Augustine's Cogito Argument Pre-Dates Descartes' Cogito

I'd always thought that Descartes' Cogito argument, (the idea that even if he is doubting, he as a doubter must exist, or to put it in it's usual form 'I think therefore I am'), was original to him. I don't think I'm alone in that. In fact, as Richard Sorabji demonstrates in his recent book, Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death, Augustine used almost exactly the same argument, and possibly Plotinus too before him (this is also noted in the Wikipedia article on the Cogito). So Descartes wasn't the first. And Augustine, like Descartes, even used the argument as a reponse to scepticism.  Here is the Augustine's version that Sorabji cites (Sorabji gives a number of other places Augustine used a similar argument)

"But who will doubt that he lives, remembers, understands, wills, thinks, knows, and judges? For even if he doubts, he lives. If he doubts where his doubs come from, he remembers. If he doubts, he understands that he doubts. If he doubts, he wants to be certain. If he doubts, he thinks. If he doubts, he knows that he does not know. If he doubts, he judges that he ougth not rashly to give assent. So whoever acquires a doubt from any source ought not to doubt any of these things whose non-existence would mean that he could not entertain doubt about anything." (Augustine, On the Trinity 10.10.14 quoted in Richard Sorabji Self, 2006, p.219).

On the basis of the evidence here Descartes was a far superior stylist. And the first person expression of the idea in the Meditations is peculiarly seductive as a mode of writing. But it's interesting to learn that the Cogito idea predated him...

Comments

[bob]

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 noting in it that is incorporeal. These are two very different things….13a

[jake]

The stylistic difference is in fact substantive.

Augie invites us to see ourselves - I think, I live, I am - as living human beings acting out the narrative of our lives, as embodied rational men and women. Descartes’s “I think, I am” leaves us rational animals no longer, without having much to do with a body as the last comment notes. Hence Locke divorces self and person from the living and sensing human being. Becoming the disembodied, anti-essentialist ego of later thinkers... etc.