Valéry's 'Variation sur Descartes' excellently evokes the vanishing act that has haunted philosophy ever since Darwin overturned the Cartesian tradition. If my body is composed of nothing but a team of a few trillion robotic cells, mindlessly interacting to produce all the large-scale patterns that tradition would attribute to the nonmechanical workings of my mind, there seems to be nothing left over to be me. Lurking in Darwin's shadow there is a bugbear: the incredible Disappearing Self. One of Darwin's earliest critics, Robert MacKenzie, saw what was coming and could scarcely contain his outrage:

This ‘strange inversion of reasoning’ promises – or threatens – to dissolve the Cartesian res cogitans as the wellspring of creativity, and then where will we be? Nowhere, it seems. It seems that if creativity gets ‘reduced’ to ‘mere mechanism’ we will be shown not to exist at all. Or, we will exist, but we won’t be thinkers, we won’t manifest genuine ‘Wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill’. The individual as Author of works and deeds will be demoted: a person, it seems, is a barely salient nexus, a mere slub in the fabric of causation.