Descartes' famous phrase “I think, therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum) has been the subject of immense discussion in modern and contemporary philosophy. Is it an inference or a performance (Hintikka)? Was it a central phrase in his philosophy, or did he only use it in a didactic context (Cassirer)? Is it an original idea, or was it preceded by a similar idea from Augustine (Blanchet, Gilson)? Is it an enthymeme or a simple intuition, an argument, a proposition, or a tautology (Ayer, Beck, Stone)? Is it something indubitable or something that requires proof (Kant)? Could it be that Descartes ultimately doubts he exists (Sievert)?

Not being interested in the philosophical discussion, I will simply suggest that Descartes' idea became famous because it summarized three ideas that are present throughout modern European philosophy, from Spinoza to Leibniz, from Kant to Hegel, and in such a way that they became the common sense of Western modernity (as it sees itself and evaluates other modernities). The three ideas are the primacy of reason, individual autonomy, and the doubt inscribed in the incessant search for truth.

The primacy of reason is the foundation of modern rationalism, the reverse of mistrust of the senses that often lead us to illusions, as in dreams (Descartes). Individual autonomy is the mark of the incommensurability of human beings in relation to all other entities, since only human beings are thinking entities (res cogitans) in contrast to nature, which is an inert extension (res extensa). Nature, if it exists, does not know that it exists. Only human beings know that it exists or have the idea that it exists.

Doubt is the foundation of human creativity, the ability to question everything that appears to us as true through the senses. We cannot trust what has deceived us at some point. Descartes is not a skeptic, but he uses the skeptical method to combat it. Herein lies the search for certainty in the modern era and the concept of rigor that dominates modern science: it is not about truth, but about the relentless pursuit of truth.

Criticism from the epistemologies of the South

These three ideas constitute the pillars on which Western modernity was founded. Criticism of these three ideas has been widely exercised, both within the Western intellectual world and in the non-Western intellectual world. From the epistemologies of the South, as I have been formulating them, Eurocentric rationalism alone cannot justify the need to fight against modern capitalist, colonialist, and patriarchal domination. The decision to fight against domination is as much an exercise of reason as it is an exercise of will. It is as much a mental exercise as it is an emotional exercise. It is a combination of reasons, emotions, affections, and feelings, which Orlando Fals Borda called sentirpensar (feeling-thinking) and I call warm reason. This is not a call for irrationalism, but rather a proposal for a broader concept of rationalism, one that goes beyond Descartes' dualism of res cogitantes/res extensa, as proposed by Spinoza with his concept of nature naturing (natura naturans).

Individual autonomy is precious, but it cannot be conceived in an individualistic way. Individualism was fundamental in promoting the triumph of the bourgeoisie through political liberalism and the primacy of individual property. This is a Eurocentric exceptionalism that runs counter to the multiple philosophical traditions of the world that conceive of the human being as a being-with, an existential project that is constituted and developed in cooperation with other human and non-human beings. It is not a question of dissolving the individual into amorphous collectivisms (the masses). Rather, it is a question of recognizing that the constituent power of new realities, and above all of struggles against domination, is always a collective project, where individual contributions only acquire their power when aggregated with other contributions, composing totalities that transcend the sum of their parts.

Finally, methodical doubt is perhaps the most complex Cartesian contribution. Descartes does not doubt for the sake of doubting, as would be the case with skeptics. He doubts to attain certainties, which he calls clear and distinct ideas. In the First Meditation, Descartes states that, like an architect, the philosopher must dig into the ground until he reaches the solid rock on which to lay the foundations of his thought. The shifting sands of opinion are thus discarded through the exercise of doubt. The architect analogy shows the fundamental Cartesian limitation, his Eurocentric monoculturalism.

After all, the sand may be full of gold nuggets, and other cultures build houses on sand or houses in trees, not to mention floating houses on rivers and lakes. There are no clear and distinct ideas; there are processes of clarification and distinction. There is, or should be, a conversation among humanity about the different conceptions of clear and distinct ideas with a view to identifying the ecologies among them with the greatest intercultural potential for liberation from domination, injustice, exclusion, and discrimination.

