The rationalist’s pronoun

The first-person pronoun is especially important to the rationalist, of course, since it’s the tag in the language that tracks with the locus of the reasoning faculty. It’s a code that marks the existence of a code-maker, a symbol that symbolizes the symbolizer. (Okay, enough of that.)

It is often remarked upon that Descartes writes in the first-person, and this would presumably be the reason. (How else could the cogito be expressed?) But there are two interesting consequences of this. The first is due to the kind of reason I hinted at in the previous post. If the cogito stands at the interface between the pragmatic and the semantic, then the linguistic puzzle it presents is directly due to the occurrence of the first-person pronoun. (I suppose that’s often pointed out.) The second lends weight to my interpretive hypothesis that the Discourse reads like a slave narrative: not only does the work establish, through the conventions of narrative, the authenticity of the author, but it does so non-detachably. Its pivotal moment occurs right here, at the cogito argument, an argument that cannot (without loss of meaning) be rendered in anything but the first person—precisely what one would expect of a slave narrative.