2. Descartes and the Cogito

Mathematician and philosopher René Descartes wrote at the outset of the period that is now known as the Enlightenment. Some noteworthy trends from the Enlightenment era include the embrace of the ‘scientific method’, which gained acceptance as a trustworthy method of learning about the world, gaining traction as the results of scientific enquiry became more and more profound and practical. It is in this context that Descartes would seek to determine, through reason, proof of his existence and then proof of God’s existence. This process would be spelt out in his famous work, Meditations on First Philosophy.

In these meditations, Descartes employs a method of doubt that systematically calls into question all of his beliefs, with the goal of arriving at (at least) one indubitable truth that is inherently immune to doubt itself. To kick-start his project, Descartes begins by doubting everything that he has previously believed to be true, including his sensory perceptions, memories, and even the existence of the external world. In this epistemological resistance to certainty, Descartes, perhaps (in)advertently, kept slicing away important chunks of reality as he doubted various aspects of reality and, in fact, the very foundations of reality.

Indeed, he states the following:

Descartes starts off by doubting the senses as something that can provide certain truths. He notes that it is these very same senses that have often caused him to be misinformed or come to the wrong conclusions. If it is true that the senses could be wrong some of the time, then it is plausible to also believe that the senses can be wrong all of the time. While some may consider the leap from ‘some’ to ‘all’ to be premature, and Descartes notes this when he says that ‘although the senses occasionally deceive us with respect to objects which are very small or in the distance, there are many other beliefs about which doubt is quite impossible, even though they are derived from the senses’ (AT 7: 18/CSM 2: 12–13)Footnote ², the plausibility of the possibility of this sort of absolute deception is enough (and just what he needs) to set aside the senses as a source of knowledge about reality.

Beyond all that, Descartes believes that we should also be worried about the reality of the external world since our so-called experience of the external world can be replicated in dreams, where the experience does not reflect a real-world experience. The feeling of walking barefoot on the beach, or the belief that we are in danger as we run away from a terrifying entity, suddenly attains falsehood when we wake up on our beds and realise that we were dreaming all along. More to the point, how can we tell for sure that our present experiences are not all parts of a dream? If we can never tell whether we are dreaming or not, then there is good reason to doubt the things we perceive and entertain the point that reality, as we understand it, is illusory. Even truths, such as mathematical truths, are not immune to doubt. They may just appear as simple truths due to the work of an extremely cunning deceiver. If such a deceiver is conceivable, then, Descartes concludes, there is enough reason for him (Descartes) to refuse to take any of his beliefs as irrefutable truths.Footnote ³

Following this trajectory of doubt, Descartes, in the second meditation, attempts to doubt his existence as a thinking thing and comes to a stunning realisation – that he cannot doubt his existence nor be deceived of it without implicitly affirming it at the same time, and so the only thing he can know for certain (having denied every other thing) is that he exists. If he does doubt his existence, then he must exist, because doubt requires a thinking subject – and so thinking or doubting implies existing. If he is deceived by some evil demon, the demon must have a subject to deceive, and thus, he must exist.

From here, Descartes would conclude what will become among the most famous lines in Western philosophy: Cogito Ergo Sum, I think, therefore I am. In other words, insofar as he thinks or asserts ‘I am’, he would necessarily ‘exist’ (AT 7: 26-27/CSM 2; 17–18).

He states:

What Descartes concludes here is interesting and would be relevant for the discussion that comes later on in this paper. In searching for a fundamental truth, Descartes discovers the Cogito as a viable candidate and arrives at this conclusion by denying the existence of other things in the world. If one must apply doubt to himself/herself as a thinking thing, then one immediately faces a contradiction because one must exist, first, as a thinking/doubting thing in order to doubt one’s existence as a thinking thing. And so it makes perfect sense, as far as Descartes is concerned, to identify, as certain, the existence of a thinking thing since doubting only re-affirms the existence of a thinking thing which doubts.

