argument it appears that this is the only role that subjectivity can play in Cartesian
thought. The subject must remain passive if God is to guarantee knowledge of
things as they are in-themselves; it may not impose its form on our judgments and
representations, for, as Kant saw clearly, the conception of an active subjectivity
is attained only at the expense of forgoing the claim that our knowledge is a knowl
edge of things as they are in-themselves. Thus it has become evident that the mod
em concept of subjectivity is both installed and arrested in the texts of Descartes.
For the subject to regain its absolute status it is necessary fr that which is
other than the "fnite" subject to be conceived of as in fct an alienation of this
subject - the subject itself in otherness fom itself. A transformation of the rela
tionship between subject and object must be efected. Within the "absurd posi
tion" of transcendental realism, the relationship between subject and object is
causal, since both the fnite subject and the extended object are posed as objects
by God. The metaphor of knowledge as a mirror of nature is thus generated; and
the accuracy of this mirror is guaranteed by the veracity of God. This "epistemolo
gical" cul-de-sac is "resolved" in the history of modern philosophy by the making
explicit of the implcit ontology of the subject. This means that the subject will
no longer be viewed as a being surrounded by other beings which it must represent
to itself, rather the subject will come to be identifed explicitly with what we have
called, following Heidegger, the subjectness of the subject - pro-posing as such.
lf in the philosophy of Kant the problematic of representing and truth as cor
respondence are retained, the metaphor of subjectivity as mirror is displaced by
that of subjectivity as a process; the active positing role of subjectivity has become
explicit. The price exacted by this explicitation of the subjectness of the subject is
an agnosticism concerning our knowledge of the "real," the thing-in-itself. Finally,
it is within German idealism that the positing character of subjectivity becomes
fully explicit, and it is within German idealism that the problematic of epistemolo
gy is explcitly rejected.
22
For Descartes the subject's presence to itself is absolutely certain, but the truth
of its knowledge of objects must be guaranteed by the veracity of God. The aim of
the Hegelian dialectic is to ascend to a position of self-certaity. However, for
Hegel the self is no longer the unmediated presence of the self to itself, rather the
self is mediated through the process of the dialectic. It is a self returned fom its
odyssey i otheress. At the end of Te Phenomenology of Spirit,
63
what natural
consciousness perceived as the other than itself, appears for us as the self i other
ness. Certainty has come to equal Truth and the Subject has become Absolute
Spirit.
NOTES
l . Martin Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture," The Question Concering Technology
and Other Essays, trans. Willia Lowitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1 977) p. 140.
2. lbid., p. 127.
3. Martin Heidegger, "Overcoming Metaphysics," The End ofPhilosophy, trans. Joan Stam
baugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1973) p. 95.
4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind," The Primacy of Perception, trans. Carleton
Dallery (Evanston, I. : Northwestern Univ. Press, 1964) p. 1 82.
5 . Hiram Caton, Te Ogin of Subjectivity: An Essay on Descartes (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale Univ. Press, 1973).
6. Rene Descartes, Meditations of Fist Philosophy in Philosophical Works of Descartes,
trans. Haldane & Ross (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1931)
7. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenolog,
trans. David Carr (Evanston, I. : Northwestern Univ. Press, 1970)
8. Edmund Husserl, Cartesin Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nij
hof, 1960).
9. G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel ' Lectures on Te Histor of Philosophy, trans. Haldane & Simson
(New York: The Humanities Press, 1974).
10. lmmanuel Kant, Critique of Pre Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St.
Martin 's Press, 1965).
1 1 . Te Orign of Subjectivity: An Essay on Descartes, pp. 1 97-199.
12. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenolog of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New
York: The Humanities Press, 1967) p. 369.
13. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl's Teory of
Signs, trans. David Allison (Evanston, I. : Northwester Univ. Press, 1973).
14. Michel Foucault, Te Archeolog of Knowledge, trans. Sheridan Smith (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1972) p. 149.
15. Ibid., p. 1 51 .
16. Michel Foucault, Te Histor of Sexuality, Vol. I , trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1978).
17. Hegel's Lectures on Te History ofPhilosophy, Vol. III, op.cit., pp. 89-90.
1 8. Ibid., p. 101 .
19. Richard Popkin, The History of Skepticism: From Erasmus to Descartes (New York:
Harper & Row, 1964).
20. Ibid., p. 7.
21. Martin Heideger, "Metaphysics as History of Being," The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan
Stambaug (New York: Harper & Row, 1973) p. 23.
22. Te History of Skepticism, op.cit., p. 2.
23 . Ibid.
23
24. Martin Heidegger, "Plato's Doctrine of Truth," trans. John Barlow, Philosophy in the
Twentieth Century, Vol. 3 (New York: Random House, 1962).
25. Plato, Te Republic in Te Dialogues of Plto, trans. B. Jowett (New York: Random
House) .
26. Te History of Skepticism, op.cit., p. 3.
27. lbid., p. 2.
28. lbid., p. 7 .
29. lbid., p. 8.
30. "The Age of the World Picture," The Question Concering Technology and Other Essays,
op.cit. , p. 14 7.
31. Ren Descartes, Te Search After Tuth in Philsophical Works of Descartes, Vol. 1 ,
trans. Haldane & Ross (New York: Dover Publications, lnc., 1931) p. 310.
32. Meditations, op.cit., p. 145.
33. lbid., p. 148.
34. lbid. , p. 150.
35. lbid., p. 1 53.
36. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W.R. Boyce
Gibson (New York: Collier Books, 1962) .
37. Hegel' Lectures on Te History of Philosophy, Vol. III, op.cit., p. 229.
38. lbid., p. 237.
39. Ren Descartes, Discourse on Method in Philosophical Works of Descartes, Vol. 1, trans.
Haldane & Ross (New York: Dover Publications, lnc., 1 931).
40. Rudolf Boehm, "Husserl's Concept of the 'Absolute'," The Phenomenolog of Husserl,
ed. R.O. Elveton (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970) p. 1 76.
41 . Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Te Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston,
Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1 968) .
42. "The Age of the World Picture," The Question Concering Technolog and Other Essays,
op.cit., p. 148.
43. lbid., p. 149.
44. William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Trough Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1 963) p. 3 24.
45. lbid., p. 325.
46 . Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing?, trans. W.B. Barton & Vera Deutsch (Chicago: Henry
Regnery Co. , 1 967) p. 104.
47. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mi"or of Nature (Princeton, N. J. : Princeton Univ.
Press, 1980) pp. 1 31 -139.
48. Ren Descartes, Discourse on Method in Philosophical Works ofDescartes, Vol. 1, trans.
Haldane & Ross (New York: Dover Publications, lnc., 1931) p. 83.
49. lbid., p. 87.
50. lbid.
5 1 . lbid. , pp. 87-88.
52. lbid., p. 88.
53 . lbid.
54. lbid.
55. lbid., p. 89.
56. Meditations, op.cit., p. 1 01 .
57. Phosophy and the Mi"' of Nature, op.cit., pp. 1 31 -139.
58. Te Republic, op.cit., p. 855.
59. Discourse on Method, op.cit., p. 83 .
60. Dalia Judovitz, "Autobiographical Discourse and Critica! Praxis in Descartes" (unpub-
lished manuscript) .
6 1 . What is a Ting?, op.cit., p. 1 04.
62. Cartesin Meditations, op.cit., p. 24.
63. G.W.F. Hegel, Te Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J.B. Baillie (London: George Allen &
Unwin Ltd., 1964) .