A few days ago I asked how Descartes went from “Cogito ergo sum” to proving the existence of God in his Meditations on First Philosophy (see here). I was skeptical of his argument and the more I thought about it the more I became skeptical of his first couple meditations as well.
Here is why:
(1) Descartes sought to find the one thing he could not doubt by doubting everything. The one thing he found was that he realized he was thinking and therefore he was a thinking thing. I think this can be doubted as well. It could be that there is a great being whose thoughts are so complex that when it imagines characters it also imagines the though life of characters. It would be like a 3-D version of John Grisham sitting down to write a novel. Another thing to consider would be a super computer that created a program where it simulated an artificial world that includes thinking beings as well as those being’s thoughts. Could we doubt these being exist in any “real” way? I think so.
(2) As Eric O. Springsted wrote (commenting on the arguments of Alasdair MacIntyre) we should note that Descartes never abandoned his language game, i.e. he never was able to think outside of French and/or Latin which provided him with a way of thinking and discussing concepts like thinking and doubting (see Philosophy for Understanding Theology, 2nd Ed. p. 235).
(3) Some confuse the probability that we exist, and the assurance that we exist, that we find in thinking and doubting with the absolute knowledge that we exist. In some Eastern religious schemes there is a teaching that we are part of a greater One and that “salvation” consist of escaping the misleading concept of our own autonomy. There are plenty of people throughout history that seem to have doubted that we are (in any serious way) existent. If we are part of a greater One or we are the imagination of a higher being we may be said to “exist” but not like Descartes was trying to prove.
Thoughts?
the archives near Emmaus 
Brian,
I think we need to make a distinction between denial and doubt, and between justified doubt and unjustified doubt. Awareness of ourselves as individual thinking subjects is so basic and obvious that one should not doubt it. Some will deny it, however, such as those who follow Eastern religions. But the rationality of their denial is comparable to those who deny the existence of free-will, and then go on to give you reasons for believing free-will is just an illusion in hopes of persuading you to believe the same. If everything is determined, then reasons don’t matter because rational deliberation is not possible. Their belief that free-will is an illusion is just as determined as the other persons’ belief that it is real. Determinism is rationally self-defeating, and conflicts with our awareness of ourselves as subjects who act as first-movers, but that doesn’t stop people from denying free-will. I think the same is true of personal existence. It is self-defeating to deny it, and conflicts with our own direct and immediate awareness of ourselves as existing, thinking beings, but that doesn’t stop people from denying it. People’s ability to deny the obvious, however, is not grounds for doubting that Descartes was right.
Could some hyper-skeptical individual doubt that he exists on the grounds you laid out in (1)? Yes, I suppose he could. But that is why reasonable people dismiss such hyper-skepticism as unfounded and impractical. There’s a big difference between the mere logical possibility that one is mistaken in their conclusion that they exist, and the rational justification for believing it to be so. There is no rational justification for doubting our own existence as thinking subjects. Indeed, it is incoherent. One has to say something like, “I do not exist.” But if they don’t exist, who is making the confession?
I actually think Descartes’ Cogito may be logically fallacious. He reasoned deductively as follows:
1 The act of thinking requires the existence of a thinker
2 I experience the act of thinking
3 Therefore I exist as a thinker
The second premise begs the question. It assumes there is an “I” to experience the act of thinking, and then concludes that there is an “I” who thinks. And yet, Descartes general observation seems valid: the ability to contemplate one’s existence requires that they exist.
If Descartes did beg the question, then I would simply conclude that there is no argument capable of proving indubitably that I exist. But there are some things we can know (and cannot not know them) without an argument: intuitions (logic, morality, etc.). Intuitions are things we know directly and immediately. We know them, not as a conclusion to prior premises, but without any premises at all. Knowledge of one’s own existence is one such intuition. The belief that I exist is a properly basic belief. It is self-evident, and can be known with greater certainty than anything else we can possibly know, even if one might argue that it is logically possible that we are mistaken.
Descartes does manage to sidestep some of the bigger difficulties with his line of thinking, of course. Cogito Ergo Sum just doesn’t work, but that’s why he has abandoned it by the Meditations — it appears in the earlier Discourse On Method, and he corrects himself by the Meditations. Unfortunately, he still commits a silent slip in reasoning, which fundamentally comes down to your #2.
Descartes imports a whole bunch of content into new words that he introduces. Like you mention here, when he says that “I” exist he thinks he then knows what “I” must be, this immaterial thinking self. He doesn’t even consider whether thought requires this particular type of thinker. He makes a similar move with the idea of God; he thinks he knows what ideas are, and because of his doctrine of ideas God must exist if the idea of God exists.
Just as he thinks within the confines of French or Latin, he thinks within the confines of his own conceptions of the self, ideas, God, etc. But this is the whole problem that would always plague the modern project: In the end it always treats realities that are in fact constructed as if they are neutral, just-the-facts, pure reason.
