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 the "I" from the thinking thing. Here, the "cogito" has already assumed the "I"'s existence as that which thinks. For Kierkegaard, Descartes is merely "developing the content of a concept", namely that the "I", which already exists, thinks. As Kierkegaard argues, the proper logical flow of argument is that existence is already assumed or presupposed in order for thinking to occur, not that existence is concluded from that thinking. Bernard Williams claims that what we are dealing with when we talk of thought, or when we say "I am thinking," is something conceivable from a third-person perspective; namely objective "thought-events"