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ABSTRACT
This re-examination of the cogito is prompted by a substantive question which has not previously been identified: the distinguishability of the I or self. Consequently, its force has not been addressed in the vast literature on the cogito. Failure to identify it is not simply an oversight, but gives rise to persistent misconceptions of the cogito. Descartes’ deepest error is supposed to be the confinement of the self within the perspective of consciousness, preventing it from conceiving even in the abstract of any thoughts happening elsewhere. Nothing in the Cartesian reflection gives us an objective perspective to conceive even in principle a substantial fact: ‘A is thinking’. My central aim is to set up this objection in the strongest form, and then to rebut it, beginning with a resolution of the persistent, fruitless debates regarding the status of the cogito by drawing a distinction between two kinds of order. I argue that, far from confining the self, the discovery of the cogito provides the basis for the self’s distinguishability and demonstrates the self’s conceptual resources to conceive a substantial fact, thus establishing the cogito’s unassailable legacy, and the self’s irreducible reality, freedom, and openness to the objective world.
Acknowledgment
This is a much revised version of a paper I presented at a workshop on “The Cogito—Yes or No?”, Ligerz, Switzerland, 19–23 April 2017, sponsored by the Swiss National Science Federation. I should like to thank Philipp Blum for organising the workshop and for inviting me. I should also like to thank the participants in the workshop for their comments. I wish also to thank Hemdat Lerman for her comments, and Peter J. King for his comments and numerous discussions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Williams, “Introductory Essay,” 247.
2. In accordance with standard usage, all references to Descartes’ works cited in the text are to the second edition of Oeuvres de Descartes, edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, abbreviated as AT, followed by the relevant volume and page numbers. The translation used is The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volumes I and II (trans. Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch), and Volume III: The Correspondence (trans. Cottingham, Stoothoff, Murdoch, and Kenny), cited in the text as CSMK, followed by page number.
Pace Williams, ‘incorrigibility’ and ‘irresistibility’ are not equivalent to ‘indubitability’; nor is Descartes concerned with justification which can be consistent with falsity. By ‘indubitability’ Descartes means what cannot be doubted (Second Set of Replies, AT VII 145–46).
3. Evans, “Understanding Demonstratives,” in Meaning and Understanding, 300.
4. Williams, Descartes, 100. Hereafter page references cited in the text are to this edition.
5. Descartes takes knowledge (scientia) to be metaphysically basic, not subject to reduction or conceptual analysis. Yet misattributions continue among commentators (e.g., Lennon, “Descartes’ Legacy”), and critics alike.
6. Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, K18.
7. Descartes’ “objective reality of clear and distinct ideas” rejects the veil-of-perception thesis (AT VI, 130); the content of such ideas involves a direct contact with their object.
8. Christofidou, “Descartes on Freedom”; Christofidou, Self, Freedom, and Reason, passim. The will is not an accidental faculty of the mind, as Barth (“Sellars on Descartes,” 16) claims; without the will, the intellect cannot assent, or judge.
9. Descartes: If the reader “knows nothing of my ‘metaphysical’ doubt and refers the doubt to [whether I have a body] may think that I am not of sound mind” (AT VII, 460).
10. Christofidou, “Descartes on Freedom”; Christofidou, Self, Reason, and Freedom, chaps. 6 and 7.
11. Understanding and willing are distinct modes of thinking, not radically disparate, as Della Rocca (“Judgement and Will”) argues. See Christofidou, Self, Reason, and Freedom.
12. Descartes’ technical intueri, to apprehend, to grasp non-inferentially what is real and true, requires “the conception of a clear and attentive mind, which is so easy and distinct that there can be no room for doubt about what we are understanding. … [It] proceeds solely from the light of reason” (AT X, 368–69), not the light of grace or divine emanation. Contra Kant, without intueri no first principles can be grasped, no deductive argument can begin, leading to an infinite regress, thereby destroying all reasoning.
13. The impossibility is not psychological; it implies existential inconsistency.
14. Such was the catchiness of the original formulation that it continues to mesmerise critics to this day. See King, One Hundred Philosophers, 89.
15. Contrary to Williams, Descartes, 91; and Wilson, Descartes, 57.
16. The Latin denique statuendum sit suggests ‘let it be established’, i.e., not deduced syllogistically.
17. If a proposition cannot be denied without a contradiction, it doesn’t follow that it’s uninformative or analytic, without conflating necessity and analyticity.
18. See Christofidou, Self, Reason, and Freedom; Christofidou, “Descartes: A Metaphysical Solution,” 88.
19. Criticisms by the phenomenological tradition that Descartes left the sum undiscussed, and never investigated the ego, are unfounded.
