The Cogito, or Consciousness as a Loan

Introduction

The Cogito, traditionally interpreted as the foundation of the subject, could conversely be interpreted as a revelation of the subject’s dependence: I certainly discover that I am by becoming aware that I think, but at the same time I discover that I am neither the cause of my own being nor, perhaps, of this very consciousness through which I know it.

At the conclusion of the Cogito, the subject who sought to grasp itself discovers that it can grasp itself only by transcending itself. Consciousness would be less a property possessed by the self than a participation through which the “I” can know itself.

The Cogito ceases to be merely a Cartesian problem and becomes the starting point for a metaphysics of consciousness and participation.

On One’s Own Existence

The paradox of the Cartesian Cogito lies in the discrepancy between Descartes’s familiar formulation and the experience it expresses. Indeed, we are all familiar with the (clumsy?) formula, “cogito, ergo sum,” and its irrefutable translation, “I think, therefore I am,” but this overlooks the reverse Cartesian experience, which is that one must exist in order to think:

having noted that there is nothing at all in this—I think, therefore I am—that assures me I am speaking the truth, except that I see very clearly that to think, one must be.¹

This, incidentally, did not escape the notice of Jaakko Hintikka (1929–2015):

Descartes does not infer ‘sum’ from ‘cogito,’ but rather demonstrates his own existence to himself by performing a certain act of thought. The expression ‘cogito’ does not correspond to the premise from which ‘sum’ is inferred, but to an act of thought which, as long as it lasts, reveals to Descartes the entity that he is²

A performative utterance accomplishes the act it expresses by the very fact of being uttered: “I apologize to you,” “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” for example (admittedly in appropriate circumstances). This is precisely what Descartes does³ and we should therefore say: “By thinking, I discover that I exist.”

However, a question arises. How, and why, should we prioritize existence, thought, and utterance in relation to a performative statement that simultaneously claims all three? The point is that this is not thought as thought, but thought as thinking: existence is necessarily bound up with the latter:

Thus, after having thought it through thoroughly and carefully examined all things, we must finally conclude and hold as certain that this proposition—I am, I exist—is necessarily true whenever I utter it or conceive it in my mind.⁴

Here, an Augustinian cogito was examined ⁵, particularly with regard to doubt. As for skeptical doubt, both agree that it is a disease (“For both philosophers, skeptical doubt is a disease of sensory origin for which the clarity of pure thought is the remedy, and this first certainty opens the path which, through the demonstration of the soul’s spirituality, leads to the proof of God’s existence ,” Etienne Gilson , Introduction to the Study of Saint Augustine , Paris: Vrin, 1987, p. 55.)). Regarding doubt in general, there is a striking similarity:

• “There is therefore no doubt that I exist, if he deceives me; and no matter how much he may deceive me, he will never be able to make me nothing, as long as I think that I am something” (Descartes ) ⁶;
• “He who does not exist cannot be mistaken. That is why I exist, if I am mistaken. Therefore, since I exist if I am mistaken, how can I be mistaken in believing that I exist?” (St. Augustine ) ⁷.

However, one should rather note “an immanent realism in the Augustinian cogito, whereas in Descartes , it is idealism that flows from the Cogito”⁸.

Existence (the Cogito) does not constitute the subject

In any case, this Cogito—whichever one it may be—reveals to each person that they are a “thinking thing” (“Second Meditation,” The Works of Descartes , op. cit., p. 251), a conscious being; nothing less! But is that really all? Yes, provided we realize that if being is received, should we not at least ask whether the consciousness through which this being knows itself is likewise received? A trivial observation, but one from which all the consequences are perhaps not always drawn. Is this (self-)consciousness—the so-called “reflexivity of thought upon itself,” derived from the Cogito—nothing more than the fleeting association of thought and an awareness of that thought?

When Descartes concludes that thought belongs to the individual, there is no objection:

I find here that thought is an attribute that belongs to me: it alone cannot be separated from me. I am, I exist—that is certain; but for how long? As long as I think; for it might even be the case that, if I were to cease thinking entirely, I would at the same time cease to be altogether⁹.

But isn’t it this provisional association of a borrowed consciousness and an ephemeral thinking being that answers the question “Who am I?”

A question therefore concerns the consciousness that allows one to claim to exist. Does it belong to the subject? If consciousness is understood in this way, the Cogito no longer grounds the subject; on the contrary, it reveals the subject’s lack of self-sufficiency.

