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Books, Essays, Philosophy, Reviews

The Dangerous Clarity, and Disquieting Tremors, of René Descartes

The following essay was written by AI and edited by Intellicurean.

René Descartes once promised a world rebuilt on certainty. Strip away all illusions, he said, and we might begin again—this time on solid ground. For centuries, he has been honored as a liberator of reason. But what if the revolution he sparked came not from clarity, but confusion?

Sandrine Parageauis professor of early modern British history at Sorbonne University in Paris, France. She is the author of The Paradoxes of Ignorance in Early Modern England and France (2023).

In her recent Aeon essay, “The French Liar,” historian Sandrine Parageau reintroduces Descartes not as the serene founder of modern philosophy, but as a figure who provoked psychological vertigo in his readers and existential dread among his contemporaries. Rather than a clear-eyed rationalist, he appears here as an unsettling alchemist of doubt—one whose method seemed, to some, less like reason and more like manipulation.

A towering figure in intellectual history, Descartes (1596-1650) famously declared, “Cogito, ergo sum”—I think, therefore I am. His Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy laid the groundwork for modern science, yet they also disoriented many of his peers. Parageau reveals that, far from being universally hailed, Descartes was condemned by some as a dangerous deceiver. These accusations, initially paradoxical against the architect of systematic reason, become, under Parageau’s scrutiny, a mirror reflecting the profound anxieties of a society on the cusp of modernity.

The Discomfort of Radical Doubt

With almost surgical precision, Descartes urged his readers to divest themselves of all prior opinions, prejudices, and “false knowledge”—to undergo what he called “hyperbolical doubt.” Only by demolishing inherited beliefs, he argued, could one rebuild on indubitable foundations. Parageau highlights how this radical intellectual purification, though meant to be temporary, was viewed by many 17th-century thinkers as dangerous. It wasn’t just a methodological reset; it felt like a descent into cognitive vertigo.

Recent scholarship has begun to echo this emotional reading of Cartesian skepticism. Jan Forsman, in his 2021 dissertation Of Dreams, Demons, and Whirlpools, contends that Descartes’s doubt was not merely a tool, but a lived, transformative experience meant to disorient before it could rebuild. His approach aligns with Parageau’s interpretation of Descartes not as a detached logician, but as a man whose method required emotional unmooring.

Christia Mercer, in her groundbreaking 2017 article “Descartes’ Debt to Teresa of Ávila,” suggests that Descartes may have borrowed from mystical traditions that emphasized introspective purgation—further embedding emotion into method. The Cartesian self, it turns out, may not have emerged from reason alone, but from something more elemental and uncertain.

The Accusation of Manipulation

One of the most vivid condemnations came from Meric Casaubon, who in a 1668 letter accused Descartes of constructing a philosophy that first annihilated belief, only to restore it through rhetorical domination. Casaubon accused Descartes of promoting ignorance as the pathway to the mysterious grandeur of the Cogito, dragging readers into despair before lifting them back with persuasive flair. “He casts down, and raises again, when they see cause,” Casaubon warned, likening Descartes to a puppet master of the intellect.

Parageau draws a chilling parallel between this 17th-century critique and the modern phenomenon of gaslighting—the psychological manipulation by which one is made to doubt their own sanity. Dutch theologian Martin Schoock was even more explicit in his 1643 Admirable Method, warning that Descartes’s system would lead to “mental disorder,” as it required “putting off the light of reason” and embracing ignorance. What Descartes called meditation, Schoock acidly dismissed as “doing nothing.”

For Casaubon and Schoock, the philosopher’s aim was not liberation, but domination. Descartes’s rigorous doubt appeared, from this angle, as an epistemic trap—a means to unmoor the mind only to reanchor it in his authority. It’s a startling idea: that the father of rationalism was seen by some as an emotional manipulator, wielding confusion as a tool of influence.

Religious and Intellectual Backlash

But such critiques were not merely philosophical. They were deeply rooted in the turbulent religious context of post-Reformation Europe. Descartes’s adversaries often likened his tactics to those of the Roman Catholic Church, which Protestants accused of maintaining clerical control through the suppression of lay understanding.

Parageau reminds us that these condemnations were colored by sectarian conflict. Casaubon aligned Descartes with both Puritans and Jesuits—groups seen as enemies by many Protestant intellectuals. The stakes were theological: Descartes’s critics feared his system lacked the means to support key Christian doctrines, like the soul’s immortality or the existence of God.

Steven Nadler, in recent lectures, has emphasized how Descartes’s method emerged in a time of crumbling metaphysical certainties and escalating religious anxiety. His dismantling of scholastic traditions felt, to many, like a spiritual as well as intellectual provocation.

Even those who admired Descartes’s scientific prowess were uneasy about his religious implications. As Parageau notes, English Protestants of the late 17th century often lauded his mechanics while warning against his metaphysics. His emphasis on method over received wisdom was viewed not merely as innovation, but as insurrection.

The Emotional Roots of Rationality

Here lies Parageau’s most powerful insight. Descartes, she argues, was not coldly analytical, but emotionally raw. His philosophy did not spring from dispassionate logic, but from crisis. As a young man, he discovered the teachings of his youth to be riddled with error. This epiphany caused what biographer Adrien Baillet called “violent agitations” and “psychological distress.”

