On Vulnerability: A Philosophical Anthropology 1666945471, 9781666945478

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1 Vulnus
Chapter 2 Pathos of Vulnerability
Chapter 3 Ethos of Vulnerability
Chapter 4 Mundus est Fabula

Citation preview

On Vulnerability

On Vulnerability A Philosophical Anthropology Miquel Seguró Mendlewicz

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. Translation by Sílvia Ardevol. Originally published as Vulnerabilidad in Spanish by Herder, Barcelona, 2021. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 9781666945478 (cloth) ISBN 9781666945485 (ebook) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.



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Gràcies per tanta vida, mare.

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“While you do not know life, how can you know about death?” CONFUCIUS, The Anaclets

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Chapter 1: Vulnus

1



Chapter 2: Pathos of Vulnerability



Chapter 3: Ethos of Vulnerability Chapter 4: Mundus est Fabula Bibliography Index



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101

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About the Author



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Acknowledgments

First of all, I would especially like to thank Núria Oliveres for her patience and purposeful reading of the successive drafts of this book. Without her generous help, this book would not be what it is. De tot cor, moltes gràcies! I also extend my thanks to Sílvia Ardèvol, who has carefully read and translated the manuscript. To both of them, I extend my gratitude for their generous time and tenacious commitment to take seriously the debate around each of its parts. I would also like to thank all those who, through their conversations and friendly exchange of ideas, have given and continue to give food for thought about vulnerability. They are all well aware of their relevance. I feel especially privileged for the time shared with my friends and colleagues of the debate group of the Càtedra Ramon Llull Blanquerna in the URL, with whom we continue to share and discuss concerns and perplexities. Undoubtedly, we think better together. Finally, I would like to thank the publisher, Lexington Books, and its editors for the trust placed in this book and for the audacity of putting faith in culture and literature, especially in these times of such manifest vulnerability.

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Chapter 1

Vulnus

Our lives unfold in scenarios that transcend us and in circumstances that we do not choose. Factors that go from the most external to the most intimate (such as our environmental surroundings, our social context, or our emotional-symbolic universe) decisively affect the biography we are building. These are circumstances that influence our being in the world and reveal to us the condition that makes all our experiences possible: being vulnerable. Vulnerability comes from vulnus, a Latin word we translate as “wound.” The ancients considered wounds directly related to corporality, so being wounded literally meant being physically hurt. Hence, their flesh-and-blood gods were also exposed to vulnerability. Gradually, the meaning of wound broadened and began to include mental suffering as well, and life ailments or lovesickness began to be referred to as vulnera vitae or vulnere amoris.1 “To vulnerate” can also mean to harm and attack; in all cases it refers to a condition: to be vulnerable. It is in moments of pronounced suffering when we realize that it is a reality that has always been there but that, since it hurts, we prefer not to make it too present. Vulnus implies that our situation is vulnerabilis, that we embody the predisposition for things to happen to us. However, things can affect us for better or for worse. They can involve both afflictions and propitiate affections or even both at the same time. Moreover, this points to another fundamental reality: We are not watertight and closed beings. This is the factum with which our “being” is written and rewritten, of which we bear witness and are protagonists. By vulnerability, we must not only understand the suffering reality of human beings. It does not mean that homo vulnerabilis is not homo dolens. Sickness, death, the anguish of being able to get sick or die, all these are part of our daily lives. But so are solidarity, co-responsibility, or the joy of living in a community. Why, then, when we talk about vulnerability, do we usually associate it with negative and non-constructive experiences? Vulnerability is a forma entis, something constitutive of each and every one of our experiences; for this reason, it can be considered the generic image of 1

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human reality as a whole. This is an image that gives rise to our symbolic universe, being in itself a symbol and a concept. In this essay, we propose a scheme for a philosophy of vulnerability that assumes that everything that has to do with human beings, the good and the bad, bears the stamp of their vulnerability. In other words, vulnerability is the fundamental expression of the human condition. Vulnerability is a topic of growing relevance in public debate. It is a topic, and in a certain way, it can also be a trend, which can mean two things: that vulnerability is the measure of everything that happens to us (that is what “trend,” in Spanish moda, originally meant: measure), or that it is the legitimized and legitimizing current of discourses, the halo of authority that being in fashion grants. This book explores the first meaning, the real impact of what being vulnerable means, taking also into account the dangers implied when something becomes trendy. Since thinking involves somehow figuring out how things are (meaning that by thinking something, we shape it in some sense), we think through images. The image we propose here to think about vulnerability is that of an irregular and imperfect circle that never ends up closing in on itself. We are talking about an image, but it highlights the impossibility of that longed-for perfection. It even implies that what is desirable here and now is non-perfection. Instead of seeking the finished and self-sufficient circularity of the per-fectus, the adventure involves exposing oneself to the circuits of precariousness and uncertainty of the a-ffectus. Our circle is neither related to the Hegelian complete circularity since we do not know if everything real is rational, as the idealist philosopher proposed. Who knows where the border between what is real and what is not is? Vulnerability implies affectability. We affect and are affected, that is why our image is a circle that cannot be closed. We could have turned to the wisdom of ensô, a circular symbol also widely used in Zen that expresses enlightenment and spiritual completeness. Some artists and teachers seem to close it, but others do not, perhaps suggesting that perfection is something always to be pursued, never achieved. We consider perfection not part of our reality here, so our circle can only be imperfect and irregular. It must be taken into account that being vulnerable is the starting point of our condition, so there is a really significant risk of getting over-subjective. Moreover, in philosophy, no one should be, stricto sensu, the subject of his own reflection. Philosophizing means avoiding both logical egoism and the pretense of describing once and for all what things can give of themselves. Here we suggest an image just to tangibly think about something as complex as vulnerability, emphasizing that it is a proposal, an invitation. In the Kantian epistemological system, the idea of scheme ​​ has a leading role. It is the conjunction that unites sensitivity and understanding, the imaginative procedure

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through which a pure and abstract concept is concretized sensibly (skhema, which in Greek means “form,” “figure”). Schematism is, therefore, reason at work, the aesthetic formation of the world, and in our case, the image of what being vulnerable means. Any philosophy is susceptible to being vulnerable. Therefore, the notion of scheme can also be used here in the most colloquial sense of the term. This book provides a series of reflective elements as starting points to be considered and developed. However, its objective is not “the” philosophy of vulnerability. It would be completely inappropriate. Sometimes, the discourses that seek to fix everything and close the issue force things to say what one wants them to say, leaving out all those elements that could contradict them.2 And here, we start from the conviction that contradiction is part also of our vulnerable condition. Having said that, our caution would also be counterproductive if it was used as a safe-conduct to say what one pleases, with no more endorsement than one’s own opinion. In fact, more than being cautious, that would imply being frivolous. Caution is always related to a basic will: to be able to talk about something knowing that you can be wrong and that there will always be things remaining to be said. What is proposed in these pages is a tacking of critical and reasoned elements that seek to help us think about this transversal experience that affects any experience: “the” vulnerability. A proposal, no doubt, that is always opened to be rectified. The book consists of two parts. The first outlines the “pathos” of vulnerability, and the second explores its “ethos.” In the first, epistemology and the question of certainty are treated as protagonists of the philosophical experience. In the second, ethics and politics take over as materializations of the resulting uncertain experience. Before embarking on the path, it is worth making another critical consideration: if vulnerability is always there as a condition, the reality of the metaphysical experience is no less so. After all, all philosophy is, in one way or another, a type of metaphysical action. Opposing vulnerability and metaphysics to the point of excluding them is possible, of course. Everything depends on the concepts of vulnerability and metaphysics that are handled. However, what is not possible is to pretend that the languages of vulnerability were not based on such metaphysical categories as finitude, contingency, or temporality. Without these categories, it is unthinkable to reason and to carry questions along their boundaries: the infinite, the necessary, and the eternal. Reflecting on vulnerability implies questioning ourselves to the last consequences about the sensitive material with which we build our experiences. That is, carrying out a task of ontological archaeology. If being vulnerable is the permanent universal condition of every human being, vulnerability has to

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do with being human. And if no one is alien to it because it is the condition of everything we are and everything we can become, then it is a reality that goes beyond denial. It is metaphysics. We read in the first epistle of John that no one has ever seen God. So, no one, believer or not, has had the gift of knowing the answer to the great enigma. Therefore, we dwell in doubt, and as René Descartes will show us, it is in doubt itself that we realize the reality of these mysteries. The metaphysical experience is that doubt that cannot stop sounding out its own mystery. It is the vulnerable reality taken as a centrifugal element of philosophy, as a precarious existence open to its transcendence. NOTES 1. G. Maragno, “Alle origini (terminologiche) della vulnerabilità: vulnerabilis, vulnus, vulnerare,” in O. Giolo and B. Pastore (eds.), Vulnerabilità. Analisi multidisciplinare di un concetto (Rome: Carocci, 2018), pp. 13–28. 2. M. Foucault, L’ordre du discours (Paris, Gallimard, 1971).

Chapter 2

Pathos of Vulnerability

Classics have the gift to awaken passions; that is why we come back to them over and over again. That is the case of René Descartes. Not because of his eventful life, which, like so many others, was full of fortunes and misfortunes (and, at least, his are not so unknown), nor because of the fame of his writings, deserved and already recognized in his time. What is attractive about his texts is the fascination aroused by some of his extravagances. Descartes becomes an excellent reflection partner due to his philosophy of uncertainty. It is a philosophy in which you wish to know in order to understand, to ensure clear and distinct data,1 firm and insurmountable, which confirms that that is not possible, not even as a program. And with that tension, which runs through all our hours, we inhabit the world. His pen, far from representing an amendment to vulnerable existence, ends up becoming its exponent. The certainty he treasures with the “I” (the well-known cogito, ergo sum) is discovered insufficient and powerless to achieve the longed-for existential security. Exploring the power of his imagination, Descartes brings reason to its ultimate contradiction, pointing even beyond its own structure. If the world can become a lie, how many more lies can be hidden in our reason? We do not intend to offer here one interpretation more of Descartes’s work. First of all, because it would be reckless. Saying something relevant in this regard is a claim within the reach of very few, and great specialists in the field have already achieved it with ample solvency. In this sense, some debates around Cartesian philosophy’s nuclear issues are collected in the footnotes. And secondly, because it is not, in essence, the objective of this meditation. Our essay is not about Descartes, but by being developed through him, it goes in other directions. This reading of his work intends to be the foundation to think about vulnerability and light up the structure of experience in general. We have anticipated that the question here is about circularities, which implies that no one thinks alone, nor does it start from scratch. It is therefore convenient to make it clear to oneself with whom and from what one is going to think. The so-called interior monologue is, in truth, a dialogue that looks 5

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outward. A logos, a word, a speech, which metaphorically passes through the multiple voices that populate the inner parliament that one houses. This is, in fact, dialogue: letting the word pass through those voices. If we ask ourselves if thinking always involves dialoguing, we have to say that, from this perspective, that is the case, both out and in. The thought continues to be an extraordinary parliament of discourses and forms circulating and feeding each other. Where is the border of what is proper and what is improper is difficult to locate, also because influences and convictions can change. However, the appeal to dialogue is not done in this sense. When it is said that someone coexists in dialogue, it is because it is understood that he is capable of yielding and that he can recognize that his words do not contain the best perspective of an event or situation. It assumes that the other may be right in his position and that this may be true. It involves being willing to rectify. On the other hand, everything is thought from a here and now that is part of a biography, but also from a constellation of ideas and beliefs that transcend us. Each of us thinks from a context of flesh and bone and from a worldview of ideas and convictions that populate a diversity of bodies. The incommunicable and the communicable intersect, giving place to a constituent dynamic that allows them to materialize in experiences. If we get too oriented to the project, to the future, we get lost in the only crossroads that we know what it is: the hybrid experience of now. In fact, not even Descartes was so original in his theses, as it will be seen later. He was just another specimen of homo sapiens sapiens, albeit a genius one. He was able to give life to something that did not exist as such. And the fact that, even today, we are talking about the scope of that gestation act, places him (from our cultural perspective) in the row of geniuses. The weight and relevance that the voice of Descartes has in our culture has made us privilege his voice and create a dialogue with it. It is true that many other reference thinkers lead us down the path of vulnerability and could also occupy that place, like Kant mentioned above and his Critique of Pure Reason, of course, or the intimist voice of Augustine of Hippo in his Confessions, a literary format recovered and recreated centuries later by Rousseau. Or even the less-known Helmut Plessner, who made laughter and tears objects of study. Nor is it a matter of listing a set of authors and topics since each one chooses his own, and it is evident that there is not a unique way to start the dialogue. Our intuition is that Descartes’s path is relevant for our purpose. I hope that whoever reads this book can share the suitability of our choice at the end of the journey. Descartes was the author of the Metaphysical Meditations, published first in Latin in 1641 as Meditationes de Prima Philosophia and then in French

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in 1647. It was a work of great philosophical scope that, even then, raised numerous objections among his contemporaries (Thomas Hobbes, among them), and that is one of the milestones in the history of philosophy. The Cartesian meditations, six in all, take place on successive days, one per day, as Descartes tells it. And the literary game is entirely explicit because we know that, at least as early as 1639, he was working on them,2 so their development was not a matter of days. It is relevant that each meditation, as an episode of “the” meditation, involves its temporality,3 a relationship with internal time and with the configuration of its exteriority. So, even though its objective was to achieve timeless knowledge, this process only occurs as a processus, that is, as a march, as an advance. Cartesian meditations, like all meditations, involve a succession of tempos. And, in this transit, one of the outstanding issues of human experience takes shape: duality, that is, identity in difference and difference in identity.4 A relationship that affects, for instance, the aspiration to achieve timeless wisdom while being constituted by temporality, to taste infinity embodying finitude, to specify what is necessary while passing through life contingencies. Pretensions and not realities because, meditating and going step by step, Descartes tries to find timeless knowledge, the kind that nothing and no one, no matter what happens, can undo. A claim that is, at least, problematic, as we shall see. However, let us not get ahead of ourselves. If Cartesian meditations serve as guides to think of ourselves in the particular and the shared, let us follow their pace. To meditate means to take measurements, so the metric unit is decisive to set a cartography. To be able to meditate on something, you have to choose a starting point, a measurement criterion. And what is the measure to think vulnerability? The answer cannot (and should not) be immediate, because it constitutes precisely the horizon of this book. But there must be a beginning and, considering the very nature of what we are asking ourselves here, ours is precisely found in the very fact that we are asking about something. That is, there are “questions.” Existing means, among other things, being confronted by radical questions that directly impact on our lives. Now, what does asking mean? Having questions is in itself quite revealing. If asking means being placed under interrogation—that is, in the middle (inter-) of a plea, of a request (-rogare)—asking would involve, first of all, testifying that we are not where we want to be. When we ask, we are exposed. We experience that our longing for knowledge, beliefs, or meaning is not covered and we ask, beg, for the possibility of achieving other knowledge, beliefs, or meanings. Asking implies assuming that we are exposed to the elements, not covered by the shelter of answers, somehow suspended in the air, without stepping on

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solid ground. However, asking does not involve being necessarily more ignorant. When we ask, we know more than when we do not do it; it is known, for example, that a specific answer hitherto considered good may not be so good afterward. Moreover, to some extent, that constitutes an advance. On the other hand, this process of dis-locating is not the definitive horizon. That is, one does not seek to simply get out of place. Whoever asks cherishes the deep expectation of finding a good answer. Asking is dis-locating oneself to try to re-locate oneself to the shelter of a correct answer, or at least better than the available ones. Asking is to live in the expectation of making one’s own existence habitable and to be in a position to do it correctly. THE QUESTION Four years before publishing his Meditations, an anonymous text entitled Discourse on Method appeared in June 1637 in Leiden, in the Netherlands, subtitled Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences. In one of the many letters written by Descartes to his priest friend, the philosopher and mathematician Marin Mersenne (also educated, like Descartes, at the school of La Flèche) specifies5 that he baptized his text as “discourse” and not “treatise” because, in it, the topics are presented informally, a more or less casual discourse without a specific will to enlighten. Perhaps that explains why the Discourse has the appearance of a long proem, one prior to a larger set that consisted of three parts: dioptrics, meteors, and geometry. The Discourse on Method is one of the zenith works in the history of Western culture that transcends the field of the history of ideas. It is a text presumably written between 1635 and 1637, around the time of Galileo’s conviction (June 1633), a writing that Descartes composed conscientiously.6 It was not a mere proem, but a philosophical consideration of solvent scope. Before that, he had written (although not published) a treatise that assumed the thesis of heliocentrism. Entitled The World or Treatise on Light, it was only fully published in 1664, years after Descartes died (1650). Understandably, he published the Discourse in the Netherlands, where the intellectual environment was more liberal than in other parts of old Europe, and that he did so anonymously. However, Descartes was quickly recognized as the author of the Discourse, among other things because he presents events related to his life in the first part. When, in 1637, the text began to be discussed, including some of the risky theses of The World distilled in the fifth part of the Discourse, Descartes already knew what he was exposing himself to,7 which suggests that publishing the Discourse anonymously was more an act of coquetry than real precaution.8

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The Discourse on Method also has six parts, and as its title indicates, it is a discourse. It runs, advances, and transits from one side to another and also step by step. What for? To apply understanding well, to find a straight path. That is the goal that Descartes manifests shortly after the beginning. He wants to straighten out the course, which presupposes being lost and disoriented, and for this, he has to find a path, a method (metá-hodós, way through). That is what the experience of the question is about and being out of place pushes us to move somewhere. Let us pay attention to the subtitle of the Discourse. Descartes writes that his speech is to conduct his reason rightly, and to seek truth in the sciences. He imports here the possessive “his” (sa, in French), which does not refer to “the” reason, in abstract, but to a particular one. Descartes reinforces it by affirming shortly after that his purpose is not to teach the method, the path that anyone should follow, but only to show how he has tried to conduct himself.9 However, it seems to be an affirmation that acts as a captatio benevolentiae, since it collides with the little modesty that Descartes later manifests about the evidence that he has discovered through reasoning. That is an assertion that has allowed us to consider the work as a kind of intellectual autobiography, as the personal reconstruction of a vital itinerary and the contingencies implied, when not arbitrariness or invention. Part of the originality of the Cartesian discourse resides in the fact that both in the first part and at the beginning of the second, he tells us, as a fable, his own formation, the relationship with the inherited knowledge and some of the biographical avatars that contextualized the philosophical gestation of the Discourse. In any case, the suspicion of not being in tune with the truth implies asking about the nature of the error, of being out of place, which is one of the situations in which Descartes finds himself and which he implies with the subtitle of the chosen Discourse: if you are looking for the truth, do not treasure it. We look for what we do not have, hoping to find it. Sometimes we do not even know what we are looking for (most of the times in life), because it is easier to know that you are looking for something than to know what and how to find it. Nevertheless, verifying that we are missing something, that there is something lost and we have to find it, is already tracing a path that guides us toward that desired method to try to straighten the course. And all this as if there was somehow a hint of truth in error itself, as if the fact of knowing that one is committing a mistake was already treasuring part of truth, as if one was not completely out of place. Aristotle begins his Metaphysics by stating that all men, by nature, wish to know. We all want to know, and sensations help that purpose; that is why the Stagirite says that they are so appreciated. And he specifies that the visual ones have the highest importance above all of them. We want to know

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because we want to see correctly, and our eagerness for knowledge becomes then the passionate response to the outburst that what we see produces in us. Plato, his teacher and predecessor, said that the origin of knowledge is found in admiration, giving rise to a tradition that places the origin of philosophy— and questioning—in admiration. There is another tradition, however, that places the passion for knowledge in the experience of uneasiness. Knowing can be a joy, a pleasure in the admired construction of the republic of wisdom, but that does not exclude that beforehand the experience is disturbing and potentially painful: one feels lost, and that shakes. It is the anguish and uncertainty of knowing that one does not really know and therefore feeling out in the open and at the mercy of what we call destiny, fortune, or the absurd. For Descartes, sight is also the sense par excellence, but the root problem is that the senses can deceive. What is seen is not always worthy of admiration, but of suspicion. This mistrust allows us to appreciate that vulnerability, understood as affectability, not only has to do with the body, with the embodied condition of our life, but also with the interpretation we make of its experiences. We do nothing without the body, but the notion of “body” is already a symbolic construction, as we will explain later. The language associated with the exercise of reflection is certainly closely linked to the sense of vision (the eye of reason or the illumination of objects), but it is not the only one. Other senses are equally or more fundamental to the life of concepts: taste, hearing, smell, and the most characteristic, touch. If not, let us experiment without touching, without feeling, to speak without moving our hands, to relate without using them. To understand means to “tend toward,” to the point of almost touching. If philosophy has to do with wanting to know, it means that it seeks knowledge, which presupposes that it does not have it or only possesses it in part. Its nemesis is sophistry, believing oneself too capable of reaching truths without realizing the only thing that sometimes sustains that claim is, precisely, a belief. Philosophy is the most explicit experience of epistemological vulnerability, since at standing up, scanning the horizon, and starting to walk, it does so without knowing very well where it will end up. Then is when admiration becomes a question, born out of this distance from the world. Suddenly, everything becomes strange. Other voices can serve as a reference, but no one can bear his own doubt for another. When Descartes feels overwhelmed, he takes refuge in the only thing he believes is left: his reason. Tired of searching outside himself, he embarks on the path of his own reflection in search of the truth. He calls it thinking for oneself, which is nothing other than trying to fable in a different way.10

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THE EXPECTATION The Cartesian prescription is: you have to doubt everything at least once in your life. The first part of the Discourse on Method is a biographical presentation where Descartes places himself onstage. He relates as a fable how the received training and the observed world came to collapse in his mind. What for a time seemed to him to be solid ground and clear sky ended up, little by little, cracking and becoming overcast, to the point of leaving him in the most absolute doubt. Descartes’s existential priority was finding the truth. So, when he realized that neither the ancient books with their fables, the best of schools, nor even the most learned authorities satisfied his restlessness, his world collapsed. Questions remained unanswered, and the urge to find solid truth became a stinging passion. Finding it was not an option, but a necessity, so he had no choice but to seek it by other means. The Cartesian moral has become one of the paradigmatic models of what it means to surrender to the philosophical attitude. And it is partly right. Thinking implies mainly to dialogue with oneself and with the rest and to be willing to change one’s opinion if the other’s arguments are better. However, Descartes soon succumbs to the temptation of messianic knowledge.11 Faced with the risk of getting caught up in the disturbing and erratic experience of the search, he assumes as an axiom that if something is self-evident, then it is that it is really true. It seems logical. For Descartes, evidence is that which falls by its own weight, without having to argue about it. In his opinion, for this reason it must be the great precept of the conquest of knowledge. In other words: there is a medicine. The formula to get out of the trap is never to admit as true something that cannot be known by direct evidence, as an externality that takes vision away (ex-videre). This means assuming that there are truths out there and at our disposal and, furthermore, that these truths remain and that we can grasp them. So, when something is evident, it implies that it is also intuited in a stable way;12 that means that “this” is always “this” and not “that.” Or, said in classical metaphysical terms: the essence of things is what makes them what they are. Evidence is the contemplation of essences. However, what is and what is not “evident” is ultimately unsolvable. We do not know the scope of our ignorance; we only discover it once we no longer ignore it—that is to say, once we question it and advance in that crawl. Hence, the greatest paradox of all is that, not being aware of ignorance, we ignore superlatively. Allowing ignorance to unfold, we prevent ourselves from becoming completely ignorant, although, at the same time, ignorance becomes affirmed.

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The impossibility of positively defining what is self-evident is one of the theses of any vulnerable consideration of human experience and the imperfect circularity that shapes it. Defining it would be something self-evident, which would make it invulnerable. This is the great lesson of experimental science, continuously exposed to the process of its falsifiability.13 What today is recognized as probable can be discovered as an error tomorrow, and not because we are deceived from the outside, but because we function that way. If we ignore everything we can ignore, it is because things can be “other” things. And we do not even know if they really are as we see them. What is an object, what is a datum, what is an experience? The Cartesian temptation really believes that evidence is possible, that we can strip things of the clothes that prevent us from contemplating them as they are in essence. The model for Descartes to achieve clear and distinct knowledge as a result of the good work of reason is found in mathematics and the certainties it generates. In fact, ratio means calculation, and the result of calculations can be only one. So, Descartes believes this should be the case with every matter of knowledge (scientia, in Latin): only one opinion can be valid.14 It is commonplace to classify Descartes as a strict rationalist. This is how many histories of philosophy describe him. The same happens with his desire for rational evidence; it is seen as one more episode of the wide range of defensive resources of the human spirit, as if it were a reaction to the chaos of life and its impossible reductions. Sigmund Freud, for example, said that he found a relationship of family closeness between the work of philosophy and paranoia.15 However, the issue is not so much in philosophy but in its bad uses. Psychoanalysis itself, which functions as a very valuable hermeneutical tool to illuminate some typically “Western” phenomena, is also exposed to the same danger that seems to spot. As if it were a Cartesian mathematical truth, some psychoanalysis sometimes seems to assume that nothing can have more than one truth, only its own. Nevertheless, accepting that our knowledge is temporal and vulnerable leads us to think that the most pertinent thing is to assume that all this knowledge is not on completely solid ground. So the dilemma that knowledge processes would have to face would be reflected in this choice: if demanding to find timeless knowledge (assuming that we are capable of it) or always keeping in mind that perhaps we do not know as much, although we do know enough to maintain that, although the foundations, in plural, are not firm forever, we can maintain and prosper on them. In both cases, uncertainty remains, although in a different way. The first option, the one that privileges identity, combats it, turning it into the repressed; the second, which gives way to difference, entails it. Basically, the decision has to do with the way we choose to live with the skepticism that stains all knowledge: whether we choose the one that fights

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against doubt because it aspires to its absolute improvement or the one that makes doubt its natural companion because it is understood as a reflection of the vulnerable condition. Stephen Toulmin opposes the skepticism of Michel de Montaigne and René Descartes in his book Cosmopolis.16 He does so according to the cliché that places Descartes as the father of Modernity, an affirmation he refutes. This intellectual “parricide” leads him to detect a transition in Modernity’s development that goes from Montaigne’s relaxed and understanding disposition to Descartes’s defensive and reclusive one. Modernity would begin before Descartes, by reversing the existing world’s order. This allows us to trace, Toulmin points out, how some of the problems that Descartes raises in his Meditations were anticipated and even refuted by Montaigne fifty years earlier. And then, why is Descartes associated with the beginning of Modernity? There are cases like Nietzsche, whose lucidity was not recognized until many years after his death, as if he had written ahead of time. There were likely more cases like this, although engulfed by the vicissitudes of history and relegated to the strictest anonymity. But this is not the case with Descartes, whose success during his lifetime was remarkable. He was a character adapted to his time and a good connoisseur of the circuits of power, as evidenced by the epistolary exchanges maintained with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia and Queen Christina of Sweden, with whom he shared beforehand his last work published during his lifetime, The Passions of the Soul (1649). Descartes is a philosopher of his time. We can explain his success by the rationalist rigidity of his way of thinking, which fit with the spirit that strengthened the Peace of Westphalia (1648), a vertical system of political authority based on the unity of power that also required a vertical unity of knowledge. We are talking about the time of the religious wars that led to the peace treaties mentioned above, whose consequences in terms of politics were substantial. We are still indebted, for example, to the modern concept of sovereignty, a heavy legacy that should be left behind as soon as possible. Montaigne enjoyed locking himself in the circular library that lined the walls of the tower adjoining his castle. Descartes, who also secluded himself when he realized that the only indubitable thing he could secure was his own act of thinking, did the same in the only castle left standing: his “I.” And it is true that Montaigne’s Essays are easy to read, as they refer more to Epicurus or Seneca than to Francisco Suárez’s theory of being, but Descartes’s philosophy and his way of presenting himself is more faithful to the agonizing spirit of Modernity. For this very reason, it can be said that it still interpellates us today. In the few decades between the times of Montaigne and Descartes, what happened inevitably led to the emergence of another vision of the world. The

