14

Philosophy is the quest for foundations and ultimate principles. With Descartes, modernity found these in self-consciousness, in the human subject. Why—and above all how—did he arrive at this result? One may still wonder whether the Cogito ergo sum is really the foundation of thought. Is the shift from Being to the Subject that characterizes the modern era still the right answer? Here, Michel Meyer seeks to respond to all of these questions. He shows that the Cogito has a strange status within the propositional order that it founded and to which it belongs. Is it the product of an intuition? Of an inference? Or is it something radically different? Indeed, the rhetoric whereby it is established is that of an answer deduced from the question itself, an answer that is in some way contained within the question, which is a peculiarly philosophical form of questioning. But to affirm this is to go against Descartes himself in a way, for if the Cogito possesses a founding necessity, this is, despite everything, the case with the propositionalist ideal that Descartes wanted to install to ensure the certainty of everything stemming from the Cogito, including science. He wanted to see in the undisputable and exclusive necessity of the Cogito the norm of all answerhood, even though it itself responds to a logic, that of the philosophical field. We will see how it is propositionalism itself, with its norms and its demands for necessity without alternatives, that underpins the Cartesian approach to the search for undisputable foundations, and that it is even presupposed by this approach. To eradicate questioning and problematics by reducing them to doubt is paradoxical, because this is Descartes’s initial problem. His resolution leads to a so-called first answer, the Cogito, which, nevertheless, is not an answer, because an answer, by definition, requires a question. It would be better to approach the question of what comes first by stating that what comes first is questioning itself. And then, the foundation is no longer the Cogito but the inquisitiveness of the mind as that which is aroused by things. But in embracing this approach we adopt a new model of thought and philosophy, as we pass from propositionalism to problematology.