"GENEVA, April 20, 1849.--It is six years [Footnote: Amiel left Geneva for
Paris and Berlin in April, 1848, the preceding year, 1841-42, having been spent
in Italy and Sicily.] to-day since I last left Geneva. How many journeys, how
many impressions, observations, thoughts, how many forms of men and things have
since then passed before me and in me! The last seven years have been the most
important of my life: they have been the novitiate of my intelligence, the
initiation of my being into being.
"Three snowstorms this afternoon. Poor blossoming plum-trees and peach trees!
What a difference from six years ago, when the cherry-trees, adorned in their
green spring dress and laden with their bridal flowers, smiled at my departure
along the Vaudois fields, and the lilacs of Burgundy threw great gusts of
perfume into my face!..."
-- The Third Published Entry of the Intimate Journal of Henri-Frédéric
Amiel
---
Where was I seven years ago? I was in my final semester of my undergraduate
degree in History. What was I thinking then?
Here is a paper I wrote seven years ago (edited by myself today):
The question:
"Through his method how would Descartes possibly respond to the condition of
selfhood in Shakespeare and/or Donne? Beginning with an analysis of the method
and working through a close reading of specific texts by Shakespeare and/or
Donne, evaluate both the strengths and weaknesses of the Cartesian
understanding of the subject."
The answer:
The fundamental issue that I take with this question is this: the products of
the Cartesian method cannot and do not need to be rendered into an "objective"
reality. Academics have mutilated the Cartesian method for centuries in this
fashion.
The question itself illustrates the reductionist and mechanistic interpretation
of education and “Cartestianism” that somehow remains synonymous with
Descartes, despite most thinkers since the mid-eighteenth century ignoring his
actual ontological state and total intellectual context in favor of robotic
straw men.
Ironically, they fall prey to their own so-called “Cartesian legacy” despite
nominal oppposition to it.
The Cartesian method, if properly utilized (that is for understanding and
perceiving, and not conceiving, proving, manipulating, participating within a
discourse, nor attempting to render reality into a discourse), succeeds in its
intended goals.
It is an algorithm to eject oneself out of artificially imposed social
conventions and consensus reality. And by doing so, achieve wisdom.
It does not preclude participation within the artifices of social convention or
consensus reality, but it allows one to act freely within it rather than to
react passively to it as an empty vessel.
If properly implemented, it destroys any semblance of credentialism and
ossified thinking. The idea that the method renders a subjective understanding
into a linear and simplistic mechanistic web could not be further from the
truth.
It is only when the other demands the subject render their reality into
language catered to the other that such one-dimensionality comes into play.
This is largely, if not entirely, due to the lack of exposure the Modern has to
the entirety of the human condition.
Rather than practice philosophy, the Modern reads it.
Rather than create history, the Modern writes about it.
Rather than live, the Modern is lived through fictions.
Rather than experience suffering, the Modern avoids all mention of it.
This is all linked to the distancing effect (Verfremdungseffekt) that the
generation of discourse necessarily creates when the actors within it are not
in the immediate vicinity of each other.
If one cannot lose oneself in the other, one must create a concept of the other
and be trapped by it, as an idea of the other can never have more reality than
the other itself.
This is not a Cartesian legacy; this is the severing of communication from
reality and the natural result of literacy creating experience rather than
experience creating literature.
The conflation between Descartes, a concept of Descartes, his works, and his
ignorant “Cartesian” followers only validates this.
Ironically, this is precisely what the Cartesian method set out to obliterate.
The actual context of the development of the method--that Descartes was
responding to the unthinking credibility given to Aristotle simply through
social convention--shows that Descartes was actively resisting the imposition
of methodical primacy upon reality.
Descartes liberated himself from authority and dependency in his thought and
sought to liberate other sentient individuals from the same.
Tragically, the individuals he was seeking to free viewed the Liberator as
Conqueror and the rest is a mess of misinterpretations, misapplications, and a
thoroughly authoritarian and dependent epistemology.
Let's move on to method itself.
The first step:
“Never to accept anything as true that I did not plainly know to be such;
that is to say, carefully to avoid hasty judgments and prejudice; and to
include nothing more in my judgments than what presented itself to my mind so
clearly and so distinctly that I had no occasion to call it in doubt.”
It seems self-evident that Descartes is using _to know_ in the sense of
episteme in direct opposition to doxa.
He is constructing a provisional model of the universe in which only that
belief which is unassailable is justified to be true and treated as knowledge.