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culture moved from the Renaissance to the Baroque,17 and if we say Descartes directly challenges us in the twenty-first century, it is because, in a certain way, ours is also a baroque society. Postmodernity has been followed by the explosion in all directions of the claim to truth. The techno-digital autocracy, and its horror vacui, rule and fill everything, embracing the thesis “I appear, therefore I am.” Postmodernism was partly characterized by this ecstasy of simulacrum, or even now, we could better say of exaggeration. The will to truth has taken away the possibility of discussing facts, which has nothing to do with the Cartesian aspiration, longing for the ultimate and unitary truth of the sciences. However, just like the Cartesian experience, today we are also the protagonists of changes and transformations of all kinds that make us realize our world is consumed by too many contradictions. That is why it is no longer reliable. And that is why both experiences, the Cartesian one and ours, are entrusted to the fable, to the ego and its daydreams, to their hyperbolic seclusion. Descartes helps us to understand his time, but he is also our contemporary, one of our best mirrors. THE DOUBT Qualifying someone as Cartesian does not precisely refer to any type of vulnerability or hesitation in how he proceeds. If by reason we understand calculus (ratio), being Cartesian would be to bring the calculating reason that millimeters and controls everything to its apogee. According to this image, being Cartesian would be the quintessential paradigm of reflection that seeks precision. It is not in vain that Descartes is, together with the German philosopher Leibniz, an instigator of confidence in the power of reason to puzzle out the order of being, conceived as mathesis universalis. The identity between thinking and being works as a catapult of an expectation that makes the language of mathematics its highest standard. Nevertheless, wanting surpasses power, and in the fourth part of the Discourse on Method, where the pulse of Cartesian philosophy accelerates the most,18 it is made clear that philosophy is an exercise of comings and goings that remains, ultimately and despite appearances, waiting for a truth that does not manifest itself. Reason is not a guarantee of anything other than itself. It is both a judge and part of a tiresome dialogue that never ends. Descartes finds in the “I” a limit to the confusion of uncertainty. Even placing himself in the most extreme hyperbole, denying everything, he sees. Considering everything he believes false, he comes to the certainty that at least that is true and, in addition, that someone is there affirming it. “I think, therefore I am”—ego cogito, ergo sum.19 Descartes pretends to doubt the

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existence of everything: his certainties, his ideas, and, of course, his sensations, beginning with those of the body itself. But he concludes that it is not possible to doubt that he doubts. Then, he thinks, and ergo, he is. The fiction of methodical doubt generates (it is worth repeating that) many doubts.20 A doubt that is not felt and assumed should not be worthy of any philosophical consideration. Moreover, Descartes’s doubt is methodical, placed there almost by protocol. He did not really doubt the existence of the world. He wrote quite a few letters to his friends, took precautions in relation to the inquisitorial climate of his time, and even had a daughter. While he doubted the world, he related to it. One can doubt oneself, but one cannot doubt the reality of the context, much less that there is an otherness that surrounds it. The world keeps spinning around even though one wonders if it does so. It is known that there is a world in the same way that no one crosses a pedestrian crossing doubting the existence of the car that is coming, the asphalt he steps on, the body he is, and the thought that doubts all this. One simply crosses and with all precautions. The paradox of doubt is that you doubt because there is something to doubt. So, doubt can never come first, and, consequently, neither can the one who doubts.21 First verification: methodical doubt can be gimmicky, but it is not effective. No one lives in methodical doubt, not even Descartes himself, neither explicitly (he claims to pretend that he doubts) nor implicitly (in his daily acts).22 It would be impossible. We can doubt that “something” is in such and such a way, but not of that “something.” Maybe the world is a dream, or maybe it is real, but we can only think it is a dream. However, there is a world; there is something, even if it is a dream. Perhaps that something is not extramental in the way we suppose it to be; that is, it is not how it appears or how we transfer it (even without knowing it) to consciousness. But it may also be that we are much more right in everything we do and think, and we simply cannot explain it. We do so in communication with others, in the daily forecast of mental and physical behavior and in the succession of social movements. We cross the street and, if we are careful, we do it successfully. Sometimes it is not like that, and the predictions are not met, or at least not completely. And then we realize it and ask ourselves where the gap is between being and thinking to shorten the distance. But sometimes they are met, which should lead us to value all that we guess right. However, as if it was expected, in our environment error is valued much more than success, a symptom without any doubt of a wrong expectation. What must be doubted, ultimately, is the unilateralism of language, that is to say, that language is either univocal or a constant misunderstanding. It is a false dilemma.

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Second verification: the “I” is because the “I” realizes that he thinks, but that is not the first thing either. Descartes says that the ego cogito is “something” (res) thinking (cogitans), that is, a nature whose total essence or way of being is thinking, in the gerund. The concept of substance, with its long philosophical tradition and central to Aristotle, probably reached Descartes through the reading of the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), whose Metaphysical Disputations were the philosophy manual of the Henry IV school in La Flèche.23 Substance denotes an original consistency, and therefore, it can sustain and hold thoughts, desires, memories, passions . . . , all of them experiences of the “I.” Consequently, the “I” is said to be subjectum,24 which is below all this emotional life. Descartes sees that, in order to think, it is necessary to exist. So, no matter how much he harasses himself with one doubt after another, that is indubitable. But then, who thinks? And what does thinking mean? It has been stressed that the Cartesian thesis is equivocal,25 that it is neither so clear nor so distinct. Is it the reason that thinks by itself? How do we go from a thought to an “I”? If the subject is what is below and has thoughts, then it implies that the subject differs from them. But how do we know that the “I” thought is plausible? Philosophy cannot be understood without the biography of those who construct it, a story that, in turn, cannot be understood without the context in which it is developed. Nor does the context circulate outside the subjects who assume it, being in itself the symbolic framework in which the life of a particular subject unfolds. This chain of implication and complication of elements makes it very difficult to know where to delimit the one and the other, the “I” and its fiction, the “context” and its fable. Part of Cartesian timeliness, and especially that of his Discourse, is not in this supposed discovery of the “I” (after all, impossible to certify or refute), but precisely in all the movement that causes his agitated search. A fruitless obsession to waterproof the “I” that certifies that all this methodical experience is, in its literal sense, a path and not a goal. To the dynamics of self-awareness, which, as a dynamic that it is, never closes and never calms itself down (the “I” that thinks is no longer the “I” thought in the act of thinking: they are two “I” that coexist, in turn, in dynamic relationship and distance), we must add the subjectum dismissal carried out by Nietzsche and Freud. The underworlds of consciousness are not what we could call clear and distinct. “Who” am I? The question goes from “I” to who. And although Descartes finds the answer in the incontrovertible fact that he thinks, the problem begins precisely there. The thinking being exists. Does it mean that I can trust my own appearances? The vulnerability of our intimate experiences is revealed in many ways, but above all, through the fact that an interior abode is followed by so

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many others. It is the dynamic of self-awareness, where the strange and the familiar come one after the other. Since this is the preamble to all matters, the question that truly promises to be revealing is: What is the point of so much eagerness to fortify the “I”? THE PRELIMINARY If Descartes can doubt, it is because he, in effect, doubts something. This means that doubt does not come first. If we can doubt something, it is because there is something to doubt, since doubting is an intentional action that tends to something. We doubt a specific object, even if we end up doubting everything. It remains to know what that something is made of, the ultimate riddle of doubt: if it is an idea, an illusion or something else. But that there is something, that is unquestionable. That “something” is represented as an alterity, as something else, transcendent to the constructed identity. Asking is getting agitated about something, taking distance from what is being asked and providing a resolution in the form of an answer. And for this process to be possible, there has to be something to ask about; that is, there has to be something that appears in front of me. Even in the field of self-awareness, that alterity is always there. When asked about the constitution of the protagonist of each story, of the “I,” there is always “something” left to integrate. Leaving aside all the psychological dynamics present in the construction of the identity of the “I” and going back to the fundamentals, that something we have just mentioned is the alter of the ego, what radically constitutes it. Looking for the “I,” what is found is the other in the “I.” We could call it “being,” “life,” “mystery.” Or if we are more positivist, “matter” or “energy.” In all cases, existence is not constituted from itself, but rather, each individual is only possible by presupposing his or her otherness. One is at the expense of existence, as one is at the expense of a gift. The French phenomenologist Michel Henry proposed the notion of “manifestation” as a vector of philosophy.26 “Being” is found in all things, carrying out the essence of a presence. But being is always “being-of,” something concrete, something particular, so the focus of the question that seeks to decipher its meaning is always concreted.27 Then, the being of human reality must be taken as the starting point of the problem of being in general, understanding by human reality all its conditions, including the flesh-and-blood one. Henry argued that the particular expresses the general, so that the particular life, my life, is a phenomenon of life in general, “the” life. The transcendent life that occurs in the ego must be its ultimate foundation.28 That is why the sameness (le soi), which Descartes called “soul,” Henry calls life.29 And

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Henry places the ultimate possibility of thought, where being is appreciated, in the affectivity of life. Philosophy is constituted as a phenomenology of absolute subjective life. The reflection and question about the “I” points to a primary phenomenon: the self-donation of Life, which is what allows us to explain, finally, the affectivity of the singular self.30 The ego cogito must then become subject of reflection because it is not at the origin. It is a double question: for himself and for his manifestation (or his essence: who am I?); and for what is manifested with the manifestation of it, that it is not its own foundation (its being: who am I?). If a philosophy of vulnerability takes on the image of an unfinished and imperfect circularity, it is because its starting point, the question of the “I,” for the world or for itself, is unceasing. Moreover, it has a double meaning: the essential (what is the world; what am “I”?) and the existential (why is there a world; why do I exist?). Reflection leads from one thing to another and is never-ending, although sometimes it intends to go off on a tangent, that is, to close the circle. It is in the realm of the existential that the vulnerable condition manifests itself most clearly. The question becomes an aporia and an existential wound. The mystery that remains unsolved is precisely the clearest and most diaphanous one. There is something, yes, but why? A question that is not a mere intellectual restlessness and that does not reveal what it seems to be asking. The anxiety of existence itself is not that it exists, in general, but that it exists in a finite and contingent way. The question of why and for what there is “being” involves an intellectual distance from the intimate experience of precariousness, from the assumption of existence as a gift, from the feeling that today one is here and tomorrow who knows. It is the most radical experience of all and where expectation becomes more urgent. It is the question that accompanies all questions and the one that may not have an answer. In the field of the question about the essence, about what things are and what oneself is, the meandering and unfinished process of identification and reinterpretation cannot occur without the interaction of various types of alterities. Nor can it happen without the inheritance received (genetic, phylogenetic, socio-educational, economic, and even spiritual) or the debts contracted that have allowed and continue to allow us to reach this point. Others are never out of place, and there are few events where there are more mixtures than in each of our “me.” Or extimities, as Jacques Lacan proposed.31 If intimacy frightens, knowing that there is no such thing as pure intimacy frightens even more. The absolute in the human is its relativity, that is, its relationality. Interestingly, this constitutive alterity of all experience is experienced as closeness and distance, as an intersection. In self-awareness, restlessness curves over itself, seeking to cancel all distance. However, being aware that I am aware, what I discover is that there are two ways of being: an intimate

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otherness where there are two selves that are related and interpellate each other because one is active (the one who thinks) and the other is passive (the one thought). Furthermore, what is relevant happens precisely in the hiatus of that experience, in the interruptus attempt of the curve to close in on itself. Who thinks, and who is thought? And why do I ask? In short, who am I? Faced with having to do something with that “I,” there are those who assume that whatever is done, everything is a theater. What does it matter if you opt for this or that mask, if you play this or that character? If we must represent life, it is about finding the best script, the one that is most convenient. It is an ethic of convenience that looks out for itself and nothing else. On the opposite side, there are those who aspire to play life by themselves, as if the task were to discover the stable thing that is embodied—an ethic of authenticity that distills a desire for stillness and resolution of the identity chiasmus without depending on other things. There is no doubt that one is not the same as the other, but in both cases a fundamental element is overlooked: that existential, essential, and intersubjective otherness forms part of the constitution of any experience, and that, without a sustainable assumption of these othernesses, sameness cannot survive. The ethical and political implications that emerge from this relationality are clear and unequivocal and constitute, to a certain extent, an amendment to both possibilities, as in the second part of the book we will explore. CASUS VITAE Without wanting to consider Descartes’s philosophical approaches as defensive responses to traumatic episodes in his life, some of those bitter trances gave rise to attitudes that would allow a better understanding of some of his positions.32 For example, it seems that the death of his mother when he was barely a year old left him with a continuous feeling of lack of protection and mistrust throughout his life. He began to develop a marked character of intellectual autonomy from an early age, at La Flèche school, run by Jesuits. That probably also helped him cope with the difficulties of his life, which had already weakened him in terms of physical health. On the other hand, his father, who soon remarried, did not have an emotional care relationship with him, so it is disputed whether an adult Descartes was really affected by his death.33 All these experiences meant that, at the same time that Descartes refined his intelligence and gave free rein to an insatiable desire to know, he transmitted the sensation of preferring solitude to social life.34 It was an autonomy assumed, perhaps, as a way to cope with the experienced emotional wound, which would also have to do with the willingness to scrutinize everything on

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his own and the consequent self-generation of the certainty of his being. The cogito ergo sum could not come out of nowhere, because Descartes was also a child before being an adult. Likewise, his interest in medicine, understood as the possibility of knowing (and even controlling) the destinies of life and fostering a bodily proximity with which to interact without risk (a corpse does not bite), could have something to do with all this. One imagines that Descartes was as intelligent as he was cold, distant, and even haughty, especially with those whom he considered inferior. Nevertheless, he was also a person sensitive to criticism, attesting that that “I” so supposedly impervious and undaunted was not so. In addition, it seems he was concerned about the passing of time. As if he were a transhumanist avant la lettre, Descartes even harbored a desire to find some way to reverse aging.35 Descartes had a daughter. As a result of a relationship with Helena Jansdr vander Storm, a servant in one of the houses where he stayed, little Francine was recognized by Descartes as his daughter, although he did not give her his surname and sometimes introduced her as his niece. Unfortunately, Francine, who was born in 1635, died at the age of five, thus adding herself to the blacklist of Cartesian tragedies. It is surprising that a philosopher who made such a crusade for truth could maintain such a falsehood about his true relationship to Francine, even though it is claimed that he really loved his daughter. Some legends evoke an afflicted Descartes36 developing a mechanical replica of the little girl. Such an automaton was never found, although the same story tells that he was thrown into the sea by a captain unable to bear the horror caused by the sight of such an artifact. Whether this was true or not, it is relevant that there is no doubt that Descartes could have gone so far as to develop a device that mitigated the deep nostalgia caused by the loss of his beloved daughter. The redemptions that we humans seek for ourselves in the face of pain are unpredictable. Descartes can be considered the rationalist par excellence. And, of course, there is no doubt that we think, but this is not the only thing we do. It may even be that thinking is not the primary function of the mystery that we embody. Our basis is that we are sensitive beings whose biography represents the concatenation of the affections received and delivered. Still, we must be very careful about reducing everything to a single explanation. We can try to figure out why Descartes wrote what he wrote from possible biographical explanations, but why he thought what he thought, we will not know. A typical vice of philosophers (and not only philosophers) is that we too easily build explanatory existential connections, when the truth is that we are not always able to recognize them, not even in ourselves. The leitmotif of searching oneself, which presupposes being able to find something still and immovable there, is an aspiration that, when observed carefully, is not only revealed as a chimera, but directly as a contradiction.

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It is like trying to stop time to talk about time, pretending that the internal experience does not develop thanks to temporality, as Kant formulated it in relation to the internal sense, and was later developed, existentially, by Martin Heidegger. Furthermore, even if the discovery of the “true self” was possible, its utility could be debatable because it is not clear that this knowledge reports characteristic notes concerning the search for that other great puzzle called happiness. There is not a moment in which one can say of oneself, “Now, yes, I have reached it. I know myself.” Being with oneself or finding oneself is, strictly speaking, a fallacy. However, it is curiously at that intersection, in feeling dislocated in the middle of that internal jungle, in the distance between the imagined “I” and the one who is the protagonist and who does not stop questioning it, when the reckoning begins, the process of (dis)identification we deploy day by day. This only allows us to certify that we identify ourselves, here and now, as X or Y—that we are the main character of a story and that we oppose it to the images of ourselves that we do know, here and now, that are further away from what we think we are. A continuous masking and unmasking that, furthermore, from inside is one and from outside takes other forms. However, and despite it may seem contradictory, being a person is precisely this: knowing that we are and we are not the same, and that does not mean that we can be just anyone. FAITH AND REASON The incessant flow of external and internal elements that continually affect us leads us, by force, to be restless, if not directly to feel exhausted. The “I” cannot be the only secure stronghold in which to shelter from the elements because, in addition to being finite and contingent, it is the product of this circuit of afflictions and affections that make up its biography. The idea is to try to counteract this agitation by other means. One way is making this fragility more bearable by finding support in personal relationships or with other living beings. Another way would be to go to other spheres, as Descartes did. For him, the idea of God provides the counterpart to this fragility. It could have been any other instance that he would have considered as “perfect,” that is, that remained undaunted by the future, completely made, and with nothing to be added to it (perfectum). As any absolute and independent instance that becomes a guarantee and an Archimedean point (progress, matter, energy, or a “divinity”), it captures that transcendence from which everything relative hangs. There is no doubt that not all these instances are the same, but they share their verticality. Some are more abstract, others more symbolic, others purely

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anthropomorphic, but all guide and provide security. They are not a point of view, but the vanishing point: nostalgia of a shelter, a house, of the original truth to which we can always return. Once again, however, wanting does not mean being able to, and the Cartesian itinerary is also paradigmatic in this sense. Descartes’s expectation travels along two opposite paths that reveal how we function. In the first place, one ascends to the truth, in singular; then, one descends to its relativity. As if the masks of that truth could not bear the burden of our excessive desires and ended up claiming also their right to vulnerability, uncertainty ends up reappearing. Let us start with the ascent. What is decisive here lies in how to explain how the idea of ​​“perfection” originates. What is perfect in itself must also exist precisely because of its perfection. Descartes says that nothing in the world could allow to fabricate this idea, and even less by denial. Our imperfection can only think of the imperfect, but not the perfect. So, if we have the idea of ​​the perfect, it is simply because the Perfect has placed it in us. Just so. Furthermore, it can only be placed if the Perfect exists, from which he deduces that the Perfect must exist. We are in the logic of the ontological argument of the existence of God, which combines the concepts to derive his existence from the idea of the ​​ perfect. In this case, Descartes revolves the development of his argument more on perfection than on immensity, unlike what Anselm of Canterbury did a few centuries earlier.37 However, Descartes’s longing is not the idea of perfection. ​​ His sting is that he doubts, is inconstant, and gets sad.38 It is the Cartesian triad that brings together in the same feeling the epistemological hiatus, the motivational impediment, and the passionate reverse. The actual knot is the pain caused by uncertainty and the tiresome fate of having to live with it. And God, to the Cartesian eye, cannot waver, doubt, or be sad. It is his nemesis. Descartes would have been glad to be free of doubt, inconsistency, sadness, without perhaps noticing that those same experiences are what allow us to experience joy, hope, and love. Imperfection hurts, it is true, but the price of perfection is the impossibility of being affected by otherness. The Discourse on Method as a metaphor for philosophy and the strategy of knowledge finds here its most transversal teaching, which is not made explicit. The ugly and the beautiful in life refer to the same constitutive fragility and show us that living is, in any case, a risk. It is because he wants this impermeable home at all costs that Descartes seeks the guarantor “God.” A “God” of reason, geometer of the world. An impassive “God” who cannot cry and who, perhaps, cannot love, because if he is not moved, he does not love. Without vulnerability, there is no love. Nevertheless, this dry “perfection” of God allows him to protect himself from what really torments him: that someone can deceive him. At last, the

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longed-for certainty, the desired calm, and the mission of the method were completed. The syllogism that breaks down this distrust and that cannot fail: if “God” is perfect, he cannot deceive; otherwise, he would not be perfect because his will would not be good, and he would lean toward what is not true. Then, what Descartes does not trust is others’ will. That is why he goes to his reason to know what the divinity can and cannot do. What guarantees his peace is not the divine Other, but the reason that limits it. Looking for that unbroken evidence, Descartes even proposed the hypothesis of an evil genie, a powerful sorcerer and trickster, who, with his sophisticated art, would greatly deceive the most sensible of humans. He would make a deception of the world by passing off as real things that, as incredible as they seemed to be, were not. But the evil genie, if it existed, would be anything but a genie since Descartes would have discovered it. However, it is evil, which is what really torments of this extravagant hypothesis. The real problem behind the idea of the ​​ perfect and the evil genie is the possibility of lying, which Descartes raises as a question of metaphysical logic. Skepticism was one of the general characteristics of the cultural environment at Descartes’s time. However, the question is not merely intellectual because the main thing is, precisely, the will that is at the base of all action. The question is wanting or not wanting to lie because it is possible that, without being perfect, we humans would not want to lie. The argument of the impossibility of deceiving makes his “God” hostage to the loop of reason, mortgages his freedom, and, consequently, certifies his limit. “God” cannot be truly free if he has no alternatives, although if he can choose, then, following Cartesian logic, he is not perfect. The dilemma is unsolvable. Nevertheless, for Descartes there is no such a dilemma. Control and order are seen as an epistemological priority; company and trust, as an existential need. Affirming the divine also works as a balm for existential loneliness,39 amplified by insidious vital isolation.40 That seems to be the primary interest of a sensitive and wounded reason. It would be rash to consider Descartes naive. The climax of the tiresome Cartesian epic highlights how we all tend to function almost without exception. Let “God” be replaced by any other element elevated to the rank of absolute, immobile, and explanatory principle, and it will be easier to see to what extent each one of us is, somehow, Cartesian. We want to know, and not for the pleasure of knowing (which would be a secondary explanation), but because we want to control, to keep ourselves in the slipstream and with the reins of existence in our hands. And yes, there are certainties, there are truths, and there is knowledge. But they are never totally certain, nor true, nor complete. What makes sciences advance is the precariousness of their results. It is the well-known

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falsification thesis, which, instead of looking for what corroborates a particular scientific thesis (which implies a verification process that never ends, because there can always be something left to prove), opts for the opposite path and goes after those elements that refute it. It is a science that constantly places itself in front of the mirror. Speaking of circularities, the mathematician Pierre Gassendi, a contemporary and a critic of Descartes, was one of those who pointed out and denounced the circularity that Descartes’s procedure would bring into conflict with the idea of God: ​​ what guarantees the truth of ego cogito clear and distinct thoughts on the world is that God exists and cannot deceive, a truth that is imposed, in turn, by the clear and distinct evidence of the notion of perfection that certifies the ego cogito. In other words, the action mechanism of doubt itself is too powerful to be overcome. Then, there is always the possibility of error, of a mirage of reality that is not such. Why should we believe that our faculties cannot deceive us? Do not they allow our senses to deceive us? Or is it that our senses do not make us see oases where there is only desert? If we doubt the world’s existence, how can we be sure of being able to reveal all the mistakes we have committed? Could it not be that the final victory of such a feared evil genie was not precisely to make him believe that he could get to know the fundamentals? Thus begins the descent phase. The problem for Descartes is that not even mathematics is guaranteed per se to be true. On the contrary, trust in God is what assures it. In 1630, a few years before the publication of his major works, Descartes sent his friend Marin Mersenne some letters in which he already assumed that the eternal truths, including those of mathematics, were so because God had created them.41 They were truths, yes, and eternal, but they were also created. Beyond the paradox that something can be eternal and created at the same time, the remarkable thing about this thesis is that the fact that truths such as two and two are four,42 or all the radii of a perfect circumference are equidistant from the center, are true because God wants them to be so. That is to say, God could make the sum of two and two not turn out to be four or that the radii of a perfect circumference were not identical. In the philosophical tradition, it is known as voluntarism: the primacy of the divine will over reason. The certainty of reason rests on the good faith of the divine will, which makes it exact. We move in the field of intimate conviction and, therefore, of its fragility. We say that something is fragile when it can break or split in half. And reason is fragile, like every human thing. In the antipodes of Cartesian reason’s desire for self-sufficiency, our vulnerable condition means that everything remains, ultimately, waiting to see the magnitude of our miscalculation. That is why Descartes wants God not to surprise him. He wants him to be as he thinks he is, in the same way that God wanted the three angles

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of every triangle to add up to 180 degrees. Let us put common sense in the place of this “God,” and we will see how gullible our rational conviction can also be. So, let us be careful with Pierre Gassendi’s warning. If the action mechanism of doubt itself is too powerful to be overcome, there is no certainty without the willingness to believe in it. And that means opening the doors to the possibility of idolatry. According to the Book of Exodus, the people of Israel, not being able to stand waiting for Moses’ return, built a golden calf for themselves. Moses, who had climbed Mount Sinai (where he would receive the Tablets of the Law), left his people orphaned of leadership and certainty for forty days and forty nights. That is, with the anxiety of being left without any sense of control, so they did not hesitate to build their calf, their idol— and a beautiful one, indeed. Opposing philosophy to belief is a simple but imprecise way of explaining the circuit of ideas. Some kind of credit always survives, something on which to rely. Even the most extreme skepticism, which is still the expression of a truth that is assumed to be indubitable, is an affirmation that trusts in itself. Beyond all that can be said, Mystery emerges, and at this point we must take into account that idol and idea share etymology, and since ancient times eîdos has been linked to “sight.”43 If we all have our own vision of the world, a particular perspective of things, in a certain way, we are all exposed to the excesses of our idolatries. The point is that, if we are to generate idols, at least we have to have clear ideas about them and not leave them out of the critical debate. And if given a choice, when we build socioeconomic idols, they should be completely favorable and not so vindictive. REASON IN THE WORLD Thirteen centuries before Descartes, Augustine of Hippo (354–430) formulated the following: What if you are deceived? For if I am deceived, I am. For he who is not, cannot be deceived; and if I am deceived, by this same token I am. And since I am if I am deceived, how am I deceived in believing that I am? For it is certain that I am if I am deceived.44

And he adds: When I inquired how it was that I could make such judgments (since I did, in fact, make them), I realized that I had found the unchangeable and true eternity of truth above my changeable mind.45

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This is a known and studied alignment.46 Does this mean Descartes was aware of Augustine’s work, perhaps in his formative years at La Flèche? It seems so. Moreover, he expressly cites the Bishop of Hippo.47 And he may even be neither the only nor the most important influence. There are others closer in time and with an even more evident resemblance.48 And then, does this remove Descartes’s credit? Is all the fame harvested undeserved? These are questions that reveal suspicions rather than doubts—and suspicion of a direct influence. Sometimes we are not beings who doubt, but beings who suspect, and we suspect something not out of ignorance but on the contrary. Suspicion tries to uncover falsehoods because it thinks it knows what is hidden below appearances. It looks behind the masks for a hidden truth. Suspicion does not have to do with mistake but with the certainty that something is being passed off for what it is not. If the error is an epistemological problem, the suspicion is an emotional matter. It is not our intention here to judge Descartes, although the question is there, and it has its a priori reasons. On the other hand, what does interest us around this matter and at this point in our itinerary is that, wondering to what extent Descartes was original in his positions lays on the table the need to establish a comparison, a critical approach to both thinkers, arranging and combining various elements. And comparing, as we will now try to show, has to do substantially with the way vulnerable rationality works. Comparing is, in effect, a confronting exercise; it involves placing one thing in front of another, causing things to happen between them. Unlike the monologue, we said, dialogue is open to a relationship, to make other reasons pass through the contradictions themselves, taking from one side to the other (that is what re-latio means) the opinions of one and the other. However, we are warned that comparisons are hateful. And this can make us suspicious of them, also because they are usually born from dark, unflattering desires that hide behind themselves: envy, jealousy, and distrust toward others that spoil relationships. Affective realities that, on many occasions, we do not want to be there and that are also part of that “I.” But comparisons do not have to be agonizing. What is more, agonizing is the only thing that comparisons cannot be, that is, life or death, all or nothing. Comparing is not judging but quite the opposite: it involves suspending judgment beforehand because, in the comparison, what is called into question is the identity and difference of the things being compared. Thales of Miletus, who could be considered the first Western philosopher (seventh–sixth centuries BC), suggested that everything refers to water.49 This is a clear example of what a comparison is not. “This refers to water” would be the only possible formulation. And it is because there can always be something that is not. What becomes unsustainable is the “everything,” which exhausts the possibility of otherness. And otherness is constitutive of

