Univerza v Ljubljani,

Filozofska fakulteta

Cogito in Jaz
Proseminarska naloga pri predmetu Racionalizem

Šarić Ajla

Mentor:

dr. Miran Božović

Ljubljana, November 2018

 Contents

1. Introduction...................................................................................................................... 1

2. Reflections on the second meditation...............................................................................2

2.1 Methodic doubt..............................................................................................3

2.2 A cunning deciever........................................................................................3

2.3 Deception of senses.......................................................................................3

3. Nietzsche's critc on Descartes' cogito

4. Cogito ergo sum and solitary confirment; introspection or annihilation of self?

 1. Introduction

In this work, I shall take on a task of examining the concept Descartes had been, quite so thoroughly
and quite so radically doubting while writing one of the works, that without a doubt (or within it,
perhaps?) had an enormous impact on modern philosophy – Meditations on first philosophy.

First and foremost, it is necessary to reflect on the Second Meditation: The nature of the human mind,
and how it is better known than the body as a whole, in order to explain the concept of cogito and its
importance.

Further, I will be presenting a critical standpoint delivered by Friedrich Nietzsche in his works Beyond
Good and Evil, as well as The Gay Science. Finally, before concluding this paper I will, through my
own, personal re(cognition) of the sense of existence through thought alone, try to resolve and
elaborate the moments of supreme awareness that haunted me like an affliction that dates back to my
early childhood; and was, by all means – both sickening and blissful.
 2. Reflections on the Second Meditation

2.1 Methodic doubt

Descartes opens his Second Meditation with his methodic doubt (previously introduced in the First
Meditation) that is immensely important when it comes to understanding his method of proving the
existence of things through decomposing all previous beliefs in order to re-compose them again in a
manner such that they become „stable and likely to last“1. To bring his path closer to us, he states: „I
will suppose, then, that everything I see is fictitious. I will believe that my memory tells me nothing
but lies. I have no senses. Body, shape, extension, movement and place are illusions. So what remains
true? Perhaps just the fact that nothing is certain.“2

He throws away his senses and previously acquired knowledge, not for a pure cause of invoking doubt
itself, but to open up a passage that will, through his doubt establish the foundations of reason.
Descartes is not much like a skeptic that sees doubt as a way of thinking and perceiving for he knows
no other (and his doubt, as such - that exists only for the sake of itself alone, loses its philosophical
value) but rather as a seed that will give birth to beliefs that carry sound legitimacy.

2.2 Deception of the senses

The example Descartes uses to dispute the legitimacy of his senses is the one of wax; and how the
physical appearance it possesses (the one that can be perceived with one's eyes), its smell, shape and
the sound it produces once it has been touched, its colour and taste all fail to persist once that same
wax has been encountered by a fire (as it melts). However, the perception of wax that has been made
with the mind (ratio) remains the same, that it is, still, indeed, wax – and therefore, the final perception
he has conceived is not at all dependant on his senses, for they are not to be trusted (as it is shown in
that particular example), but with his intellect alone (solius mentis inspectio3), and it is then left to his
will to be affirmed or denied.

2.3 A cunning deceiver (genius malignus)

In order to postulate his Cogito ergo sum thesis, Descartes brings in the idea of an evil, powerful
deceiver who's single purpose is to constantly trick him; but even then when he does so, he will never
be able to convince him that „he is nothing while he thinks he is something“4, a standpoint he uses to
further exclaim, „At last I have discovered it – thought! This is the one thing that can't be separated
from me. I am. I exist – this is certain“...“strictly speaking, then, I am simply a thing that thinks – a
mind, or soul, or intellect or reason“ (Descartes believed he only had „moral insurance“ about the
existence of his body, whereas he had metaphysical certainty about his soul; which is why he was less
sure of the existence of the first than the second)5 to establish himself as a thing that „doubts almost
everything, understands some things, affirms this one thing (namely that he exists and thinks), denies
everything else, wants to know more, refuses to be deceived, imagines many things involuntarily and
is aware of others that seem to come from the senses“, but most importantly, he establishes that he, as
that thing, would exist no less in a perpetual dream controlled by an evil deceiver, if he himself
acknowledges his existence.
 3.Nietzsche's critc on Descartes' cogito

„Let the people suppose that knowledge means knowing things entirely; the philosopher must say to
himself: "When I analyze the process that is expressed in this sentence, 'I think,' I find a whole series
of daring assertions that would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove - for example, that it is I who
think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on
the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an 'ego,' and, finally, that it is already
determined what is to be designated by thinking - that I know what thinking is.“

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, 1886

As seen in chapter five of BGE6, while criticizing Descartes' concept of thinking and existing,
Nietzsche did not dispute the conclusion alone nor object to the conclusion as such; but he had
objected to Descartes subject-predicate logic, where it is presumed that the predicate is determined by
the subject, because „in Nietzsche's philosophy, “a thought comes when ‘it’ wants, not when „I“ want;
so that it is a falsification of the facts to say: the subject „I“ is the condition of the predicate „think“
(BGE 47)“7.

Nietzsche also believed that the ego, the „I“ was „manifestation of various drives“8 essentially
controlled and given by the Will to Power, and that we, even when we think that we are complaining
about a force of a drive, what is actually happening is that there is a second drive that is complaining
about the violence of the first drive9. However, I believe Nietzsche is, even if it is with great wit and
legitimate oppositions, reflecting more on Descartes' metaphysics than he is on the core idea that
comes out of Descartes' reasoning, which is why it becomes hard to justify his inversion – Sum ergo
cogito.

