The modern idea of subjectivity as awareness or self-consciousness originates with Descartes. The ancient Aristotelian school thought of humans as rational beings, but had very little to say about the way in which the subject relates to the contents of his own mind. For the Cartesian tradition-- which English philosopher Gilbert Ryle calls "the official doctrine"-- the human mind is always aware of its inner representations and it infers the existence of a thinking subject from such awareness. Subjective identity is then, a direct result of the mind's capacity to be constantly aware of its own representations. Subjectivity is essentially self-awareness.

In effect, for the Cartesian and Pre-Freudian modernity, there are no subconscious representations or forces. Men and women know they are thinking substances, and their mental contents are always transparent to them. Furthermore, each particular representation is an indicator of the existence of the subject as someone in particular or an "I" which is also a thinking being. The sphere of the subject or the "I" is, therefore, a realm of luminous self- representations. Gilbert Ryle explains:

Descartes proposes the thesis of subjectivity as rational inner awareness in his book Metaphysical Meditations. This is a peculiar philosophical book since it is not a text for spiritual guidance, as a meditation is supposed to be, or a philosophical treatise in the form of a long essay which is more characteristic of the Aristotelian tradition.

The Metaphysical Meditations takes the form of a narrative of the various stages of the development of its author internal and intellectual life. Descartes’s Meditations can be read as a literary text, a work of fiction, which contains various of the themes that are common to the baroque period such as: change, uncertainty, the illusory nature of appearances, doubt, and madness.

The Metaphysical Meditations exhibits a "tendency which dominates the whole of all baroque art" which is an "attempt to arouse in the beholder the feeling of instability and infinity of all representations" (Hauser, 177). This is done by having its author-narrator doubt about the reality and substantiality of the surrounding world, as well as, putting into question the soundness and reliability of the workings of his own mind.

Another baroque element in Descartes' autobiography of the intellect is the use of allegory. Descartes creates the allegory of an evil demon, whose sole purpose consists in blurring the intellectual capacities of the writer. This writer is Descartes’s own intellect which tells the story of its journey from deception to certainty and eventually to the knowledge of a transcendent God.

In effect, as many of the baroque artists, Descartes uses allegories and allusions to symbolize transcendental realities, as well as and to invite the observer or reader "to reflect on the brevity of man's existence and the insubstantiality of all worldly things. (Martin, 134). Yet, the reader of the Meditations reflects on the certainty and substantiality of her own existence as a result of participating directly of the doubts, illusions and epistemological nightmares narrated by Descartes.

In sum, the Cartesian formulation of subjectivity as an inner scenario makes its first cultural appearance in Europe, in a philosophical work that is written in a literary fashion and through an imagery of distortion and illusion which is more characteristic of the baroque than of the classical and rationalist world view attributed to Descartes.

Furthermore, the strategy Descartes uses for knowing himself implies severing himself from the social and historical world both in a literary and a philosophical sense. Solitary introspection leads to metaphysical solipsism, and the introspective gesture takes the form of an autobiography of the spirit or meditation. The autobiographic dimension of the Meditations contributes to the success of Descartes' project to put forward a theory in which the "I" has ontological priority over the world.

Thus, the subject or self of the Meditations attains freedom from deception by the successful manipulation of illusion performed by the author who is also the sole character of the Meditations. The author-character creates a text that is baroque in style, pushes it to exaggerated extreme and, ends up subverting it. The baroque upside down is Cartesian classicism.

The Metaphysical Meditations is a baroque autobiography of the intellect that is to say, a fictional text, which produces non- fiction in the fashion of metaphysical certainty. Descartes Baroque fiction --which contains uncertainty, doubt, illusion, and even total deception--when applied to the "I" becomes rational certainty. The " I doubt everything" becomes he "I undoubtfully and certainly exist".

The baroque period is obsessed with change, transience, and mutability. The new discoveries in the physical and astronomical sciences of Galileo and Copernicus dislocate the position of men in the universe making reality seem unstable and fluid.

The new representations of the physical world require serious debates about the nature of knowledge. Thus, the writers and artists of the seventeenth century need to rethink the nature of knowledge since "there is no such a thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because life itself is but motion. (Martin, 197)

The ancient model of knowledge was essentially reproductional or mimetic. According to the Aristotelian epistemology knowledge originates in perception and the human mind reflects the world like a mirror. Since mind is a mirror of the world, or there is symmetry between concepts and things, truth can be defined as the adequation of concepts and things

The breakdown of the ancient- Aristotelian epistemological model begins with Galileo who proposes that some of the qualities observed and attributed to objects are really subjective. Galileo locates qualities such as colors, odors, shapes in the subject claiming that "tastes odors, colors and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned, and they reside only in consciousness" ( Galileo, 274). He adds that, "if the living creatures were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated"( Galileo, 274). The human mind takes part in the constitution of the object and the substantiality and permanence of the material begins to crumble.

