“I think therefore i am”, can really only mean “I think therefore i am a thinker”. The truth is[“I am therefore i think” “sum, ergo cogito” although not everything that is, thinks.b][/b]
i agree. existence precedes essence and action.
one is, and then one thinks - consciousness has to be directed, hence interntionality. one cannot merely be conscious, he has to be conscious of the fact that he is conscious. thus he has to exist first and foremost and this existence ensures the cogito.
In the movie Pi, a computer solves this ancient riddle. Before it breaksdown, it becomes aware of itself. It is awesome. Now I think that Descartes was right on the money. He said, “I think, therefore I am.” He said that because he was doubting the existence of everything. When it came to himself he said he exists. Why does he exist? Because he thinks. So it is the wording of the cogito.
right…but existence does and must have an effect. and the congito’s cause is most certainly God. descarctes goes on to give 2 proofs for this. it’s amazing how this second part of the equation is always lost in its repetition.
i think descartes’ entire intent was to proove God is, but needed to proove that the “I” is first. while we can say he said, i think therefore i am, a better reading of it would be God exists, I think of God, everything must be what I think.
interesting how this concept has been taken by the existentialists…i quiet like the robbery, however, and jedi_pocky summed this up nicely (btw, jedi, i love your sig 
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Jedi Pocky is great. Awesome mind resides within those flesh walls.
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I sometimes wonder if Descartes was born in present time, would he have tried so hard to prove God’s existence? I think I heard somewhere that he doubted everything, but he knew what had happened to Galileo, so he went against himself to try to prove God first. Does anybody have any valid info in this, because I’m not sure if it is true or not.
Perhaps, but Descartes was attempting to ascertain some certain knowledge. He couldn’t use the argument “I exist” because he didn’t know he existed. He first had to postulate the fact that he thought, which he subsequently shows that one cannot deny, and from that he concluded that he existed. It is paradoxical to say “I don’t exist” because in order to think it, one must exist.
I don’t think Descartes was trying to prove God with the cogito at all. Granted, he attempted to prove God’s existence in the 3rd and 5th Meditations but that was only after he’d proved his own existence. The statement “I think, therefore I am” regardless of Descartes own biases stands alone as a profound statement of certain knowledge. What we cannot doubt must be knowledge.
- ben
thank you for the kind words trix and jedi smooth. its certainly encouraging… i often feel overwhelmed when i come in here just lurking and around and reading. my knowledge is very limited to certain areas/writers i like.
descartes thought it necessary to prove the existence of g-d for he wanted to name a source for the thoughts in his head, hence god. (and then theres a whole discussion disputing this point in yet another thread somewhere here)
i agree with jedi, that was basically what i was trying to get at. its hard for me to believe that descartes ever gave up the belief in god and i think this is evident even from meditation 1 where he refers to a being who decieves not as god but as an evil demon. if descartes didn’t prove the cognito, then it would have been almost impossible for him to make the causual and ontological arguements for god’s existence. least we forget, descartes’ god is a thinking being.
I agree mostly with ben.
Anyway I don’t believe that Descartes’ main objective was to prove God’s ecistence.
I believe that he wanted to thorn down the antiquated scholastic system and build in its place a new one. Thus he started form the position of methodical doubt and tried step by step to understand what existed and what was in our power to know. I think he wanted just to use God just as a solid ground on which build everything else. The french philosopher had to prove God’s existence because he intended to use him as a garantor of truth. na dof our ability to attain it.
With Descartes God became the cardinal point of every search of knoweledge and ironically the symbol of the optimism in the human mind to totally comprehend truth.
In my opinion this sentence contain a piece of profound philosophy, no matter how simple it appears to us. My own interpretation of this is that what Descartes means is that the words “exsist” and “sum” have different values. Therefore I think that his statement is almost ambivalent. By the way, the latinum sentence for it is “Cogito ergo sum” , which gives the sentence the other sense than scorpio has mentioned.
As for me, someone is supposed to think for himself to exsist, because without thinking the human being is reduced to the lowest level and follows the others, or let’s say, immitates the others, what is in my opinion the worst fact. But I don’t say that children who grow up and who haven’t learned to think for themselves doesn’t exsist (would be a contradiction). I merely want to say that this “sum” describes mature people. Just to exist is not the same as being able to call yourself a human being with dignity and intellect.
Where is your evidence for this? “sum” is merely the latin for “I am”. In the 2nd meditation Descartes says “I am, I exist: this is certain, but for how long?” He himself equates “I am” to “I exist”. I’d be interested to see your evidence for supporting the claim that “I am” means something different to “I exist” according to Descartes.
I disagree. Why does existence have to include being mature. Although a child may not be able to understand Cartesian concepts, Descartes is attempting to show us that whenever a living mind thinks, regardless of what is thinking, it must exist. However, and Descartes is very clear on this, it only proves the existence of an object that thinks. It does not prove the existence of a person or a body, let alone a human being with dignity and intellect. Those attributes are not necessary. Descartes does not say “I think, therefore I am a human being with dignity and intellect” because he cannot take this as certain knowledge (which is what he’s trying to find).
