"I Think Therefore I Am" Explained

therefore i am one of the most if not the most famous statement in the history of philosophy yet as with so many famous philosophical aphorisms the meaning of this phrase is often less familiar to people than the phrase itself and so today we're going to explore a little bit of the philosophy of renee descartes who coined that phrase and uncover what i think therefore i am actually means but even if you are already familiar with the meaning of this maxim your interpretation will not be the only one that exists for example did you know that

a number of respected scholars are of the opinion that i think therefore i am is actually a mistranslation of descartes that subtly obscures what he was really trying to express more on that later for now i want to start at the basis of descartes philosophy to understand what he was actually trying to do when he stumbled upon this famous phrase rene descartes belonged to a school of philosophers known as the rationalists which also famously included the thinkers spinoza and leibniz these were men who believed that there is such thing as innate knowledge they believed that

there is such a thing as a priori knowledge which immanuel kant defined as knowledge that is absolutely independent of all experience a priori literally means from what comes before for rationalists there are truths like two plus two equals four perhaps which can be known prior to any observation or experimentation that is we can come to knowledge through reason alone for comparison the great intellectual nemesis of rationalism is called empiricism empiricists believe that all of our knowledge ultimately arises from our sense perception that is from our observations of the outside world david hume is perhaps the

most famous member of the empiricist school of thought and he argued that for example the only reason you can have a concept of say a unicorn in your mind is because you've observed in the past say a horse and you've observed horns and you can put these together in your mind to create what hume would call a complex idea complex ideas like that of a unicorn obviously don't arise directly from our observations of the world but the simple ideas from which they're built like a horn or a horse can only be known about through what

we've observed ultimately all of our knowledge comes from the external world and there is no innate knowledge only that which we've learned through observation now this kind of knowledge is called a posteriori knowledge knowledge which comes from our sense data and you can see that the words a priori and a posteriori contain prior and post that is before and after a priori knowledge is knowledge that comes before any kind of observation or experimentation a posteriori knowledge is knowledge that comes after experimentation and observation and this is the key distinction between the rationalists and the empiricists

when descartes set out to write his most famous work he was attempting to discover what kind of a priori knowledge might exist what if anything can we know to be true beyond any doubt without having to rely on observations or experiments which after all could be illusory or false can there be such a thing as philosophical certainty on any subject to find out we'll turn to that famous work called meditations on first philosophy to discover how descartes got to i think therefore i am or as the scholars like to call it the cogito [Music] descartes

begins his meditations by recognizing a problem of skepticism how can we know that anything is true how can you know that anything exists after all it's possible that your senses are deceiving you and the world is an illusion it's possible that you're actually dreaming right now usually when we're dreaming we're not aware that we're dreaming and think that we're having real experiences so who's to say that this or something like this isn't happening right now or to try to discover what we can know with certainty and avoid these kinds of doubts descartes therefore decides to

take anything that it's even minutely possible to doubt and treat it as false if it's possible to conceive of a belief being false he treats it as if it is false so that whatever's left over will only be that which we can know with certainty this way we can find a rock-solid intellectual foundation upon which we can hopefully build up our other beliefs but this foundation must be something that it is impossible to doubt here descartes introduces his famous evil demon he writes i will suppose therefore that some malicious demon of the utmost power and

cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me i shall think that the sky the air the earth colours shapes sounds and all external things are merely delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment i shall consider myself not as having hands or eyes or flesh or blood or senses but as falsely believing that i have all of these things a modern equivalent of this thought experiment that's often used is that of being a brain in a vat so if you don't like the evil demon that descartes proposes just imagine

that instead you are a brain in a vat and all of your sense experiences are just illusions and that somebody's deceiving you that way instead so for argument's sake descartes says it's all false i don't have hands i'm not sat in front of a camera my memories aren't actually real descartes even doubts mathematical truths saying that a powerful enough deceiver could make it such that quote i too go wrong every time i add two and three or count the sides of a square i mean it's possible right and remember as long as it's possibly false

we're going to say that it is false so that what's left over is what we can know beyond doubt so this is where descartes ends the first meditation by taking all of the beliefs that he can possibly doubt and acting as if they're false [Music] so serious are the doubts into which i have been thrown as a result of yesterday's meditation that i can neither put them out of my mind nor see any way of resolving them it feels as if i have fallen unexpectedly into a deep whirlpool which tumbles me around so that i

can neither stand on the bottom nor swim to the top so that's where we're up to kids quite a miserable condition i think you'll agree but it's here in the second meditation that descartes finally finds a ground for his feet descartes asks if my hands don't exist nor the world nor my memories etc does it follow that i do not exist no i must exist in some form maybe i don't exist as alex o'connor of male homo sapiens with hands and feet and a need for a haircut but i must exist in some form how

