The concept of “my nature” in Descartes Metaphysical Meditations’: regarding a practical-self in cartesianism

Abstract

What is the status of the concept of "my nature" in Descartes' Metaphysical Meditations? That is the inquiry of this article. In order to answer it, the present study is divided into two moments. In the first part of the work, I intend to investigate the concept of “my nature” as it appears specially in the first two meditations, namely, as the nature of the common sense; which needs to be overcome in order to give rise to a theory of knowledge accordingly to the natural light of reason. In the second part of the work, notably through the analysis of the sixth meditation, I try to elucidate that, despite its impertinence to a theory of knowledge, the notion of “my nature” is, conversely, the fundamental building bloc of a Cartesian practical philosophy. And this, however, entails some cost for Cartesian metaphysics in general. Surely, Descartes’ theory of knowledge is wholly based on a priori elements (i.e., necessity, universality and innatism); but his practical philosophy, in turn, and this is the point to be stressed, since founded on the mixture of reason and senses, must be constructed almost entirely in a contingent and experimental soil.