I Think Therefore We Are

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From the beginning of the 20th century European humanism took the form of phenomenology, which can be seen as idealism’s modern way of resisting analytical philosophy and the accompanying tendency to lower a positive, determined, naturalistic, ceiling over the world, with technological society — according to this view — being one of the results. Among phenomenology’s accomplishments, as it struggles against what some of its proponents call the "thingification" of the world, can be counted a strong comeback staged by the Subject while avoiding the pitfall of relativism, as well as some open and useful philosophical debates between religious believers and non-believers, and, last but not least, the development of a critical and ethical outlook on the social sciences and their big questions.

Matthieu Villemot is a young and skilled phenomenologist who manages to write both clearly and deeply on difficult subjects. His aim in this book is to develop the notion of empathy and "inter-subjectivity" as an important form of solidarity and answer to the question: how should we act in the world? Suspecting that the beginning of the answer lies in the beginning-again which is the heart of the phenomenological method, Villemot chooses to accompany two philosophers as they go back to Descartes and start over: Husserl, considered the founder of phenomenology, and Michel Henry, probably the most outwardly confessional (Christian) of phenomenologists. Husserl first made the pilgrimage back to Descartes’ famous cogito starting point in an attempt to re-found philosophy and by extension science on irrefutably solid ground. In his keenly-felt mission to link the conscious subject to the objective fact in some satisfactory way, he discovered to his dismay that retracing cartesian doubt back to that luminous point of consciousness was in fact an act to be repeated continually, each time achieving results a bit more precise. If not, the philosopher is condemned to repeat the cartesian fix-it solution: separating mind and body and making the cogito into a kind of mathematics-like first axiom. Amidst the ruins of his dream of once-for-all re-foundation of scientific knowing, Husserl comes to see the beginning point as the way itself, as the only way to avoid the naturalistic error.

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