If one assumes that truth has subjective certainty as an effect, any subjective
knowledge that must be externalized (i.e. verification depends upon external
authority, reified or no) cannot be true knowledge.
The intuitive understanding of this aspect is the first step to successfully
employing the Cartesian method.
An individual must know subjectively and completely that absolutely everything
one thought one knew is not necessarily true and in doubt.
This was known as the blackening of the lapis philosophorum.
The second step:
“To divide each of the difficulties I would examine into as many parts as
possible and as was required in order better to resolve them.”
The purpose of this second stage is to actually deconstruct all belief
previously held to be knowledge.
It is the use of _res cogitans_ in the same manner as the first step.
However, rather than arriving at true knowledge of doubt, one doubts until one
cannot doubt _more_.
In other words, the individual moves from knowing that one knows nothing to
actually deconstructing the habitual conventions and impressions that one
subjectively holds to be knowledge until each is reduced back into the category
of individual (i.e. one and indivisible, inseparable) belief.
Every iota of cognitive information thought to be subjectively derived but is
in truth dependent upon externalities is doubted in totality.
Subjective verification is purged of all reliance upon perceived objectivities
and external authorities, of which almost all subjective pseudo-knowledge
eventually resolves.
This was known as the whitening of the lapis philosophorum.
The third step:
“To conduct my thoughts in an orderly fashion, by commencing with those
objects that are simplest and easiest to know, in order to ascend little by
little, as by degrees, in the knowledge of the most composite things, and by
supposing an order even among those things that do not naturally precede one
another.”
Once the mind has been purified of all false-knowledge (i.e. knowledge
predicated upon something other than knowledge of the self via _res cogitans_),
the use of a liberated reason becomes possible.
From this point, one can receive understanding directly from universal
experience without reference to externalities or conceptualization.
This was known as the yellowing of the lapis philosophorum.
The fourth step:
“Everywhere to make enumerations so complete and reviews so general that I
was assured of having omitted nothing.”
At this point, all understanding is intuitive and without conceptualization.
Thus, it is not limited by the rationalistic constraints imposed by the need
for discourse. All perceptions become self-evident. It becomes possible to
experience the inconceivable (i.e. God, the One, Naturata naturans. etc. ad
infinitum).
The purification of the ontology is now complete, affording a perfect
subjunctive capacity. It becomes possible to have emergent ideas from the
interplay of pure foundational experience.
What was divided is now whole—the Cartesian subject is now unified with the
universe without doubt, dependence, or ignorance. One becomes the perfect
embodiment of the divine—the final stage, the reddening of the lapis
philosophorum.
As to the “weaknesses” of this Cartesian understanding of the subject, its goal
is fundamentally at ends with discourse, which is purely a socially-contingent
activity. By definition, this makes all discourse occurring around the idea of
Cartesian understanding static and hypocritical.
The Cartesian method eliminates doubt. Discourse requires doubt (or “interest”)
to operate. Ergo, the true Cartesian method cannot be implicated in a change to
discourse obsessed with method.
This is the reucrring trend of epistemic breaks facilitated by a charismatic
founder.
Those who successfully achieve Liberation withdraw from the discourse; those
who do not, but think they have, participate within the same discourse under a
new lexicon pilfered from the initiation materials authored by the charismatic.
This has occurred numerous times throughout history. A few examples:
* Christianity and secular politics
* The Franciscans and monastic possessions
* Marxists and the resulting Communist Party
A coherent and accurate vision of the former precludes participation within the
latter.
Those who believe that the two can be reconciled are schizophrenic at best and
hypocrites at worst.
G.K. Chesterton said it best, talking specifically of the Christian ideal, but
the sentiment is convenient to the Cartesian method:
“The great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean
over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the
Middle Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and
rout. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been
found difficult; and left untried.”
The Cartesian subject cannot be rendered objectively, as it is fundamentally
beyond the limits of conceptualization.
In other words, the experience of the Cartesian subject is ineffable and
transcendental.
By fully living out the Method, the subject sacrifices all possible accuracy of
representation within social realities for eternal Truth that cannot be
conveyed to others through human language, but only pointed towards.
The works of Descartes were pointers, nothing more, nothing less. They are the
instructions for the journey, not the destination.
To treat them otherwise will result in very bizarre and incoherent pathologies,
oxymoronic as Christian Rulers, wealthy Fransiscans, and authoritarian
Communists.
Literalism is, if not the death of truth, the harbinger of unreality.
When the spirit is violated for the letter, false justifications, ritualism,
and magical thinking, untethered to reality, are certain to follow in its wake.
