could most truly become, knowing who we most truly are? We must get to
the very bottom of things before such questions can be truly answered.
Doubt, Past Mere Nihilism
Three hundred years before Nietzsche, the great French philosopher René
Descartes set out on an intellectual mission to take his doubt seriously, to
break things apart, to get to what was essential—to see if he could establish,
or discover, a single proposition impervious to his skepticism. He was
searching for the foundation stone on which proper Being could be
established. Descartes found it, as far as he was concerned, in the “I” who
thinks—the “I” who was aware—as expressed in his famous dictum, cogito
ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). But that “I” had been conceptualized long
before. Thousands of years ago, the aware “I” was the all-seeing eye of
Horus, the great Egyptian son-and-sun-god, who renewed the state by
attending to and then confronting its inevitable corruption. Before that, it was
the creator-God Marduk of the Mesopotamians, whose eyes encircled his
head and who spoke forth words of world-engendering magic. During the
Christian epoch, the “I” transformed into the Logos, the Word that speaks
order into Being at the beginning of time. It might be said that Descartes
merely secularized the Logos, turning it, more explicitly, into “that which is
aware and thinks.” That’s the modern self, simply put. But what exactly is
that self?
We can understand, to some degree, its horrors, if we wish to, but its
goodness remains more difficult to define. The self is the great actor of evil
who strode about the stage of Being as Nazi and Stalinist alike; who
produced Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, and the multiplicity of the Soviet
gulags. And all of that must be considered with dread seriousness. But what
is its opposite? What is the good that is the necessary counterpart of that evil;
that is made more corporeal and comprehensible by the very existence of that
evil? And here we can state with conviction and clarity that even the rational
intellect—that faculty so beloved of those who hold traditional wisdom in
contempt—is at minimum something closely and necessarily akin to the
archetypal dying and eternally resurrected god, the eternal savior of
humanity, the Logos itself. The philosopher of science Karl Popper, certainly
no mystic, regarded thinking itself as a logical extension of the Darwinian