Cogito caught between two fires

“— Tell me, Lucian… hey, Lucian… are you there?”

Lucian seems absent, lost in his thoughts.
“— You know, Félix, I have doubts…”
“— Good, Lucian… you doubt… therefore you are… You know the cogito, don’t you?”
“— Like everyone else, Félix, but where are you going with this?”
“— I’m getting there… For you, instinct comes before reason… and for me it is the opposite: I think, therefore I am. And for now, what interests me is this therefore. Contrary to what the word ‘therefore’ may suggest, the cogito is not a syllogistic reasoning, but an immediate intuition.
Here is Descartes’s gesture: I doubt. That is where I want to go. Didn’t you tell me earlier that you were doubting? Now, doubting is a form of thinking. Therefore the very moment we doubt, we cannot doubt that we think. And if we think, we cannot fail to exist.
Thus, thought immediately guarantees the existence of the thinking subject. Do you see now where I am going, Lucian?”
“— I don’t see… no.”
“— You were doubting… as I am doubting now… and as Igniatius doubts…”
“— What does he have to do with this?”
“— You told me he was doubting… or more precisely that he suspected something. He believes, at least according to what you told me, that you might be the author of the drawings he brings from the gallery—the same gallery where I myself found the drawing we analysed yesterday… and perhaps again today.”
“— I believe I already explained this to you, Félix… It was an attempt…”
“— Always instinct before reason! But the cogito is not a demonstration; it is an evidence grasped by the mind, an inner experience. The cogito inaugurates a new metaphysics in which the subject becomes the first foundation of certainty. It establishes a self-authentic truth that confirms itself. Even if deceived, dreaming, or manipulated, I must exist in order to be deceived.
And it seems to me, Lucian—if I may borrow Igniatius’s suspicion—that you are deceiving yourself. That is why I asked you to have him come, and why you stubbornly refuse. Every day, whether you want it or not, a page turns, Lucian. Look more closely at this image in which you claim to see Igniatius, and consider how it might actually be you who is recognizable there… Admit it: it is troubling.”

For Descartes, the essence of the human being is not the body but thought (res cogitans).
The subject is above all a mental reality: feeling, sensing, imagining, understanding, willing… and even, I would add, seeing—
all of this belongs to thought. Everything emanates from this first fixed point.

Félix pauses, breathes deeply, and continues:
“— An idea occurred to me, Lucian. Could it be that you intended—generously—to help Igniatius by producing these drawings, hoping that he would ‘come upon them’ at the gallery which, I found out, is located in the same building where you live… on the ground floor?
If I am to believe this image, which you claim I believe is yours—just as Igniatius does—then you would indeed be caught between two fires… as the image itself suggests…”