In the ‘Western’ philosophical tradition, there have been numerous pushbacks against the cogito. Søren Kierkegaard (Reference Kierkegaard, Hong and Hong1987 [1846], pp. 317–319), for instance, thought that the cogito was tautologous. To state ‘I think…’ already presupposes the existence of the ‘I’, and so to prove the validity of the claim as an actual proposition is problematic since the predicate is itself the subject. In other words, the cogito fails to prove existence since it presupposes existence from the start. And if the existence of the thinking remains unproven by its pre-affirmation, then the cogito is itself not the foundational truth but the ultimate doubt since the thinking thing cannot be affirmed as existing by virtue of the cogito itself!

This problem is extended even to the phenomenological sphere by Nietzsche (Reference Nietzsche and Zimmern2006 [1886], pp. 17–18), who questions the assumption that the experience of thinking necessarily identifies with the self or subject that is thinking, or the assumption that we know what thinking actually is, such that it can be necessarily tied to an entity of some sort that we might identify as ourselves. One response to this problem could be that the experience of thinking, or what it is like to think, manifests itself as something originating from something else. If we concluded that this was a false assumption, then one would still have to say that thought itself is an existing phenomenon. And so, even if a self fails to exist, thoughts exist insofar as there is thinking. One could also argue that the thought is only conceptually distinct from the thinking thing, and so once there is thought, there is a thinking thing.Footnote ⁴

Gilbert Ryle’s allusion to a ghost in the machine might also raise an interesting problem for Descartes (especially if one decides to equate the ghost with the immaterial self), where the existence of the thinking thing itself is called into question (Ryle, Reference Ryle2009). However, as most property dualists intuit, there is something more to mind or thought (what it is like to experience the colour red, for instance) that is difficult to explain by mere recourse to a mindless body. Whether reducible to the body or not, thought must exist in some way since thoughts are the very things that allow us to create our vision of the world. And if thoughts exist, then Descartes’ cogito still rings true since we cannot doubt their existence insofar as we think.

Yet the thought/thinking must be about something, it must have content in order to appear in the world. And if Descartes’ search is for indubitable truth, we believe that there is something Ubuntu has to say to Descartes’ project, something that reveals an even greater truth than was envisaged by Descartes. We begin our exposition of this alternative in the subsequent sections.

3. On Ubuntu

Now, what we do here, as earlier stated, is present to the reader an alternative perspective to Descartes’ search for the foundational truth on which reality can be built. This alternative path lies in the idea of Ubuntu and the relationality that proceeds from it.

Ubuntu is a traditional African philosophical system that is mostly prominent in Southern Africa, where the ideas that currently espouse aspects of this viewpoint have been drawn from oral literature and (purportedly) from the lived experiences of the peoples of this region. The term Ubuntu is difficult to define, as is the case with many philosophical concepts, but historically, it has been used to describe a type of ethic (Ramose, Reference Ramose, Coetzee and Roux2003; Gade, Reference Gade2011), a type of epistemology (Mboti, Reference Mboti2015), a type of ontology (Ramose Reference Ramose1999), etc., our concern is with its ontological manifestation – especially the relationality that undergirds it.

In Mogobe Ramose’s philosophy, ubuntu or, better put, ubu-ntu, reflects a relational notion of being that is driven by incompleteness and/or imperfection, as Ada Agada (Reference Agada2015, p. 64; Reference Agada2022) will say. In the prefix, ubu-, we encounter a general notion of being as unfolding and ever-evolving, never static and complete. The incompleteness of being is somewhat satisfied by its constant evolving, unfolding, and yearning – for if being, in general, were complete, then the apparent unfolding of being becomes unnecessary since unfolding and evolving imply new forms of expressions and new forms of improvement, or even devolution, that an inherently perfect state does not entail. -ntu, on the other hand, reflects a specific instantiation of being, as recorded in the conscious mind, as it gazes towards that being. It is the ‘nodal point at which be-ing assumes a concrete form or a mode of being in the process of continual unfoldment’ (Ramose, Reference Ramose1999, p. 36). That is, it is the point at which ubu finds material expression. This picture of being, -ntu, never reflects being in its completeness or wholeness, and the tendency to think so is wrong. When we look at a particular instantiation of being, we are looking at something in motion—for instance, a good person who may become bad over time, in different contexts, and/or under future circumstances.Footnote ⁵ Thus, further reflected in his description of the concept is the impossibility of a being-alone or even individual completeness/perfection at any particular place or time since -ntu only (and necessarily) unfolds through its relationship with other things through time and space.

