Descartes' Cogito and the Birth of the Modern Self
ACADEMIC PAPER
In the paper that follows, I attempt to trace the beginnings of modern conceptions of selfhood to Descartes, arguing that, for the first time in the post-Pagan west, the self would be conceived as an epistemological entity first and foremost.
Introduction
It can with little exaggeration be said that, with the works of Descartes, the modern philosophy of the self was born. Where for the Medievals, the self had first and foremost been a metaphysically conceived entity, one whose governing principles of unity, substance and permanence were theologically endowed and whose epistemic profile was derived from this metaphysical signification, Descartes would invert this primacy, outlining instead a self whose basic structure and foundation were epistemic in nature. By laying, at the foundation of the self, the cogito, Descartes did what, for the god-fearing scholastics, would have been almost inconceivable: he identified reason itself as the locus of one’s transcendental essence. For the history of philosophy this had, among many others, a major implication: the self no longer needed god for its ontological validation. In Descartes the idea of god is never absent, to be sure. Nor is it, contrarily, what it may be argued to be for Berkeley: an empty Deus ex Machina, one called upon to fill otherwise insoluble speculative lacunae. The god principle is an important component in Descartes’ reasoning, and yet, as one reads both Meditations on First Philosophy and Discourse on the Method, one is struck by the suspicion that he could just as well have done away with it without unduly compromising himself. God is no longer the causa ultima of human selfhood, no longer the logos whose light shines brightly on man’s otherwise pitifully limited mind, illuminating the way to true salvation and, therefore, to one’s highest and truest form of self. The light here spoken of is, instead, the ‘natural light’ of reason[1], the light one finds as one jostles through the jungle of one’s prejudices and superstitions, and finally uncovers, in the form of the cogito, the transcendental essence of the self. One is on account of one’s thinking, and one is as one is because one is a thinking thing, a res cogitans. The self here depicted is firmly a terrestrial not a celestial one, one that derives its metaphysical and ontological self-legitimations from its solipsistic reflections, and not the other way around.
The self Descartes arrives at, having clawed his way toward it through an epistemological quagmire, is one pruned of extraneous ‘worldhood’ in at least two ways: societal and sensorial. While he submits to the strictest scrutiny all beliefs he has hitherto thoughtlessly imbibed from others, and dispels them all, even those that give rise to merely the slightest doubt in him, he also questions those about the nature of objective reality which sense perception would initially appear to unquestioningly validate. The ‘Others’ – to borrow a Heideggerian term – are biased and careless, and the senses are spurious and misleading. The radical disavowal of both as legitimate fonts of knowledge leaves Descartes with only one option: to beat a hasty retreat in the exact opposite direction, into the depths of the cogito. It is here and here alone that he will find his authenticity: a self freed of pernicious external influences that seem eager, at every turn, to sway him from this very enterprise. It is almost certainly in Descartes, in fact, that we find the earliest comprehensive iteration, in modern times, of authentic selfhood. And his laying of its attainment at the foundation of his thought has at least two far-reaching implications for the history of philosophy. Firstly: if Cartesian philosophy is epistemological in scope and focus, and if it furthermore principally orients itself around considerations of the self, Descartes’ ‘first philosophy’ can also be seen as the philosophy of selfhood. Secondly: since the Enlightenment, broadly construed, is a project of human liberation from centuries-long falsehood and superstition, and since the antidote to this ancient inauthenticity is presented, often enough, as a return to the purity of the self, Descartes can be seen as its pioneering first proponent. If the search for the authentic self ushers in the beginning of the Enlightenment and provides the furnace in which many of its ideals are forged, then Descartes is its zealous pioneer. In this chapter, I shall examine Descartes’ notion of selfhood in light of these considerations, situating his thought as the beginning of modern notions of selfhood, and in the sections that follow, wield the thought of subsequent prominent theorists of the self to attempt to critique it.
