Remarks on the Cogito with Reference to Reppert
Victor Reppert has an interesting recent post on the Cartesian Cogito ergo sum. He makes two main points. While the first is undeniably correct, the second is controversial. Here is my take on both points.
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1. Every sophomore knows how to parody the Cartesian dictum with 'I drink/link/stink, therefore I am' thereby demonstrating ignorance of the point Descartes was trying to make, not to mention the sort of jocose insouciance for which the sophomoric of all ages are famous. The Cartesian point is not that existence is a necessary condition of my engaging in an action or having a property, although that is certainly true. Pace Meinong, a thing cannot have a property, stand in a relation, or engage in an action unless it exists. If that were the point, drinking would do as well as thinking by way of proving my existence. For if it is true that I am drinking, then (given that existence is a necessary condition of property-possession) it follows that it is true that I exist.
Decartes' point is not the above straightforwardly ontological anti-Meinongian one, but a combined ontological-epistemological one. Given that I am conscious of a (putatively external) object (in whatever modality: perception, imagination, recollection, etc.), it is possible to doubt whether the object of consciousness exists apart from my being conscious of it. Presently gazing at Superstition Mountain, I can doubt the existence of the mountain, but I cannot doubt that a mental act of visual perception is now occurring, or that this act is of a mountain of such-and-such a description. Both act and object qua object are indubitable as to their existence; dubitable alone is the existence of the object in reality.
Suppose now that I am walking. I cannot doubt that I seem to be walking, but I can doubt that I am walking. This is the difference between Cogito ergo sum and Ambulo ergo sum. While cogitating (in the broad Cartesian sense that covers perception, imagination, etc.) I cannot doubt that I am cogitating; but while walking I can doubt that I am walking despite all my visual, aural and kinaesthetic sensations as of walking. (The 'as' serves notice that the walking may not be really occurrent for all that I can tell from within the experience.)
A cognate point is that the Cogito is not an enthymeme. It is not a truncated argument which, when spelled out, would amount to something like this:
Everything that thinks, exists
I think
Therefore
I exist.
This is a sound argument, but the most it shows is that 'I exist' is contingently true. Decartes' point, however, is that 'I exist' cannot be false as long as one is thinking. When I enact the Cogito, I do not argue, but achieve a direct insight, an intuition, of my being as a conscious and self-conscious subject.
2. The relevant schema exhibits a triadic structure: ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum. There are three distinguishable items but they appear to form an inseparable unity. There cannot be a cogitatio without a cogitatum qua cogitatum, and vice versa. Or, in Husserlian jargon, no noesis without a noema, and no noema without a noesis. It is also exceedingly plausible to maintain that there must be an I-pole (Husserl's Ichpol)corresponding to the object-pole, the cogitatum as such. Directedness to an object qua object demands directedness from a subject qua subject.
But what is not so clear is why the I-pole must be construed as a substance, a thinking substance or thinking thing (res cogitans). Here I believe Reppert goes wrong. He thinks that Descartes has proven the existence of a substantial thinker. Reppert writes:
. . . just because we can say "there are thoughts" and not actually say that someone is thinking those thoughts doesn't make the suggestion coherent. As Russell should have known, you can say "Floyd the barber shaves everyone who doesn't shave himself in Mayberry," but only when we ask whether Floyd shaves himself do we discover that the suggestion is not coherent. Does the term "pain" really mean anything if there is no one experiencing the pain? We can redescribe the pain in such a way that it no longer refers to an individual having the pain, (the firing of C-fibers in the brain) but if we do it seems we lose what is meant by pain. (This would be a good way to solve the problem of pain, if it were legitimate. "You think these people are suffering terrible pain, and that God shouldn't allow it. But really all that is going on is that people's C-fibers are firing.)
In short, I think that Descartes argument that there must be a thinking subject is a successful argument.
A Cartesian thinking subject is a substance, a continuant, i.e., an entity that is wholly present at each time it exists and is 'behind' each passing cogitatio. From the fact that there must be an I-pole, it does not follow that this I-pole must be a substance. It might be a momentary entity. Granting that a pain sensation must have an owner, that owner might be a momentary entitiy, a temporal slice of a person.
Instead of thinking of minds as substances, they could be thought of as diachronic bundles of temporal parts with each temporal part being a synchronic bundle of mental data. One such datum might be the hearing of a bird singing. In this hearing one can find the ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum structure. But it would be an inferential leap to say that the ego of that momentary mental act is a substance, a res cogitans in the Cartesian sense.
Notice: I am not saying that Reppert is wrong in his view that there is a substantial self. I share that view. What I am saying is that Reppert is wrong to think that the Cartesian Cogito proves the existence of a substantial self.
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Posted by William F. Vallicella on
Thursday April 7, 2005 at 9:45am
I'm thinking here of Kant's "Synthetical Unity of Apperception". He says:
So, in other words, don't we get over your objection to Descartes' (and Victor's) argument for the existence of a self once it is recognized that "I think" that accompanies all of our representations is not an evanescent 'point-consciousness', but an activity that has a duration whose unity requires a thinker?
Just a thought ...
Rob
Let's think about it some more. You made a good point with the barber example: what may seem to be coherent at first glance, may turn out not to be coherent. And so you want to say that, although at first glance it appears to make sense to posit a pain without an owner, upon analysis one sees that the suggestion is incoherent.
My point was that, even though this is right, it is still a further, and rather long, step from 'a mental datum must have an owner' to 'the owner must be a substance.'
Take an occurrent episode of perceiving. It has an object: no intentional state without object-directedness. But is there a subject, an I, from which the ray of intentonality proceeds, so to speak? Some, like Sartre and Butchvarov, deny this. But let's grant it. In other words, let's grant that a perceiving has both an object-pole and a subject-pole. How do you know that that subject-pole is a substance, a continuant?
One possibility is that there is an 'owner' of mental data, but that owner is construable bundle-theoretically. In that case, there is a diachronic subject of experience but no res cogitans, no soul or mind substance.
But I wasn't affirming the bundle view. I tend to think of the subject as a substance. My point against you and Descartes was that the substance view is not proven by the Cogito alone. I can say this without agreeing with Russell.