In all these, Ramose suggests that umuntu (conscious being – in this case, a person) is the be-ing through which ontology and epistemology find meaning. Through consciousness, self-awareness, and the awareness of others, umuntu translates and articulates being and ventures to understand it through the dialogue of be-ing with be-ing (Ramose, Reference Ramose1999, p. 36). And here, we have the first glimpse of an argument that will be crucial to our alternative perspective as we proceed further. For it seems apparent that for umuntu to discover being – to conceive and/or discover truth or the reality of an existent thing – a relationship must precede that discovery. That is, ubudlelwane buza ngaphambili kokucabanga (relationality must precede thought and/or truth). We will return to this point later on.

The idea of relationality is ubiquitous in African metaphysics – from Pantaleon Iroegbu (Reference Iroegbu1995) to Ramose (Reference Ramose1999, Reference Ramose, Coetzee and Roux2003), down to Chimakonam and Ogbonnaya (Reference Chimakonam and Ogbonnaya2021) and Attoe (Reference Attoe2022). In our view, this relationality begins with a strong denial of the possibility of nothingness (understood as absolute nothingness), whether in its conceivability or its manifestation (logically and ontologically). In the mere semantic expression of the possibility of nothingness, one encounters a paradox where the phrase ‘nothing exists’, immediately points to the somethingness of nothingness, which, in itself, contradicts the meaning of nothingness. When Joseph Kaipayil asked ‘… why is there something rather than nothing?’, his response was that ‘… there is something (at least one who asked the question) and something cannot come out of nothing, for nothing comes out of nothing, and hence something must be there always’ (Kaipayil, Reference Kaipayil2009, p.55). Kaipayil’s view captures the intuition of some anonymous traditionalFootnote ⁶ African philosophers who often point to God and some primordial raw materials as the eternal condiments for the resistance of nothing and the unfolding of being (Wiredu, Reference Wiredu1998, p. 30). What is being extracted here is the assumption of the existence of, at least, a thing that must persist in one way or another throughout (and, perhaps, beyond) time. In other words, there must be a reality or a conglomeration of realities that must exist eternally in order to account for the existence of things in the world – and if we take time to be a finite reality (by suggesting a beginning of time) then eternal reality must have the capacity of existing outside of time.

The presence of somethingness does not, however, imply the actualisation of being-alone (a concept that is thought of as the closest to (if not synonymous with) nothingness in African metaphysical thought). By existing, reality must interact with something – at the very least, the environment in which it exists, for a thing cannot exist within the confines of absolute nothingness – the possibility of such implying another contradiction. For if we say that being exists within absolute nothingness, the existence of that being automatically denies that absolute nothingness. This is why the concept of being-alone, is such an incomprehensible concept for us. The impossibility of absolute nothingness due to the presence of a being requires that the burden of existence is necessarily shared with something else, since it cannot be shared with absolute nothingness, because of the contradiction that that entails. Again, we see here the fundamentality – and even necessity – of relationality at the most fundamental level.

For the anonymous traditional African philosophers of the Akan school of thought, it is this rejection of being alone that necessitates the idea that God is, alongside other primordial and (presumably) eternal ‘raw materials’ (Wiredu, Reference Wiredu1998, p. 30). For even God cannot be a being-alone (and God manifests incompleteness/insufficiency because of this), and it is the relationship between God and these raw materials that eventually produces new things in the world and kick-starts the cosmos that we inhabit.