The Cartesian empirical self: authenticity, doubt and demolition
Descartes’ mission to attain authentic selfhood is framed by him as a construction project – or better still, a reconstruction project – and so, in fact, it can legitimately be seen. In Meditation I, he describes the initial impetus behind this enterprise: having reflected on the sheer quantity of falsehoods he’d unquestioningly taken for truths in his childhood, he is suddenly horrified at the “highly doubtful nature of the edifice [he’d] subsequently based upon them.”[2] His ‘I’, which he now deems filled with objects of knowledge questionable both for their unreliable sources and the inherent shakiness of their presuppositions, suddenly begins to sway as might a building that rests on unstable foundations. Famously, he declares he must “demolish everything”[3], raze his ‘I’ to the ground and start again from zero. The empirical self, which for Descartes – implicitly, at least – amounts to the sum total of all epistemic data pieced together over time in one’s consciousness, is here revealed to be misconstructed, and in desperate need of being dismantled and rebuilt – one unit at a time. It is a sudden, anxiety-ridden awareness of one’s inauthenticity – one that will be more than faintly echoed by Heidegger three centuries later[4] – which serves to prompt Descartes’ investigations. His consciousness, which is so cluttered by falsehoods as to make any single authentic datum of knowledge, any legitimate mental representation of reality all but impossible to identify among them, must now be hollowed out completely, so as to make space for such truthful representations as they are arrived at.
Very little survives Descartes’ ruthless demolitions. As he scans his misconstructed empirical self, and all the doubtful opinions that have thitherto inhabited it, he understands how precious little can be salvaged. He begins with traditional ethics, applying the full force of his doubt to the disquisitions of the ancient moralists, which he describes as “very towering and magnificent palaces with no better foundation than sand and mud”[5]. He then takes his wrecking ball to philosophy, in whose sphere, he argues, there is no matter “which is not still in dispute, and nothing, therefore, which is above doubt”[6]. Not yet satisfied, he finally passes to the ‘other sciences’ which, since they derive their foundational principles from philosophy, must necessarily be demolished in the same fashion[7].
Descartes’ emptying-out of his empirical self is total and devastating; not even beliefs derived from sense perception are permitted to retain their residency therein. Since our senses give us inconsistent representations of reality – here conveying as small an object simply because it is distant, there conveying it as dark in colour simply because it is poorly lit – we would do well to discard them altogether. The senses are inherently unreliable, and cannot be used as a steadfast source of knowledge, nor as an acceptable engineering principle of selfhood. Descartes attempts to illustrate this assertion exactly in a celebrated passage about shape-shifting wax. Fresh from the honeycomb, wax is firm, cold, easily grasped and handled. It retains some of the taste of honey and the scent of the flowers of the plant from which it was gathered. And yet if you hold it over a flame, it melts, it loses its scent, its taste and its solid texture. Were it for the senses alone, you may be duped into thinking the substance had changed entirely, and yet you know this is not so; it is still wax. How can we know this? How are we able to affirm the persistence of the wax through its different physical iterations? How are we able to maintain a firm hold on our authenticity when the world outside us appears hell-bent on warping it at every opportunity? The answer for Descartes, as we shall see now see, lies in the deeper structures of the mind, in the ‘transcendental’ part of the self.
The Cartesian transcendental self, or the cogito
Thus far we have discussed what might broadly be termed Descartes ‘empirical self’. It is a term he himself never uses, but which may nonetheless be applied to a distinction repeatedly implied in his thought. The empirical self is – to further Descartes’ own edificial metaphor – that part of the ego which is constructed. It is comprised of all the knowledge-data I am able to gather of the world by any means at my disposal – through sense perception, by the power of my own reason, or as a result of social conditioning. Since my mind knows not instinctively how to distinguish which among these is reliable as a source of knowledge and which isn’t, it will often allow world-representations to enter and settle its consciousness indiscriminately, irrespective of their origin or veracity. This mechanism exactly is what can lead to the inauthentic ‘I’, which can hereby be defined as a consciousness that is inhabited – either wholly or partly – by false representations of reality. The empirical self is, therefore, not the same as an empiricist self – the latter referring to a consciousness whose structure is comprised entirely, or at least primarily, by data derived by sense perception.
