Self-reflection focus on the beatific vision after death. The 13th century pope Innocent III wrote about the essential misery of earthly existence in his ""On the misery of the human condition"" – a view that was disputed by, for example, Giannozzo Manetti in his treatise ""On human dignity."" A famous quote of Shakespeare's Hamlet (II, ii, 115-117), expressing the contrast of human physical beauty, intellectual faculty, and ephemeral nature: René Descartes famously and succinctly proposed: "Cogito ergo sum" (French: ""Je pense donc je suis""; English: ""I think, therefore I am""). The Enlightenment was driven by a renewed conviction, that, in the
Cogito, ergo sum in the former case, and an objective thinker in the latter. He argues, first, that it is impossible to make sense of "there is thinking" without relativizing it to "something." However, this something cannot be Cartesian egos, because it is impossible to differentiate objectively between things just on the basis of the pure content of consciousness. The obvious problem is that, through introspection, or our experience of consciousness, we have no way of moving to conclude the existence of any third-personal fact, to conceive of which would require something above and beyond just the purely subjective contents of the mind.