Denial in the age of non-learning

Criticism based on the epistemologies of the South aims to provincialize Descartes, recognize his contribution situated in time and space, and put him in dialogue with other equally situated contributions that together constitute the epistemic diversity of the world. It recognizes the importance of the issues raised by Descartes while pointing out the limitations of the cultural universe in which he moves—Eurocentric modernity—and the historical purpose that gives it notoriety: the nascent bourgeois revolution founded on a supposed rationalist and individualist universality that serves its interests of global expansion with the consolidation of colonialist capitalism. The aim is to broaden and diversify what it means to think, the identity of those who think, and the meaning or purpose of existing and re-existing in order to imagine a future that survives the human and non-human destruction caused by the bourgeois revolution, now degenerated into a bourgeois counter-revolution.

Instead of this counter-hegemonic purpose, we are living in a period in which Descartes' ascendant thinking is being deconstructed, supposedly in the name of its maximum realization. The three central ideas underlying Cartesian thinking, instead of being used counter-hegemonically, are being denied in the form of their trivialization. This denial-trivialization takes three main forms.

Feeling over knowledge

By eliminating the idea of credible alternatives to the status quo, neoliberal capitalist society separates collective causes from individual consequences to such an extent that social suffering is always experienced as individual suffering and never as collective suffering. There are sick people, but society itself is not sick; there are poor people, but society is not poor; there are ignorant people, but society is not ignorant; there are criminals, but society is not criminal. When collective causes are absent, it is easy to transform the different consequences experienced by different individuals into causes of individual suffering. One does not suffer with; one suffers against. What is close is always more evident than what is far away, except in the case of religious experience. But this, subject to the same neoliberal logic, eliminates collective causes in this world once and for all in order to function as an elixir against individual suffering.

Individual suffering cannot be attributed to any rationally identifiable cause that transcends inter-individual situations, be they family or workplace disputes, rivalries, hatred, envy, intrigue, or spells. The question—why me?—has no other possible answer than that which can be given to another question: why not him or her? This is where the punitive nature of our time comes from. As Luis Buñuel wrote, envy is the only deadly sin that inevitably leads to wishing for the death of another person whose happiness makes us unhappy. In extreme cases, being a murderer (causing physical or civil death) may be the only alternative to suicide.

Individual suffering without collective suffering transforms individuals into subjectivities without shelter. The search for shelter, so often desperate, tends to find refuge in the nearest comfort zone, the community of individuals who suffer in a similar way, who attribute similar causes to their suffering, or who seek to alleviate it in an identical way. In a society where the idea of unjust collective suffering has disappeared, only negative solidarity is possible: not being alone in individual suffering. Comfort comes from the common sense of this negative community. As common sense is knowledge taken for granted, comfort comes from the feeling of being right simply because one is not alone. Why think if it has already been thought? Conformity with what has already been thought is not a manifestation of passivity; it is a militant act against loneliness. Social networks are the viaducts of the information age. Those who pass through them are the same ones who take shelter under them.

Subjectivity enslaved by false autonomy

Neoliberalism is today an existential philosophy with the following main characteristics: contemporary societies exist in a state of permanent crisis due to the complexity and fragmentation of the centers of power that control them, with the state being only one of these centers and not even the most important one; the suffering of individuals corresponds to the normal way of life of societies living in permanent crisis; the replacement of the concept of social responsibility with the concept of guilt means that damaged individual life is the result of a damaging individual lifestyle; the body is the only property that the individual is free to manage in their own way; the body can be commodified, used in the most profitable way, or obsessively kept inviolable; the use and exchange value of the body can be maximized by the fitness or cosmetics industry; individuals are conceived as autonomous beings so that they can function as fragments of an anonymous crowd that sometimes converges to work, sometimes to celebrate, and sometimes to lynch or destroy.

