Good sense is by nature equal in all men. Cold, and sounds like fairness. Sit with it longer and the fairness starts to feel like a hand on your shoulder, and I have learned to be suspicious of hands on my shoulder.
I want to say up front that I am not accusing Descartes of anything. He may have believed every word. The equal-capacity claim and the unequal-cultivation claim are not in contradiction in his framework, and serious people have held both for four hundred years without flinching. So the question I am chasing is not whether he was lying. The question is what the sentence does, regardless of what he meant by it. Famous sentences have effects their authors do not always control, and this is one of the famous ones.
Here is what I think of the effect.
If reason is equal, then nothing I get wrong from here can be blamed on the reason I was given. The equipment has been declared sufficient before I have picked it up. Whatever fails next, fails on me. The second I accept the gift of equality I have signed away every excuse I was going to use later, and I signed in writing I never saw, because the writing was the gift.
That is how an anesthetic works. It does not need intent behind it. It only needs to numb the patient before the cut, and the cut, in the Discourse, is the rest of the book. The standard for thinking that Descartes lays out is so severe that almost no one in four hundred years has met it. If he had led with the standard I would have closed the book. He led with the equality and I kept reading, and by the time I got to the standard I had already agreed I had no grounds to complain about it.
So far, so clean. The opening line is anesthetic. The reader gets numbed. The harsh claim gets through. I could end the essay here and feel pleased with myself.
Except.
The reason the reading is clean is that it sorts the world into two groups, the readers who got numbed and the readers who saw through the numbing, and it places me, by virtue of having written the essay, in the second group. The whole shape of the argument is a machine for delivering me to that conclusion, and I built the machine, and the machine delivers me.
Which is the same machine.
This is the part I did not see until I had written it down. The essay you are reading is doing the thing the essay is about. It is offering you a flattering frame, the careful reader who sees through Descartes' opening move, and the flattering frame is the price of admission to a harsher claim, which is that you have just been sorted by me, in writing you did not see, because the writing was the essay. If you found the anesthetic reading persuasive, you accepted a gift. If the gift felt like clarity, the gift was working.
I do not know how to write my way out of this. I have spent the last hour trying. Every ending I tried let somebody off the hook. The one where the speaker stays uncertain lets the reader feel awake. The one where I step outside the trap pretends there is an outside. There isn't. The mechanism is what writing is, when the writing is trying to move someone. Every persuasive sentence has a small anesthetic in it. There are no writers who refuse it. There are only writers who keep catching themselves using it.
So I am not going to give you the line I was going to give you, the one about being awake. I do not know if I am awake. I wrote a sentence that would have made you feel awake, and then I cut it, and the cutting is a move too, and so is telling you about it.
Descartes gave his readers a floor and called it equality. I am not going to give you one. That is the only difference between this essay and the sentence it spent eight hundred words taking apart, and I am not certain it is a difference.