Theological Origins of Modernity

200 chapter six
To become master of nature, Descartes tells us, one must fi rst become master
of oneself, by freeing oneself from the illusions of the imagination. We
assert our freedom by exercising our will in the form of doubt to avoid
being taken in by any of these illusions. Will thereby asserts its superiority
and its freedom from both God and his creation. 124 However, as we have
seen, such freedom is the freedom of the void. Th e will as doubt or negation
shatters the world into a million pieces, leading Descartes to suppose
that he and the world are nothing. 125 Doubt, however, discovers that it cannot
doubt itself. 126 In freeing itself from illusion, the will discovers that it
cannot will itself away, and in this discovery lays the foundation for its
conquest of the natural world.
For Descartes doubt thus ends not in skepticism or in the aporetic wisdom
of Socrates and Montaigne but in a practically useful science that
makes possible the mastery of nature and the alleviation of the human
estate. Th e principle of this new science is thus individual autonomy that
arises out of the self-assertion and self-positing of the human will. 127 Th e
self is therefore not just another object but the foundation of the representational
reconstruction of the world; and the citadel of reason, the great
city described at beginning of Discourse, is build upon this foundation.
Th inking for humanism was also a form of willing, a poetic making
and self-making that painted an image of the world. Descartes accepts this
humanist notion, but he believes that we cannot rely upon the imagination
to bring about such a reconstruction. Th e “truth” of the imagination, the
artwork and technology rooted in the imagination, present at best merely
probable solutions to a fortuna that remains outside of and apart from the
self. Descartes’ representational reconstruction of the self and the world
rests not upon the imagination but upon an analytic algebra underpinned
by a self-certifying self. Descartes’ “poetic” remaking of the world thus
produces a world that is no longer a cosmos or a creation independent of
man but a human artifact that comes to be through me and that can therefore
be totally mine. It is as it is only with respect to me; it is proper to me;
and it can therefore become my property. To understand how this change
is brought about, however, we need to examine more carefully the manner
in which Descartes expropriates this world from its previous owner, that
is, from God himself.
Descartes’ fundamental principle, ego cogito ergo sum, seems on the surface
to guarantee only the existence of a self that thinks. Descartes claims,
however, that it is the key to establishing the certainty of his universal
science, the Archimedean point from which he will be able to move the
world. How does the fundamental principle, the self-creating I, guarantee