Although the Cogito is introduced in Descartes’ earlier work: the Discourses on the Method; it is further developed in the Meditations on First Philosophy. The aims within the Discourses may have differed from the aims within the Meditations. And these ideas are further complicated by the differing interpretations of what Descartes aimed to establish. I will first go through briefly what I think Descartes argues in the Discourses, then go through all the interpretations in the Meditations and determine which aim is most likely or dominant. And finally, determine if the most likely interpretation of the Cogito successfully establishes what it aimed to establish.
What is the Cogito? It is simply this statement: I think, therefore I exist. It is the only clear and certain idea that is left behind after every piece of knowledge which can be doubted is removed. The Cogito is the foundations to Descartes’ metaphysics, and it is impossible to doubt it since one can doubt everything, but there must be a thing to doubt everything, and within the very act of doubting, that is, thinking that everything is false; we must still be acting to think. Therefore, it is self-evident that there must be a thing that exists to do the thinking. Descartes describes this ‘thinking thing’ in the Discourses as a “substance whose whole essence or nature is solely to think”(Descartes 36), which can exist independent of the body. In the Discourses, Descartes takes for granted that the ‘I’ or ‘thinking thing’ is the same as the soul or the mind, and may have taken to prove that they are one and the same, but his argument is not substantiated in his earlier text.
In the first Meditation, Descartes’ later text, he introduces the Cogito with the Evil Demon argument, in which there is a supremely powerful demon that is capable of deceiving one of everything: of the existence of the world, the sky, the earth, minds, or bodies. But again, there must be a subject to deceive in the first place about all these things, so that subject must be ‘I’. Descartes then takes a step back in the Second Meditation, and tries to define what he means when he says ‘I’. There are three possible interpretations of what he aims to establish. The first one (which appears in the discourses) is that he is trying to prove that ‘I’ is the mind and is also the immortal soul responsible for thinking and is an enduring substance whose essence is to think (Descartes 36). The second interpretation is that he was trying to prove the existence of the mind, the thing that is responsible for producing its own thoughts and whose essence is solely to think. The third interpretation is that he is trying to prove that there is only a stream of consciousness without an underlying mind and that a ‘thinking thing’ is merely a placeholder concept. It is unlikely that he meant only to establish that we are merely a stream of consciousness since he maintained that he is “…a thing that thinks; that is, I am a mind, or intelligence, or intellect…”(Descartes 82). Even though Descartes does argue for the existence of the soul in his philosophy, the second interpretation is probably what his Cogito aims to establish since he explicitly said so: “I am mind, or intelligence...”(Descartes 82). He does argue for the existence of the soul later in his Meditations, but he did not aim to establish the soul with only the Cogito.
Does the Cogito establish what it aims to establish? Descartes ideas come under various attacks which were characterized in a series of publications called the Objections. In the Third Objections, Hobbes points out that, although Descartes has proven that a thinking thing is not nothing, he has not proven that the thinking thing is “mind, or intelligence, or reason”(Hobbes 128). Hobbes states that it is not valid to say “I am thinking, therefore I am thought”, since it is as absurd as saying “I am walking, therefore I am walk.” Since “philosophers make a distinction between a subject and its faculties”(Hobbes 128); Descartes has not proven the existence of an underlying mind. Descartes responds by saying that a walk is not comparable to a thought, because a walk only refers to the act of walking, while a thought can be taken to refer to the act, or the faculty or even the thing which possesses the faculty. This is a valid response based on Descartes’ metaphysics that a ‘thinking thing’ is a substance whose whole essence is solely to think which would include both thought and faculty in essence. In the Fifth Objections, Gassendi objects to Descartes’s definition of a ‘thinking thing’, he attacks its vagueness and states that one does not understand what a wine is by describing it as a ‘liquid thing which is compressed from grapes, white or red, sweet…”(Gassendi 129), but rather one has to show its internal substance by using a chemical investigation. Gassendi states that one must use a chemical investigation to find out if our internal substance is better known to us than our body since we already know much about our body using anatomy, chemistry, and other sciences and senses. Descartes retorts by saying that we know what a substance is by finding out its attributes, and that the more attributes we know, the more perfectly we understand its nature. He further argues that we indeed know the mind the best since every attribute we recognize in a given thing is also contained in the mind as knowledge pertaining to the thing (giving our mind a further attribute of knowledge), and hence the nature of the mind is the one we know best of all (Descartes 130). So Descartes effectively retorts to at least two attacks to his Cogito, although there could potentially be many more. So how would one know if the Cogito does indeed establish what it aims to establish without examining every single objection? Taking a step back and examining Descartes assumptions, I believe he does successfully establish the aims of the Cogito implicitly. There can be no disembodied stream of consciousness, and the medieval scholastics[1] wouldn’t believe that thoughts came from nothing. One does not believe in light coming out of nowhere, rather, we believe light comes out of a light emitting objects. Similarly, thought cannot come out of nothing, it has to come from somewhere, and that place must be the mind. And if there is no mind, where do we get this concept of the mind from? Certainly, our senses do not perceive this ‘mind’, since it only exists inside of us as the innate knowledge that comes from our natural light[2]. Although Descartes never makes the above argument explicitly, given his assumptions, it should follow that it is clear and distinct that a mind necessarily exists if we have thoughts.
