Lecture Supplement On “Augustine’s Cogito Argument:”

Copyright © 2024 Bruce W. Hauptli

In his City of God [426], St. Augustine offers something like Descartes’ cogito:

but, without any illusion of image, fancy, or phantasm, I am certain that I am, that I know that I am, and that I love to be and to know. 

  In the face of these truths, the quibbles of the skeptics lose their force.  If they say: “What if you are mistaken?—well, if I am mistaken, I am.  For, if one does not exist, he can by no means be mistaken.  Therefore, I am, if I am mistaken.  Because, therefore, I am, if I am mistaken, how can I be mistaken that I am, since it is certain that I am, if I am mistaken?  And because, if I could be mistaken, I would have to be the one who is mistaken, therefore, I am most certainly not mistaken in knowing that I am.  Nor, as a consequence, am I mistaken in knowing that I know.  For, just as I know that I am, I also know that I know.  And when I love both to be and to know, then I add to the things I know a third and equally important knowledge, the fact that I love. 

  Nor am I mistaken that I love, since I am not mistaken concerning the objects of my love.  For, even though these objects were false, it would still be true that I loved illusions.^[1] 

On November 14, 1640 Descartes writes to Andres Covius, a Dutch Minister who brought Augustine’s argument to his attention:

you have obliged me by bringing to my notice the passage of Saint Augustine which bears some relation to my “I think, therefore I am.”  Today I have been to read it at the library of this city [Leiden], and I do indeed find that he makes use of it to prove the certainty of our being, and then to show that there is in us a kind of image of the Trinity, in that we exist, we know that we exist, and we love this being and the knowledge that is in us.  On the other hand, I use it to make it known that this I who is thinking is an immaterial substance, and has nothing in it that is corporeal.  These are two very different things….^[2] 

In his A Brief History of the Paradox, Roy Sorensen maintains that:

when [Augustine’s] passage was pointed out to Descartes, he replied…that Augustine fails to use the argument to show that “this I which thinks is an immaterial substance with no bodily element.”  However, in The Trinity (10.10.16), Augustine does seem to gravitate toward this conclusion from the premise that he can doubt that he has a body but not that he has a mind. 

  Descartes claimed that he had never heard of Augustine’s cogito.  Descartes’s Catholic education at La Flèche makes this unlikely.  Augustine’s writings were popular among Descartes’s Jesuit instructors.  Augustine presents his cogito seven times in such intensively studied works such as The Trinity and City of God. 

  Augustine’s loosely strung anticipations of Descartes’s Meditations do not constitute an attempt to systematically found a philosophy inside out à la Descartes.  Descartes is far and away the more precise and organized thinker.  Yet Augustine clearly had more than a lucky premonition of the Cartesian mind set.^[3] 

While Augustine’s and Descartes’ arguments are very similar, their orientations are very different.  Descartes seeks rational certainty—he wants to know what we can be absolutely certain of on our own.  He wants to construct the edifice of human "scientific" knowledge on this foundation, and he believes that it is in knowledge that our “good” lies.  1,214 years earlier, Augustine (like the early modern philosophers) also sought certainty in a world where the old order (the Roman world) has fallen apart—he wrote his City of God, in part, to explain why his deity allowed Rome to fall to the barbarians [410 C.E.].  Between Augustine and Descartes stands the Middle Ages, however.  As the “first of the Medievals,” Augustine finds his certainty (as well as peace and security) in his faith.  He contends that his City of God “...shuns [universal skepticism] as a form of insanity” and “...believes the Old and New Testaments...as canonical.  Out of these he formulates that faith according to which the just man lives.  And in light of this faith we walk forward without fear of stumbling....”^[4]  As his Confessions make clear, Augustine has an acute sense of sin—one which is almost “abnormal” to the modern eye.^[5]  It is important to remember what the first sin is (Adam’s sin), and to note that Augustine constantly tried to avoid the sin of intellectual pride. 

     Descartes, who is on the “modern” side of the Middle Ages, is also a sincere and believing Catholic, but he would find certainty, peace, and security in human rational knowledge.  While both are writing at a time when the security provided by an earlier era (the Roman and the Medieval, respectively), has come undone, and a “new methodology” is sought, their orientations toward reality, knowledge, religion, and the deity they both worship is radically different.  As W.T. Jones notes:

...Augustine was not greatly interested in the problem of knowledge....his consuming interest...was “peace”—the desire for security....Second...he held that reason is an inadequate instrument for reaching the truth, which can be attained only through faith.  Knowledge, he thought, is validated by faith in God’s goodness and providence, not by logical reasoning or geometrical demonstration.  It is thus characteristic of Augustine’s whole point of view that the passage just quoted [above] about self-knowledge was merely incidental to his account of the nature of the Trinity.^[6] 

In his The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, Peter Gay maintains that:

Augustine sees man as unhappy; puzzled by himself, his world, and his destiny.  All men want happiness, and all philosophers seek the way to it, but without divine aid all fail: “Thou has made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it rest in Thee”—this famous exclamation from the Confessions is the exclamation of a tormented soul weary of mere thought, weary of autonomy, yearning for the sheltering security found in dependence on higher powers.  When Augustine speaks of understanding or reason, these words have a religious admixture: philosophy to him is touched by the divine.^[7] 

...Augustine’s dictum stands the traditional method of classical philosophizing on its head: God, who to the ancients was the result of thought, now becomes its presupposition.  Faith is not the reward of understanding; understanding is the reward of faith.  Man may search for the explanation of his situation by his humble reason; he may even try to order his moral conduct through the understanding.  But the explanation for the human condition is a myth—the Fall; the guide to his salvation is a supernatural being—Jesus Christ; the proof text for the primacy of faith over reason is a divinely inspired book—the Bible; and the interpreter of this Book is an infallible authority—the Church.  All four testify to the collapse of confidence in man’s unaided intellect. 

  Hence, nisi credideritis, non intelligetis: unless you believe, you will not understand.^[8]  This injunction is the center of Augustine’s doctrine on the relation of philosophy to theology, and through its enormous authority, it became the center of medieval speculation on the same subject, although the Scholastics, as the philosophes knew, provided intellect with much room for play.^[9] 

Clearly, there is a difference in the use which these two thinkers would make of their common argument.  In these differing contexts, one might contend, they are (or, better, almost are) different arguments. 

     In his “Idealism and Greek Philosophy: What Descartes Saw and Berkeley Missed” M.F. Burnyeat offers a discussion which can help us see yet more clearly these differing contexts.  He maintains that:

Greek philosophy does not know the problem of proving in a general way the existence of an external world.  That problem is a modern invention....The problem which typifies ancient philosophical enquiry in a way that the external world problem has come to typify philosophical enquiry in modern times is quite the opposite.  It is the problem of understanding how thought can be of nothing or what is not, how our minds can be exercised on falsehoods, fictions, and illusions.^[10] 

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Email: hauptli@fiu.edu 

Last revised: 07/21/24.