Meditating with Descartes, Cogito and the Inseparable Thinker. His Second Meditation.

In the Second Meditation, Descartes arrives at the most famous philosophical statement in western history — cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. Having dismantled everything in the First Meditation, having pushed Descartes doubt to its absolute limit until nothing remained he could be certain of, he finds one thing that survives. The act of thinking itself. And from that single thread he begins to rebuild. What I want to do here is follow that thread further than Descartes took it — because the Buddha Dharma, and a rather sharp eighteenth-century German physicist named Lichtenberg, both have something to say about what the cogito is actually pointing at.

The Descartes Cogito — What He Actually Said

It is worth being precise about where the cogito actually appears, because there is a common confusion. Cogito ergo sum — I think therefore I am — is most famously phrased in Descartes’ earlier work, the Discourse on Method. But the deeper working-out of what this means happens here, in the Second Meditation, where Descartes is not just asserting the cogito but examining it from every angle.

What he is doing in the Second Meditation is asking: having doubted everything — the external world, the body, God, even the reliability of his own reasoning — what is the minimum that must exist for there to be any doubting happening at all? And the answer he arrives at is the thinker. Not the body. Not the senses. Not the world. The thinking thing. If doubt is occurring, something must be doing the doubting. That something — whatever it is — exists.

🏛️  “Is there not a god, or whatever I may call him, who puts me into the thoughts I am now having? But why do I think this, since I myself may perhaps be the author of my thoughts.”

— Descartes, Second Meditation, AT 24

What I find remarkable in this passage is not the conclusion but the question itself. Descartes pauses at the threshold of the cogito and asks — where do thoughts come from? Is there a source beyond me, or am I the source? He does not fully resolve this. He uses it as a stepping stone to establish his own existence. But the question he is reaching toward is one that the Buddha Dharma has been examining in extraordinary depth for two and a half thousand years.

The Lichtenberg Point — It Thinks, Therefore…

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was an eighteenth-century German physicist and aphorist who read Descartes very carefully and noticed something that most people miss. The cogito — I think therefore I am — smuggles in an assumption before it even gets started. The word I. Descartes uses the experience of thinking as proof of the existence of an I. But Lichtenberg argued that this is not actually what the experience of thinking establishes.

All you can honestly say, Lichtenberg argued, is that it thinks — “Es denkt” in German. Not I think. The I is a conclusion being drawn from the thinking, not something given in the thinking itself. The thinking is immediate. The I is an interpretation layered on top of it. Descartes assumed the very thing he needed to prove.

🏛️  “We should say it thinks, just as we say it thunders. To say cogito is already too much if we translate it with I think.”

— Georg Lichtenberg, Waste Books, Notebook J

This is a genuinely devastating philosophical observation and it did not receive nearly the attention it deserved in the western tradition. Lichtenberg is pointing at something that the Buddha Dharma had been articulating clearly since Nagarjuna — that the self is not a given, not a foundation, but a construction. An inference. A story the mind tells about its own activity.

There Is Thinking — Taking It One Step Further

I want to take Lichtenberg’s move one step further, because I think there is something even more precise available. Lichtenberg says it thinks — which is better than I think, because it removes the personal pronoun and the assumed selfhood. But it still posits an impersonal subject. Something is doing the thinking, even if that something is not a personal I.

What the Buddha Dharma points at, and what I find confirmed in my own practice, is that you can go one step further still. Not I think. Not it thinks. There is thinking. Subject, object, and action are not three separate things. The thinker, the thought that is being thought, and the act of thinking are not genuinely separable. They arise together. They are one movement. When you try to find the thinker apart from the thinking, you cannot locate it. When you look for the thought apart from the act of thinking, there is nothing there. The three are not three.

This is not a word game. It is a description of what happens in meditation when you actually look. The moment you turn attention toward the one who is paying attention, the observer and the observed collapse into each other. There is awareness. There is knowing. But the knower and the known are not two separate things sitting on either side of a desk. They are one event. One movement of mind.

