Naturally, any “I” that may write such a sentence is not the same person that you will perceive upon meeting the body thought to contain this “I”. No self is perfectly consistent over time, and arguably a multiplicity of selves are constantly waxing and waning in dormancy inside us at the behest of external stimuli. It is possible (indeed probable) that multiple are active at any given moment. Moreover, even were “I” to possess a singular, coherent, and dominant self,ᵃ it is obvious to any rational human that the apparent man who converses with others is radically distinct from the man who scribes alone by candlelight, the latter of which I am doing now. Even were you to meet me—and if you have had such fortune—you would not perceive the same self that writes these words. “I” write, then, as a self fundamentally and tautologically unknown to you.ᵇ For our purposes, you should interpret “I” as “a self that occupies the same bodily structure as the self I perceive the author to have, and which while not identical, shares sufficient memory and properties of being that I may safely conflate the two for practical purposes that do not require a full treatment of the scatteredness of the human mind”. Certainly this definition dramatically oversimplifies matters, but do not begrudge me this convenience—I make it only in service of a concise and direct treatment of the remainder of the phrase above. For a somewhat more rigorous definition of “I”, albeit still necessarily compact due to publishing constraints, kindly refer to pages 1017-1302 of my previous volume.
My previous volume—which I shall assume the reader is quite in command of—thoroughly dispensed with the absurdity of Descartes’ dubito, of which absurdity his “am” represents the highest zenith.I shall not repeat the argument at length here. Suffice to say that my colleague Pierreᶜ was altogether far too gracious on this travesty of reason, for not only does it presuppose the “I” and that one may know definitively that “I” thinks, but this very presupposition renders the conclusion entirely meaningless and circular. If “I” (which is) thinks, one already concludes that the “I” is and need not say more. I invariably amaze my students at the Collège Royalᵈ by demonstrating that not only do the three words of the dubito contain no useful insight of any kind, but despite this calamity, Descartes nevertheless manages to use thrice the words necessary to express even this utter tripe!He would have done as well with simply dubito, or better still, ego—though I suspect such a reduction of the phrase to its essentials in this way would have exposed the intellectual farce therein too greatly for it to ever grace the page. If the reader is still in any doubt as to the veracity of the dubito—or worse, his subsequent necromancy of his stillborn cogito, for thrice useless words were apparently still not enough for the thought-devil René—then once more I invite the reader to consult my first volume.ᵉ For now, let us proceed with the indisputable truth that “I” presupposes the “am” of its own object, and therefore in this way “am” here pertains not to existence nor operates at all on the “I” but entirely on the subsequent negatio of the “not”, serving wholly as a linking verb without which phrases like “I not he” and “I am not he” would be mistaken for one another. We will return to the operation of the “not” shortly.ᶠ
We now return to the operation of the “not”. It is a common error among amateurs and Germans to consider this “not” (or more properly, as I have proven, the “am not” union) wholly a negatio in essence. Nothing could be further from the truth. For the establishment of a negatio in a premise—or the establishment of its counterpart aequalis, for that matter—also constitutes an epistemological claim.ᵍ For “I” to be “not” anything, one posits that one sufficiently comprehends both the “I” and what it is “not” to satisfactorily discern between the two. Crucially, this epistemological claim also elevates the premise as a whole beyond a mere question of existence. For if the mere use of “I” implies its existence,ʰ then so too must our statement of something that it is not—that is, that we reference something that it is not implies that such a thing exists. Our statement, therefore, is neither that “I” is not non-existence, nor that it is not something else about which we only know that it exists—for if all we knew about “I” and this other entity was that they both exist, we would not be able to discern them. In this way, the establishment of the negatio, in contrast to the negative quality of the negatio itself, positively implies both the existence and knowledge of some quality (or its absence) belonging (or not belonging) to both the “I” and the other entity such that we may tell them apart.ⁱ
At last—the punctum saliens, la pièce de résistance of our entire operation! We journey now from the epistemologicalʲ to the metaphysical in our consideration of the “who”. For if we understand the sentence to have been written by the “I”, then this “I”—in union with the “am not” negatio—speculates not just the existence of the “who” (as conception)ᵏ and sufficient knowledge of it to make a claim, but also that the properties of the “I” and the “who” are not operated on by some other metaphysical property that renders them identical.ˡ Others at the Collège Royalᵐ have postulated, for instance, that an “I” is but matter’s aggregate conception of itself, and by this view if all was known about the “who” was that it is likewise a conception, then the “I” could not be sure that it was not also the “who”. While obviously incorrect, my students often nevertheless find this line of reasoning to illuminate—much as a housefire illuminates—an entrance to the grander metaphysical labyrinth at play. I retain it in my lectures and publications for this reason. For now, we may not discern the exact nature of the metaphysical properties that the “I” attributes to the “who”, for in doing so in the context of a claim that simultaneously disputes the aequalitas of these entities, the “I” also assigns metaphysical properties to itself—posing an irreconcilable double-variable quandary that may not be resolved without additional verbiage.ⁿ I will shortly release a supplementary volume elucidating the implications of similar phrases (most curiously of all, “I am going to think”) and in the Appendix I shall provide a short outline of how said implications would modify the “I” and “who” we consider now. I expect that the Collège Royal, after the success of this volume, will promptly request that I expedite such a focal tome—in which case, I urge the reader, if he feels he holds tight any pending contributions to the metaphysics of “who”, to either make them forthwith and profit thusly—lest I sweep his livelihood aside in but a year’s time with my subsequent publication—or forever still his pen on the matter.