can i know this well because even if i'm being deceived entirely by an evil demon or by somebody controlling my brain in a vat there must be a me to be deceived i can't deny my own existence because if i denied that i existed who's doing the denying an evil demon can convince me of all kinds of falsities but it can't convince me that i don't exist because there needs to be a me to be convinced of this remember descartes method is to take anything that can be doubted and treat it as false but doubting

whether or not i am thinking is a special case because doubting is a kind of thinking since doubting is a kind of thinking by doubting that i'm thinking i automatically prove that i am thinking because the very act of doubting is an act of thinking it would be impossible to doubt that i'm thinking because this would amount to thinking that i'm not thinking which is a contradiction in terms and so as long as i am doing some thinking well i am i am thinking simply contains i am and as soon as descartes even begins to

doubt everything that he can he's already thinking since to doubt is to think and so as long as i'm doing some kind of thinking i can know that i exist at least in some form that is to say i think therefore i am that exact phrase i think therefore i am doesn't actually appear in the meditations but descartes uses other words to express exactly the same point he writes of the evil demon let him deceive me as much as he can he will never bring it about that i am nothing so long as i think

that i am something so after considering everything very thoroughly i must finally conclude that this proposition i am i exist is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind that is whenever i am thinking i am now there's a lot to be said about this and whether descartes is actually correct but at the very least this should explain what descartes meant when he wrote the cogito and more to the point why this is the first thing that he addresses in the meditations simple as it may seem descartes now thinks

he's established something undeniable something immune to doubt and so hopefully something that we can begin building the rest of our worldview upon but as i say there's still a lot more to discuss about the cogito [Music] i think therefore i am sounds a lot like a deduction it sounds like we have one statement i think from which we deduce a conclusion i am it seems like descartes is offering an argument here then that is a statement of premises and a conclusion that's deduced from it but there's a debate in the literature about whether descartes intended

to present the cogito as an argument or rather as a singular intuition to get to grips with this debate let me first define an important term a syllogism is an argument that takes the form of a major premise a minor premise and a conclusion all men are mortal socrates is a man therefore socrates is mortal now john cottingham in his wonderful commentary on descartes writes that we could understand the cogito to be a form of syllogism which would look something like this premise one whatever is thinking exists premise two i am thinking conclusion therefore i

exist this argument is valid which means that if the premises are true the conclusion must also be true and this is how logical argument is usually done it's natural for us to try to syllogize descartes in this way we're used to thinking of logical validity as occurring when you have a set of premises and a conclusion that follows from them but descartes himself responded to this when replying to objections to the meditations writing the following 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 that is to say coming to know that i exist isn't a process of deductive reasoning like you find in a syllogism but rather a single unified instantaneous intuition that i only know to be true while i'm thinking about it the philosopher peter markey writes that intuition is distinguished from deduction by the fact that it does not involve a movement of thought through a series of inferences and by its immediate self-evidence and the passage from descartes that i just quoted seems

to very heavily imply that descartes is thinking of the kugito in the sense of an intuition rather than the sense of deduction but it's never quite that simple of course in philosophy because in 1648 franz berman interviewed descartes and pressed him on this question of whether the kagito is syllogistic and descartes responded by admitting that a major premise may be quote implicitly presupposed when i arrive at the knowledge of my own existence but descartes is clear in saying that the person doing the thinking is not explicitly aware of the presence of such a premise it's

a strange thing to say given what we've already heard but this is why despite descartes insisting himself that the kugito is a mere intuition there is still some debate about whether he was really presenting something like a disguised syllogism john cottingham is of the opinion that we should interpret descartes as presenting an intuition not a syllogism and for what it's worth i agree with him we seem to arrive at the cogito as a singular intuition based on this special relationship between doubt and thought as i said earlier doubting is a kind of thinking and so

to doubt that one is thinking is to automatically rid oneself of that doubt it's simply the case that i am thinking contains i am it all just happens at once so that to me says that we should be interpreting descartes as presenting a singular intuition here john cottingham writes that quote most logicians are accustomed to thinking of validity predominantly in terms of timeless non-tensed propositions but we should rid ourselves of this temptation and understand that the cogito is only thought to be guaranteed as true when it is being thought it's the act of doubting that

confirms that i exist not the timeless fact that i am a being that doubts things it's only when i'm doing the thinking doing the doubting that i can know that i exist otherwise for example i'd have to rely on my memories perhaps at one point i established that i existed because i was thinking and now i'm not doing that doubting itself i just remember that i established that and so i know that i exist well my memories could be false they could be illusory i can doubt that my memories are giving me an accurate representation

