(…) O fato é que seria difícil encontrar nas Meditações a mínima referência a “sujeito” como subjectum, e que, em geral, a tese que colocaria o ego ou o “eu penso/eu sou” (ou o “eu sou uma coisa pensante”) como sujeito, quer no sentido de hypokeimenon, quer no sentido do futuro Subjekt (oposto a Gegenstandlichkeit), não aparece em parte alguma em Descartes. Ao evocar uma definição implícita, que aguarda a sua formulação, e portanto uma teleologia da história da filosofia (um retardo da consciência, ou melhor, da linguagem), Heidegger apenas torna a sua posição mais insustentável, quanto mais não seja porque a posição de Descartes é de fato incompatível com este conceito. Isto pode ser facilmente verificado examinando tanto o uso que Descartes faz do substantivo “sujeito”, como as razões fundamentais pelas quais ele não chama “sujeito” à substância pensante ou “coisa pensante”.
Both following Hegel and opposed to him, Heidegger proposes Descartes as the moment when the “sovereignty of the subject” is established (in philosophy), inaugurating the discourse of modernity. This supposes that man, or rather the ego, is determined and conceived of as subject (subjectum).
Doubtless, from one text to another, and sometimes even within the same “text” (I am primarily referring here to the Nietzsche of 1939–46), Heidegger nuances his formulation. At one moment he positively affirms that, in Descartes’s Meditations (which he cites in Latin), the ego as consciousness (which he explicates as cogito me cogitare) is posited, founded as the subjectum (that which in Greek is called the hypokeimenon). This also has the correlative effect of identifying, for all modern philosophy, the hypokeimenon and the foundation of being with the being of the subject of thought, the other of the object. At another moment he is content to point out that this identification is implicit in Descartes, and that we must wait for Leibniz to see it made explicit (“called by its own name”) and reflected as the identity of reality and representation, in its difference with the traditional conception of being.
The Myth of the “Cartesian Subject”
Is this nuance decisive? The fact is that it would be difficult to find the slightest reference to the “subject” as subjectum in the Meditations, and that in general the thesis that would posit the ego or the “I think/I am” (or the “I am a thinking thing”) as subject, either in the sense of hypokeimenon or in the sense of the future Subjekt (opposed to Gegenstandlichkeit), does not appear anywhere in Descartes. By evoking an implicit definition, one that awaits its formulation, and thus a teleology of the history of philosophy (a lag of consciousness, or rather of language), Heidegger only makes his position more untenable, if only because Descartes’s position is actually incompatible with this concept. This can easily be verified by examining both Descartes’s use of the noun “subject,” and the fundamental reasons why he does not name the thinking substance or “thinking thing” “subject.”