Meditations on First Philosophy

Meditations on First Philosophy is a work by René Descartes (1641).

Core claims

• The Meditations is not a philosophical argument that happens to mention God; it is the intellectual aftermath of a mystical crisis, and Descartes’s method of radical doubt functions as a containment ritual for autonomous psychic contents he could not otherwise integrate.
• The cogito does not discover the self—it amputates the self, identifying the totality of psychic existence with the thinking function alone and thereby creating the modern unconscious as a structural inevitability.
• Descartes’s deployment of the malin génie (evil genius) hypothesis reveals, in depth-psychological terms, a direct encounter with the trickster archetype, which the Meditations labors to neutralize through rational theology rather than genuinely confront.

Related questions

• How does von Franz’s analysis of Descartes’s identification with the thinking function in “The Dream of Descartes” illuminate Hillman’s critique of ego-centered psychology in Re-Visioning Psychology, particularly his insistence that fantasy-images rather than rational cognition constitute the primary data of the psyche?
• In what ways does Tarnas’s account in Cosmos and Psyche of the Cartesian cogito as constellating the modern unconscious parallel Edinger’s treatment in The New God-Image of the epistemological progression from Descartes through Kant to Jung’s discovery of the archetype as a “thing in itself”?
• Von Franz argues that Descartes’s uncritical acceptance of the privatio boni prevented him from investigating acausal phenomena; how does this connect to Jung’s critique of the privatio boni in Aion and its implications for integrating the shadow in the individuation process?

See also

• Library page: /library/ancient-roots/descartes-meditations-philosophy/

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