The OP wants to know more about thinking.
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If so, the OP should try it.
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I agree wholeheartedly.
Good post! But one thing to bear in mind. In the Latin expression, cogito ergo sum, the personal pronoun ‘I’ is implicit, not stated. By contrast, the English “I think” or French “Je Pense” creates a syntactic distance between the pronoun (“I”) and the action (“think”). That grammatical separation makes it easy to view the “I” as a separate entity or manager that performs thinking, rather than that the action of thought is itself is the apodictic evidence of being. For this reason the Latin formulation conveys the meaning better. (Descartes wrote in both French and Latin, his formal ‘Meditations’ being composed in Latin for the scholarly audience.)
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So technically I don’t exist…
Nice one though
It seems reasonable to suppose that anything that verbs is a thing that also exists (in physical reality). The only weak part of the cogito is the “I” in English or French as Wayfarer alluded to.
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@Wayfarer
There’s an important insight here, but we have to be careful how we frame it. I believe Descartes meant to say more than “thinking is going on” and (therefore) “being is going on.” Was he justified in this? Does “cogito” represent a discovery, or merely a fact? By this I mean, does “cogito” float in some sort of mental space, where others could find it as well? You or I or Descartes could each point to it, and note the same fact: “Thinking is going on”?
I don’t believe Descartes meant that. The cogito is a discovery made by an “I”, and which has the interesting feature of also being about an I.
That said, I agree that the cogito is “weak” in another sense. It doesn’t serve to characterize or describe this “I”, either as a discoverer or as an object of discovery. The move to “res cogitans” seems to me unjustified, as it gives an air of essentialism or foundationalism to our conception of the I, based solely on the cogito’s discovery. Moreover, since Descartes we’ve expanded our understanding of what a “self” can be, including aspects that are specifically not discoverable by thinking. Whether we’re phenomenologists or psychoanalysts, we’re still faced with Ricoeur’s (possibly unanswerable) question: What is the “I”? What account can we give of it, either as philosophers or as scientists?
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No doubt (e.g.) Buddha, Democritus, … Hume agree.
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I read this of yours……
……and me being me naturally thought of the Esteemed Professor’s proclivity of fixing every-damn-thing those before him dared publish, and found……
“….The I think expresses the act of determining my existence. The existence is thereby already given…..
Now, I do not have yet another self-intuition, which would give the determining in me, of the spontaneity of which alone I am conscious…..
thus I cannot determine my existence as that of a self-active being, rather I merely represent the spontaneity of my thought, i.e., of the determining by me…..
Yet this spontaneity is the reason I call myself an intelligence…..”
……thus, I can relate yours to his, insofar as the being for which there is apodeictic evidence, is that “I” am an intelligence, or, I am an intelligent being, the logically conditioned negations of which are, of course, quite impossible.
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Which is all well and good, but for those who will still want to know…..what is meant by “intelligence”? And WTF has “spontaneity” got to do with anything!!??!?
(Sigh)
Thanks Wayfarer! And nice point. It got me googling, and it seems the I is implicit in the Latin formation Descartes used, as you say, and would be intended to be understood that way. Also it was originally written in French where the ‘‘I’’ is explicit - ‘‘Je pense, donc je suis’’. Descartes’ intent to prove the existence of the Thinker/I beyond doubt seems clear. And the gap for doubt to creep in, as laid out in the grammar, is there. Where-as if it’s fair to say Experiencing IS Knowing could be true (knowing could be a characteristic of experiencing itself) there would be no such gap for error/doubt. I think!
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As I said, the way I see it all ‘flavours’ of experience are known with certainty, if knowing is a feature of experiencing itself, rather than something done separately by an experiencer. And that is at least possible.
So the experience of having an itchy toe for example, can’t be doubted, but the existence of the toe can. The existence of the ‘‘I’’ in Descartes’ formulation is on a par with the toe here imo, as doubtable.
But if a computer AI printed out ‘‘I am experiencing an itchy toe’’, it wouldn’t feel as profound or mysterious a claim as if it printed out ‘‘I think therefore I am’’. And we have similar explanations for how a computer might print out both (regarding its design). So the particular ‘flavour’ of the experience (thinking v itchiness) and whether a statement is printed out or not seems like a red herring to me. I might be missing something though.
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Well, I’d say the ‘‘I’’ lies on the doubtable side.
Unless you mean an experiential ‘sense of self’, engendered by the private first person point of view, the unified field of consciousness, manifesting as located in a specific body moving through space and time, with memories forming a coherent identity.
That’s all pretty selfy!