The empirical self is, here, rather closer to how it would be conceptualised by Kant a century later. It is that part of the self which sits ‘inside’ the consciousness, and is subsumed by it; that part of the ‘I’ which, since it derives its content, in one way or another, from an interaction with the outside world, can be seen as changeable, or ‘infinite’ in the Kierkegaardian sense[8]. We can always alter a belief, either by starting from a place of falsehood and steering it toward truth, or, for that matter, vice versa. In both cases, we are dependent on an idea we derive from a representation of reality – whether it come from our own thought, other people, our sense perceptions, or a combination of these. In this specific, ‘Kantian’ sense, the empirical self is a posteriori. It is not, in other words, necessary and universal; it is particular and adventitious. It is formed, unit by unit over time, by means of a delicate interplay between my experience of the world and the shaping effect reason exerts on it[9]. As, during the course of my life, my empirical self gathers form, I understand just how great a role chance has played in it. I cast my mind back on my own personal history, and realise that my empirical ‘I’ could just easily have developed in some other way, had I steered it on another path; had I taken mathematics as a college major rather than art, married that person rather than this, chosen to quit my job rather than stayed, or, at some point, renounced my religious beliefs rather than held onto them. Each of these would have caused my empirical self to skew into a radically different tangent. My role in its construction is thus undeniable, even when it is merely indirect, that is, when it is merely the passive and unquestioning reception of actions dealt me by circumstance. I play just as critical a part in its development as I would in the brick-by-brick construction of my own house – even when it is someone else who provides the bricks and I merely sit on the sidelines, giving my silent assent that they be laid.
Such is not the case for the transcendental self. Where the empirical self is constructed, the transcendental self is discovered. Where the empirical self is formable by a step-by-step process, in which one datum is slowly added to another, and over time a comprehensive structure takes shape, the transcendental self is pre-formed. The empirical self requires an active, involved participation on the part of the individual in whose consciousness it resides; its transcendental counterpart, however, is readymade, already existing in its complete form, waiting to be found. It requires no greater intervention than a patient teasing-out, a judicious uncovering. The empirical self resides ‘inside’ the consciousness, whereas the transcendental self envelops it. The transcendental self is necessary and universal, that superstructure of consciousness without which human essence and knowledge is impossible, and human Being is next to inconceivable. It is this, among other things, that is intended by Descartes when he proclaims, “Cogito, ergo sum”[10]. That is, not only is the self verified as existing through an uncovering of its own epistemic core, but it can be also said to be incapable of existing in any other way that by means of it. For Descartes, the cogito is the pure, distilled essence of the transcendental self, that kernel of his selfhood which is leftover after his project of demolition has been successfully completed, after his inauthentic empirical self has been dismantled. In this sense, Descartes’ conception of the ‘I’ is necessarily twofold; the self is both empirical and transcendental, both formable and discoverable. This latter part, the aspect without which human thought and existence would be inconceivable, is – its necessity and universality notwithstanding – latent and elusive. It sits in a remote inner chamber of the consciousness, and can be accessed in no other way than by going – as Nietzsche worded it – “down into the deepest depths”[11]. And once these depths are reached, it requires, in order to be teased out of its hiding-place, an operation more passive than active, like the capture of a hare by lure-and-trap. Since it is necessary and universal – that is, a priori – it is a sort of essential purity. It is authentic in this fundamental sense; my transcendental core of selfhood is faithful to me, always, since it is necessarily unchanging and unchangeable. It has always been there and can at most be covered over but never removed, nor for that matter implanted. No matter how long it remains hidden, nor how heavy is the empirical shroud with which I cloak it, if I sheer it of all unnecessary worldhood, I will find that it has lain there all along, intact and unmoved. In this sense, Sartre’s ontological priority can here be seen as pre-emptively inverted. For Descartes, essence precedes existence – if not metaphysically, then certainly epistemologically. I know and think first, I exist later; up until this point, everything, even my own Being, can be doubted. I know I exit because, at my core, in my innermost essence, I am a thinking thing, a res cogitans.