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any experience. Could we say “everything refers to water” if our environment was aquatic and we could not leave it? Here we go through another way, the well-known unfinished and imperfect circularity that allows us to conjugate the two sides of a coin. This is the path of acceptability and vulnerability of any claim that allows us to say that: 1) we claim something; 2) we doubt this affirmation of something is total; 3) by doubting, we reach a truth, which is a vulnerable truth. So, there is truth and non-truth at the same time, and they remain because neither one defeats the other, but they complement each other. They are relative. Now, we go a step further and discover that the relativity of any truth brings it into being in comparison with other truths. That is, given that no truth can exhaust “everything” that is true, it can find a complement to itself in other truths. Let us observe carefully what this means: for two truths (or situations) to be compared, neither their similarities can be absolute, nor their differences. In the case of the similarities, it is clear because if not, they would be identical, and there would be nothing to differentiate them. They would be the same truth (or situation). But the difference between them cannot be absolute, either; otherwise, they would have nothing to do with each other. Suppose I compare the truth claim of a mathematical problem resolution with an emotional situation. In that case, the possible range of comparison narrows much more than if we are dealing with two mathematical solutions placed one against the other. But even so, it is possible to compare a mathematical problem and an emotional situation because, if you can find a point of similarity, these situations are related. In other words, if the constitutive alterity of the experience appears in any affirmation that is made, it is that any experience is dialectical, that is, that it can enter into a dialogue with other affirmations.50 Therefore, that two elements do not correspond to each other is explained because they do not respond in the same way to the key element required when confronted. It is the criterion, not the things themselves, that establishes the difference between them, because anything can be compared. Let us bring this dynamic to our comparison, the one between Augustine of Hippo and Descartes. We find that, despite their convergent formulations, there are substantial differences between what Augustine of Hippo tells us and what we read of Descartes. To begin with, there is no discourse on the method in Augustine nor a methodical doubt, nor does the same idea of rea​​ son shine through. And the significant difference lies in not sharing the same notion of body. Much less (and here is probably the great difference) the same notion of body is exhibited. Having said that, and taking the affirmation that we have just made that it is the criterion and not things in themselves, what establishes the difference between them—if the criterion were, for example,

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being in front of thinkers of subjective type, or of theistic conviction, or of Western tradition—the meaning of the comparison would be another. So, was there a direct influence or not? It seems difficult to know. But the answer, which cannot be clear and distinct, depends on what you want to highlight. Some reasons bring positions closer, and other reasons distance them, so the answer depends on where the accent is placed. Now, if what is required is an emphatic answer, the only objective we can establish is that, by virtue of the set of circular relations proposed here, we are inclined to think it is probable that Descartes did not take his cogito out of his mind. We never know for sure the radical origin of an idea, but that does not constitute any demerit because nobody lives without alterities, and because what is paradigmatic in the Cartesian case, as we have said a little above, is not in this supposed discovery of the “I,” but in the whole movement around that symbolic construction around the “I.” Things can be different, can be a little similar, or can be very similar. But in any case, they all enter into the relational dynamic. It depends on what the privileged analogous reason is: it will be decided whether the resemblance is nothing, a little, something, or a lot, but the comparative flow between entities is incessant and, consequently, reviewable. This does not imply that everything is relative, in the colloquial sense given to the expression. Because, in fact, not everything goes. The prevalence of one or another thesis is explained by the greater or lesser capacity to account for itself in the face of the established criteria. However, we are not saying anything new that has not been made explicit by the Aristotelian and medieval theory of “analogy,” which digs deeply in the entity of words. Not even affirming that things “are” escapes this analogical circularity. Moreover, if any concept is the paradigm of the analogy, it is the concept of being. Or is it not true to say that an idea is, a dream is, a body is, and this book is? Many of the metaphysics criticisms that accuse it of generating a world parallel to the real world do not fit well with the Aristotelian thesis that being is said in many different ways.51 If that is so, it is because none of those ways is said completely. In this sense, the metaphysical discourse is, by its own dynamics, opening. Like vulnerable reason, left at the expense of unsuspected alterities that are always there or could be, there is always something left to say. Metaphysical reason and vulnerable reason embrace each other in their relativity and analogy. Since you cannot be sitting in every theater seat in the world, the only obvious thing is that you have a certain perspective on things. Even if the sum of all the perspectives is virtually re-created, this would still be one more perspective. And, besides, a second-rate one.

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VULNERABLE REASON At times, one is seized by the sensation that living is like an eternal present always in motion, in which one has to look in the biographical rear-view mirror to focus well on the time that is projected forward. In this restless present, which we know is linked to the past and related to the future, our rationality must be dynamic and agile. It is alive and must feel as such—among other things, because our reason is affected by continuous appearances and disappearances of multiple elements that constantly force it to position and reposition itself. It is also possible that the disruptive and the unforeseen may occur at any moment. That is why ours is a reason that, by its own idiosyncrasy, has to work based on analogies. Human reason is, de facto, analogy in action. The Greek word analogia is composed of the particle ana, which means “reiteration” or “above,” and the particle logos, which can be translated as “word,” “discourse,” or “reason.” Analogy means a comparison or relation between several reasons or concepts we understand to be neither purely identical nor totally different. That is, any of the concepts we use to try to name our experiences. The classic example to explain the analogy is the adjective healthy. Is a healthy body the same as a healthy habit? Is a healthy bodily activity (playing sports) the same as a healthy spiritual action (going to the theater)? We use the adjective indistinctly, although not to express the same thing. In principle, healthy is an adjective referring to some medical issue, but we also speak of healthy relationships. A friendship, for example, can be said to be healthy. In the beginning, an analogy was used to settle semantic questions, although later it came to shape the relations that constitute what we call reality. The question raised by Aristotle in his book Categories refers to the possible relationship between names and their essential definitions, which could be homonymous, synonymous, or paronymous. On this last notion, the Aristotelian analogy of being must be sought, the delicate point of meeting and relation of difference and similarity where the (im)proper of each thing is pointed. The Neoplatonic commentators of Aristotle explained the differences in meaning through a reduction to that which necessarily makes them really similar. Thus, a problem that was initially rather epistemological or hermeneutical became a metaphysical question, so that when one wonders in what way healthy can be applied to both a biological reality and an interpersonal experience, from a Neoplatonic perspective, one must, first of all, seek the origin of the “healthy” and see how both experiences actually participate in that first notion.52 This is an analogy that moved from explaining how we speak of the world to making explicit what the world is like.

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Today, we speak of two models of analogy, two ways of comparing. In the first place, we speak of an analogy of attribution (Neoplatonic), when in the relation given between two terms compared to each other, one thing to another, the form signified is entirely found in one of the subjects to which the name is applied—the first analogate. The others—second analogates—are related to that first according to measure (“more,” “less”). If it is established that what is healthy is properly said of the body, then the adjective healthy applied to a relationship will be by derivation of that first sense, which is the authentic one. The other model is of the analogy of proportionality (Aristotelian), which is defined as a ratio of proportions (1/2, 2/4, 4/8, 16/32). Here there is no reference to any first analogate, but parallels are drawn between independent relations—for example, the relation between vision that exists between the sense of sight and the observed object (the eye and what it sees), and the relation between the understanding and some object to refer to reality (the eye of the understanding and an idea). Here, there is no single way of expressing the reason or analogical name, but what is established is a relation of relations. In general terms, we can say that, in the vertical analogy of attribution, more emphasis is placed on the aspect of similarity between the analogues (historically, the followers of Francisco Suárez have opted for this model, relying on some aspects of the conception of Thomas Aquinas), while that of proportionality, horizontal, gives more relevance to the proportional similarity that exists between particular and, therefore, less similar proportions (this was the analogy defended by Thomas de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan, highlighting other aspects of Thomas Aquinas’s work). Analogy is not an easy question in philosophy, and besides, it sounds old-fashioned and very technical. However, we must insist this is not so: analogy has to do with how we understand the reality of things and therefore how we experience them. This is a resource we use much more frequently than we suspect in our daily lives because our day-to-day lives are nothing more than an exercise in comparison between what was and what we do not know will be—a comparison that, in this case, leads to making immediate decisions and is embodied in consequences.53 Each day is unique, but to some extent, they are all similar. No one can say for sure to what extent they become so, similar or different, because forecasts are not decisive. There is a principle of insurmountable uncertainty that can make what happens to us not be what we thought would happen. And that completely modifies what one will expect from then on from the following days. The distinction between an analogy of attribution and an analogy of proportionality reflects the idea of reason with which we try to handle uncertainty and with which we shape our lives. An analogy of attribution or unitary

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reduction of the multiple to the one suits a reason that believes it can discover reality as it is. It is a vertical model, which scales from plurality to unity, where the definition of the concept in use is only one. This is what Descartes exemplifies in his intention to discover the language behind the world, which can only be in one way: the unique and universal language of mathematics. However, with the unfolding of methodical doubt and the discovery of circularity, how can we know that the language with which the truths of things can be expressed is one and universal? Will it not be multiple and multifocal? Can mathematics result in other precisions, if God would want it that way? Descartes’s famous letters to Mersenne of 1630 assume so. Mathematics is exact because God wants it to be exact. And it is exact with these numbers because God wants them to be the numbers. God could make the radii of a circumference not equidistant, if he wished. The world suddenly opens wide. In one of these letters to Mersenne in 1630, he writes that God is a cause whose power exceeds the limits of human understanding.54 From the infallible analogy that scrutinizes the cause and the language of being, we pass to the renunciation of this pretension and to the realization that what guarantees that this principle is true is the confidence (the fides) that, thanks to God, reason is right. Credo, ergo cogito. It is as if Cartesian reason became aware of what “reason” ultimately is: a potent producer of truths that cannot ensure that those answers are anything more than conjecture. No matter how much we raise our eyes to the heavens, the heavens continue to be just as far away for feet that remain on the ground, and that error is always a possibility. Descartes abandons the regal analogy of attribution, based in his case on the independence of the objectivity of mathematical language and, therefore, on the correlation between what is thought and what is, to make his way through the ambivalence of an uncertainty principle that also affects the objectivity of that mathematical language. If things can always be otherwise, then it is that reason cannot specify the designs of being. To put it colloquially, it can end up remaining blank,55 and with it also we. REASON INCARNATED The first thing that comes to mind when one hears the word vulnerability is a body and, possibly, a suffering body. However, the dimensions of corporeality (like those of vulnerability) are not reduced to the image of crying and weeping. If corporeality is part of the philosophical experience, it is for the simple reason that without a body, nothing is possible, beginning with the very possibility of thinking about it.

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The following phrase is attributed to Aristotle: “Without sensation, neither learning nor understanding would be possible.”56 With sensation, the subject suffers “a certain type of alteration,”57 and this affection sets in motion the reconstruction, or knowledge, of that something that alters it. And this is an alteration that presupposes the structural otherness to which we have referred, which gives rise to the analogical circuit of identity and difference we have been exploring. Aristotle formulated it in On the Soul, a delicate and controversial text regarding its authenticity. It contains one of those lapidary phrases in the history of ideas that people love to quote: “The soul is in a certain way all entities.”58 As if it were a magma capable of assuming all possibilities (but only in a certain way), the soul would be the impermeable meeting place of everything that happens. In other words, it would be the stage where the world is re-created from its vulnerability. The fact that understanding is an act of sensibility makes living an aesthetic work in the complete sense of the word (aisthetikos, to be able to perceive by the senses). Immanuel Kant found the meeting point between pure and practical reason in the Critique of Judgment (aesthetic). In the third and last of his three critiques, his philosophical intuition splendidly burst forth, leaving passages for his readers from which new existential implications can always be extracted. In the Critique of Pure Reason, for example, Kant gives the transcendental imagination a special primacy in how we consolidate experience, synthesizing categories and sensibility that make up knowledge. We are thus in the realms of corporeality. At the beginning of our book, we have expressed the conviction that Descartes’s work encourages reflection on vulnerability. In our eyes, his positions lead us to consider vulnerability as a condition and a metaphysical key to all human experience. We have been observing up to now considerations and uncertainties concerning the question of the truth of our ego cogito. Nevertheless, vulnerability, as the Latin word vulnus indicates, implies assuming first and foremost one’s carnality as a primordial reality. And here, too, despite appearances, Descartes’s work leads us to ask ourselves what is this conscious carnality that each of us constitutes. The mechanistic perspective that characterizes the philosophy of René Descartes would undoubtedly suggest the opposite. Heir to the Renaissance conception that considered the body as a machine (which, like a clock, functioned punctually and regularly), some Cartesian passages convey the feeling that bodily reality has nothing to do with proper human life. The body refers to itself, it works on its own, and that is why Descartes may well have wanted to replicate his late daughter, Francine, through an automaton. An automaton is nothing more than a well-combined object, just like the body. And, by then, it had already begun to become, in every sense, an object of study.

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During Modernity, anatomy became the privileged language for explaining the body’s functions.59 Cartesian anthropology has gone down in the history of ideas as a paradigmatic example of dualism. The thinking “thing” that is the ego (res cogitans) is not in any way the extensive “thing” that is the body (res extensa). From this confronted duality, true knowledge by Descartes would not refer to any of the senses, placing him at the antipodes of considerations such as those of Aristotle or Kant. On the contrary, if there is anything from which Descartes would have to flee, it is the vagaries of the senses. However, the Cartesian itinerary gives us reason to believe that his dualism was not so severe and that the only thing he raises is, once again, the hyperbolic possibility of thinking separately about human affairs (the thinking thing and the extensive thing).60 Not only because Descartes was familiar with the medicine of his time, including that of the Netherlands61 (not in vain the fifth part of the Discourse on Method is a succinct lesson on anatomy), nor because the pineal gland (where the thinking and extensive substances coincide) appears in his reflections, but also because, as far as the passions of the soul (today we would say emotions) are concerned, for Descartes thinking also implies feeling. Nevertheless, the banishment of the dualistic presumption would be provided, curiously enough, by the notion of evidence. Where would evidence come from, even in its most metaphorical and analogical sense, if not from sight? All our life depends on our senses, among which that of sight is the most universal and the noblest.62 Descartes sustains it forcefully in the Dioptrica, the first of the treaties that followed the Discourse on Method, reinforcing the feeling he himself suggested that the Discourse was only a light-hearted way of thinking, an informal representation of some questions. As if now that he was getting down to business, doubt could be neither methodical nor hyperbolic. Descartes also considered sight as the main sensible asset of life, and, as Aristotle suggested of the soul, where all things are made effective in a certain sense. In perception,63 in the specific exercise of observing something, a certain identification happens between the one who observes and that which is observed. It is only in a later step, when this act is thought, that the segregated elements appear: what is seen (which is the vision of something) and what is somehow there in front of it; the reflexive process of thinking that one sees and the still more reflexive process of thinking that someone sees. In vision, then, the assembly of the world takes place. It also happens with the other senses, such as touching, tasting, or hearing. But it is mainly embodied in vision, which provides unequalled analogies for the symbolic life of our daily lives (seeing a truth, being blind to an event; or not seeing a situation clearly). These are analogies in which circularity is impossible to delimit and

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self-censor: What do I see out there or represent to myself in here? Where does the image of the “world” end and the “world” begin? Do I really see what I should see? Let alone if this sensitive faculty were suspended, and then I had to rely on what I did not see. Consequently, it would be all the more evident that one lives explicitly at one’s own expense. Truth is one, but it is not invulnerable to the eyes that look at it. When the cogito withdraws into its supposed transparency, from which it decides what it is and it is not, it is most vulnerable. It can cover its eyes or its head, but it can never make its vulnerability disappear. And, even less so, make its fear of vulnerability disappear, here in its most literal, etymological, and carnal sense. The shadow of doubt that accompanies each of its shreds of evidence and makes all its knowledge contingent is always lurking. Hence, the cogito is subject to those sad things that do not characterize “God” and that it wishes it did not have to suffer. The renowned neurologist Antonio Damasio published in 1994 Descartes’ Error. This study starts from the cliché that Descartes was a dualist and explains, in opposition to this dualism, why reason cannot be understood without emotions. If there is no body, there is no emotional life, Damasio synthesizes. And there is no emotional life because the body is neither passive nor a simple automaton mechanism, but it supports and contains what we call “mind.”64 Descartes’s mistake, he specifies, is that “he imagined thinking as an activity quite separate from the body,”65 the same error of imagination that we can see today, for example, in the belief in a computer system capable of reproducing human reason. The human mind is embodied, not a simple computational algorithm. For Damasio, it is “indisputable”66 that the mind proceeds from the brain. This statement turns Cartesian dualism upside down while, paradoxically, falls back into the Cartesian temptation of indubitable and evident truth. If Damasio himself assumes there is no single answer to the brain-mind equation but many possibilities (always rooted in the nervous system),67 how can we assume this is unquestionable? Descartes also believed he had found the solution to the mind-brain problem in the pineal gland, the center of union and meeting of the two substances, an extravagant nonsense to our eyes. So, Damasio’s error, to make an easy play on words, does not lie in the fact that it is reasonably arguable that Descartes was so dualistic in his positions and that he remained throughout his work in that same position. The critical starting point is to be found in that assumed unilateral explanatory reduction, the structure of the Cartesian temptation of evident truth, which he also shields as indisputable. We are back to the central issue we are discussing here. Why should we exclude other possible ways of looking at things if no one can claim to be the eye of God? It is the vulnerability of our knowledge and assumptions about

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what reality is that here, as far as the flesh and the body are concerned, has to do with the circularity between emotional life and sensitivity. While all knowledge begins in experience, not all knowledge comes from experience. This statement inaugurates Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and establishes the basis of the interaction between sensibility and understanding, which for Kant is knowledge—neither rationality nor empiricism, but rationality and sensibility, without “isms.” If vision provides good and suggestive analogies of the emotional life (to see a clear situation; to see the truth of a context), it is because there is a symbolic construction that goes beyond the empirical data. Moreover, what we correctly see are not objects, but colored spots that respond to some forms, and thanks to the recognition of those forms, those colored spots become objects. In other words, sensitivity is as essential as its categorization for the processes and circuits of knowledge. Damasio speaks of body and organism indistinctly, when by this dynamic, we are not really talking about the same thing. They are two ways of expressing reality, two languages and two semantic constellations. One refers to the experience of the body, the idea of the body, and the other to the objectivity of its functioning and its organization. The body is the symbolic construction of the organic functioning of its component parts, so although body and organism refer to the same thing, they do not express the same thing. Each day that goes by, we get to know the organism better and better at the same time that the conceptions of the body are transformed. However, what influences what and in what order and importance is not always clear. Anatomy only sometimes precedes the symbolic construction of the body, and anatomy itself can be explained by the context in which it develops. The analogy between the notion of the body and the idea of the machine, which Descartes uses and re-creates in his writings, gave way in the nineteenth century to the organicist conception of nature. This meant that the body-machine model was discarded in favor of the body-organism notion. In other words, from a stable and predictable characterization of bodily behavior, we moved to an open, living, organic conception of it, whose spontaneity is not always predictable—an openness much more in accordance with the unpredictability of medicine, in which two and two may not make four. At the dawn and beginning of the twentieth century, the phenomenological school, whose method is to describe how phenomena appear, developed with great impetus. Among its main interests were the experience of carnality and the distinction between organism, or objectified flesh, and body, or lived flesh. As an example of this distinction, we can ask ourselves what would happen if our arm was cut off. What would we feel? Would we continue to be the same person, or would we be “less” than before? The first thing that happens when you lose an arm is that you feel pain, if it is mutilated without some kind of sedative. It is something that is imposed,

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passively, to which you usually react angrily. If my arm is cut off, I scream and rage. But my arm does not. It doesn’t seem to flinch, apart from a reflex action, although it is the one being mistreated, to put it that way. Since my arm is being severed, I experience this situation as an affront to myself and to others at the same time. Because I continue to be me, and although I have no arm and its loss hurts me in more ways than the primarily physical, I exist just as I did before. I am no less on the existential plane. To think about the difference between an arm, the object, and my arm, the experience, thinkers like Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, or Helmut Plessner worked on the distinction between the lived body (leib, in German) and the physical body, as a physical object (körper).68 The lived body is of the most significant importance to constitute things we consider real. However, without an arm, there is no tactile experience, and that severed, inert arm I observe in front of me, I observe it because I see it. One does not go without the other, although they are not commutative experiences. In feeling things, one feels oneself. One is not those things, but one feels them in such an intimate way that, as happens with sight, one is almost one with the thing perceived. But this almost does not allow us to speak of a closed circularity that leads to a stable identification, as is shown when we are in pain or have a disease.69 One is not that pain, and one is not that disease. The open circularity of which we have been speaking is materialized in the dynamics of the lived body (leib) that cannot be unified as an object (körper) because it can never be observed from the outside. In the same way that happens with self-consciousness, when one sees oneself, one distances from oneself, and the one who observes is not the same as the one who is observed. Identity is always a hiatus. Am I my body, or do I have a body? It is impossible to point at where one perspective begins and the other ends. When one sleeps little, one attends less, or when one is drunk, one calibrates badly, and, of course, when one gets sick (when one has the sensation that the body follows its own path), the distance between the “I” and its affection is sharper and especially dialectical.70 The body is ill, but it is the “I” that suffers from it. The rhetorical question “who am I?” unfolds in the experience of carnality as em-bodied vulnerability, which is no longer felt as a phantom ego cogito, but as a body that is more than an organism and wonders, here and now, for its meaning and its image. For constructing this image of the leib-körper duality, at least another circularity must be added: the one provided by the sociocultural dimension. Why do we dress? Why this way? Why do we sunbathe? Why do we crave a certain figure? By incorporating a whole series of social habits, as the sociologist Pierre Bordieu emphasized, we determine our presence in the world and, through it, also our being. The body is the echo of the being, and being is said in many ways, let us remember, which also includes social

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being. By acting in a certain way, we continue to give life to the social habits that trace our physiognomy. The idea of its beauty, its health standards, or its gestures form structures of a profound power from which it is not so easy to detach ourselves. That is why we say they are habits because they are the beams of our relational habitats. If we do not want to end up hostage to them, it is essential to be aware of their necessity for the processes of identification, but also of their alienating power, whether by self-interested exploitation or, what is worse, by self-exploitation. Speaking of the body is, in short, wondering about a magma of circuits in perpetual change. The experience of the body, the physiological objectification of this experience, or the axiological and communitarian consideration of this experience (which we understand to be very intimate and, at the same time, common), are all issues involved in the same question. The body is the centrifugal issue of all philosophy because it is there and because, in fact, it is what it undoubtedly is. And not because it is only vulnerable to bad things, sensitive to blows or woundable, but because, in the polychrome garden of its interiorities, all experiences flourish, even those that make us go after them. Descartes never overlooked the fact that health was the most important thing, even for having a good mood.71 If health can be lost, it is because our precarious existence is bordering on exodus, always with one foot out of situations, in expectation of fears and hopes. That is how we are. However, if vulnerability must cease to be taboo in order to be confronted squarely, naming it should not be the only thing to be done. Those who take advantage of the fears of others to do evil are also vulnerable. Considering the pathos of vulnerability as the structure of existence, much remains to be done. Vulnerability can bring about everything imaginably good in life and also the opposite. That is why its wounds are so painful. Letting our vulnerability unfold, we have in our hands the sensitive material with which all stories are woven, with which we decide whether or not life has been worth living. From the pathos of vulnerability, we pass to ethos, to the fable of the world within the world. NOTES 1. The “clear and distinct” in Descartes can be various elements: ideas, conceptions, knowledge. Even in the third of the Metaphysical Meditations, the one dealing with the existence of God, he speaks of clear and distinct perceptions (in both the Latin and French editions), as he also does in §45 of the Principles of Philosophy. 2. In a letter to his friend Marin Mersenne, dated November 1639, he notifies her that he is working on a short text about metaphysical questions in relation to mathematics. As of 1640 (cf. E. Garin, Descartes [Barcelona; Crítica, 1989], p. 131), it

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is the problem of the “foundation” of scientific knowledge that most concerns him, a concern that will end up leading to the voluntarist affirmation of “foundation” of all knowledge, although it had been at least a decade since Descartes had begun to work on major metaphysical questions (cf. F. Alquié, La découverte métaphysique de l’homme chez Descartes [Paris: poof, 1950], p. 81). We allow ourselves a digression on this. Playing freely with the appreciation in the title of the later French version, Méditations métaphysiques touchant la première philosophie, with respect to the first Latin, Meditationes de prima philosophia, we could anticipate what we will say later: that it always remains beyond (meta-) any possibility of reaching “the” first foundation. So, there is no first philosophy except as a witness to its impossible achievement, as the unsuccessful attempt to close the circle on itself. The “last” question is always left open, so it cannot be “first” ascertained. 3. J. Wahl, Du rôle de l’idée de l’instant dans la philosophie de Descartes (Paris: Descartes & Cie, 1994); J.L. Marion, Sur le prisme métaphysique de Descartes (Paris: poof, 2004), pp. 187ff. 4. I have dealt with the issue of identity, difference, and their relationship with the development of analogical thought (a subject to which we will refer later) in Sendas de finitud. Analogía y diferencia (Barcelona: Herder, 2016). For a detailed study of the question of identity and difference, see the monograph: W. Beierwaltes, Identität und Differenz (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2011). 5. The letter was probably written in March 1637. Cf. R. Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes. Vol. I (Paris: L. Cerf [ed. Adam-Tannery], 1897), pp. 347ff. 6. Cf. P.L. Font, “Introduction,” in R. Descartes, Discurs del mètode (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 2006), pp. 28–29. However, there is no unanimity among specialists regarding the dates. 7. Cf. E. Garin, Descartes, op. cit., pp. 102–16; E. Gilson, “Introduction,” in R. Descartes, Discours de la méthode (Paris: Vrin, 1976), pp. vii–xvi. 8. Pere Lluís Font uses this noun, coquetry, to qualify the matter (Cf. “Introducció,” in R. Descartes, Discurs del mètode, op. cit., p. 15). 9. Translation of: “Ainsi mon destein n’est pas d’enseigner icy la Methode que chascun doit suivre pour bien conduire sa raison, mais seulement de faire voir en quelle sorte j’ay tasché de conduire la miene.” Cf. R. Descartes, Discours de la méthode. Oeuvres de Descartes.Vol. vi (Paris: L. Cerf [ed. Adam-Tannery], 1904), p. 14. 10. Descartes’s meditation is still another fable of the world. J.-L. Nancy highlights the weight of the Cartesian story and its nonexemplary will, the extremity of the cogito, which tells, and in its telling, fabulates (Ego sum [Paris: Flammarion, 1979], pp. 97–127). 11. One of the renowned scholars of the Cartesian work, Ferdinand Alquié, highlights this element of Descartes’s voluntary search for the balance of the structure of being, which starts from a radical disappointment, but reaches a no-less-radical affirmation: “the” affirmation of the Infinite Being (cf. La découverte métaphysique de l’homme chez Descartes, op. cit., pp. 35–53, pp. 161ff). It is an affirmation that also has overtones of hope. It is the “salvation” of promising certainty.

