Poe and the Cogito

With his famous theorem, Cogito, ergo sum, René Descartes initiated a modern conception of individual consciousness that signaled the divorcing of mind from a physical world that was now comprehended only by way of a method of doubt. In its dualistic conception of existence, Descartes’ theory split the individual mind from the world of nature and society, resulting in a growing sense of uncertainty and isolation. In the decades following Descartes’ death in 1650, European and American philosophers attempted to come to terms with the difficulties posed by his famous theorem and with the reliance on rational analysis that it implied. Among these philosophers, Pascal, Spinoza, Rousseau, Franklin, and Jefferson arrived at differing conclusions, but whether they experienced the Cogito as liberating or enslaving, each was profoundly affected by the challenge to conventional truths that it entailed.

Edgar Allan Poe’s philosophical leanings, while hardly systematic and shifting throughout his career, reflect a context of epistemological doubt of the sort that Descartes set as the starting point of his inquiry. Poe followed Descartes in pursuing a basis of certainty in the face of this condition of doubt, and he sought that certainty in the same place: in the clarity and conviction of the human mind. Yet the problem for Poe is that this approach failed to provide the conclusive proof of existence and order of the sort that Descartes claimed by way of ontological proof. The further Poe delved into the contradictions of the human mind, the more evidence he found not of a transcendent force of unity and arrangement, as suggested by the existence of human reason itself, but of selfishness, disorder, and criminality.

Nonetheless, Poe, who lived two centuries after the French philosopher, spent a great deal of his efforts working out the implications of Descartes’ Cogito. In his stories of the unbridled and isolated ego, Poe presses Descartes’ point to its logical end: that is, the annihilation that follows the proposition that the non-communicative, self-sufficient ego may operate independently of the physical senses. Given the isolation of self from world implicit in Descartes’ thinking, the self is both impotent to effect change in the objective world and beyond the restraining influence of that world outside itself. As the self becomes convinced of its total separation from physical reality, the world is transformed into a mere hall of mirrors for the self-reflecting ego, as in “William Wilson,” or objective reality becomes enslaved to the monarchical ego, as in “The Gold-Bug.” Through the narrator of “The Black Cat,” through Monsieur Dupin in the detective stories, and through the insanely controlling figure of Prince Prospero in “The Masque of the Red Death,” Poe explored the implications of Descartes’ theorem, but having exposed its flaws Poe had few resources for salvaging the relationship of the ego to outside reality.

A recognition of the implications of Descartes’ distinction between essence and existence is to be found everywhere in Poe’s writing, perhaps the most common feature of which is the recurring sense of the insubstantiality of the physical world. In “Descent into the Maelstrom,” “M.S. Lost in a Bottle,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the material universe inhabited by Poe’s characters is shifting, chaotic, and treacherous, and the narrator’s knowledge of this world is consequently unreliable in ways that summon up the central philosophical dilemmas investigated by Descartes: the dream hypothesis (the inability to prove a distinction between waking and dreaming states) and the demon hypothesis (the possibility that existence is unknowingly controlled by a demonic power). A suggestion of both conundrums is evident in the passage in “William Wilson” in which the narrator, during his fifth year at Dr. Bransby’s school, enters the bedroom of his rival with the intention of carrying out a malicious prank of one sort or another. What he discovers, instead, in the visage of his sleeping rival, inspires instantaneous horror—a horror that derives from observing that his antagonist in the sleeping state appears utterly different from the waking imitator who torments him. As the narrator states...