Is Descarte putting the cart before the horse when he says 'cogito ergo sum'?

Question

Famously Descartes said 'Cogito ergo sum'. I'm a bit puzzled by this. I do not need to think in order to assert/understand/intuit that I exist: when I wake up in the morning I immediately intuit that I exist. I see this understanding as a form of inner experience.

I can imagine myself as a bat, and as a bat, I do not have access to logic, formal or otherwise, but I would say (though as a bat I couldn't articulate this), that I would still feel I exist.

Descarte, as a human being, and as a philosopher, is in my opinion, privileging a quality peculiar to humans: thinking.

My feeling is, that Descarte is being seduced by the axiomatic method in mathematics to attempt a similar method in philosophy, that he's trying to conjure something out of nothing.

My preferred statement would be 'I am', or even more stripped down, 'am': I don't think a bat would conceive of itself as an 'I'.

Answer 1

You're reading Descartes out of context; he doesn't just say "cogito ergo sum" and go home, he says it in the course of an argument. I'm not going to rehearse all of the steps of the argument here-- the Meditations on First Philosophy are readily available, and easy to read-- but in broad strokes, he's asking: what do we know indubitably? Is there any kind of knowledge that it is impossible to doubt?

For example, I see the cup on the table in front of me, but when I am dreaming, I often see cups? Can I be certain, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that I am not dreaming now? No, he argues-- sense perception can be doubted.

But, can I doubt that I exist? Doubt is a form of thinking, and if I am thinking, I indubitably exist. Thus, no matter what else I doubt, I cannot doubt that I exist.

Whether I am a bat or a person is not really relevant to the problem; if bats are capable of doubting their existence, they fall under the cogito. (If they're not, then the issue doesn't come up for them-- Descartes is not aiming to investigate bat epistemology.)

I suggest you read the Meditations; they are fascinating, and brief, and a wide variety of secondary literature exists to help you along the way. And, what's more, Descartes published a number of responses to objections from his contemporaries, so we can see exactly how we would respond to a number of possible refutations.

Answer 2

I think your response is the intuitive one, but your goal is more about causation. We want to say that we think because we exist, and it's not our thinking that causes us to exist.

But Descartes isn't talking about causation, he was trying to justify knowledge. If perception can be doubted, all concepts fallable etc... then on what foundation does any knowledge lie, he asks.

About the existence of his body, he says maybe it could be like a dream - that the body doesnt really exist and maybe he's dreaming it (a demon could be tricking him, he said). But when he came to cognition, he surmised that that cant be doubted, because, to him, it's a logical necessity that thought requires a thinker.

So in the lingo, thinking is sufficient but not necessary to exist (as a mind/soul). How a mind/soul exists, if at all, is another question for another age though.