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| This painting by Botticelli shows Saint Augustine talking with a child on the beach, who was trying to scoop the sea water into a hole. According to the Web Gallery of Art, the child tells the bishop that it's easier to spoon the sea into the hole than it is to explain the mystery of the Trinity. After speaking the child disappeared.http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/staugustine/ss/staugustine.htm |
The Latin phrase cogito ergo sum[a] (/ˈkoʊɡɨtoʊ ˈɜrɡoʊ ˈsʌm/, also /ˈkɒɡɨtoʊ/,[b] "I think, therefore I am") is a philosophical proposition by René Descartes. The simple meaning is that thinking about one’s existence proves—in and of itself—that an "I" exists to do the thinking.
This proposition became a fundamental element of Western philosophy, as it was perceived to form a foundation for all knowledge. While other knowledge could be a figment of imagination, deception or mistake, the very act of doubting one's own existence arguably serves as proof of the reality of one's own existence, or at least of one's thought.
Descartes' original phrase, je pense, donc je suis (French pronunciation: [ʒə pɑ̃s dɔ̃k ʒə sɥi]), appeared in his Discourse on the Method (1637), which was written in French rather than Latin to reach a wider audience in his country than scholars.[1] He used the Latin cogito ergo sum in the later Principles of Philosophy (1644).
The argument is popularly known in the English speaking world as "the cogito ergo sum argument" or, more briefly, as "the cogito".
The cogito ('cogito ergo sum' - I think, therefore I am) is surely the most well-known argument in philosophy - it occupies the kind of place in its field which the Mona Lisa, Hamlet's soliloquy, or Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, occupy in theirs. This kind of mass popularity can, paradoxically become a barrier to proper appreciation. In order to draw out its importance for consciousness, I should like to focus on two points about it: first, it isn't original; second, it isn't logical.
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| Not original, because the same argument can actually be found in St Augustine. I don't think anyone knows for sure whether Descartes found it there or came up with it independently, but the obvious question is - if St Augustine came up with it first, why aren't we all talking about St Augustine's cogito? The reason, I think, is that the argument was of no great importance to St Augustine. He was in pursuit of faith, not doubt, and was more interested in God's existence than his own. He puts no particular stress on the cogito argument, and readers who aren't particularly looking out for it could easily read it without noticing its signficance. For Descartes, by contrast, everything depended on it. He needed a point of certainty from which to begin the construction of his metaphysics: St Augustine already had a source of certainty in God. Descartes also turned to God as a guarantor of knowledge, of course, but in his case, unprecedentedly, God did not come first. In this respect, modern philosophers are mostly in the same boat as Descartes, and if they want certainty, they have to undertake a similar exploration.http://www.consciousentities.com/cogito.htm |
St Augustine, more than thousand years earlier, had a somewhat better argument, involving a similar form and same principle: "Fallor ergo sum" - if I am mistaken, then I still exist, even if I am mistaken.http://maartens.home.xs4all.nl/philosophy/Dictionary/C/Cogito%20ergo%20sum.htm
Descartes wasn't the first. St.Augustine, like Descartes, even used the argument as a reponse to scepticism. Here is the Augustine's version that Sorabji cites (Sorabji gives a number of other places Augustine used a similar argument)
Ref: http://virtualphilosopher.com/2006/12/augustines_cogi.html"But who will doubt that he lives, remembers, understands, wills, thinks, knows, and judges? For even if he doubts, he lives. If he doubts where his doubs come from, he remembers. If he doubts, he understands that he doubts. If he doubts, he wants to be certain. If he doubts, he thinks. If he doubts, he knows that he does not know. If he doubts, he judges that he ougth not rashly to give assent. So whoever acquires a doubt from any source ought not to doubt any of these things whose non-existence would mean that he could not entertain doubt about anything." (Augustine, On the Trinity 10.10.14 quoted in Richard Sorabji Self, 2006, p.219).
intimior intimo meo et superior summo meo
closer to me than I am to myself and higher than what is highest in me
From http://www.saintaugustinechurch.org/index.cfm?load=page&page=151
Augustine felt this closeness of God to man with extraordinary intensity. God's presence in man is profound and at the same time mysterious, but he can recognize and discover it deep down inside himself. "Do not go outside", the convert says, but "return to within yourself; truth dwells in the inner man; and if you find that your nature is changeable, transcend yourself. But remember, when you transcend yourself, you are transcending a soul that reasons. Reach, therefore, to where the light of reason is lit" (De vera religione, 39, 72).
It is just like what he himself stresses with a very famous statement at the beginning of the Confessions, a spiritual biography which he wrote in praise of God: "You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you" (I, 1, 1).
God's remoteness is therefore equivalent to remoteness from oneself: "But", Augustine admitted (Confessions, 6, 11), addressing God directly, "you were more inward than my most inward part and higher than the highest element within me", interior intimo meo et superior summo meo; so that, as he adds in another passage remembering the period before his conversion, "you were there before me, but I had departed from myself. I could not even find myself, much less you" (Confessions, V, 2, 2).
Precisely because Augustine lived this intellectual and spiritual journey in the first person, he could portray it in his works with such immediacy, depth and wisdom, recognizing in two other famous passages from the Confessions (IV, 4, 9 and 14, 22), that man is "a great enigma" (magna quaestio) and "a great abyss" (grande profundum), an enigma and an abyss that only Christ can illuminate and save us from.
This is important: a man who is distant from God is also distant from himself, alienated from himself, and can only find himself by encountering God. In this way he will come back to himself, to his true self, to his true identity.
- See more at: http://www.saintaugustinechurch.org/index.cfm?load=page&page=151#sthash.99HnSReY.dpuf