Now today's piece:
The Physical Barrier to Thought: Navigation of the Human Condition in Order to Achieve
Decartes, Digested
Kevin Boykin
Apr 17, 2026
The foundational axiom of Western philosophy, René Descartes’ “Cogito, ergo sum” — “I think, therefore I am” — was a monumental achievement. It was a necessary reduction to define life after honest recognition of available information was weighed. It was an attempt to locate the self in the pure, ethereal realm of consciousness, to anchor identity in the intangible act of thought and thereby escape the fallibility of the body and the deceptive senses. It was a declaration of intellectual and spiritual independence.
It’s true as well, but becomes more complex when seen through the limitations and baggage of human understanding. We have to add to it to make it something we can process. Once it is known that we exist then further extrapolations are available. To our senses we exist primarily in the physical. Our endeavor here was to reduce, and in that spirit the physical is easily reduced to the presence of an anus.
For a significant portion of humanity, the honest, unvarnished, and empirically verifiable translation of Descartes’ statement is not the lofty ideal of the mind, but the gravitational pull of the gut. The realistic and honest human take would be:
“I think about the anus, therefore I am.”
This is not an intellectual provocation. It is a clinical diagnosis. It is the only logical conclusion for a consciousness that cannot escape the base, physical, and animal nature of its own existence. To understand this, we must first examine the very tool that sought to map this territory: the psychoanalytic revolution.
The Brazen Bull of Psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud, whether he knew it or not, forged a brilliant and terrible device. His psychoanalytic framework, with its theory of psychosexual stages, was designed as a tool of analysis and control. It provided a roadmap of human development, a checklist of fixations and neuroses. The “anal stage” in particular, with its concepts of the “anal-retentive” and “anal-expulsive” personalities, became a clinical language to pathologize and classify behavior. It was a scalpel intended to dissect the psyche, to render the human animal predictable, manageable, and ultimately, explainable.
It was a Brazen Bull. From thearcheologist.org:
I think I saw Martha Stewart schlepping one of these but I digress. It seems that every sword is double-edged to some degree, some more than others. That Brazen Bull was first tested on it’s designer for efficacy. It went on to claim many, including the king himself after losing power. The poetic justice of the king being just another one of the bull’s short-term inhabitants prepares us for the reality we see today. Precedence is there for all to use.“The Brazen Bull was allegedly created by Perillos of Athens, a bronze worker in the 6th century BCE, and introduced to Phalaris, the tyrant of Akragas, a Greek city in Sicily. Its design was a masterstroke of ancient artisanship, a life-sized bull cast entirely in bronze with a door on the side for the victim to be placed inside. It was hollow, allowing for a human being to be forced inside, and it was designed in such a way that, when a fire was lit beneath it, the Bull would heat up, slowly roasting the person inside alive.”
So like all such instruments, psychology has now been turned on its makers. The very lens Freud created to observe humanity has been weaponized to render the most damning diagnosis of his intellectual progeny and the culture that wields his tools.
The Tethered Consciousness
In order for this reductive cognitive process to take root, it requires the base aspect of the physical as its foundation. Their consciousness cannot exist untethered. While Descartes dreamed of a mind that could float free, untethered from the machine of the body, this type of consciousness led by Freud et al is welded to it. Their “thinking” is not a clean, abstract process; it is a messy, noisy byproduct of biochemical hardware anchored in the gut.
Why the anus? It is representative of many human understandings. Lets start with the complexity of life as it presents on earth. The most complex life forms are denoted by the presence of a mouth and an anus. Then this imports that our time is not wasted on amoeba. From there the human mind moves to lived experience. The strongest representative of this is the feeling of shame. They associate this with the anus despite having already recognized that it is a sign of a complex life form. The reasons are obvious, but the power that it has over the mind is not commensurate regardless. The human mind finds the entire arrangement to be intolerable in most situations, and deals with it through humor, sexual interest and more. These things at play send the average human into a circle of logic: we are thinking creatures that are superior, yet we have anuses which hammer home the concept of limitations, but still we think, etc.
The human POV: this is the critical failure of the Cogito. “I think” assumes the “I” is a thinking thing. But what if the “I” is primarily a physical thing, and its thinking is a secondary, parasitic process? What if the most persistent, undeniable, and foundational thought is not about God or mathematics or love, but about the immediate, undeniable reality of one’s own physical waste and elimination? Any deity after all requires faith and labor of the mind, while the other school has to be dealt with daily in the physical- it does not need to be sought out.
This philosophy places them from the outset on a life course of inevitable vulgarity. Their art, their politics, their relationships, their entire culture becomes a reflection of this core tether. It is a consciousness that, when presented with the cosmos, can only point and say, “It is a system of waste.” The path of escape from this prison becomes overgrown with fear.
The Inevitable Conclusion
“I think about my anus, therefore I am” is not a descent into insult; it is an ascent into honesty. It is the ultimate materialist statement, the “Cogito” for a mind that has been successfully pruned of all transcendence, leaving only the undeniable, gravitational reality of the flesh.
The life form that is stopped at this physical fact is in essence nothing more than the anus they focus on. Inability to move beyond the physical through thought imprisons us to the physical exclusively, and the ultimate reduction of the human experience to many is the anus.
EDIT: Something came to me when I was making the video for this: there's a scientific field called topology that classifies objects by their most basic, unchangeable properties. When this reductive science is applied to the human body—a tube with an entrance and an exit—we are found to be topologically equivalent to a donut. So even science then admits there is something to this thinking.
https://kevinboykin.substack.com/p/t...ght-navigation





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