Like Archimedes, Descartes sought to create one immutable and fixed fulcrum of knowledge to lift one out of doubt and to establish the foundations of his philosophy. And he did this using his Cogito to establish the certainty of our existence as thinking things with underlying minds.
The Causal Principle
The “causal principle” is the principle that there must be at least as much reality in a cause as there is in the effect of the cause (Descartes 91). Descartes aimed to establish the validity of objective reality using that principle given to us by the natural light (Descartes 91). Using the causal principle, he wanted to prove that the cause of an idea in objective reality is no less real than the cause of an object in formal reality (Descartes 91). He also uses that principle to argue for the existence of god in Meditation Three. And as a result of arguing for the existence of God, he is also able to prove that what he perceives very clearly and distinctly is true (Descartes 87). And this is true provided that god is not a deceiver, although it is conceivable that god had given him a nature “such that [he] was deceived even in matters which seemed most evident.”(Descartes 87). So to prove that what he clearly and distinctly perceives is true, he must prove that there is a god and that god is non-deceiving.
To make his proof more comprehensible, Descartes lays out his assumptions and definitions before he continues. If ideas are considered simply as modes of thought, there is no recognizable inequality between them, but in so far as different ideas are considered as images that represent different things, it is clear that they differ widely (Descartes 90). The ideas that are considered modes of thoughts, or that which originates within us as representations, and not from the natural impulses[3], contain “objective reality.” On the other hand, the ideas that contain “formal reality” represent a thing outside of us, which exist regardless of our will and has its own intrinsic reality. Now, the “casual principle” starts to apply, as there must be at least as much reality in the efficient and total cause as in the effect of that cause. Where would the effect get its reality from, if not from the cause? (Descartes 91). This is true in formal reality, as a stone which did not previously exist cannot begin to exist unless it is produced by something which contains formally everything to be found in the stone (Descartes 91). And like formal reality, the objective reality of a stone (the idea of a stone) cannot exist in me unless it is put there by some cause which contains at least as much reality as I conceive to be in the stone. For example, even the idea of a Unicorn has objective reality since it arose from the existence of horses and horns. Although the Unicorn has less objective reality than a horse and a horn, it still arose from these things which do exist. This does not contradict the “causal principle” as the unicorn exists in objective reality, although it does have less reality than its cause.
Something cannot arise from nothing and also that which is more perfect (contains in itself more reality), cannot arise from what is less perfect (Descartes 91). In Discourse Four, Descartes presents the idea that what is more perfect must contain more reality. He argued that between existence and non-existence, god as the supreme being would definitely exist since God is perfect by definition and existence contains more reality than non-existence (Descartes 38). God is defined as “a substance that is infinite, eternal, immutable, independent, supremely intelligent, supremely powerful, and which created both myself and everything else.”(Descartes 93). Finite beings cannot account for having the idea of an infinite substance, since the infinite has more reality than the finite and there must be at least as much reality in a cause as there is in the effect of the cause. To illustrate his point, Descartes make a comparison between darkness and light. One cannot create light by negating darkness, rather, it is the negation of light that causes darkness (Descartes 94). Similarly, one cannot create the idea of the infinite by negating the finite, since that would be like negating darkness to create light. This does not work, since darkness is the absence of light, similarly, finiteness is the absence of perfection or infiniteness. Since infinity contains in itself more reality than the finite, the finite must be found by negating the infinite, and not the other way around. If we were to say the finite conceived of the infinite, there would be more reality in the effect than in the cause, which would contradict the casual principle. Since the objective knowledge of God cannot have come from finite objects, or nothing. There is an infinite substance that is God which endowed us with the objective knowledge of its perfection and the conception of the infinite.
By using the “causal principle”, Descartes has taken himself to have proven the existence of God. But why would this God be non-deceiving? God is non-deceiving because it is morally imperfect to be that way, which contradicts the very definition of god (Descartes 98). Therefore, since God is a non-deceiver, the ideas that are given to us that appear clear and distinct must be true. The only reason one would be mistaken is that we are finite and imperfect beings.
[1] Medieval philosophers of the time who had the predominantly Aristolean or Platonic metaphysics
[2] Natural light is what Descartes believed to be the innate reason that is endowed to us by God.
[3] “When I say ‘Nature taught me to think this’, all I mean is that a spontaneous impulse leads me to believe it, not that its truth has been revealed to me by some natural light”(Descartes 89)
References
1. Descartes, Rene, John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. 1998. Descartes
Selected Philosophical Writings. Pg. 32-130. Cambridge University Press: New York
2. Hobbes, Thomas, John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. 1998. Descartes
Selected Philosophical Writings. Pg. 32-130. Cambridge University Press: New York
3. Gassendi, Pierre, John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. 1998. Descartes
Selected Philosophical Writings. Pg. 32-130. Cambridge University Press: New York