We need not discuss the assertion by the “I” of the existence of the “you”, for any diligent reader may prove this to their own satisfaction given the truths established by footnotes 2, 4, b, g, j, and k. What is of supremely more interest is the choice by “I” to construct the “who” via an entity engaged in a present tense verb (the “who” that “you think”) as opposed to a past tense verb (the “who” that “you have thought”) or one without an attached entity at all (“that was thought”). Only a moron of scientific significanceᵒ could interpret the present tense as absolutely literal—that is, that the “I” believes that the “you” is currently conceiving the “who” at the very moment the sentence is written. Nevertheless, the choice to insert “you” here as a thinker of thoughts raises two questions: one metaphysical, and one practical. The metaphysical question relates to the “I” and its conception of the “who”. Does the “I” believe that the “who” must be constructed by an entity (“you”) in order to possess the elements being contrasted via the negatio (“not”)?ᵖ Or does the “I” believe that the “who”, rather, is the recursive union of the “who” and the “you” that thinks it? The practical question is of markedly less interest—perhaps the “I” is an uneducated man or a Swede, and does not appreciate the value of the rigor that could be added by amending his claim to “I am not the who of the thoughts in your head”.
The juxtaposition and interplay between the “I am” unions that initiate and conclude the sentence is of extraordinary consequence to the remainder of our investigation of this subject. It will be immediately evident to all that the latter “I am” is more definitively a conception than the former (given that it is something being thought by “you”), and that what it means for “you” to ascribe being to “I” via “am” is not synonymous with the actual being experienced and asserted by “I”. However, the cascade of logical deductions we may make from the coexistence of these two premises is at once exquisite and treacherous—a pandorae arca that promises tremendous insight into the very nature of reality, and more importantly still, the quintessence of “am” . . . if only one can avoid the myriad and quite fatal traps laid by Logic herself across its lid! Alas, having substantially truncated the planned contents of this volume in my lifelong pursuit of brevity, I now expect to publish it several days before the final examination of my current students will take place—a final examination which will consist entirely of the words “I am” duplicated on forty-five sheets of otherwise fresh paper, around which they must, after deducing the intended nature of the task, essay forth on the true nature of these two words. As no suitable replacement examination could possibly be developed in time—being less than a season away from the date—I am therefore unable to provide any further explanation of “am”, “I am”, or indeed anything else in this volume lest I imperil the academic integrity of this process.ʳ⸴ˢ
𝐚) A tragically ignorant hypothesis that has nevertheless recently arisen in certain, shall we say, Discours—to mystifyingly positive reception.
𝐛) Any reader of mediocre talent ought to observe at once that the same caveat, naturally, applies to “my” knowledge of “myself”. While true, we will return to this epistemological claim shortly in footnote 2. A reader of more remarkable perceptive abilities will observe that, by the relational property, any claim that the reader cannot under any circumstances know my mind also supposes that I cannot comprehend what conception the reader has of my mind. It is perhaps even the case, therefore, that the epistemological claim I will attribute to the establishment of the negatio “not” shortly in footnote 3 has, in fact, already been presupposed merely by the “I”! The halfwit René Descartes has attained celebrity for nothing more than a banal extrapolation of the ego,ᵝ yet one that he earnestly—insofar as a charlatan may be capable of earnestness—believes unassailable. I, for whom humility is supreme virtue, commit no such sin of hubris. It may be, and indeed as I believe weᵞ shall discover through further study, that the entirety of this claim, in toto, is likewise reducible to the ego alone.
𝐜) The Disquisitio Metaphysica, while now unfortunately made redundant by the sum of my previous volume and the volume gracing your hands at this very moment, remains of some historical importance to our piercing inquiry of the ego, and would be an excellent introductory text to the subject for a precocious boy of twelve. My colleague Pierre will be happy to provide a free copy to any of my readers, I am certain, given the extravagant funding that he has recently received—and which, therefore, I did not—from the Collège Royal at which we—as I remind him often—serve.