By denying being-alone and projecting being-alone as something that is, itself, akin to nothingness, African metaphysicians (both traditional and contemporary) often come to the conclusion that no being is so complete and absolute that it can truly resist a relational existence (Ramose, Reference Ramose1999; Asouzu, Reference Asouzu2004, Reference Asouzu2007). Some have even gone as far as to think of relationality as necessary (Attoe, Reference Attoe2022, pp. 41–74). Relationality, then, presupposes the idea that nothing is self-standing or self-evident. Rather, all things are relational particulars. As particulars are ontologically open to other particulars in their constitution and actions, particulars are inherently relational. Relational particulars and their interactions are ultimately what make up our reality (Attoe, Reference Attoe2022, pp. 54–55). Furthermore, our access to reality is through the observation of the interactions of these relational particulars. Relationality, thus, undergirds Ubuntu. Relationality and Ubuntu come together to make the same point; that being, as a whole, as it unfolds, is constituted by the interactions of its contents. Knowledge about reality is merely to perceive those interactions, and existing in the world only serves to preserve/express that relationality. All these ideas come together to form an alternative perspective for our interaction with Descartes’ Cogito.

4. The Cogito in Light of Ubuntu

As stated earlier, the first meditation consists of Descartes engaging in radical doubt, bringing all he believes he knows into question. However, within the framework of Ubuntu, to doubt the existence of everything is to doubt one’s own existence. Remember – being alone implies something akin to nothingness within the African view.

By doubting the existence of other things in the world, including his body, Descartes’ actually undertakes to undermine the actual existence of everything in the world. To buttress this interpretation of Descartes, we turn to Descartes’ own words: ‘Anything which admits of the slightest doubt I will set aside just as if I had found it to be wholly false; and I will proceed in this way until I recognise something certain….’ (AT 7:24/CSM 2:16). If one must deny as false anything that can be doubted, as Descartes notes, then it is not far-fetched for us to say that anything that is subject to doubt, once set aside as false, ceases to exist (in the context of Descartes’ thinking and deliberation) until such a time that they are proven, with certainty, to be true. This point is further acknowledged by Kierkegaard (Reference Kierkegaard, Hong and Hong1987 [1846], pp. 232–233), who notes that Descartes ‘… eliminated everything in order to find himself as a thinking being ….’. Also, Descartes, noting the possibility that God or some cunning demon had employed all their cunning and energy to deceive him, can be interpreted to reject the existence of things in the external world stating that ‘the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely delusions of dreams ….’ (AT 7:22-23/CSM 2:15). This point is important, and the weight of its implications is often forgotten. In doubting the existence of a thing, what Descartes actually does is remove from his perception of reality the actual existence of the thing that has been doubted, since it is false. And so, at the end of his exercise in doubt, Descartes’ cosmos is one that is initially bereft of all reality, except, of course, the thinking thing. While the arguments that sustain the existence of the thinking thing are beautiful, Descartes’ thinking thing immediately manifests itself as a being-alone. And so, the first point of contrast is struck. If the thinking thing is akin to a being-alone, then the thinking thing is akin to nothingFootnote ⁷, for it is not in a relationship with any other thing in the world. Also, if a thing, according to the Ubuntu-relational framework, only identifies itself in (and through) its relations with other things, a thinking thing that is a being-alone, that relates with nothing, cannot have an identity. The ‘I’ in Descartes’ cogito is immediately called into question since a thing cannot identify itself as an ‘I’ without the ‘other’ (which has been removed from Descartes’ cosmos by doubt). By saying, ‘I think …’, Descartes makes the first mistake from the Ubuntu viewpoint.

