Cogito, ergo sum
I think, therefore I am
René Descartes (1596-1650) moved to the United Dutch Provinces in 1628 at the age of 32 where he took up residence at the University of Leiden. It was the same school that Johan de Witt (1625-1672) attended before he and his brother — both heroic republicans — were cruelly assassinated in 1672 in a public square in La Hague by an angry mob of political royalists who supported William III (1650-1702), Prince of the Hapsburg House of Orange-Nassau. William III would later replace James II on the English throne, wage war against Louis XIV for nine long years (1688-1697) , and bankrupt the Prince’s native Dutch homeland in so doing. It was during this war in 1694 that the Bank of England would be instituted and statutory counterfeit would find its debut on the world stage.
At the time of Descartes’s arrival in Leiden Jean Calvin (1509-1564) had been dead for more than half a century, and the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) had been ravaging the European continent already for a full decade. John Locke (1632-1704) would not be born for another four years, and one year later in 1633 Galileo Galilee (1564-1642) would be found guilty of the crime of heresy in Rome for his scientific proof that the sun did NOT rotate around the earth. Galilee’s trial and subsequent life-long, house arrest in Arcetri, Italy (a hilltop town just south of Florence) sent a cold chill throughout the scientific community of Europe.
At the time the United Dutch Provinces were considered a Protestant bastion of political and intellectual freedom, and Amsterdam was the financial capitol of the world. By 1628 the Bank of Amsterdam had already been in operation for 19 years, and silver, the hard currency of the day, dominated all of Europe. The pinnacle of the Dutch Empire, the largest commercial empire that the world would ever know until it was eclipsed by the British colonial empire, was still a very distant dream for many.
Descartes’s departure from Paris and move to Leiden is not easily explained. For, Catholics, although tolerated, were not well-liked in the Dutch Provinces, and Descartes had been raised a Catholic at an outstanding Jesuit school in La Flèche, France. What is more, L’édit de Nantes (Edict of Nante, 1598, Henri IV) that temporarily put an end to the persecution of Protestants in France had already been in effect for three decades. Perhaps, Descartes feared the war, and like so many others, viewed the United Dutch Provinces as a beacon of the European Enlightenment and economic prosperity.
It was in his tract "Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la vérité dans les sciences" that Descartes’s statement “Je pense, donc je suis” first appeared in 1637.1 It would appear still again in 1641, but this time in Latin as “Cogito, ergo sum” in his work “Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, in qua Dei existentia et animæ immortalitas demonstratur”. Both works were written while Descartes was still resident in the Dutch Republic. In 1649 Descartes was invited by Queen Christina of Sweden to become her mentor. It is in Sweden where he died of natural causes one year later. Descartes’s remains can be found today at L’église de Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, France at the intersection of — note this — Les rues de Bonaparte et de Jacob (the streets of Bonaparte and Jacob) very distant from Descartes’s birthplace in La Haye en Touraine, a small town located south of Paris halfway between Tours and Poitiers.
I bring the matter of Descartes and “Cogito, ergo sum” to your attention, because it is, by far, the best starting point to begin a discussion of the concept of the free will and its fundamental role in the understanding of Western civilization and America’s philosophy of governance as it was originally conceived by John Locke in his anonymously published “Two Treatises of Government” in 1689, the same year that William III was crowned King of England with his English wife, Mary II.
Indeed, it is this notion of the free will and Western society that lies at the base of American jurisprudence and that distinguished it at the time from all other systems of governance of the day. It is the free will that is captured in the words,
We hold these truths to be self-evident that
all men are created equal
they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights
among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
to secure these rights governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter, or to abolish it, and to institute new government laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
Let us consider each of these tenets in terms of the free will of the individual and the social and juridical ethos that founded our once great, but now crumbling nation.
All men are created equal: Each of us is assigned a name at birth, and it is this name by which all that each says and does becomes known. It is this unique identity that distinguishes each from everyone else who shares the same notion of self. And, it is in this regard that we are all equal. Slaves and indentured servants were not considered free men at the time. They had involuntarily or voluntarily relinquished their rights when they became permanently enslaved or temporarily indentured, respectively.
Endowed with certain unalienable rights: I am, and you are you. And. because I am, because you are, and because we are all equal in this regard, we share certain rights which are
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: I am a thought incarnate in a body. Like you, I will one day perish, because this is the nature of each. So long as I remain in this body — whether I perish with it or not — I, like you, have a right to my person that is both my body and my mind, and what I say and do with it is up to me. I, like you, am free to pursue my own destiny, and only when my right to self and pursuit of my own destiny conflicts with your right to yourself and your pursuit of your destiny, must we come to terms — and this, through the institution of government when we are unable to negotiate peaceably between and among ourselves.