For neoliberalism, the only freedom that counts is economic freedom, and the success of individuals in neoliberal society is measured by how well they absorb this principle. The other side of individual suffering is the individual enjoyment of autonomy and the permanent uncertainty of precariousness. Neoliberal autonomy is autonomy without the conditions to be autonomous, that is, without being able to decide what autonomy consists of and for what purposes. It is not being able to take risks because you have no insurance against any of them. The “collaborators” of home food delivery companies are autonomous, but none of them own a restaurant, and if they don't deliver food, they starve, as does their family. The need to be autonomous is the new slavery as long as wage labor is the dominant way of earning one's daily bread.

Mechanical collapse of doubt

Methodical doubt and the rigorous search for truth require a slow temporality that allows for the constant questioning of acquired knowledge, the identification of what is not easily observable, the confrontation between different positions, and the cross-checking of information. Above all, they require a constant exercise of questioning the subject of knowledge in the very process of knowing. To use German terminology, “Erkenntnis nach innen” must proceed in parallel with “Erkenntnis nach aussen”; introspection and self-reflexivity must go hand in hand with empirical observation of the outside world, the experience of objects. Furthermore, thinking includes unthinking. Over the last hundred years, critical thinking has been a powerful tool for unlearning acquired thinking in order to be able to think differently.

Today we are entering an era in which unthinking thinking has given way to dispensing with thinking. An era uninterested in deep and collective causes, restricted to easily observable consequences, and fueled by the compulsion to convert everything that exists into merchandise and a source of profit demands a fast temporality and intellectual and emotional fast food. An ideally instantaneous temporality that allows us to know before knowing and feel before feeling, so that everything is available and ready-made for docile consumers. Thinking, in this case, is a waste of time. Questioning, verifying the truth, and proposing alternatives outside the small circle of authorized ideas means, at best, stalling and throwing a spanner in the works and, at worst, betraying, being on the wrong side of history, and being silenced.

To paraphrase Ortega y Gasset, beliefs are quick and do not admit doubt, while ideas are slow and admit doubt. If throughout the 20th century thinking was dispensed with both by beliefs and by preconceived ideas, today's prêt-à-penser has reached an unprecedented level: artificial intelligence.

Doubt, whether analytical, dialectical, or rhetorical, has been eliminated by the mechanical certainty of artificial intelligence. The pragmatic rationality of Western modernity, based on the adequacy between means and ends and averse to ethics, has reached the asymptotic paroxysm of self-extinction. The New Man, so desired by communists and fascists alike, and the Übermensch, dreamed of by Nietzsche, finally emerge in the form of a New Machine: the intelligent machine governed by algorithms that, based on them, learns deeply. Generative artificial intelligence. Homo sapiens gives way to homo artificialis. Etymologically, artificialis comes from Latin and means made by humans and not obtained from nature. In the age of artificial intelligence, homo artificialis is not the human being who makes, but the human being who is made.

I will not discuss here the merits or dangers of AI. I am only interested in analyzing the consequences of the vast outsourcing of doubt and learning that is currently underway. For a time, this transfer means the emergence of new modes of producing certainty and the unlearning of skills that have become redundant, which is not new (it has been around since the first industrial revolution). What is new is the possibility of the concept and experience of doubt disappearing. A new ignorance, in Nicolaus Cusa's terms, is emerging. What is new is the possibility that unlearning will gradually slide into non-learning or, at least, into the non-learning of everything that does not relate to intelligent machines and how to collaborate or cooperate with them. Skills in inter-human relations not mediated by AI will disappear. Orality will be the pathology of talking to oneself. The moment AI fails, humanity falls into the abyss like an airplane on autopilot that suddenly freezes.

The mechanical collapse of doubt does not eliminate doubt. It only relegates it to the unconscious, and it is young people who suffer most from this. They experience with particular intensity the contradiction between the unlimited expectations that the society of mechanical and superhuman certainty creates for them and the immense frustration they feel in the face of the limitations of their fragile and uncertain humanity. Their authoritarianism in outward behavior is their way of dealing with the inner demons of uncertainty and fragility that society does not allow them to express. They are lost and only find themselves in their digital community, which, in an ever-changing way, sometimes glorifies idols and sometimes radically demonizes those it chooses as enemies. Adulation and hatred hide an underlying indifference that torments them. Psychologists struggle to change them, but not to change society.