When Descartes places the search of his ‘I’ at the centre of his philosophical project[12], the ‘I’ that he is searching for is, in fact, the transcendental kind. For, were it empirical, it would be constructed rather than found; one can no more search for it than one can the house in which one resides, or the house one intends to build. The reconstruction of the empirical ‘I’ must necessarily wait until its transcendental foundation has been decluttered and unearthed. In fact, the Descartes recognises as the necessary condition for an authentic reconstruction of the empirical self, the laying bare of the transcendental framework precisely. Descartes’ project of authentic selfhood is thus revealed to be a three-step process: (a) clear the empirical ‘I’ of its inauthentic clutter; (b) identify the pure, transcendental ‘cogito’ as the locus of all a priori authentic selfhood; and (c) rebuild an authentic self a posteriori on the foundations afforded by (b).
It may at first appear fatuous and anachronistic to speak of the cogito in Kantian terms, but it important for the reader to keep in mind that these are here merely used as hermeneutic tools; they are not intended to replicate exactly the Kantian ideas they broadly evoke. The Kantian transcendental self is a ‘unity of apperception’, which has a very specific technical meaning inapplicable in its details to Descartes. It is, for Kant, the a priori condition of the combination of the manifold of intuitions in the consciousness, as well as the domicile of the pure concepts of the understanding according to whose rules this synthesis takes place. In Descartes, there is no synthesis, nor any pure concepts of the understanding – at least not in the strict sense – and any attempt to ascribe these to him would be anachronistic without question. And yet, taken laterally, as an a priori – that is, universal and necessary – structure of consciousness from which all empirical iterations are derived, Descartes’ cogito can be deemed transcendental without question. It is the non plus ultra of consciousness, it’s a priori precondition – just as it is for Kant.
A notable difference between Descartes and Kant lies in how they articulate the relationship between the empirical and the transcendental selves. Where for Kant, the transcendental ‘I’ yields an empirical ‘I’ incapable of grasping its own unity, in Descartes we see the opposite result. The empirical self is a unity precisely because of the transcendental foundation upon which it rests, and holds together for this reason. However numerous and discrepant my thoughts, intuitions and representations may appear to be, they are inescapably bound together by the unity the cogito affords. I may here doubt and deny, there assert and understand. I may in one minute feel fear, but joy the next. I may on Wednesday negate a belief which on Tuesday I triumphantly affirmed. I may in the dark see an apple as blue which a moment ago in the light appeared red. But throughout these empirical vicissitudes, I remain sturdy in my ‘I’, for it is anchored in the transcendental cogito. I am, always and inescapably, a thinking thing: coherent, unitary and indivisible. This Kant would have deemed a paralogistic affirmation, one lying beyond the limits of human reason to genuinely support. For Descartes, on the contrary, it is an axiomatic first principle, the cornerstone of his philosophy of the self and, by extension, his philosophy tout court.
Before moving onto the final section of this chapter – a critique of Descartes’ position – we will do well to briefly summarise the findings of the last two sections in light of some of the historical statements we initially used to frame them. Descartes’ philosophy of the self can, without exaggeration, be seen as his first philosophy – this he explicitly mentions in a least two places in the two works here focused on[13]. His search for ‘truth’, and for a means of consistently and reliably reaching it is, at once, a quest for that part of one’s consciousness free of those pernicious, inauthentic influences that are external to it, for the authentic ‘I’. Given the radical departure of Descartes’ thought from that which precedes him, and also its far-reaching, revolutionary consequences over time, it could also convincingly be argued that the start of the Enlightenment is coincidental with the establishment of the authentic ‘I’ as philosophy’s governing epistemological principle.