All the more so since it is only at the end of a “negative egology”¹⁰ (by analogy with negative theology¹¹), that an identity—and even identity in itself—will eventually be found:

Since the true person is unitive knowledge of being, what can a being who remains on the plane of dualistic knowledge say about it? Ultimately, the “I” cannot be grasped positively in any way. We are therefore left with only one possibility: that of a negative grasping. ¹²

The “I” cannot be found by taking itself as its object; it is discovered only by renouncing the identifications of the “self” and ascending toward the Identity in which it participates. Without this Identity, it may claim to exist, but its ontological ignorance remains total:

It [the “I”] appears as the consciousness of our ontological ignorance, as that blind spot at the heart of our consciousness with which we cannot help but identify. (Ibid.)

From Non-Identification to Identity

To truly discover oneself, one must, paradoxically, cease seeking oneself, renounce the ego’s identifications in order to discover being and consciousness in their source—that is, in God: the supreme Identity in which every personal identity participates:

To go further, to become oneself, one must therefore renounce everything that one is not—all possessive and alienating identifications—to make room for spiritual identity alone. How, then, do we embark on this path? The final paradox—and the most fundamental of all—in this search for the “I” is that it is not the “I” itself that we must aim for, but God —not the human person, but the divine Person who alone knows our true “I,” because our “I” is nothing other than this very knowledge. […]. It is God alone who will give us to ourselves, because there is no identity other than Him. Since God alone is identical with Himself; since God alone is the center, and the sole Center; every identity, every centrality, is either a participation in the supreme Identity or does not exist. It is through the grace of the supreme Identity that each person realizes his or her own identity. (Ibid.)

This is because “the essence of the human person is spiritual and not psychological.” To truly become oneself is to free oneself from the illusory identifications of the ego: to die to the possessive self in order to be born to the knowledge of our spiritual identity.

The alienation of the “I” lies in its identification with that which is not itself. The alchemy of the person—true personalization—therefore consists in detaching ourselves from ourselves, in rejecting any illusory identification with that which is not the spiritual center of the human being, and in breaking free from the the comedy of the ego that chains us to having rather than liberating us into being. To cease attaching ourselves to the ceaseless psychological changes that make up our daily lives is to pass through death; but […] if the “I” is merely an illusion of appropriation, a theft of existence, then to die to the illusion is to be born into knowledge. (Ibid.)

On the Existence of God

To think that Descartes would have been so naïve, or even “intellectually stupid” ¹³), to deduce existence from a concept—that is, to deduce existence from thought —even though Descartes explicitly denounces this sophism, is precisely what Kant will do, by reinterpreting Descartes’s argument and calling it the “ontological argument” ¹⁴. However, Descartes’s meditation “ ” is, of course, far more subtle—and even the opposite: while one certainly cannot deduce the existence of a thought, there is a thought that originates in being:

Just as the mere fact that I conceive of a mountain with a valley does not imply that there is any mountain in the world, so too, although I conceive of God as existing, it does not seem to follow from this that God exists: for my thought imposes no necessity on things; and just as it is entirely up to me to imagine a winged horse, even though there is no such thing, so too I might perhaps attribute existence to God, even though there were no God who existed. Far from it; here lies a fallacy hidden beneath the guise of this objection: for just because I cannot conceive of a mountain without a valley, it does not follow that there is any mountain or any valley in the world, but only that the mountain and the valley—whether they exist or not—are inseparable from one another; whereas from the mere fact that I can conceive of God only as existing, it follows that existence is inseparable from Him, and therefore that He truly exists: not that my thought can bring this about, or that it imposes any necessity upon things; but, on the contrary, the necessity inherent in the thing itself—that is, the necessity of God’s existence—compels me to have this thought. For it is not within my freedom to conceive of a God without existence—that is, a supremely perfect Being without supreme perfection—just as I am free to imagine a horse without wings or with wings.¹⁵

To think of God is therefore not to infer His existence from our thought; Far from arguing, ‘I think of God, therefore He exists,’ Descartes realizes that ‘it is because God is that I can think of Him. Descartes , as a metaphysician, remains in the same vein as the Cogito: far from a “I think of God, therefore He exists,” he realizes that “it is because God is that I can think of Him.”

