Reasons Why "I Think; Therefore I Am" Is Fundamentally Flawed (Perspectives Part 1)

The month of August, although it has been taxing at times, has also been pretty eventful in terms of my academics (though I can't say the same about the productivity of my blog). I took an online Intro to Philosophy course as well as two RCM exams, and even though I would have liked to keep up my writing in the meantime, I was fairly swamped as it was. The chaos of the past few weeks is finally starting to die down though, and I thought I would ease back into Reasons Why with a blog series called Perspectives, outlining my personal perspectives as well as the perspectives of other scholars on a few of the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical concept I learned about in my philosophy course this summer. I found the nature of the course's required readings especially fascinating because when combined, they read more-so as conversations rather than objective texts. Each successive paper built on the last, whether deliberately or coincidentally, and it was highly fulfilling to indulge in that on-going discussion with my own opinions and beliefs. I can only hope that this blog series will serve as an invitation to partake in the conversation yourself, because it's certainly a worthwhile one to have.

You may have heard of French philosopher Rene Descartes' famous-to-some-but-infamous-to-others statement: "cogito ergo sum," or perhaps more recognizably: "I think; therefore I am." This widely-debated declaration was first stated in Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, and has since been quoted, requoted, and misquoted time and time again. 

Descartes' was one of the first and most influential skeptics, and his objective in recording his meditations was to detach himself from any assumptions and beliefs that had reasonable cause for doubt, and consequently, to discover through logic and reasoning which elements of his experience truly existed. In order to do so, Descartes starts off his first meditation by unpacking some of the supposed absolutes that people often rely on as starting points for determining what is true. For example, he acknowledges that sensory experiences such as sight and touch are widely accepted as absolute truths, but he rejects sensory data as a reliable starting point because no sound evidence exists to prove that those experiences are not products of the imagination. Hallucinations and dreams can be just as engaging and stimulating to the senses as conscious encounters, but have no more validity than a story or a fairytale.

Once he has removed himself from the biases of doubtful absolutes, Descartes expands with his second meditation by taking a dualistic perspective (separating the human mind from the human body) and identifying the mind as the only indisputable basis for determining what is true. From this line of reasoning emerges Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am,” which refers to proof of existence based solely on the ability to form thought. 

Descartes' methods aren't convincing to me, but they do have their strengths, one of which being their acknowledgement that there are many things we accept as being true merely because we have been accustomed to accept them as such. Descartes insists on discovering a completely objective starting point—if such a thing exists— and eliminates as much bias from his reasoning as possible. That kind of objectivity is valuable because when people's beliefs are based solely on subjective constructs, they become unstable and unsound.

Another merit of Descartes’ method is its opposition of materialism. Materialism is the philosophical theory that nothing exists except that which can be experienced with the senses, and it presents a number of problems, the central one being that human societies rely on and are held together by unseen things— ethics, morality, justice, etc. Since Descartes believes the foundation of reality to be a product of the mind, he acknowledges the existence of the unseen, an acknowledgement that I consider to be highly valuable in navigating and fully grasping the world. 

Despite its strengths however, Descartes’ position, which is purely based on doubt and suspicion, has essentially created a closed feedback loop in that none of his beliefs can be reasonably disputed while still supporting his disbeliefs. Descartes opens by stating, “we may, generally speaking, doubt about all things and especially about material things, at least so long as we have no other foundations for the sciences than those which we have hitherto possessed.” His arguments disregard science, divinity, and sensory data, and are thus indisputable because any argument one may raise against his claims would have to appeal to one of those bases of knowledge to make its case. For example, a neuroscientist might argue that thoughts are the results of chemical reactions transmitted via the dendrites of neurons, which implies that they are no different than other forms of sensory data, but because Descartes starts off by discounting biological science, that kind of a rebuttal would be completely senseless. This philosophical method is contradictory however, because after disregarding physical sciences such as physics and medicine, Descartes goes on to use psychological sciences to prove his conclusion that the mind is the only absolute. He writes: “Arithmetic, Geometry and other sciences of that kind which only treat of things that are very simple and very general, without taking great trouble to ascertain whether they are actually existent or not, contain some measure of certainty and an element of the indubitable. For whether I am awake or asleep, two and three together always form five, and the square can never have more than four sides, and it does not seem possible that truths so clear and apparent can be suspected of any falsity.” Descartes chooses which sources of knowledge to accept and which ones to disregard based on whether or not they support his personal beliefs, and because of this, it is impossible to dispute his opinion. 

A number of philosophers have tried to refute however, including David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Baruch Spinoza— most of whom were monists (they believed that the human mind and the human body were unified and inseparable). Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature suggests that there is no proof that one is the same “thinking thing” from one moment to another. Descartes states in his meditations: “I persuade myself that nothing has ever existed of all that my fallacious memory represents to me,” and Hume uses this admittance to the possibility that memories can be false to support his own opposing view. 

Additionally, Nietzsche's argument is formed around the fact that Descartes bases his evidence for existence on the thought processes in his mind because he has rejected external data as a grounds for proving existence. Nietzsche argued that internal thoughts cannot be separated from external data, because the only reason thoughts exist is because external data, such as social constructs and interactions, put them there.

Whether or not it is sound in reasoning though, the fundamental problem with Descartes' model is that it isn't the kind of philosophy one can live by, because it doesn't play out in day to day interactions. Descartes was a white, upper-class male in a society where he had the privilege to study and think about logic and philosophy, but personally I can't picture myself overlooking physical pain, fear, or heartache in any situation that really presented it. If Descartes were surrounded by hungry predators, caught in the hold of a capsizing ship, or trapped in a burning building, I doubt he would have the presence of mind to uphold that he "can't say for sure that [he] now sees the flames, hears the wood crackling, and feels the heat of the fire."

And that's why "I think; therefore I am" is fundamentally flawed.