The uniformity of religious beliefs also begins to fall apart. Luther and Calvin put into question the authority of the Church by proposing inner persuasion or conviction as the foundation of the understanding of The Bible. Theological truths are not known through external sources legitimated by the Catholic Church since the Holy Ghost inscribes truths in the heart of men that guarantee a correct and pious reading of the Holy Scripture. The universal and divine truth embodied by the Church turn into diverse and even conflictive interpretations as individuals see themselves with the freedom and the authority to know their God directly.

Another factor, which leads to the proliferation of truths in the seventeenth century, is the encounter with the cultures of the Americas. These cultures are taken as alternative ways of looking at things, and their discovery contributes to the development of relativist theories of knowledge. Thus, seventeenth century epistemology embraces the idea that the position of the individual or his perspective, as a valid approach to knowledge. Susan Bordo (1987) states that " joined with a rising interest in spatial perspective, the discovery of undreamed lands and cultures raised the possibility that point of view. is the guardian force behind belief" (40). The epistemological crisis of the seventeenth century could be taken back a century earlier to the works of Montaigne who is both a skeptic and a relativist. Montaigne’s awareness of the diversity of human opinions triggered by the discoveries of the Americas, and the advance in the sciences, leads him to believe that no sect or group has a privileged access to truth. For Montaigne "religion and morality were as much the product of custom as style of dress or habits of eating"(Burns, 384). As for scientific truths, Montaigne argues that the conclusions of reasons are sometimes fallacious, and that the senses often deceive the common observer as well as the educated inquirer. Thus, "the sooner men come to realize that there is no certainty the better chance they have to escape the tyranny which follows from superstition and bigotry" ( Burns, 384). The road to salvation is, therefore, sustained doubt

The religious conflicts of the seventeenth-century seem to lead Europeans to wonder whether Montaigne skeptical, yet flexible, attitude in relation to knowledge, is the most sensible and safest way to proceed, both theoretically and practically. According to Stephen Toulmin, (1992) the assassination of Henry iv of France, (just as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963), is immediately seen as a historical turning point which puts into question the flexible attitude towards religious affairs assumed by Montaigne. Therefore, if "skepticism lets one down, certainty was more urgent" (55).

Moreover Toulmin believes that the theological authorities of Europe finally reject the tolerance and readiness to live with uncertainty that characterized the humanism of the Renaissance period, arguing that such attitudes have not contributed to the solutions of religious conflicts but actually helped, to worsen the tensions. Religious authorities reason that "it might not be obvious what one is supposed to be certain about, but uncertainty has become unacceptable (Toulmin, 55).

Descartes is strongly influenced by this epistemological and religious uneasiness of the seventeenth century and the Metaphysical Meditations is a text which takes this cognitive anxiety to a philosophical and literary extreme. The anxiety produced by doubt turns into complacency as the subject discovers the "phosphorescent" and certain nature of his subjectivity.

The Meditations falls outside the borders of traditional philosophy as this text uses fiction, to break with the baroque paradigm of uncertainty and illusion and puts forward a classical- rational model of subjectivity. Moreover, the baroque autobiographical and literary model allows Descartes to rebuild his psychological identity, while concomitantly serves his critical pursuit. Eventually, all fiction surrenders to philosophical inquiry as the subject discovers himself as a thinking substance or fixed identity whose existence is beyond epistemological doubt as well as literary illusion.

The new identity which Descartes reaches through the use of a literary genre is neither a man nor a deity, but rather is a conflation of both. The transcendental "I"" and the psychological ego are displaced by the axiomatic in a simple act of intuition. The, "I am I exist" is the intuition that cancels the universe of uncertainty deception and fiction. And it is certitude rather than truth what Descartes is looking for. The hyperbolic doubt is thus, the access to the certainty of subjectivity and subjectivity the only shield against doubt.