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12. Intuition and evidence go hand in hand in Descartes as an exercise to conceive things in an easy and different way. It is where all doubt dissipates and where it recognizes itself as a spontaneous, free process (J. Simon, La verdad como libertad. El desarrollo del problema de la verdad en la filosofía moderna [Salamanca: Sígueme, 1983], p. 135). 13. Cf. K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Routledge, 2002). 14. Descartes states at the end of the first part of the Discourse that “considerant combien il peut y avoir de diverses opinions, touchant une mesme matiere, qui soient sous- tenuës par des gens doctes, sans qu’il y en puisse avoir jamais plus d’une seule qui soit vraye, je reputois presque pour faux tout ce qui n’estoit que vraysemblable” (R. Descartes, Discours de la méthode, op. cit., p. 8). 15. In the first chapter of La vida también se piensa (Barcelona: Herder, 2018), I expose and dialogue with this Freudian presumption. 16. Cf. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 17. To understand the relationship between Descartes and the Baroque, a suggestive incursion can be found in S.Turró, Descartes i l’ esperit del barroc (Lleida: Institut d’ estudis ilerdencs, 1997). In his research Descartes: Del hermetismo a la nueva ciencia (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1985), Turró explores Descartes’s life. He was a person well adapted to his time and who knew about emerging science, which is what offered him the structure of the world that would be the basis for his cogito later. 18. Although there are scholars who usually warn that the fourth part of the Discourse is, compared to the Metaphysical Meditations, less deep and solid in metaphysical terms, there is no agreement on the scope of this opposition. There are those who catalog this distance in a more radical way (F. Alquié, La découverte métaphysique . . . , op. cit., pp. 144–50) compared to those who, on the contrary, already recognized in 1630 a genuine metaphysical attitude, understood as the will to transgress positive (scientific) knowledge, especially mathematics (J.-L. Marion, Sur le prisme métaphysique de Descartes, op. cit., pp. 9–72; id., Questions cartésiennes: Méthode et métaphysique [Paris: PUF, 1991], pp. 44ff). 19. “Je pense, donc je suis” is how Descartes formulates it in the Discourse on Method (Cf. Discours de la méthode, op. cit., p. 32). In the Latin edition of the Discourse on Method, of 1644, he translates it as “ego cogito, ergo sum” (Specimina Philosophiae: seu Dissertatio de Methodo. Oeuvres de Descartes. Vol. VI [Paris: L. Cerf (ed. Adam-Tannery), 1902], p. 558). On the other hand, in the Meditations he equates “being” with “existing,” both in the Latin version (“ego sum, ego existo”), and in the French (“je suis, j’existe”) (Cf. R. Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes.Vol VII [Paris, L. Cerf (ed. Adam-Tannery), 1904], p. 25; R. Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes. Vol. IX (Paris, L. Cerf [ed. Adam-Tannery], 1904), p. 21. 20. B. Williams proposes to doubt that methodical doubt is the Cartesian method, since doubt is always intentional, is concrete, and reveals a will to generate a system and a certain order (cf. Descartes. The Project of Pure Enquiry [Oxfordshire: Routeledge, 2005]). In our opinion, however, it would not be the case of existential doubt, which is expressed as anguish or diffuse restlessness, whose anxiety

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expresses the unfinished experience of being exposed to the elements, of being in the world. 21. J.-L. Marion places the discussion about the Cartesian “first philosophy” around the reality of the mathesis universalis, that is, the independence of mathematical knowledge and the certainty of its language. That is why he claims Descartes’s metaphysical disposition, because, as will be seen later, not even mathematics depends on itself to be true (cf. Le prisme métaphysique, op. cit., pp. 64ff). 22. J.-C. Mèlich (in La sabiduría de lo incierto [Barcelona: Tusquets, 2019], pp. 104–23) explores the double experiential condition of Descartes: the biographical “I,” of which Mèlich highlights his facet as traveler, observer, and, above all, reader; and the metaphysical “I,” which pretends to be beyond space and time. It would be the biographical self—or performative, as we call it in the second part of this book—the one that most concerns the ethos of vulnerability, where one finds oneself challenged to act, always making oneself and, therefore, open to otherness. But also, the metaphysical “I” has to do with the vulnerable “I,” the “I” that affects and is affected. In short, the real “I.” 23. The Thomist and philosophy historian Étienne Gilson catalogs Descartes as “élève des élèves de Suarez” (L’être et l’essence [Paris: Vrin, 2008], p. 158). 24. The conflicting elucidation of the value of Descartes’s fundamental propositions throughout his different works has another episode here: Are we talking about a self-referenced cogito in the Discourse that advances toward a greater metaphysical clarification of its foundation in the Meditations (F. Alquié, La découverte métaphysique . . . , op. cit., pp. 150ff, 169, 180ff., 207)? Or, on the contrary, is the affirmation of the substance of the cogito much clearer and stronger in the Discourse than in the Meditations and, therefore, less metaphysical in the latter than the affirmation of the substance of the cogito (J.-L. Marion, Questions cartésiennes, op. cit., pp. 62–73; Sur le prisme métaphysique . . . , op. cit., pp. 147ff.)? 25. Especially from the analytical philosophical tradition (for example, the aforementioned B. Williams [cf. Descartes. The project . . . , op. cit., pp. 91–127]), quite reluctant to any metaphysical consideration, although being itself, like any idea of ​​the world, indebted to a certain metaphysical position. 26. L’essence de la manifestation (Paris: PUF, 2003). J.M. Esquirol has developed the notion of affectability as the core structure of experience, also accounting for M. Henry’s idea of the self-affection of life itself (cf. J.M. Esquirol, La penúltima bondad [Barcelona: Acantilado, 2018], pp. 26–49). Also Hartmut Rosa, who has developed the concept of “resonance” as a socio-anthropological key, has recently proposed taking affection as a starting point to think about the “uncontrollable,” which is another concept that links to “resonance” (cf. H. Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World [Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020]). He specifies that “resonance” implies that the subject is moved and, therefore, in a disposition to become vulnerable (ibid., p. 82). Thus, Rosa seems to move away from the notion of vulnerability as a metaphysical condition that we propose here: condition for everything that happens in life, be it good or bad. In addition, it gives the feeling that this vulnerability is projected into the subject’s relationship with what is “outside,” and not on any of our experiences, when it turns out that the possibility of “resonance” presupposes the definition,

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stabilization, and differentiation of what resonates, but, at the same time, an intimate connection between what resonates and the one where it resonates, which implies blurring the boundaries between one and other. In other words, “resonance” is, following our image, another expression of the circularity of the vulnerable condition, which comes to tell us that before resonance, there is vulnerability, and as a condition, not as a possibility. 27. L’essence de la manifestation, op. cit., pp. 41, 58. 28. Ibid., p. 53. 29. “Sur l’Ego du Cogito,” in Phénoménologie de la Vie II. De la subjectivité (París: PUF, 2003), p. 81. 30. “Le Soi singulier s’auto-affecte, il est l’identité de l’affectant et de l’affecté mais il n’a pas posé lui-même cette identité. Le Soi ne s’auto-affecte que pour autant que s’auto- affecte en lui la Vie absolue” (C’est moi la Vérité. Pour une philosophie du christianisme [París: Seuil, 1996], p. 136). 31. First used in 1958 by Lacan in his seminar “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,” Jacques-Alan Miller developed and systematized this Lacanian neologism to a certain extent, as it can be seen in the Spanish translation (Cf. J.-A. Miller, Extimidad. Los cursos psicoanalíticos [Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2010]). 32. Cf. E. Garin, Descartes . . . , op. cit., pp. 12ff.; B.Williams, Descartes. The Project . . . , op. cit., pp. 17ff.; B.-A. Scharfstein, The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of Their Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); D.M. Clarke, Descartes. A biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 6ff.; G. Rodis- Lewis, Descartes. His Life and Thought (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1998). 33. R. Ariew, “Introduction,” in R. Descartes, Philosophical Essays and Correspondence (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 2000), p. xi. 34. Although there is also evidence of intense friendly relations throughout his life (cf. G. Rodis-Lewis, Descartes . . . , op. cit.). 35. B. Williams, Descartes. The project . . . , op. cit., p. 30. 36. Although Descartes’s interest in publishing his Metaphysical Meditations did not seem to be affected by the event in a sustained way, nor did he think much about that premature death afterward (cf. D. M. Clarke, Descartes. A biography, op. cit., pp. 134–35). 37. F. Alquié emphasizes, however, that the Cartesian metaphysical experience is precisely that of infinity: “L’infini est donc la condition de toute Pensee” (La découverte . . . , op. cit., p. 207). Somehow Alquié observes that this brings him closer to Saint Anselm (pp. 228ff.), but it should be noted that the difference between an ontological argument structured around the idea of ​​immensity (such as that of the Anselmian Proslogion, for example) or the idea of perfection ​​ has important consequences, also epochal ones. The perfect would be closer to a modern mentality. For those interested in the development and scope of this distinction, in Los confines de la razón (Barcelona: Herder, 2013), where the question of God is addressed as a philosophical question, I make a reference to the Cartesian terminology (pp. 113ff.). 38. “Comme je voyois que le doute, l’inconstance, la tristesse, et choses semblables” (R. Descartes, Discours de la méthode, op. cit., p. 35).

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39. F. Alquié, La découverte métaphysique . . . , op.cit., p. 253. 40. E. Garin, Descartes . . . , op. cit., p. 191. E. Cassirer also highlights Descartes’s loneliness and isolation, perhaps as a consequence of experiencing all scientific relationships as an agonizing competitive struggle (E. Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012]). 41. Letters from Descartes to Mersenne of April 15, May 6, and May 27, 1630—the latter with some questioning by the editors (cf. R. Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes. Vol. I, op cit., pp. 135–54). 42. In a letter to the philosopher and mathematician A. Arnauld, dated July 29, 1648 (R. Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes.vol. v [Paris: L. Cerf (ed. Adam-Tannery), 1903], p. 224), Descartes writes: “I don’t think that we should ever say of anything that it can’t be brought about by God. For since every basis of truth and goodness depends on his omnipotence, I wouldn’t risk saying that God can’t make an uphill without a downhill or bring it about that 1+2 = ̸ 3. I merely say that he has given me a mind such that I can’t conceive an uphill without a downhill, or a sum of 1 and 2 that is not 3; such things involve a contradiction in my conception” (translation taken from J. Bennet, Selected Correspondence of Descartes, Early Modern Texts [2013], p. 208). 43. The imposing work of metaphysical reconsideration and reformulation that Jean Wahl carried out a few decades ago underlines it as a founding element, and for that very reason critical of any metaphysical experiment (cf. Traité de Métaphysique [Paris: Payot, 1953]). 44. City of God, pp. xi, 26, in Collected Works, vol. xvi (London: Penguin Classics, 2004). 45. The Confessions, VII, 17, in The Works of Saint Augustine (New York City: New City Press, 1997). 46. The similarities are evident: withdrawal from the world, willingness to respond to the skeptic, search for perfection through the idea of “perfection,” intellectualism in the argument of the existence of God, identity of being and knowing (cf. R. Ávila, Lecciones de metafísica [Madrid: Trotta, 2011], p. 109; K. Lowith, Dio, uomo e mondo nella metafísica da Cartesio a Nietzsche [Roma: Donzelli, 2000], pp. 19ff.). But there are also differences, and substantial ones. Alquié highlights, for example, that unlike the isolation of the Augustinian thinking soul, the Cartesian cogito expresses being in relationship with the world that surrounds it (La découverte métaphysique . . . , op cit., p. 198). J.-L. Marion emphasizes, relying on the metaphysical force of the cogito as the substance of the Discourse, that unlike Saint Augustine, Descartes places the first principle of philosophy in the cogito, and not in the divinity (Le prisme métaphysique . . . , op. cit., pp. 141–48). 47. J.-L. Marion highlights this point in Le prisme métaphysique . . . , op. cit., p. 139. 48. The most obvious and overwhelming resemblance is with the maxim of the Spaniard Gómez Pereira, found in her book Antoniana Margarita, from 1554: “Nosco me aliquid noscere, et quidquid noscit, est, ergo ego sum” (“I know that I know something, everyone who knows is, therefore, I am”). Descartes had to justify himself by arguing that he did not know the work of Gómez Pereira, which precisely does show that, first, the work was known enough in his time to establish the comparison, and

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second, that said comparison was widespread enough so that Descartes knew about it and had to write to Mersenne in a letter dated June 23, 1641, that he had nothing to do with it and therefore had no urge to see the work. 49. Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, p. 983. 50. The correspondence between hermeneutics and dialectics (cf. H.-G. Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982]) must be recognized for the ontological consideration of what thinking means. What is interpreted, and in what way does what is interpreted underlie what is interpreted? That is, in what way is the historical, for example, in itself an ahistorical category? Are we talking about a transcendental strategy or a transcendental property? Here we propose that it is a transcendental strategy of thought because it represents a transcendental property, the experience (ours, of course) of what we call reality. It is a belief that this representation is a photograph of what it is—the same as its opposite. It is the transcendental limit of the dialectic that allows its interpretation to be possible. However, it does not mean that it is automatically a lie, because, in effect, there is something. That is to say, there is something in which to believe. 51. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1003b. P. Aubenque masterfully explains the systematic gestation of this thesis in Le problème de l’être chez Aristote. Essai sur la problématique aristotélicienne (Paris: PUF, 1962). 52. J-F. Courtine, Inventio analogiae (París: Vrin, 2005). 53. To the celebrated and discussed study by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors we live by (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), we must add the work, also by two hands, by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander: Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (New York City: Basic Books, 2013). Both have an impact on this line: analogy is the experience of the life of reason and, consequently, the limits to its pretensions. 54. The sentence we particularly want to highlight is “Dieu est une cause dont la puissance surpasse les bornes de l’entendement humain, et que la necessité de ces veritez n’excede point nostre connoissance, qu’elles sont quelque chose de moindre, et de sujet à cette puissance incomprehensible” (Descartes’s letter to Mersenne of May 6, 1630, quoted according to the version of R. Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, vol. I, op. cit, p. 150). 55. J.-L. Marion studies the question in his magnificent Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes (Paris: PUF, 1991), where he baptizes Cartesian theology as “blank” because it is anonymous and indeterminate, without qualifying or specifying its enterprise, as if it were a blank check (p. 450). It is a theology that eliminates any possible univocity and correspondence between thinking and being. The implications of this question for the understanding of modern philosophy are capital since it is clearly in the wake of the slow gestation of the analogia fidei, of Protestant roots, which will hatch with the imposing work of Karl Barth. It is not in vain that in Luther, one recognizes the imprint of William of Occam, for whom the divine was understood principally from the idea of infinite will. Indeed, the incomprehensible God of Descartes is not far behind. 56. Aristotle, On the Soul, Book III, chapter 8, p. 432a. 57. Id., On the Soul, Book II, chapter 5, p. 417a.

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58. Id., On the Soul, Book III, chapter 8, p. 431b. 59. A. Le Breton, Anthropologie du corps et modernité (Paris: PUF, 2011), pp. 69ff. 60. U. Galimberti, Il corpo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2002), p. 73. Cf. also M.T. Aguilar, “Descartes y el cuerpo máquina,” in Pensamiento (2010), p. 249. 61. The friendship and exchange with the eminent Dutch scientist Isaac Beeckman is one of the keys to Descartes’s itinerary (cf. E. Garin, Descartes . . . , op. cit., pp. 25–33). 62. “Toute la conduite de nostre vie dépend de nos sens, entre lesquels celuy de la veuve estant le plus universel et le plus noble, il n’y a point de doute que les inventions qui seruent a augmenter sa puissance, ne soyent des plus utiles qui puissent estre” (R. Descartes, Diop- trique. Oeuvres de Descartes. vol. VI (Paris: L. Cerf [ed. Adam- Tannery], 1902], p. 81). 63. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2010). 64. A. Damasio, Descartes’ Error (New York City: Avon Books, 1995), pp. 219ff. 65. Ibid., p. 248. 66. Ibid., p. 251. 67. Ibid., p. 260. 68. B. Waldenfels, Grenzen der Normalisierung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998), p. 181. 69. Ibid., p. 121. 70. Siri Hustvedt expresses herself this way in The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2011). 71. R. Descartes, Discours de la méthode, op. cit., p. 62.

Chapter 3

Ethos of Vulnerability

Descartes tells us that in 1619 he was in southern Germany. It was the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), and he was a young man in his early twenties attending a conflict that was to bring about a change of era in Europe.1 Perhaps he did so as a way of seeing the world. However, the fact is that he enrolled in the military academy of the Prince of Orange, Maurice of Nassau, and enlisted in the Catholic army of Maximilian of Bavaria. The winter quarters of these armies were located in an infrequent and cold place on the banks of the Danube, near Neuburg, and Descartes preferred to spend the days alone and secluded in the shelter of a stove. In this relative comfort, he relates that he could find the time to devote himself to meditating on the matters that would later make up the Discourse on Method. Thinking requires, indeed, not to be engaged in any agonizing struggle. For example, when one is in mourning, there is no material time to think about anything other than getting out of the painful situation unscathed. But when one indulges excessively and enjoys the trance of pleasure or joy, there is also no room for reflection. In fact, in an entirely happy world, there may be no need to think, since reflection is born of nostalgia for something that is not or will not come to be. Thinking about vulnerability is only possible if one is not at either of these experience extremes—neither in the agonizing struggle nor in blissful bliss. Descartes was at the right point and in the shelter of a stove, which provided the necessary temperature for his organism to relax and allow his mind to wander. According to his biographer Adrien Baillet, on the night of November 10–11, 1619, Descartes received a decisive sign for his life’s destiny.2 He says that on that night, he had three premonitory dreams about his existential mission. These three dreams, which broke down into a unity, pointed to the same providence: he was the one who was going to discover the secrets of a marvelous science that would explain the world. In the third of these dreams, 45

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he remembers seeing a book of poems on the coffee table in which he reads, at random, a verse that rhetorically asks: What path should one follow in life? It is curious that for Descartes, a strict correspondence between the dream world and the waking world is the germinal point of a philosophy that wonders about the entity of the world and, precisely, whether it is a mere dream. It is remarkable, not to say symptomatic, that it is a dream that gives rise to the most paradigmatic exercise of rationalism in the history of ideas. To the Cartesian mysticism of innate ideas3 must be added, with this event, not a few doses of esotericism. However, the appellation esoteric does not necessarily imply something pejorative. It indicates, psychologically, that something comes from “within,” so that etymologically it would not have to connote anything hidden or concealed and even less strange or harmful. Indeed, the intimate is not public, and that is why it is called a private vetoed space, but it is not hidden, which would be somewhat mystical, mysterious, which here connotes to be initiated in the knowledge of an ineffable secret. According to Descartes, this supposed revelation comes from within (that is what esoteric means), and dreams are dreams; one knows it when awake, with relief when they are nightmares and with melancholy when they are idyllic. Nevertheless, how to know that a reverie does not reveal the truth of wakefulness? Descartes will seize on this doubt to validate his desire. However, if there is something that Cartesian dreams reveal, without any doubt, it is his yearnings. The voice of truth presents itself to him when the vigilant ratio is extinguished as he turns off the light, and dreams of a different vigil, but he does not know why this passion drags him, nor why he desires it, nor why this one in particular. Freud, who naturally could not overlook these dreams, wrote a letter4 in which he suggested some interpretations in this regard, although the ultimate question would only be forwarded, as it also happens with ourselves, since we will never know if Descartes dreamt it because he previously assumed it, or assumed it because he first dreamt it. In any case, Descartes, like so many other politicians, researchers, explorers, or creators, believed he had found the certitude of sleeplessness in the universe of dreams.5 He also needed to know that what he was doing made sense, and he found it when he closed his eyes. As for any human being, the will to truth is not a whim. Without the pretense of truth, it is impossible to give meaning to the decisions one chooses, so they fly high and light. Lies are heavy and burdensome, and ultimately, the destructive mortgage of any project that is undertaken, although it is well-known (and in this delicate matter, even more so) that sometimes the sleep of reason produces monsters.

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THE DAILY LABYRINTH As a matter of principle, we want to be masters of our own desires; who else should tell us what we should want? Nevertheless, not knowing what we want is one of the most universal and democratic experiences reiterated on a daily basis, even in that aspiration that claims to have the greatest possible freedom. What to do? Amid this situation of heartfelt practical dislocation, some maintain that our main task should be to go in search of it and catch it. As if that freedom were there, in front of us, and offered some safe conduct to happiness, without having to decide later what to do with it. As if the meaning of freedom were not intentional and its idiosyncrasy did not imply surrendering it to some purpose, even if it is the struggle for “freedom.” Jean-Paul Sartre, the defender of an idea of existential freedom that is creative and untied from any predetermination of its essence, sees in Descartes a referent of this struggle for conquering human freedom.6 It is worth stressing here the word human because, in some way, he considers that Descartes is on the path to recover it for the cogito to the detriment of God. The break with a specific vision of the world awakened him to a self-consciousness that, paradoxically, freed him from the power of the lies of any evil genius. It was a first step. Man, in his finitude, could realize not only his finitude, but also the extent of the powerful one’s lie. Sartre concludes it would take a few more centuries for human beings to realize this freedom is indeed creative in itself, definitively turning the tables. As Ludwig Feuerbach will say in the nineteenth century, God will become a creative projection of human will. That freedom is part of the core of Cartesian philosophy is already intuited in his affirmation of a God-Will. Even the necessary truths are the fruit of the will, of a Freedom with a capital letter that has decided so, with no other necessity than its will. The truly substantive aspect of reality is the will.7 However, transposing this divinized freedom to the human sphere cannot be done without serious counterindications. The fantasized freedom has nothing to do with the possible, feasible, and not very absolute freedom, more modest in its achievements, in which wanting is not always power, nor is power always what must be wanted. In general, the word freedom refers to something detached, that is let go. Unlike self-determination, which implies determining oneself, freedom evokes instead an expansive force that shuns ties. However, it is unfeasible, and even counterproductive, to think of intersubjective freedom of this caliber, for it is precisely in human freedom that precariousness is most evident. The free will to fly that derives from a conception of freedom projected as absolute availability does not correspond with the finite and conditioned possibilities of our vulnerable reality.

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We can think of Descartes as one of the champions of human freedom. In reality, he is far from the triumphalism of humanity, which feels itself to be the creditor of its destiny. Descartes doubts, and this saddens him, shakes him, and leaves him in an uncomfortable position. He would like to be like God and not a vulnerable being. He would like to give light to a new world and immediately, spontaneously, and unabashedly know all its nooks and crannies. In short, he would like to possess it. And yet, freedom being his yearning, he comes to certify that human freedom is erratic, affected, and affectable.8 Not to mention the internal struggle that animates his daily life, in which freedom has to contend with his passions. In The Passions of the Soul (1649), Descartes synthesizes the conflict in this way: although the passions seek to incite and make available the bodily craving of the soul they reveal (Art. 40), in the same way the will is so free that nothing can ultimately constrain it to do so (Art. 41). We are unpredictable to ourselves. Passions mean for Descartes (and this is very important to avoid misunderstandings) any perception or advisory knowledge of the mind (Art. 17 and Art. 74), that is to say, an aid in the foresight of what is convenient to choose. But this is the premise: although not everything is convenient and not everything helps, the sense of a choice is never prefigured. There is freedom, and there is freedom because there is conflict. In the French edition of the Principles of Philosophy (1647; the Latin edition is earlier, from 1644), there is a letter-preface where we find one of the most precious metaphors on philosophy. Descartes writes that philosophy is like a tree, whose roots are metaphysics, whose trunk is physics, and whose branches coming from this trunk are the rest of the sciences, which are reduced to three main ones: medicine, mechanics, and morals. Morality, he adds, is the highest and most perfect, and since it presupposes a complete knowledge of other sciences, it is the highest exponent of Wisdom.9 Descartes devoted considerable time and energy to medicine and mechanics—and with impressive results, as we would say today. However, there is no Cartesian systematic morality,10 or anything resembling a treatise on virtuous behavior. On the contrary, in the third part of the Discourse on Method, he exhorts to adopt what he calls a provisional morality, the safe-conduct to live and coexist in a given context. Since one cannot be without doing anything (because not-doing is already a way of being in the world), Descartes’s provisional morality consists primarily in: first, adopting the customs of the country in which one is; second, following the religion received from childhood; and third, following for the rest of things the most reasonable and adjusted opinions of the most reputable people. In short, prejudice elevated to judgment, provisional but practical, and the ad verencundiam fallacy (or argument from authority) as a conscientious

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endorsement. In the absence of truth, it seems that what matters is utility, or not doing things so wrong. Moreover, since it is necessary to coexist, Descartes seems to suggest it is better to accommodate oneself to the least harmful. The dialectical belligerence of methodical doubt is tamed to its minimum expression. It is known that this morality is provisional, that it is not the definitive one. However, there is no urgency to get out of it because, after all, it already serves its proposed purpose: to offer a safe-conduct. To know how to live is to know how to conduct one’s reason in order to remain safe. Cartesian practical reason is not mainly concerned about truth. During the complicated sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, there was an explosion of Stoicism, which gave rise to syncretic neo-stoic syntheses, in which the classical postulates of Stoicism were combined with some Christian dogmas. The Stoicism of the time, of which Montaigne was a fabulous representative, was that provisional morality that Descartes welcomed. One can even recognize traces of Montaigne’s practical philosophy in Cartesian philosophy, although it is true that Montaigne’s Stoicism was nuanced by a growing presence of skeptical positions that consciously and progressively opened him to the opinion of others, to otherness.11 Unlike Descartes, Montaigne did not follow the path of solipsism. The Stoic schools had flourished during Hellenism, a critical period that began with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and declined toward the second century AD. Alexander’s imperial expansion had popularized the idea that the world was a great city, a cosmopolis, leaving behind the localism of the polis, the classical Greek city-state. In this way, the differences between citizens and foreigners, between Greeks and barbarians, were blurred, and the individual and the way he related to his environment became the center of attention. Also, for the Stoics, the main concern was knowing how to live in order to achieve well-being. This need increased with the death of Alexander and the consequent crisis that led to the division of the empire into four great kingdoms. What was to be the city of the world ended up being a new episode of intemperate struggles among fellow citizens. The main concern of the Stoics was to attain happiness, which was not conceived as something very playful. Generically, it is stipulated that for Stoicism, the structure of the world is based on two principles: a passive one, which is the material substance, and an active one, which is the reason (divinity, or “logos”) in matter. Reality combines these two principles, ordered matter, a great organic universe where the particular is related to the universal. The wise man’s task is to combine his own desires with those of “destiny,” with the necessary order of the “whole.” Sometimes the wind blows in favor, but at other times it is not so. It is then that one must understand that the order of the cosmos is always necessary and that the sequence of events is the best

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possible. For the Stoics, to live according to nature is to live according to the plan of events. Taking care of oneself is the main task in the life of the Stoic, but not in a very exultant sense. What is convenient is to adapt one’s desires to destiny so as not to suffer more than necessary. That is why it is also essential to keep the passions that unnecessarily alter the mood at bay. The wise man is the one who masters the art of apatheia, which is the elimination and mitigation of all emotional excess and the indispensable element to be happy, which consists in being able to remain impassive in front of the world. What Stoicism proposes is a moral and emergency solipsism. That may be why it resurfaced so strongly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when it was perceived that the world was too changeable and disconcerting. It was necessary to protect oneself from its harshness and perhaps they found a way to deal with that instability and uncertainty in its doctrines. However, Stoicism also harbors a clear claim to truth. In addition to offering a refreshing attitude, it wants to explain the truth about the world, which clashes with methodical doubt and suspicion of matter. For this reason, it is also surprising that Stoicism is still so attractive today. Although it may seem paradoxical, almost none of the current recoveries made of Stoicism are suitable Stoic because our conception of the world is not the same as that of the original Stoics. And not only because when things go in our favor we want to maintain them and, when not, to transform them, implying that the cosmos does not function with a necessary order, but is modifiable. The main difference is that for the Stoics, to live according to nature is to live according to the necessary plan of the divinity, aligning their own reason with that of the world. On the one hand, for us, who are heirs of the philosophy of suspicion, the “natural” and the “rational” are motives for discussion, and this supposed divine plan is an object of deconstruction. On the other hand, on a practical level, we assume time and again that we embody an accelerated notion of time and an unbridled neoliberal dynamic of labor relations. We should ask ourselves to what extent the motto of cura sui (self-care) in this environment of effervescent technocracy and incessant consumption of experiences can be compared to the ataraxia advocated by ancient Stoicism. In any case, and returning to the question of Descartes’s provisional morality, although the retreat around the ego cogito is reminiscent of the moral solipsism of classical Stoicism, Descartes’s philosophical itinerary does not evoke it, neither by the absence of self-pity nor by the wildness of his intellectual and scientific ambition. The world for Descartes is there to be explored and repeatedly called into question, not to be complied with. Moreover, what stands out most about Cartesian provisional morality is its Catholic faith.12 Such is the first commandment of provisional morality, to