𝐝) I have amazed, at minimum and in chronological order of such amazement, the following of my studentsᵟ with such a demonstration: Étienne du Montreuil, Jacques de Affamé, Claude Bouchard, Louis-Henri Beaumont, Guillaume d’Aubigné, Matthäus Wackelkopf, François Valfort, Henriette de La Faye, Tommaso Bellavicini, Jean-Baptiste Sourdière, Théophile d'Argentmure, Castel de Roqueblague.
𝐞) Due to insufficient dissemination of the release of my first volume—against all policy and good sense—several copies remain available for acquisition at the Collège Royal libraries. This state of affairs, obviously, will not remain for any longer than a week after publication of the volume you now hold. If such a period has not yet lapsed, I suggest one makes haste immediately to attain a copy.
𝐟) In footnote 3.
𝐠) Observe that it is the establishment of the negatio that introduces the epistemological claim, not the negatio itself. This nuance frequently takes students the entire duration of their studies to comprehend at even a surface level. Pending further publications, I invite the reader to muse upon this curiosity for several dinners before proceeding further. I shall unravel this mystery once and for all in a future volume.
𝐡) As demonstrated in footnote 1, and despite the ludicrous ramblings of one René Descartes—who, for all his pomposity that I have worked to expose, I understand now calls home a bugridden tavern in Egmond-Binnen. Suffice to say that the quality of one’s thought will eventually reflect itself in the quality of one’s abode. (You may quote this freely.ᵋ)
𝐢) The reader will note with great pleasure that even a simple “not”, used masterfully, makes more sophisticated claims about the ego than the entirety of the dubito and cogito combined.
𝐣) A former student—who, as will be shortly evident, did not complete my program—once asserted that by the very logic of footnote 1 as applied to the existence of the “I”, the “who” also constitutes an epistemological claim of its own existence. This is nonsense. Where “I” stands alone as an entity asserted in its own right, “who” is introduced here as the summation of the subsequent “you think I am”. That is, “who” is to be what “you” understand of the “I”. If what you understand of the “I” is that it does not exist,ᶿ then “who” would quite simply be nothing more than a nullus, and the negatio of the nullus hence becomes the “I” asserting its existence, rather than the “who” asserting its own. One would think that this revelation alone would prove sufficient to quell all doubt. I myself, despite my possession of considerable mental power and resilience, was laid flat in bed for weeks by its force. And yet, reader, not only did this student remain standing—radiant Truth having had no effect on them—but they found the nerve to wonder if my earlier argumentᶺ that our contrasting of the “I” to the “who” supposes the existence of both might also imply that “you” cannot conceive a “who” as nullus! I naturally had no choice but to remove them from my course at once for this apostasy. My colleague Pierre has since taken this student under his own tutelage, which I consider an admirable but misguided display of charity.
𝐤) A quite separate matter to the error made by my former student in footnote j. The metaphysical “who” does not assert itself, nor does “you think I am” necessarily assert that the “who” is anything other than a nullus. But the manner in which the “I” asserts the existence of the “who” by referencing it is a thornier quandary to adjudicate. One may at first believe that as “you” may think that “I” does not exist, in such case “you” would hold that the “who” is indeed a nullus, and the “I” is merely to disagree. However, for “I” to claim that “you” conceives of a nullus is also to potentially modify the “who” into no longer the nullus itself, but the conception of the nullus that the “you” holds—a conception that necessarily exists, but in different form. I once delivered a public lecture on this very subject at the once-prestigious Université d’Avignon, referring colloquially to it as the “you-who dilemma”. However, I no longer care to discuss the matter, after a gaggle of cretinous d’Avignon students—but I repeat myself—maliciously and vociferously reinterpreted the dilemma as a reference to the perplexing refusal of several former pupils to respond to my greetings in public.
𝐥) Which would refute the negatio. One might wonder if the “I” and “who” are necessarily dissimilar, for how could an “I” be identical to a mere conception of an “I”? One might also drink poison or lick rocks. Such is the calibre of reasoning at hand.
𝐦) Among them, regrettably, my colleague Pierre.
𝐧) I have thus set upon a mathematical approach to this problem instead (for, by grace, I seem as competent a mathematician as philosopher) and believe myself imminently upon a solution. Unfortunately, for reasons of privacy and propriety, I kept my notes on the matter in the back of a janitorial closet at the Collège Royal mathematics department, and arrived one evening to find the closet newly locked. Despite my two decades of professorial servitude to the Collège Royal and renown throughout its halls, my inquiries to administrators, janitorial staff, and fellow mathematicians of note have as of yet been unable to remedy this egregious incident. However, I have recently acquired a prybar, and by the time you, dear reader, peruse these words, I expect that I shall possess and resume this vital work once more.
𝐨) I am thinking of one such man in particular.