You may have your own opinion of what “I exist” means, but it’s certainly not what Descartes is attempting to get at in his Meditations. His quest for certain knowledge starts and finishes with the Cogito. It does not, and cannot, postulate the existence of anything more than a thing that thinks.
With regards to Descartes motives, I do think he had an ulterior motive i.e. to prove the existence of God, whether that was because of his own religious leanings or because of pressures of the society he lived in. However, that does not detract anything from his philosophy if we forget who has written it and take is a stand-alone piece of literature. Descartes does not ask us to assume anything in his first two meditations and so they still hold as valid philosophy, even if he is setting the scene for his own agenda.
- ben
But “I am” before i say “I am”.
Or “I am” before i even think “I am”.
Well it doesn’t really matter for Descartes o_O
All he wants to prove is the existence of his mind
Since the non-existent is nothingness, and nothingness can’t think (as a matter of fact it can’t do anything, well it could be discussed), so his mind has to be existent.
The “ergo” (therefore) it’s not there to mean a temporal causality in which thinking is the cause of being, but connecting the two statements as a logical consequence. There is no temporality in his sense as a before or later; he is just saying “I know for a fact that I’m thinking, and if I’m thinking it means that I somehow exist” that’s all I see in the cogito.
Well I hope I’ve gave a satisfactory answer to your objection. If not please explain yourself better.
Im not sure what you mean by the non-existent, if your meaning “before I am” then surely it does think (just as your heart is beating without you thinking it to beat) just because your unconscious to something doesnt mean it doesnt exist.
Thats simply a very strong belief and not a “fact,” it already presupposes the apparent reality of thinking; “i think, i think therefore i am” would be a better analogy. I holding that your conscious or subjective experience is described by “I am”, or is of “I am”, you are presupposing that you can apply the word or concept “I am” correctly.
Kesh, you are misunderstanding the purpose of Descartes Cogito. Iroel has already said the same thing but I will try and lay it out as clearly as possible.
What Descartes IS saying:
- I think I don’t exist
- If I don’t exist, I cannot think
- Therefore I exist.
He is attempting to find some statement of knowledge of which we can be certain. This piece of knowledge is, “While I am thinking, I exist”.
What Descartes IS NOT saying:
- I exist
- I think
- If I exist, I think.
Descartes is definitely not saying that everything that exists thinks. What he is saying is that everything that thinks can know its existence because it is self-refuting to think and not exist.
How can it not be fact? If some object is thinking, it cannot not exist. If it did not exist it would not be able to think. What counter-example can you give of something that thinks but does not exist? The argument is self-refuting which is why it is untouchable by scepticism.
I have no idea what this means.
- ben
If something does not exist it is nothing.
Nothingness does not think.
Descartes cannot doubt that he is thinking. Hence he is not nothing thus he exists.
He cannot doubt he is thinking because he is posing questions. And even if those questions are illusions, an apearence of thinking, there still has to be something to be subject of the illusion. o_O
I’m been misunderstud here, I’l try and explain myself. My psyche existed for me before i could say “I”, and when this “I” disappears, like when asleep or unconscious my psyche and life go on as my observation of people in my dreams inform me. I not denying the reality of thought that would be as you said ‘self-refuting,’ i understand while Descartes Cogito was right to think that it could be certain as to how things seem to the first-person, or how things were in my own mind, its wrong to suppose that it holds a reality in-itself, within my own mind, or could be found within the first-person perspective of my own case. A first-person perspective, in which we find the strongest belief about the phenomena of mind and thought, is not that in which an account of these phenomena can ultimately be grounded or justified. The Cogito ergo sum or our capacity to think about ourselves, including the apprehension of experience, is all constituted as knowledge that could possibly relate to others, which shows in are being to be interpretable by others*. Thus, Cogito ergo sum finds ‘regular connections’ between utterance and action between people, so im making connections before i am uttering Cogito ergo sum, so Cogito ergo sum IS about its meaning in relation to others and not the subjective, reality in-itself prospective; this is why i see it not as “fact” but merely “apparent”.
i think, i think therefore i am.
If im again not understanding hit me with a wet fish or challenge me to a game of YU-GI-OH!
Others are not even considered by descartes because at the point he formulates the cogito he has already put in doubt all reality.
He claimed that as far as he knows all his life may very well be a dream, so others may be a creation of his mind and not be truly real, just ghosts.
o_O
The prime reality is not what i think,but that i live,for those also live who do not think. Do we perhaps feel thought, and do we not feel ourselves in the act of knowing and willing. The defect of discartes’s discourse lies in his resolution to begin by emptying himself of himself, in order that he might be a mere thinker, that is abstraction.