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heed the religion received in childhood, and one of the idiosyncrasies of Christian morality (if not the central one) is charity: the incessant circulation of knowledge and appreciation for one’s neighbor. Descartes seems to have been a convinced devotee. A few years after receiving the dreamlike “revelation” of the mission he was to carry out through the famous dreams of November 10–11, 1619, he made a pilgrimage to the feet of the Virgin of Loreto in gratitude for the gift. Nevertheless, his explicit acceptance of the provisional Catholic morality can also be explained by the circumstances in which he lived. It was not long after Galileo’s condemnatory trial, and Descartes’s positions were dangerously similar to those of the Tuscan astronomer, so it was in his interest not to anger the authorities. For Descartes, provisional morality also functions as a pragmatic tool to avoid greater evils in personal relationships. It is surprising, to say the least, that the incessant seeker of truth that Descartes said he was should not only have been satisfied with a morality interested in minimizing the dangers of everyday life, but also that it should be based on a criterion of such poor ethical baggage as the education he had received. Furthermore, he considered morality to be the highest wisdom of all. It is unsurprising that Karl Jaspers criticized Descartes severely in this respect,13 for neither his reason is reason, nor his faith is faith, he points out. However provisional one may conceive his morality to be, it has, like any other morality, a direct bearing on one’s life and that of others. And what he understands that Descartes’s provisional morality uncovers is a profound inconsistency between his theoretical work and his praxis. The former’s vocation for freedom does not correspond to the latter’s fear of assuming its price. Descartes went through life with unrealized freedom, Jaspers concludes. By recognizing the power of his time’s authority and submitting to it, he did not propose an alternative to its truth but made the inheritance he had received his own. Whether for convenience or utility, he ended up assuming its discourse as dogma, without any other justification, as if the real reason for this decision was that he could not bear the experience of radical doubt and the vertigo it entailed.14 Jaspers’s slap on the wrist to Descartes concerns one of the tensions that accompany all human experience, whether philosophical or not. The hiatus between what is preached and what is practiced is one of the psychic dysfunctions that is most difficult to bear and that causes us most of our problems. It is a sour reality that becomes entrenched and aggravated when it becomes a generic and relative guideline, as if the shared malpractice had less harmful effects. This has nothing to do with the pertinence and authenticity of the religious question or expression. Moreover, science, technocracy, and even politics and their respective idealizations of progress and historicism have led to blatant

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and undesirable practical inconsistencies. So, assuming it with stoic resignation, little can be done. That is the irremediable price of human precariousness. This is partly so, but like the procus, the figure of classical antiquity that represents the suitor who requests the beloved’s attention and begs for her esteemed favor, we, too, seek answers, asking how to locate ourselves, without losing sight of the fact that what is achieved using supplication (prex) is the precarius, which etymologically also means “prayer.” If precariousness is part of the ethos of the vulnerable condition, it is because when we ask, we interrogate (inter-rogate), that is, we solicit one another, and not only as thinking beings, but primarily as living beings. Beings who want, who seek (quarere) that an answer also becomes an act of responsibility. Beings who accept their mistakes, but never their indolence. PROCUS The precariousness of moral life explains Descartes’s case and prefigures the path of ethical reflection, although it does not necessarily predetermine it to fatalism or elitism. The word ethos denotes, according to Aristotle’s positions, “character.” Ethos, which is opposed to pathos, refers to something active that is generated by habit. Unlike passion, which simply overcomes, action shapes the way of being, the character, and energizes the habits that shape life.15 The word Cicero used for the Greek ethos was mos, “moral.” Mores, the plural of mos, means “customs” and refers to the set of models and contexts of action that any community assumes. There are always morals because one always has to act, and one acts in a certain way, which generates habits that are projected as customs. The moral circuit, composed of customs, habits, and convictions, is a direct consequence of the so-often-appealed human sociability. Some speak of morality and ethics almost synonymously, based on the Greek etymological familiarity. However, for us, it is crucial to maintain the distance between the two. Morality should be understood as the set of customs, the more or less established systems of behavior of a society or group, which always carry a surname: Christian morality, hedonistic morality, relativistic morality. On the other hand, ethics refers to the very nature of what is done, which questions the meaning of its action, even if it calls into question the prevailing morality of the environment. If ethics and morality were the same thing, we would not be able to lament, for example, the inconstancy or laxity of some of our actions and the hiatus concerning what we proclaim. After all, it is an ancient human custom not to do all that we say we will do, just as it is not to say all that we actually (sometimes erratically) do.

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As the classical adage says: errare humanum est. When the error is minor, without transcendental consequences, it is even easy to confess it with a mischievous smile. Nevertheless, when it leads directly or indirectly to greater evils, we move on to much more solemn expressions. To err means primarily to wander aimlessly, to have mistaken one’s direction of travel. This implies having to realize that one is not where one wants to be, that is to say, to be out of place. And that is what philosophical experience seeks: the question about the direction, the erratic possibility (or not) of the step taken. Question and habit do not go hand in hand. When a question is asked, an interpellation takes place that somehow breaks the previous cycle. That is why it cannot generate a habit, or it should not. The question threads and unravels with the becoming and is relocated as one deals with it. Now it is this; tomorrow, who knows. The philosopher’s attitude to questioning is not, or should not be, any habit. It is not repetition that constitutes it, but a request, similar to that of the procus. The philosopher’s habit of asking is not along the lines of establishing automatism. It is necessary to know what to ask, how and when to ask it, and above all, to learn to listen. And that (as with all decisions made in life) requires patience and a certain amount of good fortune. The possibility and the certainty that one will err is in no way extrinsic to the philosophical experience, because it is not extrinsic to life in general. On the contrary, it is one of its most characteristic features. It is quite another thing to use one’s freedom to cause harm deliberately, which has little to do with the dynamics of error. In error, there is regret for the undesired consequences and the will of not having committed it. In crime, this is not always the case. The paradox is that the one who regrets and blames the most is the one who does not want to make a mistake, who empathizes with the pain caused because he does not want to hurt or afflict. The one who seeks that harm and knows that he does it, is only moved by himself. However, the problem is not the mistake, but the narcissism that does not accept it. Becoming an adult means returning again and again to interact with that excessive tendency to reproval with which we grow up. But it is precisely accepting error as a condition of life that creates the possibility of overcoming both it and reproach. This is the premise of any ethics of vulnerability, without falling either into condescension or loops of whipping, of course, since both extremes constitute errors in their excess. Moreover, concerning Descartes’s provisional morality, where would the erratic be? The most erratic thing would be that he seems to take advantage of the distance between the universality of the ethical question and the contextual praxis of morality to endow his own convenience with ethical legitimacy. Because, in effect, all morality is provisional because of this distance. No system can be completely closed in on itself, claiming to have given an

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account of what it must or can confront, neither in theory nor much less in practice. But this does not mean that all moralities are equally equidistant from this question, since some are undoubtedly much more destructive and alienating than others. The fact that morality can only be provisional and contingent does not mean it is not indispensable. To consider it otherwise would be to fall into a false dilemma. From this provisionality of morality we have to supply ourselves with elements and points of reference, knowing beforehand that not all of them serve for all contingencies and that, in any case, these provisions run out. Provisionality is not necessarily something negative. What aggravates it is not the error that inevitably follows the tension between ethics and morality, but the use of this distance to make good one’s own interest. The ethical question tends, by its dynamics, to its communication, to the transcendence of its arbitrariness. When one asks oneself whether one is acting well, it is because, in some way, one leaves one’s own sphere to question oneself and to expose oneself to the other, like the procus, who, with his request, exposes himself to the reception of an answer that will also demand from him an act of responsibility. One can opt for axiological egocentrism as an a priori, but at the cost of short-circuiting the ethical experience and (what is worse for that ego) the richness of shared vulnerability. THE PATH OF NON-CRITERIA What is highlighted in the tension between ethics and morality is the same thing that is unveiled in the incessant search for truth. If we are affectable, then nothing remains closed. Hence the ambivalence of the criterion question makes it possible to discern whether an action is “more” or “less” sound, just, or prudent—the yardstick by which actions are measured. In light of what we have been maintaining, speaking of “the” criterion is inappropriate. Trying to glimpse “the” criterion is chimerical. So, if thinking ethics in terms of vulnerability implies reflecting critically on itself and assuming the open circularity of its possible foundation, the criterion for ethics of vulnerability cannot be other than its fundamental non-criterion. This derives from the impossibility of prescribing what is to be done and from the provisionality of any moral response, of any “criteriology.” The strategy of non-criteria must be distinct from that of relativism. Unlike perspectivism, which states that we do not know to what extent our gaze facilitates, eclipses, or transforms the truth and incessantly wonders about these interactions, relativism does affirm, by negation, a fundamental and unshakable truth. Perspectivism does not know whether something can

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be definitively affirmed or denied because it never reaches the plenum of certainty, which does not prevent it from seeking ways to reduce to the minimum possible the shadow of that doubt that always accompanies it. On the contrary, given that to deny categorically is also to affirm categorically, the position assumed by relativism is also that of an invulnerable and unshakable truth, but by way of negation, canceling the question. Perspectivism proposes a vulnerable truth and ethics, open to reconsideration, while relativism supposes, paradoxically, believing to know definitively that there is no truth. Consequently, such a non-criterion should make it possible to discriminate between more or less good, just, or prudent actions, since the strategy of non-criterion is already a way of understanding things, and it carries (like any other point of view) its own consequences. The strategy of non-criterion is oriented to minimize the a priori discrimination of a moral thesis and to pass from prejudice to judgment. It is the consequence that follows from this existential opening that vulnerability entails and from being exposed to ignorance. That is why trust is so central to its formulation, which calls for the will of the other. The ethics of vulnerability is also an ethics of performativity because it is an ethics of the word: when I affirm that I am giving the floor to someone, I am, in effect, exposing myself to his reasons. The assumption of this radical non-criterion is a performative act that assumes its fallibility, its precariousness, and its affectability as its elements. To propose a non-criterion is not to advocate being without criterion. It is to accept that it is reasonable to delimit some provisional criteria, always subject to revision. One can be wrong even in the thesis of the non-criterion, of course, but this confirms the same position. If one can change one’s mind, it is because there is room for the question. So, the non-criterion of ethics of vulnerability also has to do with the awareness of being able to be wrong and to live with error, with the need to learn to forgive and to ask for forgiveness. Advancing in the possibilities offered by an ethics of vulnerability will allow us to gradually endow this noncriteria with elements that are no longer merely restrictive. We will see this in the following pages. They are derived elements, and almost all of them are grounded in the mirror that is for ethics the performative affirmation, the one that reveals the value and meaning of the concrete actions we perform or omit. Performativity is the self-consciousness of practical reason. Through it and its foresight and revision processes, we reconstruct a composition of place of what we do. It is what illuminates what we assume in the daily acts we carry out. Earlier, we spoke of Descartes’s impossibility to carry out the radical doubt that he proposes. We said it was more sensationalist than effective because, while he theorized about it, his actions did not go in the same direction. He corresponded with his friend Mersenne, was attentive to the opinion of other thinkers, and was cautious with the authorities. Even

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while he doubted his body, he wrote that he doubted his body, for which he needed a hand.16 Why, then, did Descartes write letters if he doubted the existence of others? Why did he share his meditations if the only source of certainty was the cogito itself? The performativity of Descartes’s everyday acts leads us to think that the existential concerns that primarily gripped him were the disillusionment and loneliness resulting from having no choice but being preemptively suspicious of the world. Methodical doubt is the hyperbolic and subsequent staging of a painful original experience that comes from the world and that, when negatively exacerbated, leaves deep wounds for life and coexistence. The answer to Cartesian doubt is in his doing and not in his saying; in the letters he writes and expects to be read (and, of course, attended to and answered; and in the compliments and affections he longs to receive.17 In the same vein, his interest in medicine gives food for thought. Of the three branches that Descartes says come from the trunk of the tree of philosophy, one is medicine. Medicine explains the body and has to do with the search for greater well-being. Medicine, as with Stoicism, experienced an essential boom in Descartes’s time. One of the themes that most concerned Stoicism was the care of the self (cura sui), understood as a concern for man as a “whole,” as a unity of body and soul.18 If the Stoic retreat may have influenced Descartes’s theoretical exercise concerning the cogito, then his interest in medicine and health, which he places at the level of morality, would also have to do with this desire to care for oneself, to make the wound of vulnerability less distressing. Our organism is a marvelous engineering that is nevertheless impregnated with precariousness. It is infirmus in the sense that it does not sustain itself, and this is not only appreciated when it cannot cope with the presence of a pathogen and then becomes ill. Also, we only sustain ourselves partially alone when things are going well. We are affectable beings, and if we get sick, it is because we can always get sick and because sooner or later, we will come to fall completely, and our organism will become a corpse (cadaver in Latin, related cadere, to fall).19 It is the painful aspect of vulnerability. Hence, immunitas, in the sense advocated by the bacteriologist Louis Pasteur, is understood as the struggle to stand firm to stimulate the body’s defenses actively. A warlike metaphor concerning disease, which dates back to the end of the nineteenth century20 and is still valid today, above all shows us how we conceive of disease and, consequently, how we plan to live with the darkest side of our vulnerability.

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INFIRMUS Descartes was a great traveler. Throughout his life, he visited many latitudes of Europe engrossed by then in recurrent conflicts and disagreements, residing mainly in the Netherlands and visiting countries such as Switzerland, Denmark, Germany, Italy, and Sweden, where he ended his days. In the Netherlands, the desire to know the way the human body worked was remarkable, as evidenced by Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632), in which a few surgeons can be seen around a body, attentively following the explanations of the renowned physician and anatomist Nicolaes Tulp. Medical academies and confraternities proliferated in that battered Europe, giving shape to a conception of medicine that, in part, still survives today. The health concern is proportional to life’s dignity here and now. The unfolding of cultural Modernity and the process of secularization that goes with it brought the concrete reality of time into focus. Progressively, the individual became the master of his destiny and had to forge a personal and collective identity. Likewise, human knowledge went from being concerned with what was happening in the heavens to considering how to procure more and better earthly prosperity. Moreover, the organism’s health was one of these fundamental concerns to be addressed. In our hierarchy of values, health occupies a primordial (almost sacred) place. Together with money and love, it is our triad of supreme goods, and health is the most important of the three. Descartes also maintained that health is the foundation of all other goods.21 If health fails, everything else will likely fall. Nevertheless, it is curious that this sacredness, which is the fruit of the most significant earthly appreciation of human life and its irreplaceable value, is not recent. The Latin past of the Spanish word salud (“health”) already places it in the sphere of the sacred. The health-salvation duo continues to be fundamental in Western culture. It is so much so that the mysterium salutis, the mystery of salvation, is one of the Christian theological themes par excellence. This notion of health expresses a particular order, a harmony between the state of the world with the being in the world. Tuning the concrete orders of each individual with the cosmological order is the ultimate purpose of this mysterium salutis, and although it seems that secularity has broken with this theological logic, there are medical approaches that continue to advocate pathology as anomie (or of disease as a sinful stain) and healing as a return to metaphysical equilibrium that transcends the organism.22 The fact that some medical centers are named after saints could also be interpreted as an expression of this cosmological protection. However, our

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concepts of health and disease are mostly related to the vertical mechanical and quantitative Cartesian medicine, which seems to forget that health and disease have a part of symbolic construct.23 Utilitarianism and positivism have consolidated a fundamentally organicist conception of medicine in which what is healthy is reduced to specific objective parameters. The paradox is that, despite the prevailing materialism, the medical professional is sometimes asked to do the impossible, as if doctors were endowed with shamanic or priestly powers. The historical and symbolic continuity of the sacred and the profane in our notion of health continues to be narrow in some points, as if medicine also constituted the initiatory rite for the resolution of the mysteries of life. The practice of medicine is especially explicit about its vulnerability. It lives on the wire, with the limit and the exception of counselors, and in this, it is not very different from philosophy. It is also a question, an exercise in analogy and interaction with what questions it, which is everything. Galen, the physician and surgeon of Roman antiquity who gave his name to the medical profession (the “galens”) and whose work De methodo medendi—on the path, or art, of healing—was a significant influence for many centuries, wrote a booklet entitled That the Best Physician Is Also a Philosopher. Galen was familiar with the philosophical trends of his time. He maintained it was as essential to master logical reasoning and to know how to discern the nature and physics of bodies as it was to cultivate, from there, the ethical expertise to know how to choose what was convenient. What Galen was proposing was not so unprecedented since, even before, the Greeks had already proliferated the idea of the philosopher-physician and the intimate relationship between one discipline and the other.24 Today, the paradigm is entirely different, as Thomas Kuhn would say. Galen invites us to think that meditating and medicating are not so far apart. Furthermore, this relationship is corroborated etymologically. Meditating, as we said at the beginning of the book, is the exercise of taking measures, getting down to work, and dealing directly with a specific subject. For example, treatises are written when one wants to dissect a subject in depth, carefully. The same root, med-, is also found in the word medicine and is oriented to caring and treating in the health field. A physician who proposes a treatment for a given condition seeks a cure and exercises care. What is surprising, however, is that when one claims to have health problems, this duplicity and semantic richness tends to disappear. Something else is implied: there is something in the body, understood as an organism, as a biological-physiological gear, which does not seem to be working, something that does not respond to the function presupposed for it and does not conform to the norm. This is what is imposed with the naturalistic physiological

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perspective (clearly functionalist) where what happens to the majority determines what is healthy and what is not.25 Health and disease are projected based on fundamentally physiological parameters, which, although part of reality, are not always the most substantial. Some conditions go unnoticed, and yet they are there; they are asymptomatic and do not coincide with pathological expressions typified for that condition. On the other hand, some bodily ailments do not refer to any known biological alteration but are experienced as an impediment to daily life. This is why the World Health Organization (WHO) has defined health as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or illness. This is a definition that, in addition to conveying an almost utopian-platonic idea of what is healthy (perfect, complete), speaks of health as a state: a vulnerable (infirma) situation. Following the expression that we have been using here, the unilateral functionalist perspective would be the Cartesian temptation taken to the field of biosanitary sciences, forgetting that also the context and the symbolic framework to determine what is healthy and what is not have a weigh in the value placed on what is healthy. In the Romantic period, for example, some writers and artists considered illness more interesting than health. It was conducive to greater self-knowledge, they suggested, while at the same time stretching the imagination and sensitivity. This is a reckless and dangerous idea of what is interesting that is utterly alien to our conception,26 in which an understanding of illness as weakness predominates. As if those who fall ill were always responsible for their unhappiness, illness is sometimes something to hide, or even a stain of which to be ashamed. Our productive and competitive context feeds this sense of guilt by perpetuating the idea of a world of permanent exploitation where the mantra is never to stop. Being sick means having to stop and rest, and that is paid for: sometimes with the loss of one’s job, and at other times with the lack of access to efficient health coverage if not through insurance companies. Some conceptions of what is healthy and unhealthy could very well be transmuted into each other, and we would come out ahead. Despite claiming to be healthy, some conceptions of illness are clearly pathological. Therefore, the question of how to think about “health” in a way that is neither reductionist nor alienating prompts us to seek a multidimensional and liberating reflection principle. This principle is to be found in the notion of analogy discussed above. As we have already said in the first part, a classic example used by many philosophers to exemplify what an analogy consists on is the adjective healthy. Healthy is said of urine, of body, or of drink, but it does not mean the same

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thing in all cases. Urine is a sign of body health insofar as it is the subject of health, and drink insofar as it is the cause of health. Following the circularity and analogy of the concepts we have been expressing, health should be conceived as a multifocal and plural situation that allows the unfolding of our capacities and autonomy at the individual and community levels. We should also bear in mind that we are psychophysical beings, that our minds and bodies are not machines, but interactions that change, adapt, and develop and, therefore, interact with all kinds of conditioning factors. In other words, we cannot do everything, and everything we can do is not necessarily convenient for us. With health thus conceived, disease lowers its semantics of exceptionality, both in the physiological field and, above all, in the psychological field, where its taboo reaches even higher levels. Although it is undesirable because it incapacitates and adds more uncertainty, illness is part of all organisms’ possible states. It evokes neither guilt nor even less revenge because illness (infirmus) means not standing firm, and no one stands alone or forever. We depend on each other and on many other things, and there is always an imponderable of fortune and uncertainty that can make the difference. Illness manifests the darker side of vulnerability, and its possibility is not exceptional. It is always there, always present. We have enough to do with having to cope with the wounds of life without having to add painful stigmatizations that neither reduce the impact of the disease, nor make it disappear. Stigmatizations are not only useless, but they are also ethically unacceptable. ETHICS AND CARE: BEYOND THE TOPIC Ethics has to do with health because ethics also has to do with a good life augury. If not, why do we greet each other when we meet and say goodbye? We wish each other the most precious good that keeps us safe from the fearfulness of the vulnerable condition and rescues us from having to walk through its darkness. In Catalan or French, salud is expressed and augured, and in Italian, the expression salve continues to be used to greet, in keeping with the etymological richness of the word salud. Health is also appreciated because it is the biological condition of everything else. In every sense: for its essential fragility, because it can be “lost,” even if every effort is made for it not to happen and prevent or complicate any action; for its interdependence with other dimensions (intrapersonal, interpersonal, socio-political, and, of course, also biological dynamics); and for the interdependent reality to which it points, that is, the development of mutual healing and care.

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The ethics of care is usually related to the field of biosanitary sciences, but it is essentially related to all areas of life. Caring is not an appendix to the professional praxis of doctors and nurses, nor is it an appendix to any action and vocation developed with a certain self-awareness. Promoting physical health is one of the most important aspects of life, but we have seen that health has many facets and refers to being able to be in the world considering all our capacities. That is why health, in its multiple meanings, must be taken care of. If the etymology of meditate and medicate has revealed the intimate semantic relationship between the fact of thinking and curing (both have to do with taking measures of something, with treating something, and by derivation, with taking care of that situation), the etymology of care makes these relationships even closer.27 To care for means to take care of something, which brings us back to precariousness, which is to request, ask, and implore. To care finds its etymological root in the verb cogitare, which means, as Descartes has left for posterity, to think. To say ego cogito, ergo sum would not necessarily mean only “I think, therefore I am.” There is another possible connotation: I care, therefore I am. Because to take care of something or someone is not only to deal with and hold in one’s hands that which is entrusted to us. It is, above all, to think precisely and concretely about the good of the other, the “other” good that this otherness embodies. The fact that, throughout these centuries of the history of ideas, these relationships have been disseminated, eclipsing the symbolic dimension and privileging the biological and physiological perspective of health, does not prevent that, when we turn to reality, the relationship between caring for something or someone and thinking about something and someone must go hand in hand. Care is also thought. It would be absurd to close our eyes to the evidence of the spectacular progress made in biomedical sciences, mainly due to the tremendous harvested achievements in biological and physiological knowledge. Saying otherwise would be folly. However, that only explains some things. If medicine is an art, it is because two and two do not always make four and because accumulated skills can always be called into question with each new case.28 They can be validated or modified. Since bodily ailments can come from both the known and classified reality29 and so many other ignored relationships and circularities, what sense does it make, then, to speak of rare diseases? Diseases or conditions are not rare or extraordinary. They are not very common and, above all, unknown. What explains their rarity is neither the idiosyncrasy of the disease nor even less that of the sufferer, but our categorization. The praxis of the cure also combines identity (symptoms manifested by those affected by a given condition) and difference (two or more persons may respond differently to the same condition, and even the same person may

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do so in two different episodes). In other words, the analogical dynamics of existence is expressed. Moreover, this directly affects medical action because healing is, in a certain way, a unique and original act, a curative creation that starts from a technique but goes beyond it. To cure is not to reproduce a particular scheme or a specific formula. It is, starting from what is known, to postpone the horizon of the unknown a little more, to compare in order to transcend and, ultimately, to withstand the “other.” If healing is an action that is also the fruit of analogy, we should extend this doctor-patient relationship, which evokes the paradox of the non-objectivity of corporeality, to the whole experience of our own limitations. This is what the father of contemporary hermeneutics, Hans-Georg Gadamer, proposes.30 This exhortation means that the fruitless search for neutral objectivity, for clear and distinct certainty, must make room for the unpredictable. Thus, as far as health is concerned, only some things can be measured, which unfortunately implies that not everything can be medicated. The measure of all things is, quite simply, all things, taking also into account that each of these things can change.31 What do we mean, then, when we think of health? Is it a miraculous equilibrium of equilibria whose dynamics we know little about? Gadamer invites us to think of it in this way: it is the hidden state of our existence, the secret of our vitality, the silence of the organs and the oblivion; to a large extent, of the ego.32 The enigma of health and illness is beyond us. This is a direct sign that none of us is self-sustaining, as has been reiterated. Feeling or being sick should not be seen as an experience far removed from the everydayness of existence. It is the acute expression of a condition and the suffering and painful face of vulnerability that undoubtedly requires treatment but is not foreign to its dynamics. If we are vulnerable, our condition is infirma. And what is more, thanks to that same vulnerable condition, we can sometimes overcome the disease, affect it, and treat it in order to find a new equilibrium, gestate a new state in the world that, although it would seem to be a return to the previous point, it is not. With it, we have also added a new scar to our biographies. Simply stated: the ethics of care is the ethics of life. The undesirable experience of illness also bears the imprint of an absence, the loss of an own good that looks back on its past with the uncertainty of what the future holds. And it is an evil that may be greater. As happens in desire, in the experience of illness, there is something of a nostalgic experience. Moreover, in this trance, corporeality, coexistentiality, painfulness, the capacity of appreciation, and the value of human existence become especially evident.33 The realization of an uncertain opening to the general “being able to be” of existence goes from the good of regained health to the definitive fall. Life and its death.

