Formulating the Cogito

Formulating the Cogito

The Cogito is usually expressed in the words “I think, therefore I am”. The first clause is misleading: it suggests the proposition that I am a thinker, i.e., that I think things at different times. I might assert this because I remember thinking something yesterday and expect to think something five minutes from now. The sentence “I think” is like “I play tennis”—it suggests something I do regularly. But this cannot be what is meant because it is not indubitable: I could be wrong in my memory of past thinking and my expectation of future thinking. Rather, the sentence should be something like “I am thinking now”: that is something that is not vulnerable to skeptical doubt concerning other times. But then the conclusion has to be read accordingly: “therefore I exist now as a thinker”. This does not imply that I am also a self that desires, imagines, dreams, etc. I can only be having occurrent instances of part of my mind at any given time, not all of it; so, these occurrent instances are all I have to go on in deriving a conclusion about the existence of myself. I cannot say “I am thinking now, therefore I exist as a desiring, imagining, dreaming being”: the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises. I can only move from what is happening in my mind now to an existential conclusion about an entity of that type. So, I can never infer anything about the existence of a self that transcends what is happening right now in my consciousness, i.e., a self that has many mental attributes not just the attribute currently instantiated. Consider “I am now doubting that I exist, therefore I exist”, one version of the Cogito. Strictly speaking, the conclusion must be read “therefore I now exist as a doubting being”. Whether I am any other type of psychological being has yet to be determined. Thus, this version of the Cogito delivers only the existence of a momentary doubting being—which is just a part of my nature as a self. I can’t even infer that I exist as a thinking being unless we add the premise that doubting is a form of thinking—and might it not be just a feeling of uncertainty? Certainly, the existence of a feeling being does not entail the existence of a thinking being. Also, being able to think one kind of thought does not entail being able to think all kinds of thought, so the version that begins “I am thinking now” doesn’t necessarily give us the existence of an entity that thinks the kinds of things we normally take ourselves to think; it might give us only a small fragment of our mental life as we normally understand it. Given the structure of the Cogito, it is capable only of yielding the most minimal notion of a self, not the multidimensional entity we take ourselves to be. Really, it should be formulated “I am thinking now, therefore I exist now as a momentary subject capable only of thinking what I am thinking now”—not much progress against the skeptic. It is hardly what I mean when I say “I exist”.