The below is meant to be a summary of previous blog posts. I might use it as a permanent page to introduce the project behind the regular entries.

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Of course one has to start with Descartes, because Descartes’ greatest gift to Western civilisation is the idea that we need a fresh start, that our minds have become so confused that we should throw it all away and begin anew. And once the table is cleared and all we are left with is the table and ourselves, we can start rebuilding something that makes sense to us, something that does not hold together out of habit and fear of thinking for ourselves.

How different this is from all our ideas prior to Descartes, from our reverence to a golden age, to Antiquity, to Rome and to Greece. Modernity is just that, the hope that we can build something better than what already exists, that the passage of time can produce more than decadence, provided that we have the courage to break away.

The gift of a new start goes with an epistemology of doubt, as we need to be given a reason to torn down what was given to us. The foundation of knowledge is not anymore respect for the Ancients but recognition of the value of that knowledge by the self. Hence a movement from the community to the individual and from consensus to doubt.

But what does Descartes do with his fresh start? He tells us that one thing is clear, God exists. What a strange follow-up. From something that is crystal clear for us moderns, the primacy of the individual over the community, to a statement that is as controversial as can be. In a way, he goes from discarding all preconceived ideas to embracing as an evidence what is nowadays considered to be the most preconceived idea.

One could say that Descartes is blinded the context of his own times and the prevalence of religion in his times. But Pascal, his contemporary, always considers God, in his apologetic writings, as a deus absconditus, a hidden god: the mere fact that apologetic writings were considered necessary at the time of Descartes and that such writings acknowledged that the existence of God is not self-evident is telling.

If the existence of God is not a given in the age of the Libertins, we have to find another explanation for what can only be considered as an incredible mistake in his system, as neither believers or non-believers would consider that the existence of God is self-evident. What is God’s purpose in Descartes’ system? God provides us with the certainty of adequation between ciscendent truth and transcendent truth, which allows to build on the bedrock of that fresh start: if something feels true (or real), that feeling was provided to us by God to let us know that it is really true (or real).

My purpose in this blog is to use the fresh start given to us by Descartes and to see where I can go without considering that some transcendent being is in charge of making the world adequate to my perception of the world.

And it is not only perception but also reason that has to be tossed out, as without God, I cannot exclude the idea that the principles forming the basis of all my reflections has no validity outside of the feeling I get when I think about these principles. This position will take us close to a thesis that will sometimes look like nominalism, as we will not be able to presuppose an adequation between propositions (word phenomena, in our vocabulary) that feel true and things in themselves.