Then: doubt proves the existence of the doubter and of a luminous ground of
consciousness; this is the highest reality, beyond dualism and its opposite as
well. There had been no tradition of omni-skepticism in Indian philosophy for
a very long time (since Sañjaya in the generation before the Buddha), and
Shankara was not reviving its memory. But this is not quite a case of Shankara
creating both the skepticism and the cogito which overcomes it at the same
time. He has two key ingredients in his network of antecedents: the debates
among his immediate masters in the Mimamsa school of realists, who had
raised an acute question of epistemological standards and the necessary role
of consciousness in knowledge, and the entire Buddhist tradition, which had
held the Idealist side of the field that Shankara now took over for Hindu
philosophy. Buddhist philosophy had incorporated an institutionalized skepti-
cism about the world of name-and-form, extending even to the emphasis that
nirvana should not be reified. Shankara could use the heritage of this skepticism
to overthrow the worldly-sensory realism which was widespread among the
other Hindu darshanas. At the same time, a cogito move was attractive to him
because the non-existence of the self was one central item of Buddhist dogma.
A proof of the self as the pathway to the highest reality enabled Shankara to
keep himself orthodoxly non-Buddhist while appropriating Buddhist turf and
building a Hindu Idealism.
The cogito as a system-founding move allows various kinds of edifices to
be constructed upon it. Augustine, Ibn Sina, and Shankara used it to ground
Idealism. Descartes used the cogito so that he could clear away scholastic
philosophy and the Humanists’ revival of the Greeks alike, trumpeting a fresh
start for the new science with an ontology of extended substance. In this case,
Descartes emerged from a network where skepticism already flourished; he is
only a few links away from Montaigne, who used skepticism to urge disen-
gagement from the polemics of the religious wars. Descartes’s own teacher,
Veron, was a Catholic fideist who used skeptical arguments against Protestant
reliance on the Bible. For those of us educated in the tradition of modern
European philosophy, Descartes’s is the famous cogito, because the system-gen-
erating tasks for which he used it, and the multifarious branches which fol-
lowed, constitute the framework within which we think.
The importance of the system-building trajectory is made plain in the
aftermath. Descartes’s philosophy was construed both broadly and narrowly,
the latter by specific Cartesian and anti-Cartesian movement. Descartes’s cogito
was the topic of dispute among these circles in the 1670s; opponents raised
issues such as whether the cogito itself means anything more than “I thought,
therefore I think I was.” Despite this acuteness, Huet and Régis are minor
figures in their long-term influence; criticism in the absence of constructive
alternatives does nothing to open up further developments of the attention
space.
816 •^ Meta-reflections