Quotation
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“I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.”
René Descartes · Rationalism · Early modern · 1641
What does it mean?
The usual reading takes the sentence as a narrower and more exact claim than the famous slogan: existence is certain in the moment the claim is conceived, not as a permanent licence that a self has been proved for all time. The evil demon can still be supposed to deceive about bodies and about the past. A rival reading treats the line as already a theory of personal identity across a life, which the Second Meditation has not reached. It is the pivot of that meditation, after the doubt of the first has stripped other candidates away.
Did René Descartes really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Cottingham's translation of the Second Meditation, Adam and Tannery volume seven, page 25. This is the careful Latin formulation, not the shorter French slogan of the Discourse. The claim holds in the moment it is thought. This wording is a translation.
Where it comes from
Meditations on First Philosophy, II (AT VII 25)
Approximate date: 1641.
How to use it
At 4am in a kitchen in Aberdeen, unsure which of the evening's worries was real, the one item not on the doubtful list is that a worrying is going on. Descartes thinks that item is philosophically precious and practically tiny. It will not tell you whether the email was sent; It will tell you that the doubt has a subject in the instant it happens, and no more than that until further arguments are made.
A mindset reading
People upgrade the sentence into a biography, a solid self that has been secured against every question. The whenever is doing the opposite work: the certainty is tied to the act of conceiving. Stop conceiving, and this particular guarantee is not a story about an underlying thing you have inspected; The meditation will go on to ask what this existing thing is; It answers, next, that it is a thinking thing.
Understand the philosophy
The key term is the cogito in its meditative form, existence affirmed in the performance of thinking it, rather than as a syllogism with a hidden major premise. Adam and Tannery page 25 is the standard Latin address. Cottingham, with Stoothoff and Murdoch, gives the English used here. The Discourse had said it more briefly in French; The Meditations slow the claim down so that the whenever cannot be missed.
- knowledge
- self
- mind
FAQ
What does it mean?
The usual reading takes the sentence as a narrower and more exact claim than the famous slogan: existence is certain in the moment the claim is conceived, not as a permanent licence that a self has been proved for all time. The evil demon can still be supposed to deceive about bodies and about the past. A rival reading treats the line as already a theory of personal identity across a life, which the Second Meditation has not reached. It is the pivot of that meditation, after the doubt of the first has stripped other candidates away.
Did René Descartes really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. Cottingham's translation of the Second Meditation, Adam and Tannery volume seven, page 25. This is the careful Latin formulation, not the shorter French slogan of the Discourse. The claim holds in the moment it is thought. This wording is a translation.
Which work is it in?
Meditations on First Philosophy, II (AT VII 25) Approximate date: 1641.