We Could Be Cannibals After All. Descartes and his history of the self-discovery

Abstract

In the light of contemporary discussions on the European philosophy as an instrument of colonial domination, the necessity of redefinition and redescription of the history of philosophy is beyond any doubt. A brief review of the historiography on modern philosophy shows that the most typical manner to present it is still to find some inner logic that would determine the appearance and development of the particular theories (Cartesian, or Kantian, etc.), without any reference to the external, that is historical, social, cultural etc., circumstances. Mean­while, from the Latin American point of view, which the author of the article takes as a starting point in this paper, the “discovery” of America – or the “invention” of America (Edmundo O’Gor­man) – was one of the most important factors in the latter history of European philosophy, which exerted influence on a number of concepts including the pattern of rationality, subjectivity, modernity etc. In this paper the author focuses on the philosophy of Descartes and re-thinks it from this history-oriented approach. While doing this, the author also tries to avoid a new form of exaggeration: turning Descartes into a theoretician of colonialism. For example, in the very center of Cartesian project of the self one can find the unavoidable doubt that can be covered only by the act of narration in which the self-conscious individual subject constitutes itself. Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum” can be interpreted, thus, not so much as ego conquiro (as it is often presented by Enrique Dussel and his continuators), but rather as a manifestation of the total loss of certainty which can not be restituted in a dialectical, but only practical way. This internal ambivalence of the Cartesian philosophy is, the author concludes, the actual trace of the impact of the discovery of America on his thought.