Deconstructing Reason: The Rational Dreams of René Descartes

With the 1641 publication of René Descartes’ Meditationes de Prima Philosophiae, in its inexorable movement toward the exclusion of dreams, modern philosophy reaches a moment in the ultimate paragraph of the sixth Meditation where at last it is able to sleep at night, unhindered by the disruptions of the dream, certain it has exceeded the bounds of the preceding philosophical epoch. Should we choose to take Descartes at his word, modernity has arrived on the scene of philosophy in the guise of an awakening of philosophy’s reason from a long slumber of uncertain dreams. If any event in the history of modern philosophy should continue to concern us today, as philosophy rewrites its relation to modernity under the influence of postmodernism, it is the moment in the Meditations on First Philosophy when Cartesian reason, in order to become Cartesian reason, both encounters and overcomes the dream, the moment when modern philosophy awakens. Here, we are witness to the singular event of philosophy’s attempt to awaken itself as reason. At philosophy’s inception within and as the discourse of modernity, it has finally succeeded in excluding the dream from the reasonable discourse of philosophy, thereafter confining the metaphysical and epistemological problems of philosophy to the enclosed terrain of Reason. As if awaking from a dream, philosophy enters the modern age . . . .