Descartes’s Double Self

In his history of modern Western views of the self ( The Idea of the Self , Cambridge 2005), Jerrold Seigel offers what he believes is a fresh interpretation of the implications Descartes’s cogito . He asks, Who is the subject, the “I,” implied by the cogito and the sum ? And he answers that it is simultaneously, and necessarily, both the concrete seventeenth century Frenchman Rene Descartes and a pure rationality detached from particularities of time, place, body, culture, language, and so on: “The self that emerges out of Descartes’s meditation resides in a limbo between its own multi-dimensional existence, embodied and formed by its relations to a particular time and place, and a one-dimensional being, a pure reflective subject.”

Why does Descartes need both?

First, it must be the real Descartes because only a real Descartes needs to pass through the purifying fires of doubt to reach the cogito . Yet, once he pronounces the cogito , he is liberated from the concrete particularities of his existence: “all the contents of his mind that derive from his flesh-and-blood existence . . . remain in the region of doubtfulness which must be left behind in order to inhabit the separate realm of truth; the act of pronouncing the cogito cuts the speaker off from the whole of his concrete existence. The light it brings comes from the separation it establishes between the speaker’s mind . . . and his body, history, and circumstances, all still covered by the fog of doubt.” Since the “empirical person Rene Descartes” cannot be absolutely certain about anything, he must be identifying himself with “an abstraction of himself” when he states the cogito ,
a form of his person whose claim to existence rests on its being purified of all the actual, material qualities that seemed to define it until that moment.”

Yet, this abstracted ego must return to the concrete Descartes to complete the movement of the argument. Once the purified res cogitans is isolated, Descartes faces the problem of trying to bridge the gap to the world from which he’s been removed. How can we know anything but the self? The guarantor, the Bridge-Builder, is God. The theistic proof is essential for Descartes’s system, the only way that the mind can contact the world.

But the form of the theistic argument depends on Descartes’s imperfection and impurity. The argument is a kind of Anselmian ontological proof: Descartes knows himself to be composite, full of doubts and confusion; but he finds implanted in himself an idea of perfection; he cannot be the source of this perfect, only some perfect being can; and since a perfect being cannot lack the quality of existence, this perfect being must exist.

In short, the argument oscillates from the imperfect and confused Descartes who doubts; to the abstracted “Descartes” who is pure thought; back to the imperfect real Descartes who knows God exists by the trace of perfection implanted within him.