The great disarmament

In a world dominated by the incessant data digging demanded by algorithms and in which the hermeneutics of suspicion no longer exist, new forms of docility emerge, and with them new disarmaments.

Docility in the face of lies

Fake news spreads because sentiment prevails over knowledge, belief over ideas. The comfort of not being alone in a belief has become vastly superior to the discomfort of being alone in the search for truth. Let's take a concrete example. The global script of the far right is centered on instigating two feelings—fear and hatred—which are triggered by three central themes: security, corruption, and immigration. All of these are consequences of neoliberal governance. They are the preferred ways of concealing the causes, the great sociology of absences of our time. This concealment requires a major investment in lies and media complicity. Three examples:

  1. Portugal is one of the European countries with a very low crime rate. But if political propaganda proclaims insecurity as the main problem facing the Portuguese, citizens feel overnight that they lack what they have in relative abundance (physical security) in order to “forget” what they really lack (decent public health and education systems, robust social security).

  2. No European citizen sees the “terrible threat” that Russia poses to Europe. The war between Russia and Ukraine is a problem with a very long history that both countries must resolve. And it was not resolved in April 2022 only because the US and its British lackeys opposed it. But suddenly, Europe is on the brink of “a major war.” So says Mark Rutte, NATO Secretary General, a miserable disaster maker in the service of those who profit from disasters.

  3. Citizens continue to distinguish between work time and free time. Tourism had already alerted them to the possibility of the latter becoming insidious work time in the service of travel agents and tour guides. But they have not yet realized that watching television or distracting themselves with their computers is as productive for the capital of the Big Techs as manufacturing a television or a computer. The algorithm is the relentless god of the transformation of all life into data and data into profit. Even when we sleep, we produce data, not to mention that sleep is increasingly a source of profit.

Docility in the face of tyranny

As an existential mode, not thinking means total disarmament in the face of the most gross aggressions against human life and dignity. Such aggressions become the faithful mirror of those who feel validated in their inner transformation, sometimes instantaneous (through metamorphosis, revelation, enlightenment, or psychological intervention), from victim-assaulted to aggressor-avenger. Society runs the risk of becoming an immense mass of micro-dictators, each with their own micro-mass of followers on social media, whom they manipulate at will in the autoerotic solitude of their bedrooms.

Fascism will be an empty signifier if human beings see political fascism as a faithful mirror of their inner, intellectual, emotional, and relational fascism. The slow time of receptivity, socialization, and restoration gives way to the fast time of obliteration and punitivism. With democratic systems devitalized, the climate of punitive/repressive impatience permeates all social domains. This is the contemporary neoliberal version of Hobbes's homo lupus homini (man is a wolf to man).

Furthermore, when there is no real alternative, those who govern badly always count on the complicity of those who feel badly governed.

Conclusion

In the age of non-learning, not knowing is not the question. The question is feeling that you know everything about everything because you know who to turn to in order to know. Thinking was necessary as long as thought was not industrialized and freely available. Thought is distributed free of charge so that non-thinking makes everything else possible: suffering as fate and enjoying as an unpredictable and meaningless interruption; living in servitude, thinking oneself autonomous because one does not know the true masters; consuming or compulsively desiring to consume; destroying non-human life on the planet, without thinking that human life is part of it.

Under these conditions, thinking has ceased to be the certainty of existence and has become the certainty of resistance. The problem is that in a society of non-learning, those who resist easily give up if resistance is only a way of thinking. The current of the crowd is always more powerful than the current of solitude. To resist effectively, it is not enough to think. A new way of being and feeling is needed, one that allows us to share the struggle against a society that gives intelligence to machines in order to take it away from human beings. It is no longer enough to resist. We must re-exist.