René Descartes

René Descartes is presented as a founding figure of modern science and as the thinker whose account of the subject makes modernity’s central paradox especially visible: empirical human beings lose their privileged place in nature, even as the subject is elevated into an immaterial, nonsubstantial position. The chapter’s account does not treat this as a simple celebration of human reason. Descartes’s reduction of reality to mechanical matter and his account of mathematical truths as dependent on divine will make scientific objectivity and subjective certainty inseparable from a deeper problem of foundations.

Cartesian Subjectivity and the Loss of Human Privilege

Descartes makes the cogito the starting point of philosophy while reducing reality, including life, to res extensa: matter governed by mechanical laws. The juxtaposition produces the chapter’s basic paradox of modern subjectivity. Empirical humanity is no longer the crown of creation or the highest term in a hierarchy of beings; human beings become elements within the same material reality as everything else. Yet this demotion has a correlate. The subject is not simply another substantial object in the world but a pure, immaterial void, a position from which certainty can be claimed without restoring humanity’s former privileged place.

The chapter therefore distinguishes modern subjectivity from Renaissance humanism. Renaissance thought celebrates humanity as the summit of created beings, whereas modernity begins when that status is lost. The subject’s elevation is not a return to the old image of humanity as sovereign; it emerges through the very division that makes empirical man appear limited and reducible. The result is a form of thought described as antihumanist from its outset: the human being as a natural object is diminished, while the subject is located outside the positive substance of that object-world.

This division also clarifies why the chapter invokes the Kantian sublime in its discussion of modernity. Faced with powerful natural forces, the human being as a part of nature experiences impotence and nullity; that negative experience, in turn, evokes the greatness of the ethical subject. The point is not that Descartes offers Kant’s account of the sublime, but that the modern separation between empirical humanity and the subject helps make such a structure intelligible. The subject’s elevation appears not as mastery over nature but against the experience of human powerlessness within it.

Scientific Facts and the Will Beneath Them

Descartes’s importance to modern science lies, in the chapter’s account, not only in the cogito but also in a theological paradox. Scientific discourse can seem to describe bare facts without relying on an empty Master-Signifier. Its difficulty is deeper than the practical fact that science still uses ordinary language: the appearance of facticity, of things simply being as they are, coincides with radical voluntarism. Meaningless facticity can be sustained only if it is secretly grounded in an arbitrary divine will.

Descartes makes this structure visible even at the level of elementary mathematics. On this account, the truth that two and two are four depends on the will of God in theological debate; it does not rest on a concealed chain of reasons behind the fact. The example makes the problem of foundations stark: even what seems most necessary can be presented as dependent on a decision that is not itself deduced from a prior rational ground. The scientific world’s apparent indifference to meaning thus coexists with an ungrounded act of willing.

The same issue reappears in the axiomatic form of mathematical reasoning. A system begins by positing axioms; further results are then supposed to follow from them. The axioms are not presented as conclusions reached through the same chain of deduction they authorize. In this sense, Descartes’s role is not simply to affirm the certainty of scientific knowledge. His theological voluntarism helps expose the arbitrary positing that underlies a system even when its subsequent reasoning is rigorous. Scientific facticity and an act of foundation remain in tension rather than resolving into a single, self-grounding order.

The Thinking Subject and Its Opaque Remainder

Later discussion of cognitive science tests the Cartesian image of the subject as a thinking substance that transparently experiences itself. In an analysis of Thomas Metzinger’s reading of the Cartesian assertion of existence, the chapter distinguishes two functions of the first-person pronoun. One refers to the self-model’s content, the ego represented as an object; the other marks the opaque component that generates the thought. The apparent unity of a self-transparent thinking substance is produced by illegitimately identifying these two positions.

The distinction leaves an unresolved question: the thinker’s activity refers to a system that generates the thought, but it does not establish that this system is itself a self. Immanuel Kant’s formulation of the thinking subject as an I, he, or it that thinks is treated as more precise on this point. Ignorance of the subject’s noumenal nature is not merely a temporary gap waiting to be filled; it can be a positive condition of thinking subjectivity. The chapter thus turns Descartes’s search for certainty into a problem about the limits of self-knowledge: the act of thought may be evident while the nature of the agent who thinks remains opaque.

The relation between inner experience and its external explanation further unsettles the idea of a self-contained thinking substance. Francisco Varela locates consciousness at the interface, the surface-contact between inside and outside. This account does not replace one hidden substance with another; it makes consciousness a relation rather than a private interior object. A neuroscientific description of the brain and a person’s immediate conscious experience belong to different explanatory perspectives, and neither simply supplies the other’s full account. The chapter uses this contrast to emphasize that the subject is not a substance.

Embodiment, Emotion, and the Unconscious

Antonio Damasio’s critique of Descartes moves in a different direction from Varela’s. Rather than emphasizing consciousness as an interface between inside and outside, Damasio stresses its constitutive connection to the biological body. Against the picture of reflection as initially disinterested and only later affected by emotion, he presents consciousness as an emotional reaction: at its most elementary, awareness registers a disturbance of the organism’s homeostasis occasioned by an external or internal object. Consciousness is therefore an interested response, not a detached mental activity subsequently contaminated by bodily life.

The chapter brings this account into contact with Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s conception of the subject. The subject is not identical with an organism whose homeostasis exists before any disturbance and whose activity merely restores equilibrium. It emerges through the disturbance and consists in the activity of dealing with it. This comparison preserves an important distinction: the organism and its regulatory processes are not simply the subject. Subjectivity appears in the response to an obstacle or instigation, where settled equilibrium has been interrupted.

The differences between brain science and psychoanalysis become especially clear in their accounts of the unconscious. For Damasio, emotional responses can reveal an organism’s attitude when the person is cognitively unaware of it. The chapter’s example is someone who sincerely professes racial equality but whose bodily gestures disclose an unconscious antisemitic response on encountering a Jewish person. Here the unconscious is a dense background of emotional reactions that may betray an attitude hidden from conscious conviction.

Sigmund Freud’s account is not equivalent to this emotional background. In Jacques Lacan’s reading of Freud, anxiety is the affect that does not lie, which makes it exceptional: other emotions can mislead. Freud’s example of a dream that repeats the circumstances of a funeral illustrates the difference. The dreamer’s intense sadness appears to belong to the funeral of a beloved friend, but the interpretation turns on her encounter there with a man she had passionately loved and still desired. The grief masks joy at seeing him. Emotion, in this example, is not a transparent biological report of an attitude; its apparent meaning can conceal another significance.

Descartes within the Modern Social Order

The chapter’s historical account of Lacan’s four discourses places modernity between two developments: expert administration and capitalist self-revolutionizing. The University discourse has a biopolitical form, in which rule by expertise treats populations as objects of regulation, and a capitalist form, in which a system reproduces itself through the continual production and appropriation of excess. These are not reducible to one another. The chapter presents them as incompatible aspects of a modern social order, not as different names for a single underlying logic.

In this history, the Master’s discourse represents absolute monarchy as an early figure of modernity; bureaucratic expertise and capitalist subjectivity then emerge as distinct ways of undermining direct mastery. The Analyst’s discourse is associated with revolutionary-emancipatory subjectivity, which seeks to isolate and remove the Master-Signifier organizing the subject’s ideological unconscious. This later framework does not make Descartes the direct cause of those social arrangements. It does, however, place his account of the subject and his role in the founding of modern science within a broader investigation of how modernity organizes knowledge, authority, and the limits of self-mastery. The Cartesian subject’s apparent certainty is thus only one side of a history repeatedly marked by opaque foundations, divided positions, and forms of power that exceed the subjects they claim to organize.