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Moreover, if the ethics of care is the ethics of life, then it is doubly open ethics. When knowledge and behavior are standarized, everything considered “abnormal” is automatically left out. The circle closes and becomes self-referential. It is an illusion, a forced one maybe, but with terrible consequences. Time is not enough to account for the countless stories of suffering that have taken place in the name of “normality.” It is essential for general health not to confuse repetition with normativity, because it is true that there are regularities, phenomena that repeat themselves and give rise to the construction of common places, to patterns that give clues as to what may be happening. There are truths and knowledge, and we are often right. However, there is no pure and absolute evidence because there is always room for doubt. Closeness based on one’s own epistemological creed entails opening the door to the dogmatic condition and, with it, the guilty danger of running over and violating others’ lives. Any kind of absolutism, one of the most dangerous possibilities of human beings and one to which we must always be very attentive, is proof of this. THINKING AND HEALING Let us recapitulate the path followed up to here. Our meditation assumes as a starting point that vulnerability means affectability and has proposed the image of the imperfect and unfinished circle to represent it. The image of the circle has been used to symbolize many things, among them eternity. In our case, the line is lost, and the circle does not close. It never passes through the same point again, nor does it reach the same starting point. There is always an infinite opening, almost impossible to seal, a hiatus that calls for trust to reduce the uncertainty it entails to the minimum expression. This inconclusive circularity allows us to detect a beginning and an end to the processes, something that does not happen in a perfect and conclusive circle. However, the resulting procession should not be interpreted as an overcoming or progressive dynamism. It describes a circuit that begins at one point and ends at another, established as a provisional beginning and end, and which, in any case, can stretch back and forth as far as it can. Even the endpoint of a given circularity may be the starting point of another. The issue that has served as our guide to exemplifying this form has been the question of the “I.” The set of open circularities that follow one another in us and that we reap in the incessant “inner” experience could be placed side by side and draw a sort of syncopated spiral. This spiral would be the unitary idea of the “I,” its unfinished identity. The figure of the spiral, derived from the open circularity, is a metaphor for the comings and goings that we observe and represent, for the emotional and symbolic whirlwinds that shake us and

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the sentimental reconstructions to which we cling, and for the “I” that refers to so many other “selves.” The same happens in the relational sphere: the “I” refers to other “selves,” in this case, “external” ones. Relationships are incessant circuits that take us from one place to another and never stop. We know they happen, but we do not know everything that makes them happen. There is something in relationships, as in the circularities of the “I,” that escapes us, and so we cannot help but go after it. We know it is there, but we do not know how to name it. The analogy between internal and relational circularity is possible. In both cases, it is a horizontal and two-way relationship, where the internal affects the external and vice versa. Likewise, in the relational dimension, the figure of the syncopated spiral can be used to imagine the social constellation. Community life is nothing other than the open circularity of each one placed in ecstatic relation and out of oneself with the open circularity of the other, giving rise to new circularities and narratives that affect, in this case, the form of “us” or, being more generic, “humanity.” The reality of this first circularity (that of vulnerability) has left us with three guiding elements to think of ourselves and ask, for example, about truth. They are relativity, reciprocity, and reflexivity. Relativity, because the relative refers to something else. Moreover, it takes charge of that otherness and carries it. That means “relation”: the act of bringing something back. So, it is with the pretended identity of the “I” (which is composed of so many elements and can be composed of so many others), that we never know where some end and others begin. What is the “I” of self-consciousness, how is corporeality perceived, and in what way are truths assumed? In all these inconclusive and open processes, at least two sides imply each other: the thought “I” and the thinking “I,” the objectified body and the lived body, the reasonableness of the propositions concerned and the reasons of others. A certain knowledge leads to another and generates new circuits to a certain extent. There are always issues to be dealt with. Reciprocity, because the relative involves the solicitous question (procus) for what is adjacent on the other side. And that, at the same time, gives us back that question in the form of interrogation. The question for something calls and requests to take charge of the other questions. Continuing with the example: in order to understand the thinking “I,” it is necessary to realize that one exists, and that means asking about being in general; or that the body as an object is only conceivable if one attends to one’s own body perception and its sociocultural projection; or that reason can only conquer itself if it attends to its relativity and the need to question itself. There is always an otherness that interpellates. Reflexivity, because in this game of adjoining and limiting each other, we discover the game of identity and difference that makes up the experience of

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thought. If thinking is comparing, things can be compared because they are neither wholly different nor entirely identical. They are relatable, that is to say, analogous. From this cohabitation, a second step is taken, which is the process of bending and introducing those other reasons, motives, or interests that transform the starting identity. That is why any identity is a provisional and partial generation awaiting an (inconclusive) process of revision. It is affectable. So it happens with the “I,” with the body, with reason, and with any other concept, including that of vulnerability. In short: relativity, insofar as an identity or an affirmation is contextualized and open; reciprocity, insofar as we question and are questioned; reflexivity, insofar as we affect and are affected, and this leads us to modify our identities and interpretations. That is why vulnerability cannot be conceived only as the suffering expression of the human (and non-human) being that cohabits the world. If it is a concept that, conceived in the entrails of existence, must be relative, reciprocal, and reflexive, it must have amphibious semantics capable of accounting for the richness and relativity of experience. It must be the conditional cause of all experiences, not just the suffering ones. Suffering is possible because the one who suffers is susceptible to suffering. It is affectable, not completely made and therefore transformable. And, thanks to this condition, it is also possible to overcome suffering and to feel empathy or love. Sadness and its tears can be as contagious as joy and its smile, and it is also possible to cry for joy or hide the bitterest of misfortunes behind a smile. Vulnerability, also understood as a mutual gift, becomes relevant in interpersonal relationships, which is the ethics of care. But we must not fall into the cliché or even less into paternalism. When the ethics of care is mentioned, there is a certain epistemological and relational predisposition to place oneself above the other, as if the situation of explicit suffering vulnerability of the suffering person consolidated a differentiated ontology, another way of being in the world. Paternalism says more about our difficulty to coexist with the pain that is seen and touched than with the existential situation of our neighbor. We are all vulnerable. There are different worldly states where sometimes vulnerability becomes more explicit. It is true that there are situations of suffering vulnerability that are overwhelming and extraordinarily acute. To say that vulnerability does not only refer to the suffering dimension does not mean undermining the rawness of pain or its impact. On the contrary, it is to be aware of its reality, personal tragedy, and its ever-latent possibility. Nevertheless, the ethics of care cannot be a paternalistic exercise, even in its most extreme cases. In those moments when suffering vulnerability becomes harsh and cancels out many desirable capacities, one must be most caring in the most profound sense of the word.

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As we have said, “care” alludes to cogitare, to think, which also refers to becoming agitated. The greater the suffering vulnerability, the greater the need to think things through—thinking about the “other” while taking the “other” into account. In the biosanitary field, this realization is echoed in one of the fundamental principles of bioethics: the principle of autonomy, which must be combined with that of beneficence (doing good to the “other”) and, above all, with that of non-maleficence (primum non nocere; first, do not make things worse). All this is within a framework of justice and equity. In the field of positive law, we speak of informed consent in order to respect this principle and give expression to the interpersonal reality that underlies every relationship, including, of course, health care: the promotion of and respect for autonomy. The patient is also an agent and promoter of his health. This has nothing to do, therefore, with paternalism, which places itself in a sphere that bears no relation to the reality of the situation. There may be times of exception, when there is no choice but to apply it by virtue of the Hippocratic oath. However, no matter how delicate and complex a situation may be or how all-encompassing suffering may be, there can always be a loophole for autonomy, at least as a presupposition. Alongside the protocol and the moral code that normalizes and standarizes, there is the question and the request of a specific reality that demands a concrete response. It is not only a case of the universal, but a dynamic of perspectives that complement each other: to the regularities that we know, we must add the idiosyncrasy of the particular reality. Also in medicine each person is unique. Regularities are there for a reason, no doubt. As general ideas, they map knowledge and provide orientation; they do this well. But at the same time, we must also consider the reality of the unprecedented, of the “other.” So, suppose the first circularity refers to vulnerability, which marks the semantics humans experience. In that case, these three guiding elements must also be present in the possibility of ethics. Consequently, also in the field of the ethics of care, we move in relativity, reciprocity, and reflexivity. Relativity here points to the relationality of each individual’s life experience. This is a characteristic that has been emphasized, especially since the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ever since the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel wrote that one’s self-consciousness finds its satisfaction in another self-consciousness, sensitivity to otherness has been forging a codependence that has finally banished the subject’s self-sufficiency. Sometimes it has even gone to the other extreme, subsuming individuality to collectivity. If, in individualism, a human being is a victim of his loneliness and believes that by affirming himself as a subject he affirms himself as an autonomous being, in collectivism, it is believed that by renouncing decision

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and freedom in favor of the group, he obtains a greater good: security. Martin Buber summed it up as follows:34 neither collectivism nor individualism is the adequate way to realize the dynamics that cross us, and the worst thing is that they make us believe there are only two possibilities: either the affirmation of the self or the affirmation of the “other.” Buber represents the dialogical way, that which places the relationship as the starting point of any consideration of the human being. He does not accept this dilemma since he considers there is another way: the human being with the human being, that of the I and the you, which combines both elements. The pandemic we have experienced is a clear example of our dialogical reality. The main channel for the spread of a contagious disease is contact with others, the relationship. The pathology spreads because we relate to each other and are close to each other. Hence, seclusion, necessary to delimit our spontaneous relational process, has had to be implemented. At the same time, for the measure to have the desired effect, it is necessary that we all comply with it. The particular decision to freeze the usual closeness only bears fruit if we all freeze it. If we all relate to each other in the face of the duty to restrain social life, the situation begins to be reversed. Individual responsibility is indispensable but insufficient for overcoming a pandemic because one is also at the expense of and dependent on the other. In this situation, each one of us is a potential source of contagion for the other and, at the same time, an indispensable presupposition for the containment and overcoming of the emergency. Reciprocity then becomes an indispensable correlate of relationality. As we depend on each other and are sensitive to the actions and reactions that occur on all sides, we seek and request from others what we expect from ourselves. And we trust that it will be so. We generate a meeting point based on shared expectations, projected in part from each of us but beyond unilateralism. That is what makes us trust each other. Reciprocity is indispensable for our own survival and is not a gift from the “I” to the other, a plus in the relationship that is established, but it is the response that also comes from the “I” to the interpellation that comes from knowing that we are in need. Consequently, it is fruitless wanting to find oneself, once and for all, assuming that finding oneself would bring some fulfillment. The “I” is never alien to everything that passes through it, by education, affection, or biography, nor to what is evoked from these interactions. However, this does not mean that each of us is a mere product of these interactions. There is always something in each of us that remains unavailable. Moreover, to see ourselves as “products” would be a perspective too close to the logic of the market, where everything has a price and is all about selling oneself. The danger to commodify oneself does not provide shortcuts to any desirable identity. In any case, it doubles precariousness

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and precipitates misery because one is waiting for an act of objectifying that further submerges it in its alienation instead of bringing meaning to one’s own life. The path must be a different one. As the loving subject, the procus that begs and requests the loved one’s attention and care, the relational dimension is concretized in the dynamics of ethical desire. We interpellate, and at the same time, we are interpellated. We are requested, and we request, from the eagerness that the common plea would be accepted, trusting that the other responds and does so in such a way that it is no longer “other,” in generic terms, but that it is concretized in a giving, friendly, and loving action. The indispensable element in this whole circuit is, without a doubt, freedom. Without freedom, there is neither action nor reflection; it is a sine qua non condition for responsibility. It is also a sine qua non for the experience of vulnerability. If things can be different, it is because we also want them to be different. To want is not to be able, certainly, but in order to be able, it is necessary to want. With freedom and the mystery of will, we touch the ultimate limit of what is thinkable since it concerns the wonder of good and involves the scandal of evil. If one loves freely, one must also be able to hate freely. If love is not only the fruit of the conditioning factors that propitiate it, then neither is hatred. Otherwise, we would not be talking about freedom. The vulnerable condition requires freedom. It may be to a greater or lesser extent, but there must be freedom. Moreover, it is only because there is freedom that it can be assumed there is responsibility,35 which is the capacity to give an answer to the question, to the request of the procus, the queries that we raise. Without freedom, the capacity to think about that otherness, to go beyond the generic and the abstract to operate a concrete and adequate response to that request that can take us to the limit, would become an automated process. In other words, only if there is freedom is there capacity for reflection, that is to say, to abstract from all possible conditioning and to take sides in a situation, theoretically, as Descartes does by taking charge of the doubt that conditions everything, and practically, by assuming provisional morality. The fact that care and cogitare share the same etymology is not a mere fact. The intersection of both actions finds its importance here. Both are expressions of the freedom to be able to change, the flexibility to bend and to ask how to proceed, but not from aseptic contemplation, nor from impetuous action. Caring and thinking do not exclude each other but imply each other. In order to care for the other, one must think about the other, which is to move from the generality of the “other” to the “you,” from the deontological consideration of duty to the loving disposition that recognizes him or her as a neighbor and, if necessary, as a “friend.” If Aristotle devoted part of his Nicomachean Ethics to thinking about friendship, it is because it has to do

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with ethical experience. Friendship is one of the ethical joys of which human beings are capable. Friendships resemble each other, but they do not replicate each other. Some relationships go one way; others go another. Sometimes they are intensified; sometimes they are attenuated; sometimes they are lost. Their specificity makes them unique but not exclusive. Friendships must be cared for, and they are cared for because they are thought of, each one of them, in their own way, in a way that must be discovered and modulated. Neither the same word, nor the same gesture, nor the same look is always valid, and sometimes what the situation demands is to be silent. Friendship is a paradigm of the relationship with others: generic and particular; it is made and unmade at every moment; it is affected by other circumstances and affects many others. It is constantly nourished by the desire for the “other” to be there, beyond the intrusions of that obscure human passion that consists in rejoicing in the evil of others.36 Love and friendship (amor and amistad in Spanish) also share the same etymology, and not by chance. If being happy requires friends,37 it is because we ask to love and to be loved. Moreover, it helps one’s health, as Descartes realized.38 By loving and being loved, one is also taking care of oneself. However, indifference or hatred also proliferate, which destroy everything, starting with oneself. It is confusing. Perhaps there is something in our approaches to the question that we have not quite grasped, or maybe there is something in the will that remains unfathomable. Whether it is one or the other, or even both, there is no doubt that any ethical question cannot close its eyes to this perplexity, knowing that, perhaps, there is no resolution to it. THE ETHICAL CIRCUIT One of the characteristics that differentiate us from other animals is the word. The fact of transmitting it, which refers to the linguistic and symbolic capacity to dress up an experience, and the fact of giving it, makes us unique. The word transmitted is fundamental because it lubricates communication, but the word given, the promise professed, is a priority. Without it, we could not live together and, therefore, could hardly survive. The preserved epistolary word of Descartes is impressive. It was written to various people, including Queen Christina of Sweden and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. What is relevant about his letters, which comprise a few volumes of the edition of his complete works, is that, in them, he doesn’t simply give an account of how things are going for him. In some missives, he raises important questions that complete and mark the meaning of his fundamental philosophical positions, and that even transform them. That is the case with

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the letters addressed to his friend Mersenne, in which he raises the possibility that God made possible what is inconceivable for reason. A break with the strict logic of reason led Descartes to assume that the main attribute of the divine was its omnipotent will. It could almost be said that there are two Descarteses: one of the works and one of the letters, being the epistolary one probably the more spontaneous. On the other hand, Descartes’s prolix epistolary writing has also served to certify his implicit assumption of the reality of the world and of its fellow citizens. While he says that he doubts everything, what he asserts through epistolary action is precisely what he calls into question: the being of the world, the body, and others. It is his own performative refutation. Performativity has been one of the great themes of philosophical study in the second half of the twentieth century. Many have taken the research of Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas as a starting point to offer an ethical foundation based on discursive and communicative facts. These attempts at ethical foundations focus on the formal aspect of their validity and the consequent need to share the same common structure: communication. A theory of communicative action defends the following theses: when communicating, one implicitly recognizes (1) the right of all those who concur in a communicative community to participate, either to introduce a position or to refute it; (2) the right to express one’s opinions, desires, and needs; and (3) the right not to be coerced for doing so. In this way, the aim is to establish a generalizing principle that acts as a rule of argumentation based on the presumption that each participant wants to argue. From the shared will to interact discursively, the ethical implications derived from this communicative will are deduced. Obligations follow rights, so this type of discursive ethics functions as a procedure to verify the validity of the acts carried out (performative and not merely informative acts). It is a type of ethics that ties in with the question of justice and the fundamental rights and duties applicable to all communicators. However, it has been countered that this type of ethics can incur in depersonalizing abstractions, especially from the univocal and universal notion of reason that they handle. One of the main issues to be faced by this type of ethics (and any other, it could be said) is to delimit to what extent we can or should generalize and to what extent we should avoid excessive rationalisms. Let us take the writing of this passage from the book you are now reading as an example of performativity. As I write it, I assume that you, the reader, may have reached this page. I assume this as a possibility because you may have lost interest and not made it this far. What is relevant is that I foreshadow a generic image of what a reader might think, and from there, I dialogue with him or her. This process that I re-create does not consider, nor can it, the particular reality of each reader. I can generically project a sum of

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particularities, which, said the other way around, is not to imagine any particular one. Performativity in ethics helps to prefigure, foresee, and anticipate what the other may think, feel, and want, but with the value of being a generalization. And that is precisely what ethics of care, understood as particular ethics, criticizes. To think generically is to think of no one. It can even force each one to lose his or her genuineness and biography to force him or her to be just another case of “reader” or “readeress,” just to continue with the example. If there are as many books as there are readers, it is because a book is not a closed circle either, so there is no “reader” in the abstract. This pertinent criticism must also be blamed on this radical particularization that forgets that any action accepts a broader frame of reference than the particular considered case. If all of us who read books like to read and interact with the book, it is because, in effect, we read. That is why we speak of a reader and a readeress and not, for example, of a sportsman. A sportsman can perfectly well read, of course, but it is not the activity for which we say someone is a “sportsman.” It is possible that my example is not entirely clear, but I trust (as a performative act) that it will help to understand what I intend to propose: that the ethics of justice, which proposes duties and obligations common to any free agent, and the ethics of care, which claims the non-transferable particularity of that action, mutually claim, balance, and encourage each other. In effect, universalizing is a way of reducing plurality that can be very dangerous. Seyla Benhabib puts it this way: Universalist moral theories in the Western tradition . . . are substitutivist, in the sense that the universalism they advocate is surreptitiously defined by identifying experiences of a specific group of subjects as the paradigmatic case of the human as such. These subjects are invariably white male adults.39 There is not (and cannot be) a universal moral concept that does justice to the existing plurality. What is “proper” to something is projected as universal, and this “proper,” which is assumed to be normative, is by definition biased and therefore exclusionary. It is potentially violent because it easily presupposes that what is “improper,” what lies outside its sphere, becomes morally “inappropriate.” There is a tiny step from here to machismo, xenophobia, and any other sociopolitical scourges from which we suffer. However, particularism can easily lead us to relativism, which must be differentiated from the perspectivism we propose here. Radical relativism can lead to inaction that perpetuates injustice. If it is not possible to extrapolate judgments that can be valid for everyone, then there is no possibility of demanding a particular responsibility. If we do not have a positive criterion of what is or is not just, if we cannot say that the death of a refugee child on the shores of the Mediterranean is a flagrant injustice and a scandal here and in any possible world, then we are complicit in that injustice. So, we must

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not confuse perspectivism with relativism. That there are different perspectives on what is or can be justice does not mean that judgment about what is manifestly unjust must be suspended. Dealing with a particular case also entails a concern for establishing a universal axis. But it has to be a circular open (and, of course, vulnerable) universality. Because the fact that the universal never ends up being closed and is susceptible to being more universal is precisely what makes it susceptible to being universal. That is to say, it never becomes so because there are always “more” cases and particularities to be considered. To close it would be a dangerous illusion. Moral universalism, understood as ethical constructivism, understands that the concept of being universalized is always subject to infinite reversions. As if it were a provisional universal, on the way, that modulates every time it advances. The opposition to be overcome is that which seeks to confront justice and the good life as if the moral autonomous being was not real, did not exist.40 The fact that it is incarnated, contextualized, and, therefore, conditioned in constant interaction does not mean that it is not conscious of its transversal precariousness. So, it is no fiction that ethics has to ask itself about justice. And even less so that it has to do it without falling into either the dangers of universalism or the pusillanimity of relativism. Well, at this point, the dynamics of the non-criterion to which we have referred above reveal its propositional force for this ethics of transverse care. The non-criterion not only functions as a dike and resistance to the absolutist intentions of ethical reflection. The non-criterion also functions as a performative act of double meaning. In its restriction, as an alternative to the temptation to close the circle; and in its expansion, and in consonance with the reflexive awareness of this impossibility, as the assumption of the precariousness and provisionality in which every moral system remains. In other words, in matters of ethics, what really counts is the word given, the reciprocity of shared trust. Furthermore, that is valid for all cases in which it is given. Then comes the action, which must be the manifestation of that word. The performative act of non-criterion opens to universality when one affirms that somebody is a “person of one’s word.” If one proclaims that when he gives his word, he keeps it, it is because he keeps it in every case he gives it. That is why he can be trusted. It is assumed that the one who gives his word is careful with the promise. Of course, there is no such thing as zero risk, and even less so in matters that have to do with freedom. We can be wrong in promising something and also in trusting the promise received. We can even lie outright. To reduce the burden generated by such mistrust, we can enhance the penalties and punishments that derive from these acts of falsehood. However, the matter still needs to be settled because two or more

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do not understand each other if all do not want to, and no matter how much effusion one may have in the persuasion of coercion, genuine trust is built in the shared will. The word given is prior to deliberation. Hence, a more significant consideration of this preeminence needs to be included in proposals such as the one developed by Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971). For Rawls, the rational foresight of the just decision is based on the fact that we are all rational, which, in his opinion, gives unity to moral beliefs. In reality, the possibility of a moral theoretical system requires the will to want to live together. In this sense, it is also infirma: all morality depends on a prior conviction to take shape, on the mutual recognition of being people of one’s word. THE RISK OF EMPATHY Empathy is a word that can easily become abhorred. This can be explained by its indiscriminate use, the loss of credibility, and the fetishism with which it is sometimes used to cushion everything. That does not take away the fact that, if we could not empathize, it would be much more difficult to cope with an ordinary day. Being able to move into the other’s world and figuring out rightly can help in many everyday things. It is even what makes them possible. It makes it easier to pass with flying colors a situation in which behavioral routines do not make it clear how to do so. Where there is close relational contact is when empathy is often called for. To ask someone for empathy is to beg him not to be unmoved and insensitive to what is happening or what he is told is happening. It is a hybrid combination of a request for universality and particularity addressed to a person in a given situation. And it is because, in general, the ability to have empathy is presumed. Without that presumption, nobody would be required to be empathetic at all, or criticized or punished for not acting empathically. No one can be required to have a faculty impossible to have. The decisive factor in assessing whether or not a given action is empathic is, then, to show oneself as such. In other words, empathy becomes indispensable to ground the universal will to take care of oneself and others and apply it to each concrete case. However, this does not resolve the matter because, as Descartes prescribes, we must methodically doubt certain things because many seem to be what they are not, and others are what they do not seem to be. To empathize is fundamentally to know and to want to share laughter and tears.41 However, the meaning that most of us today give to the word empathy (linked to the German Einfühlung) bears little relation to that given to it by the ancients. For Galen, for example, empathy meant ailment and had nothing

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healthy about it; it was, if anything, a destabilizing trance due to excessive pain. It had little to do, likewise, with apatheia as the great virtue of the wise man in the face of the stalking of life advocated by the Stoics, who would probably consider that what we understand today as empathizing has nothing desirable about it. On the other hand, for us it is a quality, a virtue of connection, that facilitates a “healthy” interrelationship. We assume that an empathic person can put himself in the other’s place, understand his reasons, and prioritize consensus over dissent. To make something one’s own is to take it into one’s own experience. It is to incorporate a pathos. This requires combining objectivity and subjectivity, universality and particularity, similarity and difference. In short, it is analogy in action. As with vulnerability, empathy tends to emphasize the suffering sense of the identification circuit, although it is true that, unlike vulnerability, it is not unusual to say that one empathizes with the joy of others. Let us place ourselves in Paris in early 1929, in the René Descartes amphitheater of the Sorbonne University. The phenomenologist Edmund Husserl is giving a series of lectures in which he discusses fundamental issues in philosophy concerning the work of Descartes. Shortly afterward, Gabrielle Peiffer and a young Emmanuel Lévinas, who received his doctorate from the University of Strasbourg with research on aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology, were in charge of translating the text into French. The lectures, reworked and adapted to compose a book, appeared published in 1931 in French under the title Cartesian Meditations. Husserl places his method, phenomenology, in the wake of Cartesianism, but in a questioning approach to some of its key points. He was particularly disturbed by the solitude of the ego cogito and its consequences for ethics. If Cartesian philosophy is a transcendental philosophy in the sense that it wonders about the minimal and common (universal) conditions for all forms of thinking, the question of intersubjectivity cannot be absent. Husserl, who worked at that time on the question, begins his fifth meditation, the best known and most complex, by emulating Descartes’s self-referential reflection. However, he quickly concludes that the ego encounters (in addition to objects) other egos in the world. Unlike Descartes, for whom the withdrawal of the cogito also implied the automatic bias of alterity, the ego must discover itself in a magma of diverse alter egos. The Cartesian ego accesses to itself exclusively, denying the alter ego. The most it grants is the objectification of other bodies, other res extensa, which does not help intersubjectivity much because to objectify is to nullify alterity.42 On the other hand, for Husserl, affirming the ego includes recognizing the effectiveness of the alter ego, which is why knowing how empathy is possible is essential to be able to ask about the identity of the “I.”