Jason Dulle,
“Could some hyper-skeptical individual doubt that he exists on the grounds you laid out in (1)? Yes, I suppose he could. But that is why reasonable people dismiss such hyper-skepticism as unfounded and impractical. There’s a big difference between the mere logical possibility that one is mistaken in their conclusion that they exist, and the rational justification for believing it to be so.”
Descartes wanted to doubt everything he possibility could, under the assumption that anything that survived all doubt would be sufficient grounds for true, indubitable knowledge. (Sadly, he never subjected the latter prejudice to doubt.) If we’re talking about Descartes’s project, then, what you’re saying here doesn’t come into play because of his particular method.
“He reasoned deductively as follows:
1 The act of thinking requires the existence of a thinker
2 I experience the act of thinking
3 Therefore I exist as a thinker”
Right, this is basically why he rearranges things when he writes the Meditations. There it becomes,
“If I persuaded myself of anything, then certainly I existed. But there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who deliberately and constantly deludes me. In that case, too, I undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me. And let him deceive me to his heart’s content, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So, after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, ‘I am, I exist’, is necessarily true whenever uttered by me or conceived by my mind.”
Jason,
I don’t disagree that it is absurd to doubt my own existence but I am saying that I think Kant’s project failed to accomplish what he had intended. He was being hyper-skeptical! He decided to doubt all that he could doubt. I am saying if he were to follow through on his project he should have doubted his own linguistic categories as well as his surety that he was the primary thinking being in his act of thinking.
Brian,
I just don’t see any reason one should doubt that they are an existing, thinking self. Mere logical possibilities are not sufficient grounds for doubt, particularly when knowledge of our self as a self is direct and immediate.
Jason,
Do you find Descartes argument convincing? Or are you arguing that there is no “practical” reason to doubt one’s existence? I don’t find Descartes argument convincing because there was more that could be doubted. If we can doubt it than it is not as foundational as Descartes hoped.
Brian:
How are you truly doubting your existence if you keep speaking in terms of “I”?
Can you personally actually doubt your existence? Have you tried? I mean just because you can say the actual words “I doubt my existence” doesn’t mean you have in fact doubted your existence. That would be like doubting that you doubt.
Bryan,
I haven’t sat down and doubted my own existence, no. Then again, there are a lot of thinks I have not seriously doubted. I haven’t doubted that my hands in front of me are real and I am not currently dreaming that I am seeing my hands. Descartes did this very thing.
And when I speak of “I” it can be doubted because I can doubt the reality of language and if “I” actually refers to anything real at all.
I am not sure if by “doubt” you think I am saying that I can really, really, really convince myself of these things. I don’t think Descartes did this. He only proposed that he could think of a possible scenario where his hands in front of him were not real of what he saw around him may be false sense perceptions. That does not mean he actually had this panicky experience where he thought this was so. No, he only realized the possibility that it wasn’t so could be perceived and he could see possible ways in which his view could be false.
Using his scheme I think he could have doubted his own existence, his autonomy, and even that his language actually mirrored reality.
No I’m not equating doubting with convincing yourself.
Can you doubt that you doubt?
In the context of this discussion it would seem you could “doubt” that you doubt because you could continue to doubt that there is really a “you” whose thinking is not dependent upon a greater mind. Also, I could “doubt” that the word “doubt” actually captures the experience that we seemingly share that we call “doubt” and therefore I am unable to really think about this subject at all if my language fails to connect.
Again, do I do this? No, but in Descartes game it is possible.
I think the problem with your examples is that you aren’t really given an example where “you” don’t actually exist. You are just giving examples of where you aren’t quite what you think you are but you still are. Even if you are just the product of a greater intelligence or the product of a complex computer program, you still are, you just aren’t what you think you are. I think your examples are just modern examples of Descartes demon.
Bryan,
In that case we must explore what you mean by “exist”. For instance, if we return to my super computer example, does that person actually “exist”? Or does a John Grisham character actually “exist”? Now if the greater being had an imagination more complex that a human (admittedly much, much, much more complex) where its characters could be imagined and the thought life of the characters could be examined (again, let us say our imagination is 2-D and this being like 4-D) would I be part of the greater being’s imagination, and therefore only “exist” in a similar matter to a character in a fiction novel, or would my existence be “real” like we assume reality?
Yes that consciousness (person) does exist. If it is self aware then it exists. If in the future scientists and computer programs figure a way to make a machine experience consciousness then that self aware consciousness in that machine does exist.
The John Grisham character isn’t actually self conscious.. If you exist in a beings mind and you experience actual self consciousness then yes you exist.