Parageau, drawing on Tristan Dagron’s interpretation, connects this upheaval to a series of dreams Descartes experienced in 1619—dreams so disturbing that he later modeled his Meditations after them. These dreams blurred the boundaries between wakefulness and delusion, instilling a terror that would echo throughout his philosophical system.

Michel Foucault once argued, in Madness and Civilization, that Descartes expelled madness from the domain of reason. But new interpretations suggest otherwise. Instead of excluding madness, Descartes began from it. Forsman, Mercer, and others point to a method rooted in the very vulnerability it sought to overcome.

Susan James, in her work Passion and Action, has argued that Cartesian philosophy requires the management, not the elimination, of passion. The purification Descartes demanded was emotional as much as intellectual.

A Disquieting Foundation

Parageau concludes that Descartes’s critics were not entirely wrong: his philosophy did produce epistemic anxiety. But where they saw danger, she sees a more nuanced truth. Descartes embraced doubt, disorientation, even a kind of madness—not to harm, but to transform. His rational edifice was not built upon peace of mind, but upon its very rupture. In this, he resembles not a manipulator, but a figure more complex: part mystic, part surgeon, part exile from certainty.

We have long imagined Descartes as the calm architect of modernity. But as Parageau and recent scholars reveal, his foundations were laid atop psychological fault lines. The search for clarity began not with answers, but with tremors. And from that trembling ground, he built a system that still shapes how we think today.

Essays, Physics, Science

Science Essays: ‘The Stagnation Of Physics’

AEON MAGAZINE (April 1, 2025) by Adrien De Sutter:

Browse a shelf of popular science books in physics and you’ll often find a similar theme. Whether offering insights into The Hidden Reality (2011), Something Deeply Hidden (2019) or Our Mathematical Universe (2014), these books hint at an underlying, secret world waiting to be unravelled by physicists – a domain beyond our sensory perception that remains their special purview.

‘It’s akin to knowing everything about sand dunes … but not knowing what a grain of sand is made of’

Over its history, physics has delivered elegant and accurate descriptions of the physical Universe. Today, however, the reality physicists work to uncover appears increasingly removed from the one they inhabit. Despite its experimental successes, physics has repeatedly failed to live up to the expectation of delivering a deeper, ‘final’ physics – a reality to unify all others. As such, physicists appear forced to entertain increasingly speculative propositions.

Yet, with no obvious avenues to verify such speculations, physicists are left with little option but to repeat similar approaches and experiments – only bigger and at greater cost – in the hope that something new may be found. Seemingly beset with a sense of anxiety that nothing new will be found or that future experiments will reveal only further ignorance, the field of fundamental physics is incentivized to pursue ever more fanciful ideas.

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It may even require that we abandon doing physics altogether, in the attainment of an expanded reality that not only accepts but encourages the possibility of difference and more. Or, as the speculative fiction writer Ursula Le Guin once put it, what we require are ‘the realists of a larger reality’.

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Adrien De Sutter completed his PhD in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Germany. An interdisciplinary researcher specialising in science and technology studies and the history and philosophy of science, he focuses on the philosophical, sociological and political implications of fundamental physics research.

Essays, Intelligence, Philosophy

‘Suffused With Causality’

AEON MAGAZINE (March 22, 2025) by Mariel Goddu:

Causal understanding is the cognitive capacity that enables you to think about how things affect and influence each other. It is your concept of making, doing, generating and producing – of causing – that allows you to grasp how the Moon causes the tides, how a virus makes you sick, why tariffs change international trade, the social consequences of a faux pas, and the way each event in a story leads to what happens next. Causal understanding is the foundation of all thoughts why, how, because, and what if. When you plan for tomorrow, wonder how things could have turned out differently, or imagine something impossible (What would it be like to fly?), your causal understanding is at work.

In daily life, causal understanding imbues your observations of changes in the world with a kind of generativity and necessity. If you hear a sound, you assume something made it. If there’s a dent on the car, you know that something – or someone – must have done it. You know that the downpour will make you wet, so you push the umbrella handle to open it and avoid getting soaked. You watch as an acorn falls from a tree, producing ripples in a puddle.

The human power to view cause-and-effect as part of ‘objective reality’ (a philosophically fraught idea, but for now: the mind-independent world ‘out there’) is so basic, so automatic, that it’s difficult to imagine our experience without it. Just as it’s nearly impossible to see letters and words as mere shapes on a page or a screen (try it!), it is terrifically challenging to observe changes in the world as not involving causation. We do not see: a key disappearing into a keyhole; hands moving; door swinging open. We see someone unlocking the door. We don’t see the puddle, then the puddle with ripples-plus-acorn. We see the acorn making a splash.

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Mariel Goddu is a doctoral student in philosophy at Stanford University in California. From 2012-22, she was a practising cognitive scientist, focusing on causal reasoning in early childhood. She earned her first PhD in developmental psychology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2020. Her philosophical work lies at the intersection of philosophy of action, biology, and mind.