Kant clearly misread Descartes (It seems that Arthur Schopenhauer misread him as well; cf. On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (2^e  ed., 1847), trans. François-Xavier Chenet, Paris: Vrin, 1997, ch. II, § 7 Descartes , p. 31.)) to argue that his error consists in deducing existence from a concept:

The famous ontological (Cartesian) proof, which seeks to demonstrate the existence of a Supreme Being through concepts, wastes all the effort and work one puts into it; no man can, through mere ideas, become any richer in knowledge, any more than a merchant would become richer in money if, to increase his fortune, he were to add a few zeros to his cash balance.((Critique of Pure Reason (Tremesaygues, Pacaud), op. cit., p. 497. Thibaut Gress sees in this passage confirmation that Kant’s critique of Descartes is not primarily the naivety that would consist in deducing the existence of a concept, but rather in inserting “existence into the conceptual order,” Descartes and the precariousness of the world, op. cit. (online, n.p.). For Kant , existence falls exclusively within the realm of synthetic judgment; see *Metaphysics of the Paradox*, vol. II, “Paradoxical Knowledge,” Appendix 9. Kant and the “ontological argument.”)

Hegel, responding to Kant , offers at least a better interpretation, albeit one open to criticism:

One must then consider that when it comes to God , this is an object of a different kind than a hundred thalers or any given concept […]. In reality, every finite being is this and only this, namely, that its existence is distinct from its concept. But God must be expressly that which can only be “thought as existing,” where the concept includes being within itself. It is this unity of concept and being that constitutes the singularity of the concept of God.¹⁶

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Thus the circle opened by the Cogito closes. I am not because I think: it is because I am that I can think. And I do not bring God into existence by thinking of Him: it is because He is that I can think of Him. In both cases, thought does not ground being; it receives and recognises it. Consequently, consciousness itself appears less as a possession of the subject than as that through which the received being can know itself: perhaps, precisely, as a loan.

The Cogito does not ground the “I”: it reveals to the “I” that it does not ground itself.

Footnotes

1. René Descartes , “Discourse on the Method,” Works of Descartes , text edited by V. Cousin, Paris: Levrault, 1824, vol. I, p. 159. Emphasis added.[↩]
2. J. Hintikka , “The Cartesian Cogito, Epistemic Logic, and Neuroscience,” in J. Hintikka , and M.B. Hintikka, *The Logic of Epistemology and the Epistemology of Logic*, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989, p. 113, trans. Denis Kambouchner , “Identification of a Thought: Hintikka’s Cogito,” Revue internationale de philosophie, vol. 250, no. 4, 2009, pp. 405–422.[↩]
3. See Jaakko Hintikka , his famous 1963 essay “Cogito, ergo sum: inference or performance?” (“Cogito ergo sum, as inference and as performance,” trans. in *Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale*, Paris: Colin, No. 1, Jan.–Mar. 2000).[↩]
4. “Second Meditation,” Works of Descartes , op. cit., p. 248.[↩]
5. Extensively discussed in St. Augustine : *Soliloquies*, *On the Blessed Life* II, 7; *Treatise on Free Will* II, 3, 7; *On the Trinity* X, 10, 14–16; The City of God , XI, XXVI; listed by Tiphaine Jahier, “The Cogito in St. Augustine ,” Grand Dictionnaire de la philosophie, op. cit., s.v.[↩]
6. Works, op. cit., p. 248.[↩]
7. St. Augustine , *The City of God* , XI, XXVI; see also *On the Trinity*, X, X, 14.[↩]
8. Fulbert Cayré (1884–1971), Introduction to the Philosophy of St. Augustine , Paris: Désclée de Brouwer , 1947, p. 267; Tiphaine Jahier, ibid.[↩]
9. Ibid., p. 251.[↩]
10. Jean Borella , *Amour et vérité*, L’Harmattan, 2011, pp. 130–132, which we follow here.[↩]
11. An intellectual approach that denies, with regard to God , everything that can be affirmed about Him, because God is beyond all concepts and even beyond being. “Concepts create idols of God,” said Gregory of Nyssa , *De vita Moysis*, PG 44, 377B.[↩]
12. Jean Borella , ibid., p. 130.[↩]
13. Thibault Gress , Descartes and the Precariousness of the World, op. cit. (online, n.p.[↩]
14. Philosophical Works, Paris: Gallimard, vol. I, p. 432; or the “ontological proof,” Critique of Pure Reason, trans. A. Tremesaygues, B. Pacaud, preface by A. Hannequin, Paris: F. Alcan, 1905, pp. 490, 497.[↩]
15. René Descartes , “Fifth Meditation,” Œuvres de Descartes , text edited by V. Cousin, Paris: Levrault, 1824, vol. I, pp. 314–315.[↩]
16. Hegel , Preliminary Concept of the Encyclopedia; cited by Thibaut Gress , Descartes and the Precariousness of the World, op. cit., “Accounting for the Necessities of Thought through the Evidence of Being” (online, n.p.).[↩]