3.1 Nietzsche inverting Descartes – Cogito ergo sum or Sum ergo cogito?

Standing behind his objections on the subject-predicate logic (while, perhaps, unconsciously?)
disregarding that Descartes alone had given the answer to his objection, Nietzsche makes an attempt at
re-arranging the well know thesis into a form where he accentuates the importance of being (subsum)
for the purpose of thinking; however, given the idea Descartes' method included a rational being („...I
am simply a thing that thinks—a mind, or soul, or intellect, or reason, these being words whose
meaning I have only just come to know. Still, I am a real, existing thing10), the end result of his
attempt appears to fail in delivering a valid opposition, as it simply ignores one step in Descartes'
method, and goes straight to concluding that one (a rational being, and consequently – the first step)
who is aware of the fact that they are thinking - exists. This is why, personally, I think we should
observe Nietzsche's criticism more by examining the individual aspects he had targeted (such as that
the concept of self, the „I“ that comes before „think“ and „am“ (to exist) is merely a product of
various drives intervening and cannot be separated from Will to Power, than reflecting on the
conclusion that can be derived from Descartes' method.
 4. Cogito ergo sum and solitary confinement; introspection or annihilation of self?

„Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between
people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction.“

- Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Mikhail Bakhtin, 1929)

In order to reflect upon the idea that brings the Cartesian fashion into question, it would be perhaps of
most use to analyze how solitary confinement affects individuals, and how, following Descartes
dualism, it (in theory) should affect them. To make this more interesting for myself, I will bring in the
imaginary subject called Jim.

We will imagine Jim as an ordinary man, that got up one ordinary morning, grabbing Descartes'
Meditations on first philosophy because he wanted to revisit the idea of self-awareness. Somewhere in
the middle of the Second Meditation, he started having flashbacks of his life; he knew Descartes
thought Jim exists only if Jim thought Jim exists too, but what about his wife, Jo-Anne? Does he not,
on a way, exist through her eyes as well? Now, he knew Jo-Anne was a bitter woman, but she most
certainly was not insane, so while looking at Jim, telling him to take the trash out and obliging him to
feed the cat, and while thinking about Jim and how he always seizes to live up to her expectations, was
his existence not diluted within and throughout Jo-Anne's thoughts as well? And if this is true, would
that not mean on a way, he also existed through the eyes of every person that had ever crossed his
path? However, what is this version of Jim that had existed through other people?

To his wife, he was an incompetent husband that never managed to truly please her; to Cherry
Simmons from the summer of 1984, a handsome man with big words that got married too soon.
Assured that this was purely the consequence of how his wife's senses have fooled her and in order too
further investigate the problem of his own existence, he got up from the table, took an ordinary kitchen
knife and stabbed his wife to death in an unordinarily violent fashion. Then he sat back, and after
shortly considering what is the version of Jim that existed within the mind of his cat, Mittens, he called
the police that came and politely took him to prison.

Further on, we must imagine two versions of Jim (both of which had gotten into a fight with one of
their fellow prisoners over a method of peeling a hard-boiled egg, and both of them acquainted that
same unlucky inmate with a knife they made from a shank pulled out of a boot), and we must imagine
them in solitary confinment.

The first Jim enters the light depraved room, sits down in the corner and awaits for his meal. The idea
of his punishment is to make his thoughts turn inward (which is why he is provided sensory
deprivation) in order to make him understand the depth of his crimes and reform himself from within.
Jim likes this, as this is the perfect scenario for a Cartesian individual he takes himself for. He believes
if there is a method he can oblige to in order to change, this would have to be the one.

The second Jim enters the light depraved room, but he does not sit in the corner. He observes the
shape made out of light and shadows underneath a small window, as he exhales.
 4. Personal re(cognition) of cogito

Interestingly, I had recently been asked a seemingly simple question considering my earliest childhood
memory. After struggling for a while, trying to recollect anything that moves within the range of
things that can be explained with a rather plain and precise set of words describing common objects
connected with bittersweet childhood nostalgia, I failed. Of course, I most certainly remember such
things that lack complexity – my mother's voice, a parched tree in the backyard, an intense allergic
reaction to ambrosia. I could've said my earliest memory was the one of smelling this unusual- looking
plant under a crippled tree, hearing my mother scream „oh no, she's doing it again!“ in the background
(even though I most certainly lacked remembrance I had ever done it before); however, that would be
a straight up lie. Apart from being untrue, even worse of all, it would be irrelevant. But, why would it
be irrelevant?

For example, if we take the way Aristoteles and Plato explained the essence (even though Descartes
was not a supporter of Aristotelian epistemology) and apply it to my supposed first memory, we can
tell that a lot of these objects obtain their essence (the tree that provides apples as its' core
indestructible purpose or the plant that, well, gives me allergies), however, once their less important
material aspects are ignored, they seize to mold themselves into something of a greater importance.

Why would it be untrue? For, you see, the earliest recollection from childhood does not touch the
material world. It unravels entirely within the world of „thought“. The particular moment emerged
unexpectedly, it emerged during a non-particular family dinner, while I was observing people
surrounding me. I wondered, „how am I more in this suit of flesh here than I am in any other“?

I had only later learned that Schopenhauer had used a similar concept when he was explaining why
one should not fear death (trying to elaborate how on a way how it was not complete annihilation),
however, in this particular situation the concept moves in a different direction. Then, I started to
doubt: „what exactly is this awareness of mine? How am I aware in this particular moment of time,
more than I was in any other; how is this moment in time now, and how wasn't it fifteen, twenty or a
thousand years ago? And what makes this body mine, if I am not entitled to inhabit and claim any
other?“

You see, at that point in time my knowledge was very limited. I did not understand the physiology of
human body, and even less so did I understand the wiring of a human brain. I could not explain my
sense of existence to myself from a scientific aspect. And because of that, I unconsciously and without
any other choice available, used Descartes' methodic doubt.