What do you know?
Really. With absolute certainty, what do you know?
Put aside all opinions, beliefs and theories for a moment and answer this direct question: What do you know for sure? Now, as Thoreau said:
“Let us settle, work, and shoe our feet down through the mire and mire of opinion, prejudice, tradition, deceit, and appearance, that barrage which covers the globe…through church and state, through of poetry and philosophy and religion, until we hit a hard bottom and rocks in place, what we can call reality, and say, This is it, and there is no mistake; and then begin…”
In other words, let’s cut the bullshit and find out what’s real. The cogito does exactly that, and it’s very simple. The question is: what do you know?
The answer is: I am.
All other supposed facts are actually non-facts and belong to the category of agreed reality and relative truth, that is, unreal reality and false truth.
::: Cogito ergo sum
Cogito ergo sum is the equation that proves the fact. But first, before we go any further, let’s ask ourselves what else we know. What else can be said for sure?
Nothing. We don’t know anything else. And that’s the real point of the cogito. The importance of I Am is not that it is a fact, but that it is the only fact.
I Am is the only thing anyone has ever known or will ever know. Everything else, all religion and philosophy, is nothing more than the interpretation of dreams. There is no other fact than the I Am. The cogito is the seed of thought that destroys the universe. Beyond the cogito, nothing is known. Beyond the cogito, nothing can be known. Except I Am, nobody knows anything. No man or god can claim to know more. No God or group of gods can exist or be imagined that knows more than this one thing: I Am.
We can’t help but let this topic stray briefly into the Christian realm. When Moses asked God his name, God replied, “I am who I am.” The name that God gives himself is I Am.
Note that I Am is unconjugable. It does not admit any variation. God does not say: “My name is I Am, but you can call me You Are or He Is.” The cogito, the I Am equation, does not extend beyond one’s own subjective knowledge. I can say I am and know it as true, but I cannot say you are, he is, she is, we are, they are, he is, etc. I know that I exist and nothing else. Thus understood, I Am, also known as God, truly is the Alpha and the Omega; the totality of being, of knowing, of you.
::: The Line Is Drawn
The cogito is the line between fantasy and reality. On one side of the cogito there is a universe of beliefs and ideas and theories. Crossing the line is leaving all that behind. No theory, concept, belief, opinion, or debate can have any possible basis in reality once the ramifications of the cogito have fully saturated the mind. No dialogue can take place across that line because anything that makes sense on one side makes sense on the other.
We all think we know what the cogito means; this is an invitation to challenge that assumption. If philosophy teachers really understood it, they wouldn’t be philosophy teachers. Alfred North Whitehead said that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato, but all philosophy, including Plato, is rendered obsolete and irrelevant by Descartes. Nothing but the subjective I Am is true, so what’s the point of babbling?
The cogito is not a mere thought or an idea, it is an ego-devouring virus that, properly incubated and fed, will end up devouring all illusion. Once we know the cogito, we can begin to systematically ignore everything we thought we knew and unravel the self that we are not.
::: Life is nothing but a dream
There is no such thing as objective reality. Two cannot be proven. It can be shown that nothing exists. Time and space, love and hate, good and evil, cause and effect, are just ideas. Anyone who says they know something is really saying that they don’t know the only thing. The greatest religious and philosophical thoughts and ideas in the history of man contain no more truth than the bleating of sheep. The best books have no more authority than the best cold cuts.
Nobody knows anything.
::: Disprove it yourself
Anyone wishing to deny these claims about the meaning of the cogito simply needs to prove that something, anything, is true. By all means try it, hit your head but it can’t be done. Cogito ergo sum, however, is not the end point of the investigation, it is the starting point; it is a tool that helps us to see, without intermediaries, what is true and what is not.
How good is that?