𝐩) The interaction of the “you” and “not” was similarly elaborated upon at length in my lecture mentioned in footnote k, where I similarly invoked the shorthand “the you-not dilemma”. I was later informed by a colleague who transferred from the Université d’Avignon to the Collège Royal (to his eternal credit) that several studentsᵠ subsequently found great humour in postering caricatures of my visage around the campus with the mocking caption “THE YOU-NOT EUNUCH”. Although it is certain that the Université will have apprehended and expelled these students for their treatment of a visionary such as myself, I would appreciate if any readers from the Université d’Avignon would forward me the family addresses of said villains, so that I might properly ensure that the effects of their harassment are known to their kin.
𝐪) A “thought” is something that one may “think”.⁶
𝐫) Afore some curmudgeon write to quarrel on this omission, I shall add that due to my unforeseen absence through most of the semester—a dab of pleurisy, nothing to worry over, meae admiratrices—I had no choice but to set the final examination as the entirety of their grade. Would you, reader, truly endanger the sanctity of the Collège Royal given these stakes? Allow a precocious student to slip through the sacred net of learning, the process by which our faculty weeds out charlatans and fools, merely by gaining access to a vaunted first edition of this volume and regurgitating its faultless logic to attain full marks? This is an unacceptable risk, and I permit it not. I have not graduated three students—soon to be five—from my teachings at the Collège Royal through any but the utmost care for their education.
𝐬) In service of this noble aim, the remainder of this volumeᵡ shall feature only assertions of what I—and, therefore, humanity—find absolutely certain to be true. I shall provide my reasoning in a later publication—if indeed our progress as a society, building upon these truths to follow, has not reached such dizzying pace as to render my handwriting illegible through vertigo. Til then, rest assured that every premise, nay, every glyph in this volume has been meticulously verified by an objective and impartial editor: myself. Should the reader wish to study, and no doubt emulate, the methodology of this peer-reviewᵚ process—for I am truly my only peer—kindly refer to pages 2712-4055 of my previous volume.
β I refer primarily to the public’s bewildering and uncritical reception of La recherche de la vérité par la lumière naturelle—a patently rushed work, no doubt intended to mend the resounding blow my previous volume dealt to his reputation, but which has only made matters worse for him. If the Meditationes defied reason, La recherche spits at it. As a courtesy, I have personally written to René in advance of this volume to advise of its intended publication date and the likely effect it will have upon his welcome in de Nederlanden. As of my writing, I have received no reply.* Nevertheless, I expect that he shall shortly flee the country—doubtless to accommodation of even greater ill-repute.
γ I.
δ For thoroughness, I also include pupils who, sadly, whether due to inherited defect or a habitual refusal to see reason, failed to complete their tuition under my wing.
ε So long as one properly attributes the title, volume, page, and esteemed author from whence one received this rhetorical pearl and a short summation of its surrounding context, id est, the name and recent residences of the scoundrel René Descartes. I do not consider a supplementary recitation of common inn vermin to be mandatory, but certainly highly desirable.⁺
θ An absurd and self-contradictory view, per the penetrating logic of footnotes 1 and 3. Albeit, therefore, one that a certain Noorderkwartier taverndweller could likely sustain without any apparent embarrassment.
𝚲 I had managed to deliver the arguments made in footnote 3 in the very same lecture (for, by grace, I seem as competent an educator as philosopher), despite the constraints of but a five hour room allocation that the Collège Royal inexplicably declines to extend further.
φ Presumably the very same d’Avignon cretins—but I repeat myself again—responsible for the shameful behaviour noted in footnote k.
ꭓ I do not here include the remainder of this exordium, of which we have only just begun to partake.
ω Not to be confused with a Pierre-review process, which, alas, has fallen out of favour between my colleague and I in recent months—myself, now preoccupied with the very frontiers of knowledge and requiring a higher standard of proofreading, and Pierre, now preoccupied with wine and extravagant meals.ꜝꜝ
* Dubito quin fortitudinem habeat. Ha!
† Though, come to think of it, one would have already begun.
‼ Pierre has begun to suffer from a lung complaint, though he hides it from his students. I often tell him: Pierre, you must not eat so much. You are of ill-health. You mustn’t stress your body this way. Such damages, once accrued, are by no means simple to treat. At this rate—this I tell him also—you will likely be forced out of teaching entirely and leave the Collège Royale forever, perhaps regaining your strength elsewhere in France for some years before returning to Paris, outwardly rejuvenated, feeling strong, but inside unwell as ever, the lung complaint soon to return and worsen in the winters, terribly so, such that you will be bled by doctors in the home of some French patron and die a death before your time, the full extent of your works only to be published posthumously so you shall never see them bloom. Alas—were I as skilled a physician as I am philosopher, perhaps then I could make my colleague Pierre see reason. As matters stand, he has not taken kindly to my advice.
Good. Lord. This is a feat.