In effect, Descartes converts his "I" or self in fiction in order to demonstrate the non-fictional character of that very same self. Unlike the author of novels, who gives order to fiction, the author of the Meditations makes his own internal deliberations into narrative. Therefore, Descartes is both the author and the protagonist of the Meditations. Moreover, the character is, within the fiction of the meditation, the author of a new world order in which the self is the agency or demiurge which orders a world which is outside fiction, that is to say, a real order.

The author-character of the Meditations introduces himself by warning the reader that he is writing at a crucial state of his life. He has reached enough maturity to assume responsibility for the inquiry in which he embarks. This gives him credibility before the reader but, at the same time, it helps the reader to develop a temporal distance from the "I" of the author. The temporizing of the philosophical plot creates a distance between the author-character and the reader, while at the same time quietly attracts the reader’s attention into reproducing, through the act of reading, the various stages of the inquiry, thereby canceling the distance previously created. In other words, the subject of the Meditations is capable of playing the authorial, historical, narrative and metaphysical role. By posing the temporal coordinates, Descartes, draws in the reader into the text and she makes his metaphysical meditation her own.

The legitimate time for writing and meditating is the present in the solitude of a room. The author- character provides the adequate atmosphere for the meditative plot by also defining the spatial coordinates of the meditation: "So today, I have expressly rid my mind of all worries and arrange for myself a clear stretch of time. I am here quite alone, and at last I will devote myself sincerely and without reservation to the general demolition of my opinions. ( Descartes, 17).

The reader knows that the author-character is a responsible mature individual who wants to critically examine the beliefs he has acquired through culture, partial educators and social intercourse. She also knows that he is alone in a room devoted to an honest pursuit of truth. His personal credentials and intellectual virtues are quickly established and the reader feels sympathetic, yet alien, to the philosophical voyage of the author-character.

However, the reader begins to meditate along with the author- character and by the end of the second meditation, the distance created between the two totally blurs as she finds herself saying "I am, I exist." Therefore, Descartes uses rhetoric in order to attain his goal of leading the reader into the universe of certainty, that is to say, into metaphysics.

The first step of this conflation between the "I" of the author-character and the "I" of the reader is given through an investigation of the content of the consciousness of the author-character. He wants to "demolish" any idea which is not clear and distinct, but by doing so he manipulates the reader into questioning not only her beliefs but also the veracity of all her representations.

In effect, Descartes’ purpose is to examine the contents of his consciousness or his representations in order to separate false judgments or opinions from those which are "certain and indubitable". He claims that he does not have to reject all his opinions, but look for the common features that make some ideas obscure and confused. Therefore, it is necessary to go "straight into the basic principles" in which all former beliefs rested. An inspection into his own consciousness quickly reveals that most of the knowledge he has acquired up to know has come from the senses. It is therefore, necessary to be cautious since "is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once" (Descartes, 17).

Any naive reader will soon agree that most of her ideas are acquired from or through the senses and thus, has no trouble following Descartes' argument. Nevertheless, the reader begins to follows Descartes in very different way that she follows traditional Aristotelian philosophy. Aristotle's system requires a reader that carefully weighs the logic of the arguments, while Descartes’ baroque autobiography of the intellect forces the reader to engage in the meditation through the mimetic character of fiction and the slippery behavior of the pronoun "I".

It is important to note that Descartes is not saying that senses deceive us always. He claims that the senses could be both trustworthy and deceitful at different times, so that it is psychologically impossible to distinguish an instance of truth from an illusion. There might be valid logical criteria to distinguish a true from a false perception (general consensus, information about the neurovisual capabilities of the percipient etc...); yet, it is subjectively impossible to distinguish one reliable perceptive state from a delusion. In the same fashion, a madman takes his delusions for reality and no one can guarantee that the character-author, or the reader, is not mad. For all we know, we might be philosophical Quixotes in a quest for truth about a world which does not even exist. The world of objects presented by the senses might be a fancy and the quest for truth and a sad illusion of a sort of philosopher-knight.

With Descartes, the reader suspects her epistemological and psychological sanity. However, Descartes quickly abandons the idea of madness and states that the inquiry can safely proceed since "such people are insane and I would be thought equally mad if I took anything as a model of myself" (13).

A declaration of the insanity of the author-character would certainly imply a premature ending to the Meditations. Yet, it is not necessary to use as a model a sick psyche since the experience of dreams is functionally equivalent to a daily insertion into a realm of delusion. Like the madman, the dreamer wants to make a judgment about the world beyond his representations and she is not entitled to do so, since there is no material reality that corresponds partially, or totally, to what is represented.

