"Doubt" The Subversives' Defense

The Renaissance Subject “The Thinking I”

As maritime expedition fomented Europe’s literal horizons and the value of Renaissance canvasses emancipated man towards a newly discovered perspective of legitimation, humanist scholars assigned a heavier inclination towards the ‘here’ and the ‘now’ – the advent of existentialism. This marks the birth of a personal and individual ‘I’, sensible of a divinity withdrawing its transcendent existence from outside affairs. But inside the rational boundaries of logical economy in the development of individualism, the ecstasy nested on the expectation of gigantic possibilities was short-lived. Once the human subject has pledged into the task of personal judgment and perception, it successively doubted and questioned the principle of traditional authority, remanufacturing the loneliness heired from frustrated certainty. Yet again, finding the absurdity of relying on the outside world for self recognition, the renaissance subject directed the question towards its own perception thus, addressing doubts towards the evidences of the senses. However, paralleled with the manner that the medieval subject centered its perception confidently in God or a feudal overload, the renaissance subject clung to the autonomy of its own perceptions despite the possible intervention of illusions that might contaminate it. From a Lacanian perspective, this position of clinging to an autonomy of self-perspective in the presence of fading illusions cowarded an ‘unconscious’ aspect of being.

But however philosophic and religious skepticism set the human subject into a bounded journey; (bounded in the quest to question the church, the king and the divine right, nature, and its own memory or self perception) can it know anything? For sure?

An answer was given by a modern thinker by the name of René Descartes whom Lacan considers to be the father of modern sciences. It is via Descartes’ ‘cogito, ergo sum’ that Lacan places the relinquishment of ‘certainty’ forever

Resting certainty upon doubt, Descartes overwhelmingly introduced the subject to the outside world as indistinct from its own psychic functions. Thus, he has assigned the succeeding thinkers to the path of reifying the thinking subject, which in their final analysis, the only entity left for them to rely upon.

Doubt propelled human history – all great political figures doubted everything in their path. When the subject was empowered and placed in the center of the universe in the advent of the Copernican Revolution, the “Thinking I” became burdened with the responsibility to doubt.

Brutus’ Defense

In the course of human history, people who allegedly wronged their leaders like the people who blinded the wise man in the cave and the Senators, Consuls, Governors and Praetors who assassinated Julius Caesar merely doubted the existing reality that time. Albeit their actions were biblically unethical, they just signified the act of “Doubting” depending on the standards of the existing social controls. With these acts, they were called “Subversives”. Blamed for the derailed progress – but if you think about it, the “Subversives” were, and still are a necessary obstacle for the continuity of cyclical history. The power play on the 6^th floor is just history repeating itself. If we say that the rise and fall of an empire is propelled by its people – then the group who tried to doubt the existing policies on the 6^th floor was just doing its 900 year old responsibility.