Critique
As we have said, Descartes’ philosophy of the self is revolutionary for its inversion of the supremacy of metaphysics over epistemology. The ‘I’ is, now, articulated chiefly in epistemological terms – in terms of what it knows and how it knows it. The metaphysical implications of the cogito are clear and unmistakable, but incidental. One arrives at an understanding of the metaphysics of the transcendental self by means of one’s reason, and when one uncovers it, it too is found, in its essence, to be a thing of reason, a res cogitans. My innermost self has no other essence than thinking. This is, of course, a metaphysical affirmation, to be sure, but it is one that trails far behind the epistemic arguments that prop it up and legitimate it. What one is left with, once Descartes has demolished the inauthentic empirical self, identified its transcendental counterpart and begun his project of reconstruction, is an epistemic entity, one that has built itself up from the bare foundations of its thinking essence, one brick of knowledge at a time, into an authentic unity. The coherence of the self is guaranteed, not by god, but by the cogito, that a priori principle of the unity of selfhood that is uncovered by all who have courage and patience enough to excavate the depths.
Nowhere does Descartes, in fact, raise god to an uncontestable and unequivocal position of epistemological supremacy, though he many times mentions and extolls him, and even claims confidently to do exactly that – this is the first point of my critique. In various places, Descartes alleges that all knowledge, and therefore the self depend on god[14], and yet how he can sincerely maintain this position while at the same time arguing that all knowledge depends on the cogito, would, I feel, be difficult to justify by any means except spurious and sophistical argumentation. It is not upon god that knowledge depends; it is rather upon knowledge that god depends. First, we locate the transcendental self, then we devise an axiomatic first principle on which the existence of god can be predicated, and then we find god. God sits in the empirical ‘I’ as might any other concept or idea. When we confuse him for an object of external reality, and attribute to him existence simply because he appears to possess an essence to which it would be illogical to attribute non-existence, we forget how he got there to begin with. Kant would argue precisely this in his Transcendental Dialectic[15]. The seeds of this argument against the existence of god, or at the very least against his philosophical supremacy, are ironically contained in the very arguments Descartes devises to prove it – he simply fails to see it, or chooses not to. In word, he places god in first place while, in deed, he relegates him to second. It is likely that the reasons for this are historical: the time was rich enough in skepticism and freedom of thought to allow for an exultation of human reason, but yet poor enough in both to prohibit a flat-out refutation of the guiding principle it was poised to usurp. So Descartes, a child of his time, had no choice but to somewhat awkwardly place both side by side.
And now for my second critique, which can be seen as obliquely related to the first. Descartes’ epistemological inversion relegates also ontology to an inferior position. Among myriad others, ‘Cogito ergo sum’ may be argued to generate the following implications: “I know before I am”, “I exist only as a thinking self”, “I exist only by means of thinking”, “I know I am, therefore I am”, “thinking precedes existence”, etc…One gets the picture. For Descartes, being is functional to thinking, and the self is conditioned and structured by this same metaphysical hierarchy. This raises a number of important issues. The first is the nagging feeling, as difficult to dispel as it is to adequately resolve, that the leap from thinking to being isn’t adequately justified, and that it could just as easily have led Descartes to the opposite conclusion: that we exist not at all, or at most as mere thinking things, uprooted, free-floating epistemic entities in some kind of vague, idealist realm in which all images are products of our imagination, and god is, not the creator of reality but the conjurer of a simulated fantasy land. Here, we would exist in a sense, but certainly not in the fully-fledged, three-dimensional fashion Descartes presumably intends. To this, Descartes would no doubt argue that, since god is all good, he would never allow such a monstrous deception, and that all of our epistemic shortcomings are due either to our human finitude or to an evil deceiver, an other-worldly daemon who, for some inexplicable reason, has charged himself with the rather spiteful full-time job of hoodwinking humanity at every chance. But it is a tall order indeed for any contemporary reader to see this second argument as anything but nonsensical, or at the very least a desperate Deus ex Machina – even if they do manage to accept the almost equally dubious premise of god’s all-encompassing benevolence. Surely, Being comes first, knowledge later – in the philosophy of the self as everywhere else. This would be Heidegger’s and Sartre’s rebuttal precisely. For Sartre, there is no transcendental self at all, and all the ‘bits and bobs’ that comprise my ‘I’ are gathered by the consciousness piecemeal throughout my life thanks to intentional relations I share with them. I exist first, I construct my ‘self’ later. In a very vulgar and broad sense, you can say that Sartre’s phenomenological ‘I’ is Descartes’ empirical self stripped of its transcendental foundation. For Heidegger, Descartes commits the glaring error of focusing on the wrong half of his immortal dictum. It is the sum that interests him, not the cogito. There can be no thinking – or anything else, for that matter – without Being. Being pervades all entities, including the self. For, how can I think if I am not, if I don’t first exist? Is thinking not itself a form of Being, and does it not rest on that foundation? In this sense, the cogito can be seen as an empty tautology. I could not think if I didn’t already exist, since thinking is a form of being, and so to draw the conclusion of existence from this premise is to repeat oneself needlessly. This was, in fact, Kant’s argument.