The Inseparability of Thinker and Thought

Descartes comes closer to this than he is usually given credit for. After the cogito, he goes further into what the thinking thing actually is, and he arrives at a description that is strikingly close to what the dharma is pointing at — even if he does not follow it all the way.

🏛️  “Thinking? At least I have discovered it — thought; this alone is inseparable from me. I am, I exist, that is certain. But for how long? For as long as I am thinking. For it could be that were I totally to cease from thinking, I should totally cease to exist… I am then, in the strict sense, only a thing that thinks; that is, I am a mind, or intelligence, or intellect, or reason.”

— Descartes, Second Meditation, AT 24

What I find important here — and what Descartes himself flags — is the inseparability of thinking and thinker. He is not saying I have a mind. He is saying I am the thinking. The two are not separate. The self and its activity are one. This is closer to the dharma view than most western philosophy ever gets, and it comes from inside the cogito itself.

The problem is that Descartes uses this inseparability to establish the existence of a self — a res cogitans, a thinking substance — and then moves on to rebuild the rational architecture of God, world, and knowledge on top of it. The dharma would say: you were at the threshold. The inseparability you noticed — thinker and thought as one — that is not the proof of a self. That is the proof of no-self. Or more precisely, it is the pointing-at of what is prior to both self and no-self.

Saraha is not being rude for the sake of it. He is doing exactly what the Lichtenberg point and the cogito are dancing around — pointing at the fact that both extreme positions, existence and non-existence, are already inside a conceptual framework that is itself the problem. The thinker who decides that everything exists is still a thinker constructing a position. The thinker who decides nothing exists has done the same. Saraha is pointing past the thinker entirely. Now that’s genuinely genius.

The Descartes Cogito and the Buddhist Teaching on Non-Self

What the cogito establishes, and what Lichtenberg’s correction sharpens, and what the dharma resolves, is the question of what is actually present when thinking occurs. Descartes says: a self. Lichtenberg says: not necessarily. The Buddha Dharma says: look more carefully. What is present is awareness. What is present is knowing. But the one who is aware, the self that knows — that is a construction built on top of the awareness, not the awareness itself. Ergo non-self.

The teaching on non-self, anattā, is not the teaching that you do not exist. It is the teaching that the self you think you are — the fixed, independent, self-sufficient entity standing behind the thoughts — is not what is actually there when you look. What is there when you look is more interesting. More spacious. Less defended. The thinking occurs. The awareness is present. The I is a later addition, a label attached to a process that was already happening before the label arrived.

This is why the cogito, taken seriously, points further than Descartes took it. He found the minimum necessary for there to be any experience at all. He just misidentified what that minimum was. It is not a self. It is awareness. And awareness, as the Buddha Dharma has been patiently explaining for two and a half thousand years, is not a thing. It is the nature of mind itself.

In the Third Meditation, Descartes turns to the question of God and the nature of mind in more detail — and the comparison becomes even more interesting. We will meet there soon.

QP

Go Deeper

In This Series:

← Part 1 — Doubt, Nihilism, and the Buddhist Void

Part 2 — The Cogito and the Inseparable Thinker, You are Here Now.

→ Part 3 — Consciousness, God, and the Nature of Mind

→ Part 4 — Truth, Certainty, and the Vajrayana View

→ Part 5 — Essence, Existence, and Buddha-Nature

→ Part 6 — Mind, Body, and the Tantric Reframe

→ The Cartesian Conundrum — Could Descartes Speak His Mind?

On Quantum Awareness:

→ What Are Shine and Lhaktong?

→ What is Ngöndro?

→ Breath and Meditation

Further Reading:

→ Meditations on First Philosophy — Free Full Text

→ Stanford Encyclopedia — René Descartes

→ Stanford Encyclopedia — Descartes’ Epistemology

→ Stanford Encyclopedia — Personal Identity

→ Lotsawa House — The Middle Way.