For, Descartes, it is not subjectively possible to distinguish the content of a dream from the content of a clear perception in daylight. If I say to myself "I know I am not dreaming", this internal reassurance lacks psychological and logical strength, since I could well be dreaming that I am giving myself such reassurance. Therefore, Descartes concludes that "there are never any sure signs by means of which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep"(13).

Descartes points to the impossibility of distinguishing sleep from wakefulness by arguing that a familiar event in a domestic setting might be material for dreams. In order to prove his point, Descartes volunteers information about what he is doing at that particular moment. He says: "How often, asleep at night, am I convinced of such familiar events-that I am here in my dressing gown, sitting by the fire- when in fact I am lying undressed in bed"(13). This comment from Descartes domestic life causes the reader to face the author as someone who is obviously awake, and the act of reading, confirms the presence of the author of the text. At this juncture, author, character and reader briefly separate from each other. The text is there as the objective witness or material evidence that Descartes, the author has to be awake.

However, when the author dressed in his gown, and wondering whether he is asleep or awake jumps into the text, he also turns into a fictional character. A rupture is thus created in the very flow of the philosophical dilemma of finding criteria to distinguish sleep from wakefulness, and the reader finds herself facing Descartes qua author as well as character and philosophical subject.

The moment the author points to himself within the narrative, he finds himself in intersection of reality and fiction. It is at this very nexus of reality and fiction, reason and unreason that the awareness of that subject’s particular existence arises as the indubitable truth that is the foundation of Cartesian Metaphysics.

In effect, one of the main tenets of modern thought is, precisely, the introduction of individual subjectivity as a source of truth which replaces the relativism or skepticism which is typical of the baroque. Descartes takes this skepticism to the very realm of human subjectivity; directs all the force of the epistemological doubt to the very center of the human psyche and by doing so, he questions the very reliability of human intellectual and psychological capacities. Cartesian doubt contaminates the human psyche since "it is the mind's confidence in its own discriminative capacities that has been infested" (Bordo, 17).

Descartes' doubt continues in a literary crescendo, since the author wants to show that the very rational faculties of human beings could be threatened by a myriad of psychological states which obscure and obstruct the quest for knowledge. Thus, it is necessary to justify the soundness of the inquirer before justifying his inquiry.

The process of questioning the soundness of the inquirer takes the form of what Judowitz calls "the hyperbolic or baroque doubt"(139). This hyperbolic doubt is metaphysical, as well as epistemological, since it questions the grounding of the subject beliefs in the objective reality and casts doubt on reason and truth. The hyperbolic doubt implies the possibility of a total deception and it is introduced by the use of the rhetorical or allegorical figure of the evil genius.

The image of the evil deceiver is introduced as some sort of double of the Christian God. The evil deceiver symbolizes the idea that it might be theologically possible to be totally mistaken since it is not logically impossible for an omnipotent god to perform the epistemological joke of total deception on his creatures:

The idea that there is an "omnipotent God" should not be doubted since it has a "strong ground "in his mind. But, even this deeply rooted conviction is questioned and the mind seems now a confused scenario of uncertainty. In addition, if the Christian God, does not exist, He can be substituted by an omnipotent a deceiver, capable of plotting the author-character epistemological fall. There is nothing that can guarantee that such tricky god could not use all his power in leading a man or woman who is in a total state of solipsism to believe that there is a social and material world.

Descartes sees himself now alone with his thoughts, since there is no world of objects and people but merely a subject with his private thoughts. These thoughts are not even representations since there is nothing outside the subject to represent. The reader also wonders whether she is totally alone.

Descartes has put himself epistemologically and metaphysically in the very same location of the text literary setting which he designs at the beginning of the meditation, that is to say, alone, and devoted to the general demolition of his opinions. Such demolition has indeed taken place, and it turns into total devastation when bad will and evil nature are added to the figure of the omnipotent deceiver.

Theologically, the evilness of the deceiver liberates the Christian God of the responsibility of causing his creature's epistemological fall. Yet, the fall becomes profound and dangerous, since the objective validity of his representations is now a lie created by the " powerful and cunning" nature of the malicious demon. The evil genius is both ethically and epistemologically, committed to deception. Both author-character and reader, are intellectually deceived and existentially alone . Therefore, they are both extremely vulnerable. There is no world, no truth, just the evil god and the lonely, skeptical, thinking "I".

