We are raised to assume that thought depends upon our sense of self, or self-consciousness. This assumption is heir to a Cartesian revolution with which a self (moi or ego) posits itself as something that thinks (res cogitans). Is the “I” spoken of the one speaking? Can the posited self fully account for its speech? Or is there a hiatus between the speaker and speech itself? Is there one between thought and a thinking-thing (res cogitans)? The thing is always somewhere; it is always determined; but is thought not by nature indeterminate? Does thought not determine itself into a thing or other? Does thought not fall into its own determinations? Is thought nothing at all, or nothing intelligible, prior to determining itself into an “I”? Or is it the nature of thought to determine itself always, even to lose itself in its determinations? Thought thinking itself; thought as self-determination. Thought finally thinking itself as “I,” finding itself in a determination, giving rise to a determination that reflects thought itself: the mirror-image of thought itself. Thought’s revelation. An I that is being thought, even as thought can be said to finally be its own determination, insofar as the “I” looks back at thought as itself, identifying itself with its own source. Whence the possibility of an ascent to the origin of our world of things. Yet, with Descartes, the ego stands as the formal basis for progress, a building, a constructing. Far from pointing back to the original indeterminacy of thought, the Cartesian revelation of thought discloses a future-oriented, self-empowering, growing pretense of thought, as if the determination of thought could appropriate thought’s indeterminationfor itself, whereby the mask of thought would emerge as thought itself. Now, once the pretense is achieved; once thought’s indetermination is reduced to a thinking thing; there and then is its being defined—at first nominally, with Descartes, but finally historically with the consolidation of a Cartesian utopia.1
The reduction of thought to a thinking thing supports the rise of a new being that is determined without being determined, a form of existence that is only symbolically somewhere, or somewhere in a speech it is somehow detached from, as a merchant is detached from his tokens of exchange. In a mercenary way; bureaucratically, mechanically, amorally—in a Machiavellian manner.
But now, the I determined by thought is a place; as a mask of thought, it hosts the world of thought in speech. The I is the locus of poetry, of imitation, or fictions; including the Cartesian one of a thing that thinks autonomously in its world; a thing that gains autonomy by filling itself with its world, by making its world its own, by swallowing its universe in symbolic forms, by mastering nature, by taming it, by inscribing it within an arena of taming fictions, a theatrical cage of rules and regulations defined by the new “I”. Cogito ergo sum: I am the one thinking, therefore I deserve the world for myself—the world now destined to belong to me, not as a free gift, but as a mechanical appropriation. Cartesius tyrannus. Foremost dealer of cards (des cartes), our world’s master croupier.
1The framework for a shift from Descartes’s ego to the establishment of its own new world is demonstrated with accurate precision in Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra. Mineola (NY): Dover, 1992: 197-211.
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