dubito, ergo sum, vel, quod idem est, cogito, ergo sum
I doubt, therefore I am; or what is the same - I think, therefore I am
I’ve had the fact of Descartes’ first, typically omitted, part of his “cogito” put in front of me a number of times recently.
Most recently, it was by Indy Johar, by way of his recent (re)appearance on Nate Hagen’s The Great Simplification podcast.
There, Johar offered - and offered that this was something Descartes himself had communicated, but that through the passage of time and humans’ proclivity to simplify our communication of knowledge, stripping its nuance (acknowledged: that latter part is my colour) - that it is in fact our capacity for doubt that is at both the centre of our being, as well at the (requisite) centre of our future possibilities:
“I think the beauty of being human is our metacognition - that we don’t know. Our ability to know that we don’t know is, I think, the most beautiful things about humans because in that self-awareness, we generate a landscape of curiosity. In that self-awareness, we generate landscapes of tentativeness, tendernessness, care, and then play as a possible landscape of being and becoming that would otherwise not be available to us.” [00:32:49]
Notes:
- Is there some analog of the “cascade of rigidity” (that I was reading about also today, adjacent to this listen) in the impacts of the loss of nuance in knowledge as it is communicated through time?
- What role, more generally, might nuance - and its maintenance - play in our possible futures?