I could be wrong here, but it sounds like you might be confusing the subject with some particular ontology of the subject. For example, you say that if “I” am merely a thought produced by some super-powerful being, then you don’t think it can be said that I “really” exist. Why not? In what sense don’t I exist? That would be akin to saying that for Plotinus “I” do not exist simply because I am an emanation of The One. But, that does not follow. “I” exist, though I exist specifically as an emanation. It’s a very different kind of existence that your accustomed to thinking about, but that doesn’t make it non-existence. And, if we can allow that this is a form of existence, then it would seem to follow that if I have some kind of consciousness (e.g. self-awareness), then I exist. Granted, that is insufficient to establish the kind of existence that I have, but it would seem to establish some kind of existence.
Bryan and Marc,
I think the sort of existence of which you speak is a way of “existing” but I am not so sure Descartes would have found this sort of existence as a grounds upon which rationality could be built. If we admit this is the most “existence” we can know we cannot disprove suggestions such as we began at this very moment and our entire “memory” something with which we began our existence. Also, we have no guarantee that we won’t disappear in the next few seconds if this greater mind decides to stop imagining us or the super computer has a glitch.
So while I concede your point that we “exist” in some sense in this scenario it seems to be a far cry from the surety with which Descartes built his program.
Which by the way, on a side note, this reminds me of the sort of discussion that sometimes circles around the pre-existence of Christ where some argue that Jesus as the Word pre-existed in the mind as a forethought of God rather than as the Second Person of the Trinity. In such a discussion we may acknowledge that both approaches assume “existence” but a radical difference can be found between the two!
I’m not sure why the potentially cursory nature of this existence would be a problem. Descartes’ argument says nothing about how long he has been or will continue to be in existence. Only that he exists at the moment that he thinks.
And, of course, Descartes thinks that he can move beyond the bare fact of conscious existence through his ontological argument for the existence of God. Once he’s established that God exists and that he’s the kind of God who wouldn’t deceive us, he’s in position to draw all sorts of conclusions about himself and the world he lives in. So, to assess Descartes’ approach, you really need to take the cogito and the ontological argument together.
Marc,
As I posted elsewhere (https://nearemmaus.wordpress.com/2010/09/20/confused-by-descartes-cogito-ergo-sum-to-god/) I am really wrestling with his move to the ontological argument. I have struggled to see the ontological argument as good an argument as some have made it to be. For instance, if I imagined the ol’ (atheist beloved, tongue-in-cheek) spaghetti monster and I imagined that one essential characteristic of this being is necessary existence while I can see if this being does exist it must do so necessarily I don’t know how this demands that it does exist just because I can imagine it.
Now I know the spaghetti monster fails because it lacks all the other characteristics than Anselm and other posited like omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, and so forth and so on. Even at that juncture it seems that I can imagine categories that I cannot fully comprehend and so to some extent I am arguing for the surety of something using words that are only an attempt to clarify a very abstract idea that my mind cannot actually assess. To move from this to another characteristic being “necessary existence” (another phrase that seems to be trying to grasp something way, way too beyond my own cognitive abilities) feels like a huge leap.
That being said, going back to the cogito, it still doesn’t seem to me that the assumed experience of thinking can guarantee that there is really an “I” thinking and not a greater being who happens to have multi-layered thoughts were its thought can have secondary thoughts which would “appear” as it the first layer though (the so-called “I”) is the source of the secondary thought.
I think my brain is bleeding now…
I’m not satisfied with the ontological argument either. So, this is the point where I think his argument primarily breaks down. (Actually, I think the whole project breaks down earlier because I’m not a Cartesian rationalist and don’t think this is the right way to approach knowing in the first place.)
I can see where you’re struggling with this, but I think it’s more an indication of your own ontology than whether this kind of ontology is possible. There are many ontological systems that portray humans as ontologically identical with the One (whatever that is); we are simply expressions, emanations, thoughts, etc. But, in most of those systems, it’s still entirely possible to consider ourselves as existing (even if this is viewed as a bad thing and the goal is to transcend the relative “autonomy” of that existence and realize anew our essential unity with the One). It’s a different kind of existence than your used to imagining, but it’s not incoherent. (Wrong, but not incoherent.)
Snort a band-aid.
I don’t think Descartes system works either and I wonder if he would have been satisfied thinking of his existence any other way. Would he have seen the idea of emanating from “the One” as the kind of foundation upon which he could build his program?
Brian,
I think Descartes’ formal argument may be logically fallacious, but I do find the general idea he put forth to be convincing: the ability to doubt requires the presence of a thinking individual. As I said, this is a properly basic belief. Indeed, it is the most basic of all beliefs and needs no rational justification.
While I am inclined to think we can be absolutely certain of our own existence, I will admit the possibility that one could show some possible scenario under which doubt of our own existence is possible. Even if I were prepared to say “I exist” is not indubitable, of all the beliefs we have, surely the belief that “I exist” is the one for which we have the most justification, and the least reason to doubt. Just because it may be possible to be mistaken about such a belief does not mean we have any reason to think we actually are.
If Descartes was wrong, he was wrong to think there is any belief a finite creature can have that is indubitable, and wrong to think that for our beliefs to be justified, they must be based on the foundation of a belief that cannot be doubted.