Descartes’ foundation and Borges’ ruins: how to doubt the Cogito

ABSTRACT

Descartes claimed that the Cogito is ‘so firm and sure that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were incapable of shaking it’. This paper aims to demonstrate that this claim is false by presenting a sceptical scenario for the Cogito. It is argued that the story ‘The Circular Ruins’ by J. L. Borges illustrates that one can doubt one’s own existence and that pace Descartes (and many others) the claim ‘I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind’ is false.

KEYWORDS:

• Descartes
• Cogito
• Borges
• doubt

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I have used the Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch (1984–5) translation abbreviated as CSM followed by the appropriate volume and page number.

2 Recent scholarship paid attention to how the Cogito reasoning of the Discourse on the Method is not the same as the Cogito paragraph in the Meditations: the former is more inference from thinking to existing, whereas the latter seems to arrive to existence first. Indeed, Descartes presents different versions of the Cogito in various work. These differences, though certainly interesting, are tangential to the central goal of this paper, so we will not address them here.

3 To name just a few of very many examples: Hintikka (1962), Frankfurt (1970), Slezak (1983) and various references therein.

4 Johnston (2010) is a notable exception. Johnston claims that the Cogito ‘is not indubitable in Descartes’ special sense’ (142) Johnston supports this claim by presenting a sceptical scenario (pp. 142-144). The scenario consists of a source of testimony that acquires ‘considerable credibility’ (143) and then testifies as follows: ‘We members of an incredibly advanced civilization have discovered precise psychophysical correlations that enable us to create physical realizers of arenas of presence and to fill those arenas with hallucinations of people at them. But it is not that these physical realizers are persons, who could then be candidates to be the ones really at the respective centers that they create.’ (143) According to Johnston, ‘To the extent that those propositions became plausible at this arena of presence, it would be plausible that there is no one, no person, occupying this arena of presence. It would be plausible that there is no one to pick out as ‘I, myself’ even though this arena of presence is filled with thought and bodily sensational and ostensible perceptual experience … Not even the Cogito survives as something indubitable.’ (144, emphasis added) The demonstration of the dubitability of the Cogito offered in this paper is different from the one proposed by Johnston.

5 I note that this paper is not intended as a work of Descartes scholarship per se; the argument advanced in this paper does not rely on the state of the secondary literature on Descartes.

6 See, also, Wagner (2014), Paul (2018), and Forsman (2019). Paul (2018), for example, alluding to Cunning, writes: ‘Commentators almost universally recognize that Descartes believes that our awareness of the mind is ordinarily confused with our awareness of the body. Some scholars have noted that, in Descartes’s view, so long as we retain this confusion we cannot have knowledge of the existence of any mind, not even our own.’ (1110, emphasis added) Forsman (2019) explains that on his view one can doubt one’s own existence not just by thinking it confusedly, as Cunning proposes, but also one can ‘doubt her existence by losing attention from self-awareness’ (93, fn. 7)

7 Commentators distinguish between psychological and normative conceptions of indubitability. A perception/idea is psychologically indubitable just in case it is psychologically impossible to withhold one’s assent to this perception. See, e.g., Gewirth (1941), Larmore (1984) and Loeb (1990). A perception is normatively indubitable just in case one is rationally required to assent to this perception. See, e.g., Alanen (2003). See also Carriero (2008), Della Rocca (2005), and Van Cleve (1979). These ongoing debates demonstrate that Ayer’s observation about the absence of a clear criterion for dubitability remains true.

8 But see Hintikka (1962) for a reading of the cogito ‘move’ as performative. See also Broughton (2003).

9 ‘Partial Magic in the Quixote’ in Borges (1962) pp. 193–196, p. 193.

10 I am grateful to the editor of this journal for calling my attention to a paper published in Spanish by Samuel M. Cabanchik (2017). While I don't read Spanish, it seems that Cabanchik, too, finds that much can be gained by reading Borges’ ‘The Circular Ruins’ alongside Descartes’ Cogito.

11 EL PAÍS, 26 SEP 1981: Jorge Luis Borges: "No estoy seguro de que yo exista en realidad", https://elpais.com/diario/1981/09/26/ultima/370303206_850215.html

12 There may be cases in which there is no clear distinction between appearance and reality. For example, one might think that there is no such distinction with respect to pain: the mere appearance of pain is sufficient to guarantee its existence. Whatever one thinks of the case of pain, I take it that, intuitively, we can draw a distinction between the appearance of an ‘I’ and its existence. (Thanks to an anonymous referee for this point).

13 An anonymous referee kindly called my attention to some interesting similarities between the rationale for the first premise of this argument and some well-known comments by Hume (2000) on the ‘bundle theory’ of the self. E.g., ‘For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other … I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception … [we] are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.’ (Treatise, 1.4.6.3-4). If one accepts Hume’s bundle theory, one will likely accept the first premise. However, if one accepts the first premise because one is inclined to accept the bundle theory, then one might not be inclined to accept the second premise, because one might resist the claim that there is an intuitive distinction between an appearance of an ‘I’ and its reality. While it is extremely interesting and worthwhile to consider the implications of Hume’s bundle theory of self on Descartes’ Cogito, we will have to leave this task for another occasion. For the purposes of this paper, I will only note that while the rationale for the first premise does share some similarities to the motivation behind Hume’s bundle theory, it does not rely on, nor does it entail, a bundle theory of the self. The hope is that one can find the first premise plausible regardless of the theory-of-self one holds. Indeed, the argument is presented in way analogous to Descartes’ dream argument, and much like the dream argument it is not meant to be assessed with any specific metaphysical view in mind.

14 But see fn. 10 above for a possible qualification of this claim.

15 Does this conclusion entail that I do not know that I exist? Does it entail radical scepticism? I think not. Few, if any, current epistemologists believe that indubitability is required for knowledge. If one rejects this requirement, one can allow that the Cogito can be doubted without thereby committing to the view that one cannot know that one exists. Thanks to an anonymous referee for inviting me to clarify this.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Israel Science Foundation [Grant Number 1943/20].