Reversing the Cogito

Descartes’s doubt leads to the cogito , but Ricoeur, following Martial Gueroult’s argument in Descartes’ Philosophy Interpreted According to the Order of Reasons I: The Soul and God , argues that by itself the cogito gives us “a strictly subjective version of truth; the reign of the evil genius continues, with regard to whether certainty has any objective value” (Ricoeur, Oneself as Another , 8).

Gueroult claims that this can be resolved only through a “demonstration of God’s existence,” but this is achieved only by a reversal in the direction of the argument. Ricoeur writes:

“this demonstration,as it occurs in the ‘Third Meditation,’ reverses the order of discovery,or ordo cognoscendi , which ought to be the only one, if the cogito were inevery respect the first truth, to lead from the ‘I’ to God, then to mathematicalessences, then to sensible things and to bodies. The demonstrationreverses it to the benefit of another order, that of the ‘truth of things,’ or ordo essendi : a synthetic order according to which God, a mere link in thefirst order, becomes the first ring. The cogito would be genuinely absolutein all respects if it could be shown that there is but one order, that in whichit is indeed first, and that the other order, in which it is set back to secondplace, derives from the first. Now it does seem that the ‘Third Meditation’reverses the order by placing the certainty of the cogito in a subordinateposition in relation to divine veracity, which is first in accordance with the ‘truth of the thing’” (8).

As a result, the thinking thing discovered by the cogito “slips to the second ontological rank,” and, Descartes says, it even slips to the second epistemological rank: “the notion of the infinite somehow exists in me prior to the notion of the finite, that is, the notion of God exists prior to the notion of myself.” The I of the second meditation needs God to firm up its existence, and to hold up the “certainty of myself” with a degree of permanence (9). The order of reasons is not a “linear chain but . . . a loop,” as the image of the truthful God takes the place of the deceitful evil demon that worried Descartes at the outset. For Descartes, the “idea of God is in me as the very mark of the author upon his work,” such that (in Descartes’ words) I perceive my likeness to God “by the same faculty through which I perceive myself,” a conclusion that Ricoeur characterizes as a fusion of “the idea of myself and that of God” (10).

This leaves two alternatives for philosophy. On the one hand, some take the cogito as “an abstract, truncated truth, stripped of any prestige.” Ricoeur mentions Spinoza. On the other hand, in the Idealist tradition, the cogito is shored up by elevating the I to a transcendental level, stripping it of all psychological and autobiographical specificity (11).

What interests here is that what is taken as the Cartesian project (the foundationalist aspiration to ground everything on the existence of the thinking I) fails already within Descartes’s own argument. Perhaps this means that many have misconstrued Descartes’s aims; perhaps it means that Descartes failed. Either way, the self discovered by doubt needs an infinite Other to stabilize him (or he needs to become infinite himself). Even the Cartesian self is itself only with another.