dark room of the mind, likened to judicial chambers, where the under-
standing of manfinds images lying around.
Similarly, Descartes compares a dissected eye to a room with a camera
obscura. Crary comments:
By this radical disjunction of eye from observer and its installation in this formal
apparatus of objective representation, the dead, perhaps even bovine eye under-
goes a kind of apotheosis and rises to an incorporeal status. If at the core of
Descartes’s method was the need to escape the uncertainties of mere human vision
and the confusions of the senses, the camera obscura is congruent with his quest to
found human knowledge on a purely objective view of the world.^49
Crary interprets this as Descartes’model for the mind, expressed in
his second meditation:
I will now close my eyes, I will stop my ears, I will turn away my senses from their
objects, I will even efface from my consciousness all the images of corporeal things;
or at least, because this can hardly be accomplished, I will consider them as empty
and false; and thus, by holding converse only with myself, and closely examining
my nature, I will endeavor to obtain by degrees a more intimate and familiar
knowledge of myself.^50
If Descartes’mind is a room, it lacks the aperture essential for a camera.
Unlike the mind envisioned by Locke, Descartes excludes images or any
residual sensory impressions. His reason is singularly a-sensory. Indeed,
his emphasis on mathematics as the foundation of reality over that of the
senses is underscored by his metaphor for binocular vision as a blind man
divining the world with two canes. Such internalized thought informs
Hegel’s suggestion that“Thinking takes thinking for its point of departure
as something certain in itself; it does not depart from something external,
or from something given, or from some authority, but simply from this
freedom, which lies in the‘I think.’”^51
Central to Descartes’ concept of thought is the preference to look
inward, not outward. Paul Ricoeur considered Cartesian thought through
a peculiarly perspectival description, as“contemporaneous with a vision of
the world in which the whole of objectivity is spread out like a spectacle on
which thecogitocasts its sovereign gaze.”^52 Yet the only infinity Descartes
surveys lies inside, not outside, and it leads him to proof of the existence of
God, not to a world surveyed by Man. He envisioned a purely mathema-
tical reality contrasting sensory deception. Ricoeur’s statement is not(^49) Crary, 1996 : 48. (^50) Descartes, 1912 : 95. (^51) Harries, 1974 : 685.
(^52) Crary, 1996 :48n. 52.
322 Perspectives on Perspective