But it would perhaps exclude something like Dennett’s idea of a mini-me homunculous inside your head, watching the Cartesian Theatre play out, weighing decisions and issuing commands.
For Kant (if I’ve got this right) “spontaneity” was to be contrasted with “determined not by me, by something else.” He maintained that I have an “existence as a self-active being,” that is, I have the ability to think a thought that is not determined by my position in nature, or in my physical surroundings. Autonomous, not heteronomous. So intelligence for Kant would be impossible without this faculty of spontaneity. Interestingly, he would probably regard AI as a misnomer.
Not sure how this may relate to Descartes . . .
Just elaborating on the notion of “apodeictic evidence of being”, by suggesting what in my opinion is the only formal, irreducible kind of being justified by that evidence.
OK, interesting. If we could translate Kant’s thought for Descartes, I wonder if D would see the cogito as “already given”, in Kant’s sense. (I find “the act of determining my existence” hard to grasp.) Or maybe I’m just asking: What is the relation between the Cartesian cogito and the Kantian “I think”?
It’s hard to know what Descartes meant when he made his argument, but your post is a good continuation of the OP’s own line of inquiry.
Husserl wrote volumes on Descartes (Cartesian Meditations) which I haven’t read (Husserl’s writings are dense and prolix). But the salient fact is that whilst Husserl credits Descartes as ‘the first phenomenologist’, he also criticizes him for his tendency to objectify the ego.
Descartes, as Husserl puts it in his Cartesian Meditations, treated this ego as a ‘little tag-end of the world’ —a real entity rather than as the condition for the possibility of unified experience and as a domain of meaning-constitution. Or, as Husserl puts it in the Crisis, Descartes treated the pure subject or ego as a ‘residuum’ (Residuum, C 79; K 81) left in the objective world ~ Dermot Moran
‘Res cogitans’ does indeed mean ‘thinking thing’, and Descartes explicitly says ‘I am a thing that thinks’. And from there it is but a short leap to ‘the ghost in the machine’! I can’t overstate how pervasive that idea is in life and culture. I think all of us here are deeply influenced by it, know it or not.
And I think it is grounded in this tendency of ‘objectification’, to try and treat the self as an object of cognition. And that is not something that we can really do! It is what gives rise to the whole ‘hard problem’ conundrum - if mind is a thing, what kind of thing is it? and so on.
Husserl’s proposed remedy for this tendency was the phenomenological epochē, but that it a big topic in its own right, worthy of a separate thread.
Well said. The place to apply pressure, for me, in this account, would be to ask: Is being a “thing” the same as being “an object of cognition”? I don’t think it’s obvious that they are the same. As usual, our language doesn’t present us with all the nuances of choice that we might wish it did. What I’m getting at is that even though “thing” and “object” both look as if they are counterposed to “subject” – that “to objectify” is to make something a thing – there is much more to be said, and more room to keep the question open as to whether the self can be seen by itself, in something like the way it can see anything else that presents itself for cognition.
I’m going to say no, because the “already given” in Kant is for the substance of body, which is necessarily presupposed in order for me to think about myself as an existent thing, or, in Kant-speak, think of myself as an appearance. This is congruent to, or consistent with, D’s substance of body, but not of mind, that being implicit in cogito, ergo sum.
The cogito in Descartes’ sense cannot be already given; if it was already given he wouldn’t have to prove, first, that there is a substance other than body, and, second, because of that distinction, along with odds and ends of meditations, finalized by “philosophizing in an orderly manner” (“Discourse on Methods……, 1637), concluding with the impossibility of doubting that he thinks.
If, upon concluding that he thinks is impossible to deny, could he have then said cogito is already given, in a non-Kantian sense? Perhaps, I dunno, but the whole early-modern philosophical approach was predicated on the necessity of distinguishing the substances from which incongruencies in human activities, re: bodily/mental, could be explained.
But still, from a Kantian sense, already given won’t work, for “I”, the object determined in cogito, is merely transcendental representation a priori, which Descartes didn’t consider.
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Depth. While there is an awful lot of the earlier in the later, Descartes reduces to that which thinks, Kant reduces to what thinking is, such that that which thinks, is merely the representation of it. In the one, cognition is a stand-alone activity, in the other cognition is part and parcel of a system.
Culminating in the denial, the rejection on methodological grounds, that thinking equals existing, as queried by the thread title.
See Free Logic (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
In its most common form, “I think, therefore I am”, the argument is simply invalid. To be valid it needs “If something thinks, it exists”. But “If something thinks, it exists” is exactly the point at issue, somewhat begging the question.
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