Descartes’ famous proposition “I think, therefore I am” summarizes his central idea of human existence and reveals the fact that he directly related the self (the ‘ego’, for him) to a human capacity to think. That is to say, for Descartes the construction of the ego was essentially based on Cogito (I think). The question of who the I of his proposition is, arises right away.
First, let us ask: if his proposition is T → E, then is -T → -E (I do not think, therefore I am not) also valid? The response to this question seems less intuitive, because one can ask if thinking has to be necessarily a conscious process (nowadays it is considered that thinking can occur at an unconscious level, as when one dreams). However, for Descartes it appears that the proposition “I think” is based on the ability to recognize self-
consciousness and that the I of “I think” is the place where this recognition condenses, as he says: “it is impossible that he should think without existing” (Descartes,
Meditations…, 68), or, in other words, Descartes is sustaining that he who thinks is necessarily existing.
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Now, once one is conscious of himself he can assume that he is a person who exists somewhere. There is a group of inquires that follows: can one exist in a metaphysical world and, if so, can one think without a physical body? Possibly for Descartes there is One who can think without having to physically exist (God) (this would be T → –E). Can humankind be ‘not thinking’ and still exist (this would be –T → E)?
Meanwhile, in the following paragraph I believe that he is actually changing the order of the connector therefore in his proposition “I think, therefore I am”, given that he places the certitude in the fact that one exists:
“Thinking? At last I have discovered it - thought; this alone is inseparable from me. I am, I exist-that is certain. But for how long? For as long as I am thinking. For it could be that were I totally to cease from thinking, I should totally cease to exist. At present I am not admitting anything except what is necessarily true. I am, then, in the strict sense only a thing that thinks; that is, I am a mind, or intelligence, or intellect, or reason (…). But for all that I am a thing which is real and which truly exists. But what kind of a thing? As I have just said –a thinking thing.” (Descartes,
Meditations…, 18)
The use of the connector therefore seems unclear to me, especially because Descartes says that the second part of his proposition (“therefore I am”) cannot be taken as a logical inference88. Is he basically identifying human existence with thinking, T=E? Would that not deny the existence of humans who somehow cannot think? In this case, it seems that ‘existence’ should be read as ‘consciousness of existence’ (rather than a physical
existence as such), a faculty that he ascribes exclusively to humans89.
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“When someone says ‘I am thinking, therefore I am, or I exist’, he does not deduce existence from thought by means of a syllogism, but recognizes it as something self-evident by a simple intuition of the mind” (Descartes, Meditations 68).
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Given that the existence of nonhuman organisms does not need the inclusion of a faculty to think, he believes that those other entities can be merely seen as complicated machines (they do not act from knowledge) made by God.
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To recapitulate, if “I think” is based on the ability to recognize self-consciousness and “therefore I am” is based on the consciousness of existence, could one reinterpret his proposition as ‘I am self-conscious, therefore I am conscious of my existence’? The Cartesian human being would then be an entity who possesses two fundamental skills: reason and a way to express that reason (with words).
I = reason + language,
and as language must give an account of that reason r, language = dr
→ I = r + dr
This definition is very restricted, since it presupposes an essence in human beings: the capacity to reason, from where all human behaviour can be explained. Such univocal characterization presents some issues: given that the state of the human body (the machine) is unimportant, how deteriorated can it be before its deterioration starts interfering with the expression of thoughts or the formulation of thoughts? Can words give a full account of thoughts? Does one have to express reason in a reasonable fashion? Overall, the Cartesian proposition “I think, therefore I am” is a scheme that universalizes the identification of a human being with a machine that reasons.
Corollaries:
Perception. To define a human being as a creature that can reason is basically going to restrict all perception through the glass of rational thinking, leaving aside any other type of human expression.
As a consequence, the law is going to take the form of reason.
Time. It needs to be stationary, like a frozen scene in which thoughts organize and create the connections among matter and the succession of actions.
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Space. It is going to be concentric and hierarchized. Everything is going to move around reason (the self), and the importance of phenomena is going to be related to their ability to agree with the law.
Furthermore, it has to be homogeneous for the facts to be replicable.
Identity. It would take the form of the reproduction of sameness, which is that that is produced by the law – the process of mirroring the similar.
Subsequently, a human being is an individual who only communicates on behalf of reason and whose only purpose of communication is reason. Any human behaviour that reason can explain is allowed and actions that cannot be domesticated through reason are marginalized or destroyed. Moreover, individuals do not have an ethical responsibility to those forms of life that do not benefit and serve their goals, or that simply do not affect them, and furthermore they can use those machines until exhaustion90.
To summarize, humans are machines that think and reality matters as long as it can be passed through the filter of reason.
90 I wonder what type of machine women are, since they ‘are not very reasonable’. And moreover, what type of machines the Mesoamericans were when the Spanish invaded their territory, since God had forgotten to give them a soul and logos? I believe that one of the most important points to discuss after the Cartesian definition of humans would be to know who decides what reason is and who are its
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