Ambulatory happiness

In his main works, René Descartes, in addition to such an impressive metaphysical construction, over and over again gives promises of happiness, which must certainly accompany the study of philosophy according to a new model. What exactly is this happiness and is the Cartesian construction capable of fulfilling this promise? For whom can it come? If we take this promise seriously as instructions for obtaining vita beata, then the character of the Cartesian story about the construction of a new science has a serious competitor, the main character of Victor Pelevin’s novel KGBT+, who performs the same procedures as the Cartesian one, and the matches are exact, and the key act is the walk, ambulo-sum(nt): both Descartes (and his followers, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Benedictus de Spinoza) and Pelevin show one thing: a walk is not a reward for a job well done to salvation, it is work itself. This is blissful work, in which the path and the goal coincide, just like in a walk, when we walk just for walking. And Pelevin promises happiness, but it does not happen to the Cartesian subject at all. Thanks to the third figure, Giordano Bruno, this confrontation is proposed to be viewed not as a contradiction, but in such a way that the promise can be fulfilled only by abandoning the concept of extension in favor of space. After all, when walking, it’s more important not who is walking, but where, there are places and spaces in which you won’t be able to walk. The Necker Cube helps us understand the concept of the space in which the three described walks (Descartes’, Pelevin’s and Bruno’s) take place, aimed at finding the highest goal of the teachings, of which these characters are adherents.