Sorry Descartes we can never be 'alone' with our thoughts

In  Emanuel Levinas'  Cartesian Meditations, a brilliant series of lectures setting out the principles of phenomenology in brief: they contradicted Descartes’s doctrines, Husserl argued, but only out of a passion for his stringent ideals of conceptual clarity.

 The crux was that we could never be alone with our thoughts in the way that Descartes supposed: how would be overcome the risk of solipsismh in the Cartesian scenario? 
we could not have any conception of ourselves or the objective world unless we already understood the idea of other subjectivities who experience the same world as us, though in ways we might never be able to share. ‘I have within myself the experience of the “world” of “others” ... as a world that is foreign to me,’ Husserl wrote. Other people were not only ‘objects in the world’; they were also ‘subjects for this same world ... who also therefore have the experience of me’. And the realisation that individual experience presupposes a plurality of other subjectivities should, Husserl suggested, open up some promising new paths to problems that had always been shrouded in metaphysical mist: the central issues of ethics and religion.