20. Cottingham, Descartes, 123.
21. See Christofidou, Self, Reason, and Freedom, chap. 3.
22. Kenny, Descartes, 44–45; Kenny, The Metaphysics of Mind, 9–10, a historiographical and philosophical error. See §7.1 below.
23. On conscientia, see Hennig, Cartesian Conscientia.
24. Sensations, emotions, etc., fall also under the faculty of sensory awareness; they presuppose the mind-body union, they arise from that union. Christofidou, “Descartes: A Metaphysical Solution.”
25. For Descartes conscientia, in terms of the self’s ability to reflect on itself, on its opinions, prejudices, is a case of being able to scrutinise, critically assess, or suspend them—exemplified in the First Meditation. It involves no introspection or “internal sense” which he rejects (AT VII, 76), no Humean theatre, no Wittgensteinian privacy, despite habitual misattributions. His conception differs from contemporary epistemologists’ concern with self-knowledge, e.g., knowing that it is sunny, seeing a tree, etc.
26. See Christofidou, Self, Reason, and Freedom, chap. 3.
27. See ibid., chap. 10; and Christofidou, “Descartes Dualism,” 215–38.
28. On Descartes’ conception of principle, see his letter to Clerselier, June 1646, AT IV 444; CSMK 290; Second Set of Replies, AT VII 140; Principles I 49, AT VIIIA 23; and Christofidou, Self, Reason, and Freedom, chaps. 4 and 8.
29. Although it appears that his existence forms a basis for God’s-existence argument (AT VII, 107), what figures as a premise is his clear and distinct idea of God (Letter to Mesland, 2 May 1644, AT IV, 112; CSMK 232). The “whole force of my proofs depends on this one fact … that [I have] the idea of a supremely perfect being” (AT VII, 107–8).
30. Appealing to God is also a way of expressing notions of fundamentality, totality, completeness. In such cases, Descartes makes use of it only where necessary, and only includes what he can argue for.
31. Evans, The Varieties of Reference, 228 n. 41.
32. Ibid., 226.
33. However, Descartes writes: “the notion I have of the infinite is in me [prior to] that of the finite because, by the mere fact that I conceive being … without thinking whether it is finite or infinite, what I conceive is infinite being; but in order to conceive a finite being, I have to take away something from this general notion of being, which must accordingly be there first” (Letter to Clerselier, 23 April 1649, AT V 356; CSMK 377). I realise that I am finite because I am doubting.
34. Frege, “Sense and Reference,” 215 n. 5.
35. It is the acts “of the will, the intellect, the imagination, and the senses” that are “within us … that we are immediately aware of” (Second Set of Replies, AT VII 160).
36. That some subject-predicate combinations might result in nonsense is acknowledged by Evans, adding “a proviso … but the substantive point is not affected” (The Varieties of Reference, 100 n. 17).
37. Nagel, The Last Word, 67 n. 11.
38. Evans, The Varieties of Reference, 212, 259.
39. See Christofidou, “Self-consciousness,” 539–69; Christofidou, Self, Reason, and Freedom, chap. 2.
40. Contra Strawson’s misattributions in The Bounds of Sense, 163–74.
41. Evans, “Understanding Demonstratives,” in Meaning and Understanding, 295; The Varieties of Reference, 237.
42. Wiggins, Sameness and Substance, 54–55.
43. This is for present purposes, while acknowledging the complexities surrounding individuation. See Gracia, ed., Individuation in Scholasticism.
44. Without the objectivity of content, no two thinkers would contradict each other, since they would not express the same thought, but each its own. Evans (The Varieties of Reference, 15) cites Frege’s Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence, 80).
45. Fine, “Tense and Reality,” 268.
46. It might be true that everything physical is real, objective, and natural, but the converse is not true. When Descartes refers to “the natural light of reason,” he’s referring neither to anything physical, nor to divine grace or supernatural illumination, but to something real, natural, objective, pertaining to any thinker.
47. Evans, The Varieties of Reference, 259 n. 2.
48. Nagel, The Last Word, 71.
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Andrea Christofidou
Andrea Christofidou works on metaphysics, the first-person, early modern philosophy, especially Descartes. Her recent publications include Self, Reason and Freedom: A New Light on Descartes’ Metaphysics (Routledge, 2013/2016); “Descartes: A Metaphysical Solution to the Mind–Body Relation and the Intellect’s Clear and Distinct Conception of the Union” (Philosophy 94, no. 369 [2019]: 84–114); and “Descartes’ Dualism versus Behaviourism” (Behavior and Philosophy 46 [2018]: 63–99. Cambridge Core Publications).