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The “other” refers, by its constituted sense, to myself; the other is a reflection of myself, and yet it is not properly a reflection; it is an analogy of myself.43 The question is, what kind of analogy is constructed or evoked in order to think of others? As has been schematized above, the reduction ad unum of multiplicities, which emphasizes what is similar to oneself (ego), is not the same as the analogy of proportionality, where relations are established by safeguarding distances (alter). The starting point for thinking empathy is that there are given subjects that are not us. Once again, there is something that transcends us. And in this case, it is something that is already someone. It is not without paradox that one is one’s “self” for oneself, but when one is in a checkout line and is asked who is next, and someone answers “I,” we do not startle ourselves by claiming authentic “selfhood” for ourselves. It sounds like a play on words, but it is not. It is the tacit recognition that there are more “Is” outside of oneself. That no one exhausts the “Is,” even though for each of us, the only accessible “I” is the one that is embodied. From Edith Stein’s doctoral research on empathy (a thesis directed by Edmund Husserl, by the way), the empathic dynamic goes through three moments: the appearance of the experience, its explicitness, and its objectification. The concreteness of this experience has to do with that which is manifesting itself, which is the incorporation of the others’ experience, or the eccentricity of that experience, no longer centered on the “I,” but referring to the “other.”44 However, the question is: What appears, what manifests itself, in the experience of empathy? Can we say that we really come out of ourselves? In this whole process, one thing seems clear: the exercise of looking is fundamental45—looking face-to-face and, above all, not to lower one’s gaze in front of the “other” says a lot. And it says a lot about oneself, of course. It is estimated that in our societies, we look at each other 60 percent of the time during a conversation, except when we are in a state of passion or when we are in litigation, when the gaze is more direct and sustained.46 In the gaze is where the possibility of empathy is most at stake and where it circulates most clearly in both directions: we look as we are looked at. The exposure of one’s intimacy and the cracking of the mask we all wear (prósopon, in Greek; persona, in Latin)—this is what is most uncomfortable about those eyes that question us. That is why it is so hard to hold their gaze. Going to the critical point of the question about the possibility of empathy, the moment of the emergence of the element with which we empathize (because we do not empathize with the “other,” but with an experience in us of the “other” and that we report as alien) is where the circularity we already know comes into play. An analogy can help as a relational mechanism to infer empathic elements, but it can also interfere with them. When there is

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excessive foresight by analogy, everything is overreported to the “I.” This is what happens when one converses and relates everything to one’s own experience, giving rise to excessive meddling that quickly becomes interference.47 Analogy is also made from the vanishing point that oneself is, with which the question remains untouched. Suppose it is questionable that it is possible to get out of the ego cogito, considering that the alien is “alien” to me. What can we rigorously access in that alien experience? This radical short-circuit calls into question the possibility of empathy and traces a doubt that always accompanies it. We must be clear on this point and assume that the circle of empathy cannot be closed. The possibility of empathy is a borderline question, open, even vulnerable, if one prefers. We have seen earlier that in the concept of the borderline, there is a circularity by which things recognize each other. So, to ask about the limit of empathy itself is to presuppose in the first place that something around it exists. It remains to know what—whether it is an idea, an illusion, or an understanding of otherness. By stating that I feel things outside myself and think of them as alien, we discover a duality: I feel them as “me” but do not attribute them to myself. From there comes the question of how much I can attribute them as alien. This question precisely aims to refine the empathic capacity by demanding that one does not cease to be suspicious of one’s own interferences. This already implies a big question, since it entails accepting performatively that empathy is possible. However, this performativity cannot dispatch the doubt of whether we are really succeeding in our empathic aspirations, just as one cannot explain a color without appealing to any color. We must insist upon this constraint because not doing so will not remove it either. To empathize is ultimately to opt for empathy. Another important centrifugal issue for understanding empathy is its intimate connection with ethical questions. If the difference between explaining and justifying is paramount in any aspect we analyze, it is even more so in the empathy circuit. One can empathize with a neighbor’s pleasure experiences without having to approve them, in-corporating them, which does not make that person automatically reprehensible. And it is possible to empathize with an adverse event by suffering from it even more than the person to whom it has happened, which does not make him admirable. No ethical criterion is derived from empathy because it refers to other elements beyond the capacity to share a certain pathos. That is why when we claim that empathy is the miraculous solution to misunderstandings, we are probably not referring to it, or at least not to its dynamics. First, because misunderstanding is always possible. The distance between the “I” and the other, which makes our empathy always a possible fraud (a projection that erratically intrudes into the intimacy of others), is

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always there. And secondly, because the distance between the other and the “I,” which leaves the flight of its freedom intact, also remains. We may be mistaken and take as truthful a premeditated deception. That is, we may be lied to. Or it may be that we are not. So, empathy also implies assuming the risk of the word given. That is why it is also crucial to discard any kind of paternalism beforehand. We must be cautious about the ultimate possibilities of the empathic act: to be able to shorten distances. The only thing that empathy allows us concerning ethical experiences is to read them as a preparation for moral reflection on the ethical questions.48 We must emphasize the idea of preparation because it is a declaration of intentions, a manifest will to trust, to live together. No moral system can be derived from empathy because some can empathize with situations that entail diverse moral readings (but without confusing, in any case, the victim with the executioner). If one can be empathic but not share the moral system, then empathy does not help to discern which moral positions are worth incorporating and sharing and which are not. That is why we propose our non-criteria again, channeled through relativity, reciprocity, and reflexivity proper to an ethics of care, as a vehicle to minimize the risk of the decision. Relativity, reciprocity, reflexivity, and analogy, as we have said, imply fallibility, contingency, and interdependence. In other words, an awareness of transversal vulnerability, where error, forgiveness, and, ultimately, trust and the value of the word given, provides us with elements to coexist better. The will to empathize is the manifest desire to consider the other as a neighbor, to assume the joys and sorrows of the other as if they were one’s own because, in fact, they can be one’s own—to see them with eyes other than those of indifference or envy (in-videre). Furthermore, this will is primordial. But believing that with this it is possible to discover once and for all the content of “the” experience, of “the” reason, and of “the” truth is wanting to close the circle, and we know this is a fruitless objective. What is within our reach is to propose a contingent but convinced confidence that what matters to us is to seek the good that is common to us and materialize it, integrating that the other is as important and concrete as oneself and that the better off we all are, in body and soul, the better everything will go.49 The unfolding of this ethic of care leaves us at the gates of politics, the communitarian dimension of the relationship with otherness. However, above all, we must insist (before drawing the outlines of a policy by what we have been saying) that the touchstone of all philosophy, and even more so of the one we are outlining here, is freedom. And if there is freedom to love, there must also be freedom to hate. To maintain that evil is a consequence of ignorance or a certain socioeconomic context is to leave no room for other possibilities and to undervalue the capacity to relativize that ignorance and those

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conditions. Not all the ignorant are bad, and not all the underprivileged are angelic. Of course, there are conditioning factors and serious ones. And they must be eradicated. The longer it takes, the worse it will be. Nevertheless, we must not be deceived: evil exists, and it is possible that more than one evil is the result of a choice. It is frightening and shocking to think about it, no doubt, but it is a possibility that is also part of our condition. Freedom and its unavailability can take us to heaven as well as to hell. THANATOPHOBIA As a mortal being, the philosopher is interested in politics. That is to say, what gives content and form to political reflection is radical finitude and its unappealable horizon. This linking of politics and reflection on death analyzed by Hannah Arendt50 clashes with many itinerant conceptions of politics, especially those that tend to project in their action a way of transcending oneself and attaining certain levels of power. On the other hand, for a philosophy in the key of vulnerability, it is the reminder that all that is related to human (and therefore also politics) has to be accompanied by this awareness of finitude. The development of freedom itself and the reality in life of death51 are two issues that impact the existential interpretation we are making here. And both provoke such an impact on us that we see them present and repeatedly in many of the emotional knots that accompany us throughout our existence. Since both point to the nakedness of existence, they are sources of life and anguish at the same time. Few things can be said of freedom itself or the straight face of vulnerability. Of our own, hardly anything, and of those of others, we can draw and intertwine them by analogy, as we have tried to do in these last sections. However, ultimately, we cannot decide for them. We can influence their reaction but never supplant their action. No one takes the place of the other, which is why we have spoken of empathy as trust. It makes otherness always remain as otherness, no matter how much we want to reduce it. Something similar happens with death. It is a limit situation, one of the four that put existence to the test, to use the terminology of the existentialist Karl Jaspers.52 And although here the limit also has the same sense of analogy and perspectivism as the other concepts, is a radical experience. We say so since death can be projected in the first, second, or third person,53 or symbolically, as an eternal dream, awakening to the light, liberation of the body, or disconnection of the neuronal hardware. All are presumptions since there are so many things ignored, and uncertainty is, therefore, very dense. It involves a not-knowing about ulterior life from which no learned ignorance is derived. Here there is no other derivative than having to remain silent and

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hope. Or give hope up. If we do not yet know about life, how can we know about death?—the Master replies to the disciple in Confucius’s Anaclets.54 However, death is a theme precisely because it has to do with life. And like life, it gives rise to different perspectives. The position of Epicurus of Samos, the main representative of lucid hedonism, and that of Martin Heidegger, the prominent existentialist, are different. Epicurus may not be fully understood when he says that the worst of evils, death, means nothing to us since while we live, it is not, and when death becomes present, then we do not exist to suffer it. The syllogism may work, but it is an almost-utopian ataraxia, because death is presented as a much more questioning phenomenon than a logical game. It is the particular and irreversible foresight of an end, not there in front of us, exceptional, but next to us, that at any moment takes us away. As Heidegger would express, it is the definition of our being in the world. And that is astounding. Death bursts in, even if it is not summoned. René Descartes died in Stockholm in the winter of 1650, not yet fifty-four years old, of what is believed to be a viral infection that developed into pneumonia.55 He had moved to Sweden as a guest of Queen Christina. The prospect of becoming the monarch’s philosopher seduced him, but not residing in Stockholm. Finally, the Nordic stay was not favorable for his studies or works, and looking for recognition, he found death. Sweden was a Protestant country, and Descartes was a Catholic, so he was buried in the cemetery for orphans without honors and in gloomy oblivion. In 1666, his body was exhumed, and after some vicissitudes, it arrived in Paris. However, it was not until well into the nineteenth century that his remains were deposited in the former abbey of Saint-Germaindes-Prés in the French capital. He died alone, as it seems he also lived,56 and far from his homeland. If he could have chosen what death to die and what burial to receive, Descartes would undoubtedly have opted for a different situation. For a society that makes the oblivion of finitude part of its way of being in the world, the dazzling irruption of death is experienced as a return of the repressed. It is enough to observe how it is denied or trivialized to realize the great respect it instills. It may seem that relativizing it has its benefits since the fears it arouses are temporarily attenuated. However, the problem with this existential anguish is that it has no other object than life itself. We can minimize death but not forget it, because finiteness and contingency are not a subject of the afterlife. It appears in the here and now and accompanies everyday life. A fleeting review of what we do daily shows the number of automated actions we carry out to avoid dying immediately. Epicurus’s syllogism neither resolves nor dissolves the impact of death. It does not fit, for example, with the particular need to ritualize it. An ancestral characteristic, as primary as existence itself, makes us personally and

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collectively inquire about our place in the cosmos. One dies, yes, but loved ones also die. That is why not naming death also puts at risk the need to mourn and, above all, the pace of that mourning. It is not clear whether it hurts more because it represents the counterpoint to a productive and accelerated society or because it is the amendment to the experience of being in the world; what is certain is that the subject of death tends to be sidestepped. There have been diagnoses of all kinds in the post-pandemic world. There has been talk of politics, technology, health care, and globalization. Nevertheless, there is little concern for recognizing death’s role in everyday, interpersonal, and community experience. This lack of explicit awareness of our radical fragility will continue to impact how we deal with specific bioethical issues related to what it means to die and to say goodbye. Just think of the management of wakes and ceremonies in times of pandemic. It is challenging to name death. The word cancer, used to qualify some unpleasant things we see happening, is still hidden when it is synonymous with death. It is still said that someone has died after a long illness and not directly from cancer. At the same time, while the language of illness in everyday life is blurred to its minimum expression, in the political sphere, it is standardized that medical language, specifically the language of illness, serves to express the affairs of community life.57 We speak of social cancer, or cordon sanitaire, without going any further, which shows that the difficulties of living with the disease do not prevent the political use of its semantics. One of the concepts that runs through the political reflection of the twentieth century, biopower, in the sense advocated by Michel Foucault, offers an example of this intimate relationship. This concept is combined with that of biopolitics, which links politics and “bios” (the form of life) and pays attention to the management of bodies by political power. The term biopolitics is very complex and gives rise to significant nuances,58 but it has a very tragic and sinister side, as with so many human issues. One of the darkest of these was during the thanatopolitics of Nazism, most infamously embodied in the horror of the Shoah. According to its nefarious jargon, the “disease” to be “cured” was the “infection” that threatened the “Aryan” race; hence the administration of the “remedies” implemented with the Sonderbehandlung (special treatment) was not assumed by its perpetrators as what it was. Their infamous and macabre mass crime became, for them, an administrative problem. That of the Nazis was a biopolitics that, instead of being oriented to concrete life, was focused on generic death and the “management” of the actions necessary to extirpate the “pathogen” that they believed threatened them.59 This kind of semantics shudders and disgusts, which is why, even allowing for the significant differences that exist, we must be very cautious with the medical language that sometimes seeps into our sociopolitical references.

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We speak of cleaning up economies, stopping the bleeding, taking political parties out of the ICU, or even burying them. All these metaphors are drawn from the experience of illness and its connotations. It is, therefore, necessary to be very attentive. The biological is part of the interest of the public space and politics because we are also flesh and blood, but we must be cautious with the uses of these images in other areas of life. Biopolitical concern has been part of the horizon of politics since the irruption of positivism and biologicism in the nineteenth century,60 which brought together interest in biological life with the management of the polis. Since then, it has been one of the most delicate areas of political action, subject to significant human ambiguities. Since it orients politics to the radical experience of vulnerability, its action must consider all areas that affect the community, including economy. Furthermore, some situations of explicit vulnerability reflect the most unpleasant face of the common vulnerability we share and highlight the socioeconomic injustices we humans inflict on each other. Our vulnerable condition in general does not cause that the most disadvantaged social classes die more and worse.61 The cause is a manifestly unjust system. On the other hand, to be able to be educated and develop, one must be able to nourish oneself and enjoy good health, and it is indeed the task of politics to guarantee in the first instance all the fundamental needs imposed by concrete lives. However, this does not offer any justification per se for excessive interference in regulating individual freedoms, especially when it is said that these are done in the name of the security of those same individuals. The supposed greater good of security at the expense of the radical good of (vulnerable) freedom inevitably raises the question of whether these measures only lead to greater security for citizens or whether they also have other effects on their freedom, which may end up affecting the citizens’ trust in their political institutions. On the basis of Hannah Arendt’s reflection that politics concerns us as mortal beings, the dilemma of biopolitics becomes concrete in that we must decide which of its uses to favor: whether precariousness as a radical end or freedom as a radical principle of life. And in order to foster freedom and life (which is what it is all about), we must also pay more attention to the uses we make of words like community and immunity. Community (by its etymology, munus refers to a duty and a joint task, and con- that binds its members) is vulnerable—that is, open and eccentric—and has nothing to do with the notion of withdrawal and rejection that expresses the immune will. Community is constant exteriority, where the common belongs to no one, far from the illusion of the immunized world, which always needs to point out a foreign and threatening element for its own life.62 The paradox of the immune strategy is that, as happens with the most destructive autoimmune

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diseases, sometimes the reaction of the immune system is such that it self-destructs. This happens with totalitarianisms, the ultimate expression of any immune conception of social life. At some point, Saturn ends up devouring itself. Politics has become the space for everything, not to say for “all,” which constitutes a serious danger. Mainly because the need for security in the face of the fears of existence is combined with the real possibility and capacity to provide ourselves with tools that make things easier—that is to say, of self-determination. When the risk of having to decide again and again becomes unbearable, then the messianic illusion of heaven on earth is forged, and with it, immunitarianism as a tacit possibility. Furthermore, no matter how well we know history, humanity is never really safe from its own follies and from the possibility of rekindling familiar tragedies. THE MATRIX OF POLITICS Politics has become one of the most sophisticated expressions of nostalgia for the infinite.63 Nostalgia was not properly thematized until the late seventeenth century. It began to be differentiated from other melancholic moods on the basis, for example, of the diffuse affliction manifested by some soldiers sent to war. Destined for battle to defend their homes, those soldiers experienced the remoteness of home with regret. Nostalgia, which expresses the psychic pain of the impossibility of returning home, is an experience of exile. It is nourished by the lethargic longing for the ancestral land. The distinctive feature of nostalgia is recognizing oneself as being out of place and wanting to return to the origin. However, the question is whether this particular sensation of exile, which is also part of existence by its own etymology, is mitigated by returning home. That is to say, if it remains in nostalgia, there is a dislocation that is impossible to reverse, no matter how much one returns to the primordial home. Not being able to have a home is a radical problem, so having one and being able to build a home is a fundamental existential need, a prerogative to be able to survive. Nevertheless, exile occurs even while being at home, the place where one feels at the cosmological center from which the world is born. And it occurs even more tragically because a feeling of being exposed to the elements persists, and it has nothing to do with a specific space and time but with time and space themselves. In other words: the house, the habitat (which also can take the form of life habits) is set giving shape to the need to face precariousness and vulnerability. A physical and symbolic house where we are and where, above all, we relate to each other, in a certain way, constitutes a response to the pain of the lost

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uterine universe. But if vulnerability is our condition, so are all our houses. That is why we are nostalgic. In exile, or exodus, it is most difficult for us not to generate idols and myths that function as “absolutes.” Absolute means without subjection; hence when a defendant is acquitted, he is freed from the weight of guilt. The “absolute” is light, flies freely, and wanders unimpeded. It does not depend on anything or anyone, and that makes it attractive. It is like that Cartesian “God” that neither doubts nor saddens, the lighthouse that compensates for anguish and for the weight of nostalgia. That is why the risk of idols is especially significant, since it combines two opposing needs: that of telling us myths that give shape to the contingency of what we ignore (from which we cannot turn away) and that of finding some Archimedean point of attachment in this narrative that answers the question of “meaning.” Traditionally, religion has monopolized these spaces of “meaning.” It has offered security in the face of the uncertainty of not knowing if things are being done well and hope in the face of the anxiety of not knowing what will happen when there is nothing more to do. But the mythological reworking of secularity and the vacuum left by the decline of the monotheistic Judeo-Christian religion have given rise to various substitute theologies in which some political conceptions participate. Today, politics occupies the altars of this passion for the absolute, a primacy that dates back to the beginnings of Modernity. In 1648 the Peace of Westphalia was signed. Thirty years earlier, old Europe had been bleeding to death in the so-called wars of religion, more commonly known as the Thirty Years’ War. The Protestant Reformation had shaken the prevailing religious consciousness and, with it, the socio-political balance. The overall picture was one of turmoil, making it easy for religious disputes to become the most effective vehicle or banner for confronting political interests. The Sealed Peace ended these wars, brought an era to an end, and consolidated Modernity. The consequences were many: the great victorious was France, which became the first political reference, while the papacy lost almost all its political influence. The world born of the Peace of Westphalia consecrated the strength and relevance of the nation-state and its maximum capacity to manage its own conflicts and interests without external interference, not even papal. Choosing one’s own confession became a matter for the States (ratifying the Peace of Augsburg of 1555), and from then on, they determined how confessions were professed within their borders. Sovereign states were born. As we have already noted, Descartes experienced firsthand the beginnings of the Thirty Years’ War. He first enrolled in the Prince of Orange Maurice of Nassau military academy, whose interests were opposed to those of the Spanish empire. He had the good fortune or ability to do so when a ceasefire

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with the Spanish troops was still in force in Breda, so Descartes was relatively calm. A few years later, Diego Velázquez painted the famous canvas The Surrender of Breda to commemorate the Spanish recovery of the city, without Descartes being there by then. He also enlisted in the Catholic army of Maximilian of Bavaria. The fact is important because the winter quarters of these armies were located in an infrequent location on the banks of the Danube, near Neuburg (southern Germany). Moreover, it is precisely in those days that we date the episode of the stove, the poêle, so central to Descartes’s memory and the protagonist of the Discourse on Method, together with the night of November 10, 1619, when he had the three dreams, which he interpreted as a premonition of the greatness of his intellectual destiny. Descartes, already aware of the philosophical work to be undertaken, ended his time in the military in 1620. His wartime vicissitudes during the first years of the Thirty Years’ War led us to think about the confluence that Stephan Toulmin evokes in his book Cosmopolis. Descartes’s methodology and rationalist rigidity would fit well with the sovereigntist spirit of seventeenth-century politics. A vertical system of political authority was consolidating whose priority was to ensure the unicity of power at all costs. The sovereignty of truth was perfectly coordinated with political sovereignty since both refer to the same matrix: the vertical conception of relations, from top to bottom. The concept of sovereignty expresses nostalgia, a pain for something that was and is no longer.64Sovereignty comes from superanus and refers to an authority above all. God initially held sovereignty. The Epistle to the Romans of the New Testament, in chapter 13, reflects this categorically: There is no authority except that which God has established, and God has constituted those that exist. In medieval Europe, monarchs were intermediate authorities, who received the blessing of the Sovereign of the world, God, through the Pope. Progressively, civil power grew to the point where tensions between their authority and that of the Pope became untenable, and conflict became inevitable. In the sixteenth century, Jean Bodin shaped the current secularized sovereignty concept. He defined it as a republic’s absolute and perpetual power, its most extraordinary possible power of command. Absolute and perpetual, sovereignty was so because it was not limited by any force or interrupted at any time. But Bodin pointed out an exception: the princes of the earth were also subject to the laws of God and nature, so that even they reflected the finiteness of human power. With the passing of the centuries, the figure of divinity faded until it was eclipsed, and the ownership of sovereignty, now without metaphysical boundaries, became the most precious asset of the European nation-states born of the Peace of Westphalia. The fact that even today, in an indisputably

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secularized world, sovereignty appears so conspicuously on the political horizon is a symptom of the enthronement and absolute aspirations of politics. “Secularization” refers to the century, to temporality, one of the coordinates of experience dynamics. It is opposed to the timeless, necessary, and absolute, which is unchanged by anything and anyone. The word secularization would have appeared for the first time in the context of the negotiations of the Peace of Westphalia, precisely the one that ended the Thirty Years’ War. Apparently, by séculariser, the French representative meant the transfer of religious property into earthly hands,65 thus certifying the overcoming of the old power. Secularization and sovereignty should not coincide because they refer to opposing spheres. One moves in the transversality of time, while the other looks to the timeless. However, sovereignty has passed from monarchs to parliaments, and from these to peoples and nations and, in all these cases, the divine has been secularized and replaced by an immanent authority that makes political power something superlative and transcendent to the state order itself. There are ample clues that show that in the myth of sovereignty remains its theological matrix.66 It is true that later it has been and is still claimed for a “people” or a “nation,” although permanently preserving this halo of superpower, as if having sovereignty facilitated access per se to a different metaphysical status. That is why everyone claims sovereignty and no one wants to relinquish it. Wars of religion are over, but wars of sovereignty are still going on. The paradox is that, although it is presumed to be an end in fighting for sovereignty, it is implicitly assumed that it is claimed against someone: the “other” understood as a threat, being it potential or real. Sovereignty implies, at the end of the day, a recognition of otherness understood as agony, even as struggle. This explains why sovereignty and biopolitics go hand in hand in their darkest modality. The body has been a much-frequented metaphor for perpetuating powers on earth, especially in the figure of the sovereign.67 But, in addition to this, the body is also an asset (productive body) and a liability (subjected body) of secularized political power, a political technology of the body68 that seeks to dominate the other in all its dimensions. The control of otherness is carried out by reducing its reality to mere “object” and, therefore, to a utensil, thus materializing one of the temptations of sovereign power. Its desire for subjugation not only reaches the psychic sphere, but also seeks the deployment of biopower, the discipline of the body. In this context, deciding how to subdue the body of others and how to economize it is an aspiration of the one who holds adequate power, the dominus who believes he is beyond any condition. Sovereignty as biopower. Sovereignty as the subjugation of others. Sovereignty as a violation of otherness.

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THE FICTION OF SOVEREIGNTY The viability of politics and, therefore, also its credibility depends on assuming its own relativity, reciprocity, and reflexivity. These characteristics of the vulnerable condition affect all areas of human experience and, consequently, should also be recognized in political praxis. However, politics sometimes moves toward the antipodes of the vulnerable condition. Eric Voegelin referred to political religions, for example, as a concept that invites us to question the absolutist character of some political aspirations. In this light, by paying attention to the process of secularization, we can appreciate that, along with the reformulation of the ancient transcendent power through the idea of sovereignty, a progressive sacralization of that power has also been developing and consolidating. The first half of the twentieth century was a clear example of this process of secular sacralization of power through the infamy of totalitarianisms.69 In them, a completely vertical reductio ad unum of reality operates: a people, a destiny, a leader, a party, an ideology . . . a truth. It is not a question of any analogical identity since there is no possible duality. An analogy is established when there are two or more realities that can be compared, that is to say, that differ and yet generate a community, which presupposes assuming as a starting point that one is not everything. On the other hand, totalitarianism pretends there is no other reality than itself, making the principle of identity the guiding dean of any experience. Any otherness is projected as the negation of the “one,” as its enemy. Carl Schmitt, a member of the Nazi party, defined the essence of politics as the agonizing distinction between friend and enemy. The paradox of the totalitarian system is that, as with any other ideology, it survives thanks to shared adhesion. No matter how total its truth may aspire to be, what sustains it is the communal will and belief that it exists. That is to say, widespread adherence. A confession of faith, in the purest fideistic style (belief in destiny, in the revolution, or in the messianic redemption of the race, the people, or the nation) that implies assuming, if necessary, life as martyrdom, without limits or fissures and to the last consequences. At times, this adherence is the fruit of conviction. At other times, it is the response to the fear and anguish of feeling threatened by that total power. Sooner or later, however, the question of the choice made appears, an eventual voluntary servitude that puts the individual in front of the collective responsibility of which he is always a part. Some debates on the nature of parliamentary life and the decisive weight of the sovereign act also date from the years of totalitarianism. The best known of these is the dispute between Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt. This

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last one presupposed a correspondence between the metaphysical structure of existence (in his case, monotheistic) and the image or political form the state should have,70 that is: verticality. On the contrary, Hans Kelsen understood there is no middle ground between absolutism and axiological relativism, and since democracy assumes relativism, the expectation of secular ideologies must be lowered, mainly due to the consequent frustration and anger that the impossibility of carrying out a political religion entails, which is particularly destructive.71 Fortunately, the present times seem less convulsive. Although, obviously, it is no guarantee of anything, since madness can always return. No matter how much tragedy is known and acknowledged, we can repeat it. That is why we must be wary of the absolutist expectations of any political discourse, whatever color it may be. The primacy of the collective entity, the promulgation of universal moral codes, the spiritual elevation of an elected community, or the claim of the general will, which is always claimed to be right and true (the people, the majority is right), are some secular elements that can lead to intransigence.72 These are elements of democratic political life in which the vertical scheme is easily recognizable. Sometimes in the concept of “people,” for example, there is a unitary reduction of the existing diversity that should also be reviewed. Instead of being formulated as a vulnerable universal, subject to the radical reconsideration of its identity, it is formulated as a primordial, even nostalgic exclusivity, which easily fosters exclusion. The projection of the “I” to the “we” is not ahistorical, because a community is a human diversity that asks itself about its common interest and good. Hence, the heterogeneity of community life is synonymous with its provisionality and dynamism, and hence “the” people can never be sovereign because sovereignty implies the unity of the sovereign subject as a condition of possibility. Making human freedom and sovereignty compatible is difficult73 because the perspective adopted by the logic of sovereignty has little to do with our vulnerable condition. If freedom is vulnerable, then it is relative, contextualized, embodied, reciprocal, and reflexive. On the contrary, sovereignty presupposes being above, supra, and beyond any condition and co-dependence. One is propositional, the other is imposing. The verticality of power of the concept of sovereignty is at the antipodes of the imperfect circularity of the vulnerable condition. The logic of sovereignty easily falls into intimidating the other in wanting to besiege otherness. When power is conceived as that which comes from “above,” it ends up indiscriminately violating the specificity of the other. Moreover, it is intimidating because it is not really caring. Its only thought is to make effective its own interest, the expansion of itself.74 There is no alter ego because the dialectic is reduced to ego and non-ego. De facto, it is not dialectic, but struggle.

