The significance of the Cartesian cogito for modern European identity has to be understood against the backdrop of an unquestioned ideal of self expr… - Nelson Maldonado Torres

Before Cartesian methodic skepticism (the procedure that introduced the heuristic device of the evil demon and which ultimately led to the finding of the cogito itself) became central for modern understandings of self and world, there was another kind of skepticism in modernity which became constitutive of it. ... I characterize this attitude as racist/imperial Manichean misanthropic skepticism. It could also be rendered as the imperial attitude, which gives definition to modern Imperial Man.

If the ego cogito was built upon the foundations of the ego conquiro, the ‘I think, therefore I am’ presupposes two unacknowledged dimensions. Beneath the ‘I think’ we can read ‘others do not think’, and behind the ‘I am’ it is possible to locate the philosophical justification for the idea that ‘others are not’ or do not have being.

Unlike Descartes’s methodical doubt, Manichean misanthropic skepticism is not skeptical about the existence of the world or the normative status of logics and mathematics. It is rather a form of questioning the very humanity of colonized peoples. The Cartesian idea about the division between res cogitans and res extensa (consciousness and matter) which translates itself into a divide between the mind and the body or between the human and nature is preceded and even, one has the temptation to say, to some extent built upon an anthropological colonial difference between the ego conquistador and the ego conquistado. The very relationship between colonizer and colonized provided a new model to understand the relationship between the soul or mind and the body; and likewise, modern articulations of the mind/body are used as models to conceive the colonizer/colonized relation, as well as the relation between man and woman, particularly the woman of color.