ABSTRACT
There is, however, no question of justifying realism, and there is an element of final truth in the Cartesian return of things or ideas to the self. The very experience of transcendent things is possible only provided that their project is borne, and discovered, within myself. When I say that things are transcendent, this means that I do not possess them, that I do not circumambulate them; they are transcendent to the extent that I am ignorant of what they are, and blindly assert their bare existence. Now what meaning can there be in asserting the existence of one knows not what? If there can be any truth at all in this assertion, it is in so far as I catch a glimpse of the nature or essence to which it refers, in so far, for instance, as my vision of the tree as a mute ek-stase into an individual thing already envelops a certain thought about seeing and a certain thought about the tree. It is, in short, in so far as I do not merely encounter the tree, am not simply confronted with it, but discover in this existent before me a certain nature, the notion of which I actively evolve. In so far as I find things round about me, this cannot be because they are actually there, for, ex hypothesi, I can know nothing of this factual existence. The fact that I am capable of recognizing it is attributable to my actual contact with the thing, which awakens within me a primordial knowledge of all things, and to my finite and determinate perceptions’ being partial manifestations of a power of knowing which is coextensive with the world and unfolds it in its full extent and depth. If we imagine a space in itself with which the perceiving subject contrives to coincide, for example, if I imagine that my hand perceives the distance between two points as it spans it, how could the angle formed by my fingers, and indicative of that distance, come to be judged, unless it were so to speak measured out by the inner operation of some power residing in neither object, a power which, ipso facto, becomes able to know, or rather effect, the relation existing between them? If it be insisted that the ‘sensation in my thumb’ and that in my first finger are at any rate ‘signs’ of the distance, how could these sensations come to have in themselves any means of signifying the relationship between points in space, unless they were already situated on a path running from one to the other, and unless this path in its turn were not only traversed by my fingers as they open, but also
constituted as a sign?’1 For the picture of knowledge at which we arrived in describing the subject situated in his world, we must, it seems, substitute a second, according to which it constructs or constitutes this world itself, and this one is more authentic than the first, since the transactions between the subject and the things round about it are possible only provided that the subject first of all causes them to exist for itself, actually arranges them round about itself, and extracts them from its own core. The same applies with greater force in acts of spontaneous thought. The Cartesian cogito, which is the theme of my reflection, is always beyond what I bring to mind at the moment. It has a horizon of significance made up of a great number of thoughts which occurred to me as I was reading Descartes and which are not now present, along with others which I feel stirring within me, which I might have, but never have developed. But the fact that it is enough to utter these three syllables in my presence for me to be immediately directed towards a certain set of ideas, shows that in some way all possible developments and clarifications are at once present to me. ‘Whoever tries to limit the spiritual light to what is at present before the mind always runs up against the Socratic problem. “How will you set about looking for that thing, the nature of which is totally unknown to you? Which, among the things you do not know, is the one which you propose to look for? And if by chance you should stumble upon it, how will you know that it is indeed that thing, since you are in ignorance of it?” (Meno, 80D.)2 A thought really transcended by its objects would find them proliferating in its path without ever being able to grasp their relationships to each other, or finding its way through to their truth. It is I who reconstitute the historical cogito, I who read Descartes’ text, I who recognize in it an undying truth, so that finally the Cartesian cogito acquires its significance only through my own cogito, and I should have no thought of it, had I not within myself all that is needed to invent it. It is I who assign to my thought the objective of resuming the action of the cogito, and I who constantly verify my thought’s orientation towards this objective, therefore my thought must forestall itself in the pursuit of this aim, and must
already have found what it seeks, otherwise it would not seek it. We must define thought in terms of that strange power which it possesses of being ahead of itself, of launching itself and being at home everywhere, in a word, in terms of its autonomy. Unless thought itself had put into things what it subsequently finds in them, it would have no hold upon things, would not think of them, and would be an ‘illusion of thought’.3 A sensible perception or a piece of reasoning cannot be facts which come about in me and of which I take note. When I consider them after the event, they are dispersed and distributed each to its due place. But all this is merely what is left in the wake of reasoning and perception which, seen contemporaneously, must necessarily, on pain of ceasing to hang together, take in simultaneously everything necessary to their realization, and consequently be present to themselves with no intervening distance, in one indivisible intention. All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness, failing which it could have no object. At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find, then, a being which immediately recognizes itself, because it is its knowledge both of itself and of all things, and which knows its own existence, not by observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of itself, but through direct contact with that existence. Self-consciousness is the very being of mind in action. The act whereby I am conscious of something must itself be apprehended at the very moment at which it is carried out, otherwise it would collapse. Therefore it is inconceivable that it should be triggered off or brought about by anything whatsoever; it must be causa sui.4 To revert with Descartes from things to thought about things is to take one of two courses: it is either to reduce experience to a collection of psychological events, of which the I is merely the overall name or the hypothetical cause, in which case it is not clear how my existence is more certain than that of any thing, since it is no longer immediate, save at a fleeting instant; or else it is to recognize as anterior to events a field and a system of thoughts which is subject neither to time nor to any other limitation, a mode of existence owing nothing to the event and which is existence as consciousness, a
spiritual act which grasps at a distance and compresses into itself everything at which it aims, an ‘I think’ which is, by itself and without any adjunct, an ‘I am’.5 ‘The Cartesian doctrine of the cogito was therefore bound to lead logically to the assertion of the timelessness of mind, and to the acceptance of a consciousness of the eternal: experimur nos aeternos esse.’6 Accordingly eternity, understood as the power to embrace and anticipate temporal developments in a single intention, becomes the very definition of subjectivity.7