Essays, Ideas, Society

Ideas & Society: ‘The Winter Of Civilization’

AEON MAGAZINE (February 28, 2025):

I came across Byung-Chul Han towards the end of the previous decade, while writing a book about the pleasures and discontents of inactivity. My first researches into our culture of overwork and perpetual stimulation soon turned up Han’s The Burnout Society, first published in German in 2010. Han’s descriptions of neoliberalism’s culture of exhaustion hit me with that rare but unmistakable alloy of gratitude and resentment aroused when someone else’s thinking gives precise and fully formed expression to one’s own fumbling intuitions.

Han’s critique of contemporary life centres on its fetish of transparency; the compulsion to self-exposure driven by social media and fleeting celebrity culture; the reduction of selfhood to a series of positive data-points; and the accompanying hostility to the opacity and strangeness of the human being.

At the heart of Han’s conception of a burnout society (Müdigkeitsgesellschaft) is a new paradigm of domination. The industrial society’s worker internalises the imperative to work harder in the form of superego guilt. Sigmund Freud’s superego, a hostile overseer persecuting us from within, comes into being when the infantile psyche internalises the forbidding parent. In other words, the superego has its origin in figures external to us, so that, when it tells us what to do, it is as though we are hearing an order from someone else. The achievement society of our time, Han argues, runs not on superego guilt but ego-ideal positivity – not from a ‘you must’ but a ‘you can’. The ego-ideal is that image of our own perfection once reflected to our infantile selves by our parents’ adoring gaze. It lives in us not as a persecutory other but as a kind of higher version of oneself, a voice of relentless encouragement to do and be more.

To digitalise a painting is to decompose it, to deprive it of ground

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Josh Cohen is a psychoanalyst in private practice in London. He is professor emeritus of modern literary theory at Goldsmiths University of London. His latest books include Losers (2021) and All the Rage: Why Anger Drives the World (2024).

Culture, Essays

‘The Commitment To Collaborate’ (Essay)

AEON (February 22, 2025): Every week at the office, you and your fellow employees have meetings to discuss progress on group projects and to divide tasks efficiently. Perhaps in the evening, you go home and cook dinner with your partner. At least once in your life, you might have seen a team of firefighters work together to extinguish a fire at a burning house and rescue those inside. You have probably also witnessed or participated in political demonstrations aimed at bettering the treatment of those in need. These are all examples of human cooperation toward a mutually beneficial end. Some of them seem so commonplace that we rarely think of them as anything special. Yet they are. It is not obvious that any of the other great ape species cooperate in such a way – spontaneously and with individuals they have never before met. Though there has been some evidence of cooperation in other great apes, the interpretation of studies on ape cooperation has also been contested. In the human case, cooperation is unequivocal.

One crafts a spear head, the other crafts a shaft. To do so, they need some means of communicating

The evolution of cooperation has been of interest to biologists, philosophers and anthropologists for centuries. If natural selection favours self-interest, why would we cooperate at an apparent cost to ourselves? You might say that none of these examples is costly; they all benefit the person cooperating as well as the recipient of the cooperation. This is true, but there is still a puzzle to solve. If I can reduce the cost of cooperating by deception – pretending to pull my weight in the group project or in the rescue mission – and still reap the benefits, why would I not do so? This is known as the ‘free-rider’ problem.

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Saira Khan is a research associate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bristol in the UK, working on Samir Okasha’s Representing Evolution project.

Essays, Humanities, Mathematics, Science

Mathematics Essay: ‘Beyond Causality’

AEON (February 14, 2025): In 1959, the English writer and physicist C P Snow delivered the esteemed Rede Lecture at the University of Cambridge. Regaled with champagne and Marmite sandwiches, the audience had no idea that they were about to be read the riot act. Snow diagnosed a rift of mutual ignorance in the intellectual world of the West. On the one hand were the ‘literary intellectuals’ (of the humanities) and on the other the (natural) ‘scientists’: the much-discussed ‘two cultures’.

Mind and world are no separate spheres that must first be connected. Rather, both depend on each other

Snow substantiated his diagnosis with anecdotes of respected literary intellectuals who complained about the illiteracy of the scientists but who themselves had never heard of such a fundamental statement as the second law of thermodynamics. And he told of brilliant scientific minds who might know a lot about the second law but were barely up to the task of reading Charles Dickens, let alone an ‘esoteric, tangled and dubiously rewarding writer … like Rainer Maria Rilke.’

Mathematics mediates a conciliatory view that avoids the mistake of the naive realist and the naive idealist…

Ludwig Wittgenstein once said: ‘I want to show the colourfulness of mathematics.’ In that spirit, I placed mathematics at the centre of my project because, in my view, mathematics searches along more of these many paths than any other intellectual discipline. It is connected on a deep level both with the natural sciences and the humanities. It bridges the gulf between them, and it does so by putting certain metaphysical and epistemological dogmas into question, as will become clear in the following.

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Gordon Gillespie is an actuary, quantitative risk manager and data scientist. He has a doctorate in philosophy and is the author of the German-language book The Oracle of Numbers: A Short Philosophy of Mathematics (2023). He lives in Rüdesheim, Germany.