Descartes and the horizon of modern epistemology

The subject-object confrontation in which the subject has no privileged position really begins with Descartes. Before Descartes, the questioning of the epistemological qualification of the subject was not an issue. The subject, qua knower, was a pivot of certainty. What was questioned was “How can a being, subject to error, touch the absolute being without impairing its absolute character?” Epistemology was concerned, therefore, with the nature of knowledge, the necessary conditions for knowledge and questions that investigated knowledge. With Descartes a new epistemological horizon appeared, for Descartes was concerned with the very possibility of knowledge. How can we know anything for certain? “The individual existent who aspires to truth is radically separated from being as such”. This radical separation of subject and object arises in fact from the resolution of the epistemological problem that Descartes posed to himself. Having put to himself the question of the very possibility of knowledge, Descartes, in resolving this through the ‘cogito ergo sum’, could have privileged access only to the realm of internal consciousness. So whereas before the epistemological was restricted to within the horizon of the privileged position of the knowing subject (the knower), by Descartes’ radical questioning of the possibility of knowledge itself, the access was restricted even further, not as before to the person, but now to the subject qua consciousness.