‘Am I not at least something?’ A surreal dive into Descartes’s Meditations

In René Descartes’s landmark work Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), a narrator sets out to dispense with beliefs that can’t be accepted as true for certain. This disqualifies sensory experience, with all its faults, and eventually even the principles of mathematics, which an omnipotent evil being could conceivably manipulate him into believing. Then, contemplating what could possibly be certain, the narrator concludes he undeniably exists as ‘a thing which thinks’. This premise – later summed up as ‘cogito, ergo sum’, or ‘I think, therefore I am’ – is one of the most influential concepts in the history of ideas and, in its forced distinction between mind and body, lies at the foundation of contemporary philosophy of mind. This experimental video essay from Epoché Magazine pairs text excerpted from the book’s Second Meditation, in which the narrator arrives at this initial kernel of absolute truth, with a haunting score and vintage visuals that cleverly draw on themes of selfhood and the uncertainties of sensory experience.