The everyday self in Descartes’s philosophy

Résumé

As the precursor of the Enlightenment, Descartes creates the general logic of the Enlightenment project: the everyday self does not exist for the order of certainty but forms part of the enterprise. The everyday self is an absence in the strict ordo cognoscendi, but it forms the necessary margin of reliable thinking. If the everyday self exists on the margin, then its reconstruction needs the hermeneutics of margins: it needs to be elicited from scribbled notes. One can see why John Carriero thinks that in Descartes there is no articulated and systematic theory of an everyday relation to the world. In contrast to Carriero, this paper points out the systematic presence of the everyday self in Descartes. It argues that the everyday self is not only a constitutive exterior to the quest for certainty but rather a determining element in the order of certainty. The paper claims that the everyday self is not a secondary figure in Descartes’ philosophy but a starting point on the surface of the texts.