To secure these rights governments are instituted: Indeed, we acknowledge that, because
we all depend on the earth for our sustenance,
the land, to which we all have the right to acquire, own, develop, and exchange in our pursuit of happiness, is limited, and
we will invariably come into conflict over this limited resource on which we all depend for our life and liberty,
we institute government that derives “its just powers from the consent of” us, the people — those who depend on the land for their sustenance —, and that we further agree to defend against all others that we might preserve our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
We further acknowledge that all government tends toward tyranny, and that we reserve the right
To alter, or to abolish it, and to institute new government, when it “becomes destructive” to what we hold to be “self-evident”. And, should we have occasion to “institute new government”, it must be founded on the same principles and its authority must be organized in such a way that it will “effect our safety and happiness”.
Now, it was not a coincidence that our nation was founded in this manner. We were never an ancient tribe compelled to compete with its neighbors for its own survival and thereby grow into a powerful agricultural state with a highly sophisticated and influential priestly caste that worked hand-in-hand with tribal warriors to create a new social order capable of ruling over many disparate tribes.
Further, we were never conquered by one these large agricultural states that so arose. Rather, our nation was founded by European refugees — mostly English, but many Dutch, French, and even German — on land that we occupied in both cooperation and disputation with other inhabitants far less technologically advanced than we, and lacking the organizational prowess of the standing armies of those from whom we fled in search of freedom to practice our respective faiths on the one hand, and discover economic opportunity on the other hand, and all of this while still pledging allegiance to one of the aforementioned agrarian states that was once subject to Roman rule.
Further, we carried with us to this new land the ideas of the 16th century Reformation and the 17th and 18th century European Enlightenment and implemented these in ways that no nation bounded by the traditions of the aforementioned agricultural states could ever achieve. The French Revolution that followed in the wake of the reign of Louis XIV (the grandson of Henri IV) and his immediate successors, Louis XV and XVI, was just such a failed endeavor. Even the English civil wars that resulted in the short-lived “parliamentary rule” (1649-1659) headed by the “Lord Protector”, Oliver Cromwell, failed to achieve little more than a change of guard between two English kings — Charles the II and his decapitated father, Charles I — and a continuation of the same Habsburg dynasty of the House of Stuart (1566-1714).
Although the English, the Dutch, the French, and the Swiss attempted to throw off the yoke of dynastic rule, only the Swiss were able to establish an enduring republican form of government — and this, because of the geography of their land, their geographical location, and consequent ability to escape the interstate warring of the European continent. The Dutch Republic (United Dutch Provinces) eventually succumbed. Like the Swiss, America’s geography played then, as it does today, strongly in our favor.
Now, why would we ever want to abandon such a fine philosophical legacy? And, why are we seeking to abandon it now? It makes no sense, until you understand that there are always those among us who would live from the blood, sweat, and tears of everyone else and call themselves leaders. Included among these are the bankers, their most intimate corporate friends and government cronies whose only commitment to voluntary free markets is the cream that they surreptitiously, if not overtly, skim from the milk of free-market competition — in short the capitalists, and their political adversaries, the socialists. Yes, and there are the communists (or Marixists), who promise social paradise in exchange for obsequious political surrender and relentless social and political turmoil, if not outright dictatorship, death, and oppression.
Wake up, America. The Woke are braindead, the Capitalists would pull the wool over your eyes, and the cryptologists of electronic currency are geeks who believe they can see into the future without knowing the past. That we return to hard money, and do it now!
In liberty,
Roddy A. Stegemann, First Hill, Seattle 98104
Author of Mount Cambitas - The Story of Real Money and more recently “A Call to the Restoration of Monetary Order”.
In translation, the phrases “Cogito, ergo sum”, “Je pense, donc je suis”, and “I think, therefore I am” are synonymous. His work entitled, “Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la vérité dans les sciences”, translates as “Discourse on the method of rational thought and the pursuit of truth in the sciences”. This work was written in French for French-speaking lay people and academicians. His subsequent work entitled, “Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, in qua Dei existentia et animæ immortalitas demonstratur” in which he argues for the existence of God and the immortality of the soul was written in Latin for a more academic audience with broad reach throughout all of Europe.