I mentioned this a couple of entries back. It's a thing I've been thinking about for a long time; explicitly just since – oh, the mid-90's, when it first occurred to me that the C.E. was dying.
Look, you really deserve to know: I think a lot. It's actually hard to stop. I can't remember the last time I was able to. In my earlier years I was quite proud of this, and took it as a clue that I should study philosophy. I was wrong about that; but by the time that became clear I had already read, and absorbed, and thought about, several millenia of Western Philosophy.
Anyway, about the C.E.: it changed everything when it came on the scene, and its collapse is changing things again. Something is coming down the pike to replace it. I don't know what.
We humans are extraordinarily mutable creatures. Far more so than any other species of creature. What with our diverse cultures, and languages, and myths, and religions, and souls, it would be surprising if any two randomly chosen members of the human race, put in a room alone, could communicate at all. And I think we're the only species on earth of whom that is true.
The mutability in fact lies in the cultural things: the learned things, and not the genetic things. Whatever one's genetic makeup, it remains what it is from birth to death. I'm not entering here into any discussion of the so-called “nature/nurture” issues. I'm only saying that whatever components of our individual makeup are – or turn out to be – attributable to genetic factors, must remain constant throughout our lives.
But whatever is attributable to our learning – that is mutable. One may be born into a caucasian, Dutch-speaking family of circus acrobats, and be transformed – or transform oneself – into an aboriginal Australian shaman; or, born into the latter culture, transform into a Moscow taxi driver. The list, clearly, is not easy to bring to an end.
When new ideas come along they may really change us.
Back in the 17th century, Rene's idea really did change people. Maybe a little, maybe a lot, depending on just how one understood it: that is, how one absorbed it into the ecology of one's own language, one's own intellect, one's own soul.
Rene redefined “soul”. His definition was, effectively, exactly the opposite of what people had previously understood by that idea.
From at least the beginning of the Christian Era, a rough, common notion of “soul” might be expressed as “Every person is a soul, and that's what we all have in common, and that's what binds us all together.” But Descartes' redefinition made “soul”, instead, the one thing about each one of us that isolates us from each other. The famous expression “cogito ergo sum” equates soul with self-awareness, or self-consciousness. That is not how preceding millenia had understood the matter at all.
Look, for example, at the extreme contrast between Socrates, for whom truth was achieved in dialogue between souls, and Descartes, for whom truth was achieved in total isolation from other souls.
This is a very great difference. With his redefinition of “soul” Descartes could deny that animals experienced anything at all. I have no language fit to characterize the atrocities that have been enabled by that denial in the past four centuries.
What I am calling “The Cartesian Ego” is a cultural artifact. It is a way of constructing oneself, a psychological structure, and a way of seeing and interpreting the world from within that structure.
And it is dying. Or rather, collapsing. Like the collapse of the Soviet Union, or of East Germany, over a decade ago; just as a government – or a governmental structure – can collapse, so can a personality structure.
4:13:13 PM 
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