of what happened in the past so i can't rely on having done the doubting already to know that i exist i have to be doing the doubting right now in order to establish that i exist for this reason the fact that the cogito can only be known to be true when i'm thinking john cottingham thinks that i think therefore i am is a misleading translation of what descartes had to say since descartes was french the kogito first appears in french in descartes discourse on the method as japan's donkey later he wrote the same thing in

his principles of philosophy which this time was written in latin and so there we find the more famous formulation cogito ergo sum descartes never wrote in english and traditionally the phrase has been simply translated as cogito i think ergo therefore some i am i think therefore i am but keep in mind that the cogito is likely not supposed to be a timeless deduction but something that we can only know to be true when we're reflecting upon it descartes notices himself that he could falsely remember having been convinced of something i can only be certain of

the truth of the coquito when i think about it for this reason cottingham writes the correct english translation should employ the so-called continuous present i am thinking rather than the simple present i think for what makes me certain of my existence is not some static or timeless fact about me that i am one who thinks rather it is the fact that i am at this moment engaged in thinking so if john cottingham is right that descartes cogito should be interpreted as an intuition rather than the presentation of a timeless syllogism then cogito ergo sum is

best translated not as i think therefore i am but i am thinking therefore i am or i am thinking therefore i exist now this may seem like a pedantic and useless distinction but when you consider this debate about the syllogistic versus the intuitive interpretation of descartes you realize that this subtle distinction really does make all the difference when trying to interpret descartes in the english language to say i think therefore i am implies this kind of timelessness about the truth of the cogito that it's true timelessly tenselessly that's much more characteristic of syllogistic deductive reasoning

whereas to say i am thinking therefore i exist is more like an act it lends itself much more to the intuitive interpretation of descartes and the claim that it's only true the kugito's truth can only be guaranteed when you're doing the thinking i think therefore i am versus i am thinking therefore i am so for this reason when i'm discussing descartes i prefer to translate the cogito as i am thinking therefore i exist but look if you're somebody who prefers the syllogistic deductive interpretation of the cogito you might prefer to still use i think therefore

i am the more famous formulation it's really up to you of course the best thing that you can probably do is learn french and go and read the meditations in their original language but to be honest with you i struggle enough to understand descartes in the english language so good luck to you if that's the task you choose a final thing that i want to note is this the kagito is special for descartes because it is impossible to doubt and it's this that allows it to serve in his view as the bedrock of his philosophy

but something being immune to doubt is not in my view quite the same thing as it being true consider an example from baron reed who asks us to imagine a mother who may be psychologically incapable of giving up the belief that her son did not commit a gruesome murder or imagine somebody whose brain is literally wired so as to make it impossible for them to doubt that the sun is innocent it seems that the fact that for this person it's impossible to doubt something isn't the same thing as saying that thing is true for this

reason we might want to make a subtle distinction and say that the real success of the meditations is not so much in establishing truth but rather establishing psychological certainty or discovering what it's impossible to doubt but it's clear that descartes himself thought that certainty does confer truth in his third meditation he describes his inability to doubt his existence as quote the first item of knowledge he also earlier wrote in the second meditation that i am i exist is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind so descartes certainly seems

to think that an inability to doubt a proposition is evidence enough that that proposition is true but i just wanted to flag that this might not actually be true and again there's a lot more to be said about this and there's a whole discussion to be had around descartes criterion for what makes something true or certain and if you want to learn more about that well perhaps i'll make a video in the future or i would recommend reading john cottingham's book i'm going to leave a list of recommended reading for descartes and in the description

if you're interested in reading more but just bear in mind that there's a lot more going on with the cogito than first meets the eye as i say whether being unable to doubt something entails that that something is true is a discussion for another time but i hope that this preliminary overview of the corgito demonstrates that it may well be a lot more complicated and contentious than it appears to be at first descartes spends the rest of the meditations trying to prove mind-body dualism and the existence of god among other things but it all begins

here with the cogito and so i hope that this can serve as a useful introduction to descartes if nothing else i do hope that you've got something out of this video even if just the ability to go well actually that's probably not an accurate translation of descartes it's great fun to do that at parties i'll leave some useful further reading as i say in the description but before i go just as descartes wants to protect us from the deceptions of a hypothetical evil demon i want to take a moment to protect you against the very

real evil of hackers and prying eyes spying on your online activity that's right i want to take a moment to thank today's sponsor expressvpn if you watch my videos regularly you'll know that i've been using expressvpn for quite some time now expressvpn is a virtual private network which protects your internet security when browsing online it's a simple app that runs on your computer or smartphone which allows me to instantly connect to one of a huge list of secure servers from around the world and re-routes all of my online data through one of these servers in

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see you in the next one [Music] you