Page 59 - Eclipse of God

32 Chapter 3

The decisiveness of this abstraction, of this turning away, is
sometimes hidden from sight when a philosopher acts as if he
would and could philosophize within his concrete situation. Des-
cartes offers us the clearest example. When we hear him talk in
the first person, we feel as if we were hearing the voice of direct
personal experience. But it is not so. The I in the Cartesian ego
cogito is not the living, body- soul person whose corporality had
just been disregarded by Descartes as being a matter of doubt.
It is the subject of consciousness, supposedly the only function
which belongs entirely to our nature. In lived concreteness, in
which consciousness is the first violin but not the conductor,
this ego is not present at all. Ego cogito means to Descartes,
indeed, not simply “I have consciousness,” but “It is I who have
consciousness.” Ego cogito is, therefore, the product of a triply
abstracting reflection. Reflection, the “bending back” of a per-
son on himself, begins by extracting from what is experienced
in the concrete situation “consciousness” (cogitatio), which is
not as such experienced there at all. It then ascertains that a
subject must belong to a consciousness and calls this subject
“I.” In the end, it identifies the person, this living body- soul
person, with that “I,” that is, with the abstract and abstractly-
produced subject of consciousness. Out of the “That” of the
concrete situation, which embraces perceiving and that which
is perceived, conceiving and that which is conceived, thinking
and that which is thought, arises, to begin with, an “I think
that.” A subject thinks this object. Then the really indispensa-
ble “That” (or Something or It) is omitted. Now we reach the
statement of the person about himself: therefore I (no longer
the subject, but the living person who speaks to us) have real
existence; for this existence is involved in that ego.
In this way Descartes sought through the method of ab-
straction to capture the concrete starting- point as knowledge,
but in vain. Not through such a deduction but only through