Heidegger makes another well-known attack on the cogito, and it is herewith that I will conclude the chapter. Descartes’ method for arriving at his authentic self is a radical demolition by means of a doubt that amounts to nothing short of a complete sheering of one’s worldhood. But if I strip my ‘self’ of all its empirical contents, of the whole world and all objects in it, what am I really left with it? Is it a transcendental ego or a vacuum? Is it my pure ‘everything’ that I stumble upon when I leave the world behind, or a ‘nothing’, an empty abyss? What am I, really, without the world I inhabit? For Heidegger, our Being could be articulately in no other way than as ‘Being-in-the-world’. We exist only in this world, as entities that dwell in it. To take us out of it would be to simultaneously end our being, and this could only happen with the finality of death. We are side by side with all other things. We exist, inescapably, in time and space, and our destinies are intimately bound up with all other existing entities. One cannot strip one’s worldhood away without simultaneously ending one’s life – this, in fact, would be the only way to do so – and then there would be no more self to analyse – empirical or otherwise.
Bibliography
Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. and ed. by John Cottingham.
Cambridge University Press, 1996
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. by John Macquarrie Edward Robinson. Harper &
Row, 1962
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Pure Reason. Tr. Paul Guter, Allen E. Wood. Cambridge
University Press, 1998
Kierkegaard, Søren. Sickness unto Death. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
Alastair Hannay. Penguin Books
Nietzsche, Friederich. Dawn of Day. Trans.J.M. Kennedy. Mineola, NY: Dover Philosophical
Classics, 2007
[1] Meditation (Med.) III, p. 26
[2] Med. I, p. 12
[3] Med. I, p. 12
[4] Being and Time, p. 343
[5] Discourse on the Method (DM) part I, p. 6
[6] DM, part I, pp. 6-7
[7] DM, part I, p. 7
[8] Sickness unto Death, p. 60
[9] This affirmation may at first appear more Kantian than Cartesian, but it is nonetheless one which, I believe, Descartes would have endorsed, for even he understands that, in order for reason to be useful at all, it needs to draw upon data given in experience. The wax, for instance, is initially given to us through the senses, even though the conceptual framework within which we make sense of it as a unity is a faculty of our reason.
[10] “I think, therefore I am”
[11] Dawn of Day, p. 2
[12] DM Part I, p. 7: “I entirely abandoned the study of letters, and resolved no longer to seek any other science than the knowledge of myself.” Also Med. III, pp. 16-17: “But I do not yet have a sufficient understanding of what this ‘I’ is, that now necessarily exists. So I must be on my guard against carelessly taking something else to be this T…I will therefore go back and meditate on what I originally believed myself to be, before I embarked on this present train of thought.”
[13] DM Part I, p. 7; Med. II, p. 17
[14] Med. III, p. 37; Med. V, p. 49
[15] Critique of Pure Reason [A592/B620]