The allegory of the evil deceiver might be functionally akin to the baroque representations of Time the Destroyer which is usually represented as an old, pseudo-human or demon like figure, with wings, a scythe, and a serpent biting his tail. These attributes "denote the swiftness of his flight ,his destructive power and his quality of the eternal" (Martin, 202). Time is for the baroque artists-- as it was for the Stoics-- the great deceiver. His image, along with the image of death, points to the fugacity and insubstantiality of all things.

Both, Time the Destroyer, and the evil deceiver are fictitious creatures used to represent existential as well as epistemological deception. However, Descartes’ evil demon is fictional in there senses: as an element within the literary narrative of the Meditations, as an imaginary character created by the character-author and as philosophical construct that represents the possibility of living in a totally fictive or deceptive world. Yet, Descartes defends his use of his literary style by stating that the Meditations "does not differ from anything he has written "except of the method of explanation"(85) or style. He adds that he has "deliberately altered the style to appeal to a variety of minds"(85).

The evil deceiver is responsible for the epistemological nightmare of the author-character and the reader. The world is like a delusion of a dream but with a difference: I can dream that I am awakening from a dream, but, it is impossible to doubt or be deceived as regards to my own existence as the doubter or the deceived. Therefore, the evil deceiver cannot extend his trick to the very existence of the subject as a thinking of doubting being. Therefore, the author-character-reader can cast away the malicious demon by saying:"...let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think I am something"(17), or "I am, I exist". The author-character of the Meditations escapes from the fiction he has created. He certainly exists outside it as the author of the fictional structure, that is to say as thinking being. He convinces himself, within the fiction, that the world both inside and outside the fiction is an illusion, or a fiction in the epistemological, rather than in the literary sense. Yet, bizarrely the fictional narrator turns into the real narrator in the process of narrating. He takes the reader with him.

The evil deceiver turns out to be a double of Descartes himself, or at least, a double which can deceive him totally since he is not capable of deceiving himself completely. Along with dreams, madness and other forms of illusions, the figure of the evil deceiver is used by Descartes to formulate the modern idea of a fixed, rational and self-conscious identity. In other words, "the double and the hyperbole, which function for the baroque as figures both of truth and error, are now reinscribed into the Cartesian system as the ultimate proof of its special interpretation of truth as certitude" (Judowitz, 157). Hyperbolic doubt is therefore the figure for indubitability that is to say, and the Cartesian classical mathematical, and rational model of the world.

The evil deceiver becomes the great reveler of the certainty of the subject's indubitable existence. The creature whose essence was deception and the creation of an epistemological situation which is very similar to madness brings with him, ironically, epistemological and metaphysical certainty. In this sense also, the evil demon shares a similarity with the baroque representation of Time. Thus, Martin states that for the baroque artist time is also "the reveler" since "that same winged Time, whose scythe mows all men down has also "benign duty", which is to unmask falsehoods and bring truth to light." (210). Time deceives us, but it can also facilitate the arrival of truth. In sum, the evil deceiver represents the triumph of truth over doubt, of reality over fiction.

The intellectual autobiography written by Descartes is the ideal medium for the universalization of Descartes logocentric proposal, since the autobiographer can locate himself both as an author and character of the text, and by doing so, he also exchanges positions with the reader. Thus, the autobiographic moment is constituted by the mutual reflection of author and readers. This oscillation between author and reader occurs because the nature of the text contains the similarities and differences of both author and reader therefore providing for their " mutual reflexive substitution." When Descartes writes "I" he intends it as a signature and as a trope, but the trope beguile us into thinking that we have non-topological knowledge"

( Glilmore, 72).

The subject's affirmation of his own existence through his double position, both as subject capable of deceiving himself, and as object of the deceiver, emerges at the site where reason and unreason merge. The indetermination of the doubt brings forth complete determinacy and the baroque model of illusion when pushed to an extreme, through the use of rhetoric, introduces the pristine certainty of the "I am, I exist". The indubitable character of this intuition would serve as the model of classic rationalism. Derrida calls this stylistic artifice Descartes'' mad audacity. (audace folle):*

The metaphysical subject introduces itself through psychological and representational formulations, yet it does not belong to the sphere of representations. Descartes new meditative subject hides within its use of the first person its complicity with language, fiction and representations.

Descartes "mad audacity" includes the discovery of a metaphysical truth in the midst of a literary performance but such truth gains autonomy from the literary universe in which it is generated as philosophy separates from rhetoric. Fiction created truth and it can no longer contain it. Poesis and Logos reach their split and Western culture is still recovering from this schism.

Notes