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 As a critic of Cartesian subjectivity, Heidegger sought to ground human subjectivity in death as that certainty which individualizes and authenticates our being. As he wrote in 1927: "This certainty, that "I myself am in that I will die," is the basic certainty of Dasein itself. It is a genuine statement of Dasein, while "cogito sum" is only the semblance of such a statement. If such pointed formulations mean anything at all, then the appropriate statement pertaining to Dasein in its being would have to be "sum moribundus" [I am in dying], "moribundus" not as someone gravely ill or wounded,