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However, sovereignty is either absolute or it is not sovereignty. This follows from Bodin’s definition, from which it is also deduced very clearly that sovereignty is ultimately fiction. No one is absolute. Sovereign power lasts as long as other situations or people allow it to last, since its privileged position also rests on that of others. Another matter is whether that power is the fruit of fear, coercion, or devout conviction. Nevertheless, in either case, even the most tyrannical sovereign is subject to the insomnia of knowing that, at any moment, everything can change. Sovereign power has little of perpetual and absolute. For anthropological health’s sake, we need to change tack and develop another perspective on political and power relationships. Another way of approaching them is one that projects them as what they ultimately are: relationships and, therefore, subject to the circular opening we have been developing. What often has to do with power or politics is imagined from a vertical perspective. It comes from “above” and is directed to its domains, which are at its command, as revealed by the semantics of ascent or climbing in the hierarchy. What is truly revolutionary is not to hold political power, but to change the matrix of political power. To carry out a vulnerable, precarious, and responsible political action implies an idea of power that is also vulnerable.75 Not to do so is to persist in political myopia, beginning with that of the sovereign himself. Believing oneself to be a completely detached “political subject” whose will responds only to oneself complicates things even more and generates more frustration, a negativity that, in its most abject version, entails catastrophic consequences that are not fictitious at all. The vertical conception of power corresponds to the illusion of an impermeable subject that rules the world and understands its will as molding everything that happens. This subject projected as the last ratio is the grand “I,” whether individual or social, the monolithic illusion of “a” sovereign, “a” people, “a” nation, or “a” community. The vulnerable condition of politics opens the door to relativizing all these concepts by the dynamic and provisional structure of its reality. In the face of the vertical, the transversal, and the circular, we propose shared freedoms, mutually recognized autonomies, and permeable and mutable self-determinations. Naturally, this does not solve the complexity of political life, and even less so of democracy,76 nor does it pretend to do so. Democracy is not messianic, and, therefore, it does not offer formulas that solve its contradictions once and for all. Democracy is vulnerable, and that means it is always subject to improvement, but one of the structures that most jeopardizes it is precisely the scheme of sovereignty.77 Since it comes from above, sovereignty establishes a centrifugal and transcendent foundation from which all power emerges. Consequently, if democracy is to become more democratic, it must abandon

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as soon as possible the rational strategy of seeking or inventing a foundation closed in on itself78—in other words, to transfer the non-criterion sketched above to the field of politics and to the collective ethical question, and to explore what practical concretions are more coherent with its relativity, reciprocity, and reflexivity. Otherwise, we would be dangerously flirting with the same strategy with which dogmatisms operate, which, instead of opening up to the vulnerabilities of community life, withdraw into a supposedly immune foundation. It is difficult living in a world in which the ultimate answer remains in suspense, almost deflated, and in which every foundation is tinged with provisionality. It is an unparalleled demand that produces a feeling of vertigo. However, to confuse the need to obtain answers with being able to eliminate the uncertainty that accompanies them is probably one of the greatest evils we can bring upon ourselves. That is, in short, dogmatism: pretending to have mapped, weighed, and delimited that which explains everything. And if it does not explain it, pretend that it does. Dogmatism cannot stand doubt, openness to the “other,” and the verification that all identity, including its own, is based on provisionality. In order to promote a greater democratization of our world, we should explore schemes that are more in line with the radical nature of our precariousness. We should stop speaking in the name of the general will as if it were something given to which we must accommodate ourselves and know how to promote generated and shared wills where majorities do not impose themselves on minorities. Coordinate and not subordinate, without losing sight that living together in democracy does not mean eradicating dissent, but knowing how to convey it. This also requires faith or, better said, conviction. And probably more than in any political system. Democracy depends on each citizen wanting to do his or her part and on the institutions representing it also sharing this horizon, on a faith that becomes common and is expressed as social trust. A utopia? In part, yes, but not a dream. Democracy may have some beautiful naiveté, but it is not a myth. A myth is, in a certain sense, invulnerable,79 and if there is one thing that characterizes democracy, it is that it is the system in accordance with our vulnerable condition. We could say that, fundamentally, two perspectives constitute two ways of projecting the world with very different consequences. That of democracy, which is the expression of the politics of care and precarious coexistence80 in the face of the foreseeable (economy, education, society) and the unforeseeable (pandemics, catastrophes, accidents). Or the perspective of those who prescribe the truth in advance, those who intimidate because they feel threatened, and those who watch over because they feel persecuted. In other words: the

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democratic power, which belongs to no one, or that of a power that pretends to be sovereign and threatens with a struggle of all against all. Democracy is a language born of a desire to make the world a story that, rather than promising a happy ending, seeks to prevent the happiness of some from being at the cost of the unhappiness of others. A language that trusts that we homo sapiens dare to shed our misgivings and make visible the homo vulnerabilis we embody. In a letter dated November 20, 1629, Descartes confessed to his friend Mersenne that if someone had explained well what are the simple ideas that are in the imagination of men and that compose everything that is thought, and the whole world assumed this explanation, we could expect a universal language accessible to all that (and this is the main thing for Descartes) would represent all things so distinctly that it would be almost impossible to make a mistake.81 Fortunately, this is an unaffordable desire. If anything accelerates dystopia, it is the mirage of the clear and distinct, the tyranny of reason that does produce monsters. The principle of reality guarantees that we will continue to make mistakes, that nuance will exist, that the disruptive will occur, and that novelty will surprise us. That means we need space for creativity and diversity of languages. However, having the right to make mistakes does not authorize things to be done badly. It is necessary to confront the error, which has nothing to do with the mess of deception. That involves knowing how to dwell in the gap between what is known and what is still unknown, between what is wanted and what is possible. The place where, in short, we face uncertainty. Accepting vulnerability means to affect and be affected, to place oneself at the critical point where the lights that give us hope shine, and the hells that suffocate us threaten. It means, like life in a democracy, standing up every day, questioning ourselves, and how we are leading our lives, and, with that doubt, going out into the world. NOTES 1. G. Rodis-Lewis, Descartes . . . , op. cit., pp. 41ff; P.L. Font, “Cronologia,” in R. Descartes, Discurs del mètode (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 2006), pp. 48–50; L. Arenas, “Cronología,” in R. Descartes, Discurso del método (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1999), pp. 44–45. 2. A. Baillet, La vie de monsieur Descartes (1691), Book II, Chapter I; E. Garin, Descartes, op. cit., pp. 44ff. 3. E. Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge, Vol. 1, op. cit.

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4. “Some Dreams of Descartes: A letter to Maxime Leroy” (1929), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vintage, 1999), vol. 21, pp. 197–204. 5. J. Siruela, El mundo bajo los párpados (Girona: Atalanta, 2010), pp. 44ff. 6. J.-P. Sartre, Descartes (Paris-Geneva: Trois Collines, 1946). A great expert on Cartesian morality, such as G. Rodis-Lewis, also points this out in her study La morale de Descartes (Paris: PUF, 1957), p. 80. 7. Even F. Alquié focuses attention on the disjunction between two freedoms: human freedom, which wonders about what it has to do (that is, it discovers itself lost), and divine freedom, which can do everything (cf. La découverte métaphysique . . . , op. cit., pp. 281, 319–22). 8. É. Gilson studies the correlation between error and evil in Descartes, a duo of Platonic and, by derivation, Augustinian reminiscence. This union allows the metaphysical question of why evil exists, that is, why, God being certain and true, allows such a scandal (La liberté chez Descartes et la théologie [Paris: Vrin, 1987], pp. 211–35). 9. “Ainsi toute la Philosophie est comme un arbre, dont les racines sont la Metaphysique, le tronc est la Physique, et les branches qui sortent de ce tronc sont toutes les autres sciences, qui se reduisent à trois principales, à sçavoir la Medecine, la Mechanique et la Morale, j’entens la plus haute et la plus parfaite Morale, qui, presupposant une entiere connoissance des autres sciences, est le dernier degré de la Sagesse” (R. Descartes, Les principes de la Philosophie. Oeuvres de Descartes. Vol. ix [Paris: L. Cerf (ed. Adam-Tannery), 1904], p. 14). 10. However, that does not prevent tracing an absolute continuity with the moral thesis maintained in his works and letters (to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, Queen Christina of Sweden, and Ambassador Chanut). See P.L. Font, “Introducció,” in R. Descartes, Tractat de les passions. Cartes sobre la moral (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1998), pp.26ff. 11. J. Navarro, Pensar sin certezas. Montaigne y el arte de conversar (Madrid: fce, 2007). 12. G. Rodis-Lewis, La morale de Descartes, op. cit. p. 15. 13. K. Jaspers, Descartes und die Philosophie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co, 1966). 14. Ibid., p. 124. 15. Being, Thomas Aquinas wrote, is also an act. But the formula esse in actu (being in act) is not the same as esse ut actu (being as act), in whose dialectic radically different paths are traced for the existential value of the metaphysical question. The Thomist Cornelius Faber confronted this Thomistic intuition with the positions of Heidegger and Hegel (cf. Introduction to St. Thomas: Thomistic Metaphysics and Modern Thought. Selected Works of Cornelio Fabro, Volume 19 [Chillum: IVE Press, 2020]). 16. J. Butler, Senses of the Subject (New York City: Fordham University Press, 2015), p. 34.

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17. B.-A. Scharfstein speaks of “rationalizing” defensive structures in Descartes’s personality (cf. The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of Their Thought op. cit.). 18. L. Duch and J.-C. Mèlich, Escenaris de la corporeïtat (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 2003), pp. 56ff. 19. Another tradition relates “corpse” to caro data vermibus, meat given to worms, although there is no evidence of its relevance. 20. S. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (London: Penguin Classics, 2009). 21. “La santé, laquelle est sans doute le premier bien, et le fondement de tous les autres biens de cete vie” (R. Descartes, Discours de la méthode, op. cit., p. 62). 22. L. Duch, Simbolisme i salut (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 1999), p. 331. 23. Ibid., p. 334. 24. The extent of this symbiosis is discussed, in any case, in the sense that Galen may have wanted to incorporate medicine into the philosophical project and not so much the other way around, as the title of the opuscule might imply (cf. R.M. Moreno Rodríguez, “Ética y medicina en la obra de Galeno,” Dynamis 33/2, 2013). 25. C. Saborido, Filosofía de la medicina (Madrid: Tecnos, 2020), p. 92. We can establish two significant models for approaching disease and health, says Saborido, and therefore medicine. On the one hand, the naturalistic approach presupposes a univocal biological normativity that applies to everyone (from 38ºC, fever) whose understanding of the body is functional, i.e., whether the functions for which that organ is designed are fulfilled. On the other hand, the constructivist argues that if we want to know what it means to preach that something is healthy or unhealthy, we must go to the values and beliefs that comprise a social framework. Saborido defends a hybrid perspective that avoids both the excesses of uncritical objectivism and relativistic subjectivism (p. 121). Indeed, it seems that, taken alone, both perspectives are self-refuting because one leads to the other. 26. Susan Sontag eloquently exposes it in Illness as Metaphor, op. cit. 27. Cf. F. Torralba, Ética del cuidado (Madrid: Institut Borja de Bioètica—Fundación Mapfre Medicina, 2002), pp. 79ff; E. Busquets, Ética del cuidado en ciencias de la salud (Barcelona: Herder, 2019), pp. 23ff. 28. H.-G. Gadamer, The Enigma of Health (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 45ff., 29. 29. C. Saborido, Filosofía de la medicina, op. cit. pp. 178–81. 30. H.-G. Gadamer, The Enigma of Health, op. cit. 31. C. Borck, Medizinphilosophie zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2016), pp. 64ff. 32. H.-G. Gadamer, The Enigma of Health, op. cit. 33. The synthesis is by Pedro Laín Entralgo (cf. El estado de enfermedad [Madrid: Moneda y Crédito, 1968], p. 174). 34. M. Buber, Between Man and Man (New York City: Prometheus Books, 1988). 35. Responsibility is the care, recognized as a duty, for another being. Care that, given the threat of its vulnerability, becomes “concern” (H. Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985]).

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36. R.H. Smith, Schadenfreude: The Joy of Another’s Misfortune (Boston: Little, Brown Spark, 2018). 37. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book IX (London: Penguin Classics, 2004). 38. Descartes says about love: “en sorte que cette passion est utile pour la santé” (R. Descartes, Les passions de l’âme. Art. Oeuvres de Descartes. Vol. xi [Paris: L. Cerf (ed. Adam-Tannery), 1909], p. 402). It is noteworthy that Descartes, who contrasts passions, except with admiration, which he says has no opposite (Art. 53), speaks of love in parallel to hatred (Art. 102 and Art. 103; or Art. 107 and Art. 108), the most constructive and the most destructive of the passions, so far and so near, in a subject’s life. 39. S. Benhabib, Situating the Self (Routledge: Oxfordshire, 1992). 40. Ibid., pp. 182ff. On the relationship between the ethics of care and the ethics of justice, cf. E. Pulcini, Tra cura e giustizia. Le passioni come risorsa sociale (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2020). 41. H. Plessner speaks in Laughing and Crying (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2020) of both experiences as eccentricity and, fundamentally, as corporal. 42. J.-L. Marion, Questions cartésiennes, op. cit., pp. 191–207. 43. E. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations (New York City: Springer, 2013). 44. E. Stein, On the Problem of Empathy (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1989). 45. D. Le Breton, Les passions ordinaires. Anthropologie des émotions (Paris: Payot, 2004), pp. 251ff. 46. Ibid., p. 259. 47. Stein refers to analogy in his analysis of empathy, although he does not distinguish this duality we propose here (On the Problem of Empathy, op. cit.). 48. S. Schmetkamp, Theorien der Empathie zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2019), pp. 182ff. Although at this point, it is necessary to distinguish between empathy and sympathy, which authors such as Hume or Stuart Mill claim as that which facilitates relational engagement. 49. In La vida también se piensa, op. cit. (chapter 5), I try out a general outline of this position, bringing Aristotle, Kant, and Lévinas into dialogue. 50. H. Arendt, The promise of politics (New York City: Shocken Books, 2007). 51. In Existential Psychotherapy (New York City: Basic Books, 1980), I. Yalom develops both experiences as primary and pressing concerns of human existence, mainly because of the consequences of rupture and isolation they provoke. 52. The other three for K. Jaspers are: suffering, struggle, and guilt (cf. Philosophie. Band ii. Existenzerhellung [Berlin, Springer, 1932], pp. 201–54). 53. V. Jankélévitch, La mort (Paris: Flammarion, 2008). 54. Confucius, Analects, Book xi, 12. 55. S. Critchley, The Book of Dead Philosophers (New York City: Vintage, 2009); B.-A. Scharfstein, The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of Their Thought, op. cit. 56. D.M. Clarke, Descartes . . . , op. cit., p. 417. 57. S. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, op. cit.

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58. T. Lemke, Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction (New York City: NYU, 2011); R. Esposito, Bíos. Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); T. Campbell and A. Sitze (eds.), Biopolitics: a reader (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2013). 59. R. Esposito, Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics (New York City: Fordham University Press, 2013), pp. 133ff. 60. R. Esposito, Termini della politica. Vol. 2 (Roma: Mimesis, 2018), pp. 65–79. 61. M. Garrau, Politiques de la vulnérabilité (Paris: CNRS, 2018), pp. 163–66. 62. R. Esposito, Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics, op. cit., pp. 89–97. 63. George Steiner thinks, for example, of Marxism (Nostalgia for the Absolute [Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1997]), although the traces of this nostalgia for the “absolute” can also be recognized in elements proper to democracy (cf. N. Micklem, The theology of politics [London/New York/Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1941]). For a generic approach to the question of nostalgia, see the book by S. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York City: Basic Books, 2001). 64. Perhaps playing with the title of the book mentioned above by Steiner, Manuel Arias Maldonado gives this title to his essay on sovereignty (La nostalgia del soberano [Madrid: Catarata, 2020]). 65. G. Marramao, Cielo y tierra. Genealogía de la secularización (Barcelona: Paidós, 1998], pp. 18–19. 66. In addition to the aforementioned La nostalgia del soberano by M. Arias, other works along these lines are: F. de Smet, Aux origines théologiques de la souveraineté (Fernelmont: eme Éditions, 2012); F. de Smet, Le mythe de la souveraineté: Du corps au contrat social (Fernelmont: eme Éditions, 2011); D. Loick, A critique of sovereignty (London/New York City: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019); W. Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York City: Zone Books, 2017). For an overview of political theology: M. Scattola, Teologia política (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007). 67. In The King’s Two Bodies. A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1957), Ernst H. Kantorowicz explores the dual condition of the king: an earthly, mortal body and a spiritual, dynastic body. So when one king dies, another is proclaimed so that the monarchy remains the same. The same symbolic resources help to establish sovereignty and found the first forms of the nation-state, with its bodies and institutions, which also do not remain vacant. 68. M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish (London: Vintage Books, 1995). Subsequently, Giorgio Agamben has worked on the relationship between sovereignty and “naked” life in his series of works, “Homo Sacer,” especially in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 1998). 69. Emilio Gentile eloquently develops the question in Le religioni della politica (Bari: Laterza, 2018). 70. L. Duch, Religión y política (Barcelona: Fragmenta, 2014), p. 441. C. Schmitt’s opuscule Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923) is critical to understanding this question. Of H. Kelsen, the reference work on this issue is his late Secular Religion, in which he argues with his former assistant, Eric Voegelin.

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71. On this confrontation, cf. J. De Miguel and J. Tajadura, Kelsen versus Schmitt. Política y derecho en la crisis del constitucionalismo (Madrid: Guillermo Escolar Editor, 2018), pp. 165ff. 72. E. Gentile, Le religioni della politica, op. cit., pp. 205ff. On the theological genealogy of the “general will” and the relevance of Judith Shklar’s analyses in this regard, cf. A. Arias Maldonado, La nostalgia del soberano, op. cit., pp. 58ff. 73. Hannah Arendt writes that freedom and sovereignty are so little identical that they cannot even exist simultaneously (Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises on Political Reflection [New York City: Penguin Books, 2006]). 74. A reading of Jacques Derrida’s Voyous (Paris: Galilee, 2003) helps to reconstruct the direct relationship between the assumption of “a” universal reason and the notion of “sovereignty.” Derrida asserts, for example, that the abuse of power is constitutive of sovereignty itself. 75. Axel Honneth has worked on “recognition” as the key to his political philosophy (The Struggle for Recognition [Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995]). In his book The Idea of Socialism, he connects it directly with the experience of love, where the experience of existential vulnerability resonates (Cf. M. Garrau, Politiques de la vulnérabilité, op. cit., pp. 89–125). 76. D. Innerarity, Una teoría de la democracia compleja. Gobernar en el s. xxi (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2020). 77. Wendy Brown goes a step further and states that sovereignty is essentially undemocratic (cf. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty [New York City: Zone Books, 2017]). 78. There are several proposals along these lines. In our opinion, the most notable is that of Claude Lefort (O. Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007]). 79. E. Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961). 80. J. Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004). 81. Et si quelqu’un avoit bien expliqué quelles sont les idées simples qui sont en l’imagination des hommes, desquelles se compose tout ce qu’ils pensent, et que cela fust receu par tout le monde, j’oserois esperer ensuite une langue universelle fort aisée à aprendre, à prononcer et à écrire, et ce qui est le principal, qui aideroit au jugement, luy representant si distinctement toutes choses, qu’il luy seroit presque impossible de se tromper (R. Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes. Vol. i, op. cit., p. 81).

Chapter 4

Mundus est Fabula

One of the few known René Descartes’s portraits is the one painted by the Dutch Jan-Baptist Weenix. The composition is simple: the philosopher appears, facing the front, holding an open book on which one can read “mundus est fabula.” Descartes’s Discourse on Method is one of the clearest examples of a philosophical fable and how we can project our existential situation. The first passages of the Discourse show us Descartes’s autobiographical reconstruction. A profile is traced, drawn by himself, that presents him as a philosopher, a spirit that searches without assuming what he will find, somebody who considers everything and prejudges nothing. The pace of the meditations is marked here by the experiences of doubt and questioning. As the Discourse progresses, the philosopher who weighs and listens soon withdraws and gives way to the Descartes who is already the custodian of truth. He does not pretend it but disposes of it. Years before, he had been suggested through dreamlike visions that his mission in life was to discover the truth, proclaim it, and protect it. The restless navigation to reach it would henceforth demand his utmost loyalty. In return, not even the most perfidious of sages, the evil genius, who is none other than Descartes’s own demon, would be able to confuse him again with trickery. Two fables, two ways of telling oneself that give shape to two possible worlds and two beliefs. Two languages to which we surrender ourselves and which condition the character with which we inhabit the resulting world. Sometimes they combine and give feedback on each other, but one fable always ends up occupying the gravitational center. A fable differs from other types of stories in that it is a literary narrative starring animals or animate objects whose denouement provides a lesson or ethical reading of universal scope. The fact that the world (mundus) is a fable means that its history and meaning are marked by our discourses, from which direct and real ethical consequences are derived. The world is not fiction, and 97

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whether or not the fable is sobering depends on the capacity to deal with one’s own stupidity that we, its protagonists, are capable of assuming. The adjective mundus denoted for the Latins something clean, tidy and elegant and was opposed to the unclean. For them, the mundane was the most beautiful and sublime thing one could contemplate. An imposing beauty is always there, ready to snatch and rescue us. However, the world also implies a story, the one we grant. The timelessness of Descartes’s philosophy is that not even the fable of truth escapes its own fragility, for if the “absolute” (or any other image that serves as an existential guarantee) is capable of doing anything, then the unthinkable is a possibility. And that is not always reassuring because things do not always change for the better. We are out in the open, and the beautiful world is also cold. That is why the language with which we outline the world can be neither capricious nor frivolous because the word spoken is followed by the word given, the one that leads to action and the one that is not blown away by the wind. The reasoned perspective is worth more than the one that is not. It accepts, at least, to expose itself to be stripped. However, because it is contingent, its foundations may eventually crumble. And it could be for better and for worse, in what depends on us and what does not. A philosophy of vulnerability must also account for this: that although the history of our worlds is not written yet, ours are not the only hands that write it. In the end, the world is a mystery. We are in expectation. The fable reaches tones of cosmological immensity because the concept of “vulnerability” also expresses the existential provisionality in which we find ourselves. The general scheme that this book has proposed for thinking about vulnerability is nothing other than a first thematization of the instability that derives from our open reality, always at the expense and in a situation, with one foot on solid ground and the other trying to go who knows where. A precariousness that gives way to the best and the worst of us and also ambivalently fertilizes the germination of all kinds of ideologies and creeds, as indispensable for the unfolding of daily life as they are potential instigators of the most dangerous dogma. At the beginning of our exposition, we said that to oppose metaphysics and vulnerability is to leave vulnerability and its semantics without a path. As if the terms finitude, contingency, absolute, necessity, eternity, or temporality were not metaphysical considerations. Descartes expressed it in his own way: the idea of the perfect is not produced by the sum or negation of imperfect ideas, but its origin is metaphysical. So, the intuition of the divine could not be an invention of his imagination. It was the first and ultimate cause of his metaphysical, circular experience. Here we express it much more modestly and far from any Cartesian pretensions: the assumption of our finitude and contingency implies, by the logic of comparison and limit, how the “finite” and the “contingent” are challenged by the “infinite” and the

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“necessary.” Nevertheless, the experience of vulnerability and its existential wound leads us to the awareness of this limit and rises to the question of meaning, but as precisely that: a question. There are metaphysical stories that, pretending to explain everything, distort this radical metaphysical experience. And this is not the patrimony of “the” metaphysics (as if, on the other hand, there were a metaphysics) since science, sociology, or any other discipline, including the most anti-metaphysical philosophy, can also fall into the temptation of invulnerability and proclaim that they are in possession of language and speak in the name of truth. The vulnerable condition tires and exhausts. It weighs and takes its toll to have to tread the paths to be traveled repeatedly. And all this without having any certainty of success. It is no coincidence that the most varied idolatries have such a large market. It is a safe investment, because being left without a “golden calf” is one of the most desolating and discouraging experiences. It is in the experience of exile, the most typical of human beings, where the fable with which we build our worlds is revealed. That is, when idols are most needed but are least valuable. The more vulnerable we discover ourselves, the more creative and open we are, but also the more fearful and exposed to what is alien we are. It is the price of freedom and its unavailability, which binds or purges, depending on the day. Nevertheless, there is not much choice. Because if we cannot deal with these ambivalences, living with the heads and tails of the vulnerable condition, others will do it for us. And then the servitude will be double. We homo sapiens live being conscious of our tremendous and imposing capacities, proud to face pandemics, natural disasters, or biomedical impediments. And yes, we must be proud and celebrate it. But we also suffer from an excess of amnesia concerning our miseries, which are not few. While we face a pathogen, which is not entirely in our hands and which forces us to go after it, to recover ground, we cannot prevent hunger from killing, poverty from ruining lives or loneliness from consuming souls. And this, undoubtedly, is entirely in our hands. A responsibility that here is tinged with guilt and that reminds us that we are also homo demens, following Edgar Morin’s expression. The world’s fable is presented as two scenarios—shared vulnerability or repressed vulnerability. Worried about what we do not control, we neglect what we have more at hand, this being our real choice. Taking ourselves and our capacities too seriously, we neglect that these immense creative forces do not ensure the goodness of our actions. Few things are more disturbing to the rest of the species and the sustainability of the environment than our very presence. The good news is that there is another fable to propitiate. The same is true in the realm of politics, the dispatching of domestic affairs between human beings. While the chimeras of the biological improvement

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of the species are pursued, deaf ears are turned to the cries of those who are perishing from starvation while others are getting fat or of those who are withering in their scarcity while others are bored in their abundance. Capable of discussing life’s gigantic dynamics, we persist in our inability to generate mutual well-being in our homes. It makes no sense for us to spend so much time complicating our lives even more, yet that is how things are going. It is a real enigma. The question may go back to the secret of freedom and the unavailability of its times. However, whether as an ethical complaint and political unrest or as an expression of more abyssal questions, the enigma remains. Hence, we must begin to reverse the capricious inability of our time to cope with radical, metaphysical questions. Indeed, we must not lose sight of the playful dimension of life, which is also there, but one does not take away the other. Ethics is necessary to understand the meaning of life in the first-person singular and in the first-person plural. But with it also becomes essential the metaphysical question, channeling the question of Meaning and the mysterious imprint of the divine. Plato tells us almost by way of warning that Thales of Miletus, the first of the philosophers, fell into a well while his eyes were roaming the skies, to the amusement of the ingenious and nice Thracian who witnessed the scene. The modus operandi of our vulnerable condition also makes the world a fable, but we do not invent it. It also explores the mystery of existence and the world’s destiny, but without losing sight of where our feet are. Lest in the meantime, we step where he should not and end up, like Thales, colliding with the world.

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Index

affectability, 40n26, 55; vulnerability and, 2, 10, 63 alterity, 17–18, 27, 74 analogy, 28; process of, 29–31; and intersubjectivity, 75–76. See also alterity anxiety, 83; of being, 8, 25; and Descartes, 39n20 apatheia, 50, 74. See also stoicism Aquinas, Thomas, 30, 91n15 Arendt, Hannah, 78, 81; and sovereignty, 95n73 Aristotle, 29, 32–33; and ethics, 52 body, 10, 31, 35–37, 56, 64; and politics, 85, 94n76. See also biopolitics; res extensa bioethics, 66 biopolitics, 80–81, 85 Buber, Martin, 67 care, 62, 68; ethics of, 60–63, 65, 77; justice and, 71–72. Cicero. See Aristotle, and ethics community, 60, 64, 70; and politics, 80–81; and sovereignty, 86–89. See also biopolitics criteria, 28, ethical, 54–55, 77

Damasio, Antonio, on Cartesianism, 34–37 death, 1, 62; and society, 78–80 doubt, 26, 27; Cartesian, 15, 17, 22, 56 dreams, 15, 78, 89; and Descartes, 46–47 ego, 16–18, 74, 87. See also ego cogito ego cogito, 24, 32, 36, 39n19, 50, 61, 76 egocentrism, 54 emotion, 26, 50, 63, See also Damasio, Antonio empathy, 65; the concept of, 73–78 evil, 37, 69, 78; genie, 23–24, 47; genie and Descartes, 91n8, 97 faith, 21–25, 51, 86, 89 finitude, 3, 7, 47, 78–79. See also infinity freedom, 47, 77–78; and care, 68; and politics, 81; Cartesian, 48, 51, 91n7; and sovereignty, 87 Galen, 58, 92n24; and empathy, 73 God, Cartesian, 21–25; analogy of being and, 31; 37n1, 41n37, 43n55; 42 nn42–46, freedom and, 47; the idea of politics and, 83–84 105

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Index

Habermas, Jürgen, 70 happiness, 21, 49, 59, 90. See also happy happy, 45, 50, 69, 90. See also happiness health, 37; concept of, 57–60, 92n25; analogy and, 29; and care, 61–62 Heidegger, Martin, 21, 79, 91n15 hope, 38n11, 79, 83, 90 Husserl, Edmund, 36, 74–75

pathology, 57, 67 perfection, 2; in Descartes, 22–24, 41n37, 42n46. Plato, 10, 59; and Descartes, 91n8 Plessner, Helmut, 6, 36 precariousness, 2, 52, 55, 56, 61, 67, 81, 82 procus, 52–54, 64, 68 provisional moral, 53–55, 68, 72; and Descartes, 48–51

infinity, 3, 7, 72, 98; in Descartes, 38n11, 41n37, 43n55. See also God

reciprocity, 64, 65, 66, 67–69, 72, 77 religion, 83, 86; and Descartes, 48, 51 Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 57 res cogitans, 16, 33 res extensa, 33

Jaspers, Karl, 78, 93n52; on Descartes, 51 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 6, 21, 32–35 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 74, 93n49 love, 65, 68, 69, 77, 95n75; and an idea of “God,” 22; and the definition of Descartes, 93n38 metaphysics, 4, 28; and vulnerability, 3, 98, 99 Montaigne, Michel de: and the origins of Modernity, 13; and Stoicism, 49 mystery, 4, 20, 25, 46, 57, 98, 100 ontology, 65 pain, 20, 22, 35, 36, 65, 82

sovereignty, 13; vulnerability, politics and the idea of, 84–88 Scheler, Max, 36 Stein, Edith, 75 stoicism, 56; and Descartes, 49–50 Suárez, Francisco, 13, 16, 30 subject, 16–18, 60, 66, 72, 74, 79, 87, 88, 92n25. See also ego theology, Cartesian, 43n55 uncertainty, 5, 22, 30, 62 voluntarism, 24 vulnerable reason, 29–31

About the Author

Miquel Seguró Mendlewicz (1979) has a PhD in philosophy and holds a degree in humanities. He teaches philosophy in several universities in Barcelona, Spain. He has completed research stays in Rome, Paris, and Freiburg in Breisgau. He has published Los confines de la razón, Sendas de finitude, and La vida también se piensa, and he is the editor-in-chief of the journal Argumenta Philosophica. He has directed philosophical sections on television and radio and contributes regularly to the press.

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