This leads us nicely to our next point – that relationality precedes thought. To make this claim, we must have an understanding of what it means to think or have thought. To think is to do two things: to direct our minds or brains towards a thing in the world, or to form (in our minds) or identify the relationship between things or ideas (at an abstract or meta-level). If the above is true, what immediately follows is the idea that our thoughts, or the act of thinking, necessarily involve the presence of an other for which the thinking is directed, or from which relationships are formed. We can think of the concept of ‘dog’, because our thinking, our gaze, has been directed towards a thing and its relationship with the world, which we have now built in our minds into the concept of a ‘dog’. And so when we see something similar, manifesting similar relationships, we often identify such a thing as ‘dog’. We can imagine a centaur and have thoughts about such a being because, in our thinking, we make relationships, in our thoughts, between things we identify as horses, and things we identify as humans, etc. But in that relationship, what is crucial is our initial grasp of the actual things – humans and horses – as we encounter them in our thinking, through our relationship with them. If Descartes was right in his doubt of other things, then thinking itself would have been impossible. This would be so on two levels.

First, if thinking requires an other (some thing that is representative of the external world), then doubting would be impossible since one requires the perception of some thing in the external world (whose existence is called into question) in order to have thought. In other words, the very ideas that Descartes doubts, would not exist without the presence of the very thing (or at least some thing) that he doubts in the first place. Thus, the process of doubting requires an external world in order to be possible, and so this external world cannot be doubted in the first instance. So, the method of methodic doubt inherently fails in this manner. An appeal to God or a deceiver also fails because it is either nothing else exists except the thinking thing (in which case the appeal to God and/or a deceiver is moot), or the thinking thing necessarily has some interaction/relationship with God or some deceiver (who would constitute a thing in the external world), in order to think and/or be deceived (making the external world necessarily real).

Following this, we come to the second problem, which lies in the possibility of a thinking thing that is also a being-alone. When Descartes says ‘I think, I exist’, one must also ask whether thinking is possible in Descartes’ cosmos, which is absolutely bereft of other things by virtue of doubt. What is the content of that thought? How is thinking possible when thinking is directed by/to nothing? One can, of course, argue that the thinking thing might direct itself towards its own self, but is the idea of a ‘self’ possible without an ‘other’ to relate and contrast with? We do not think so. What is apparent, then, is the idea that thinking is impossible without the existence and contact with some other thing in the world. And if this is plausible, then the thinking cannot exist without a prior relationship with an other – I cannot think (since I do not have a relationship with an other), and I cannot be (since I cannot think). Even though Descartes eventually goes on to establish the existence of other things in the world, and one might argue that that establishes some relationship between the cogito and those things, our view reveals two points. (1) Either the doubting of the external world is necessarily at odds with the project of establishing the existence of a (thinking) thing, or (2) the doubting of the external world necessarily eliminates the thinking thing.

This leads us to a few inerrant truths that are revealed when Ubuntu converses with Descartes’ Cogito. If it is true that the content of thought emerges from a relationship between the thinking thing and other thing(s) in the world, then it must be the case that relationality precedes thought. If this is the case, then the existence of some other thing, alongside the thinking thing, is necessary since we think. One can go as far as to say that thought itself is a product of relationality since, without interaction, there is no thought. Relationships persist eternally since, as we stated earlier, nothingness is impossible and the thinking thing, whether eternal or temporal, proceeds from and/or exists within relationality. If this is the case, one must conclude that all conscious beings must say; nginobudlelwane, ngikhona, or I relate, I am. One can anticipate relationality by virtue of its necessity, and one can anticipate the ‘I’ since it emerges from and exists within the relational whole. However, since existence and relationality are eternal in the Ubuntu-relational framework,Footnote ⁸ the existence of things in the world is inextricably linked to the relationship between and among those things since nothingness (and, by extension, being-alone) is impossible. If it is also true that things in the world attain their individuality only through a relationship with some other, then a more fundamental truth becomes possible – ‘Konke kuyikho ngokunye’, all things are through other things.