Yet among the most powerful tactics in setting off new intellectual move-
ments are broadenings of the cogito approach. Kant’s transcendental method
of searching for the necessary grounds implied in any judgment is a gener-
alization of Descartes’s self-limiting doubt. Fichte’s version drops out the
Cartesian step of proving the existence of the empirical self; the most undeni-
able proposition A A implies a permanent self for which it is true. By a
series of similar steps, Fichte derives the existence of the external world and
the unfolding of a dialectic in which self-undermining statements lead onward
to the elaboration of the whole system. Two generations later, when Idealism
appears in the American universities, Royce formulates a version of the cogito
which combines the Cartesian and Fichtean moves: the existence of error
implies the existence of a standard in terms of which it is error; to doubt
something implies that there is something which is apprehended in some way,
by a deeper self beyond our momentary consciousness. Kant and Royce did
not spring up in situations where skepticism was a significant living faction in
the intellectual world; both invoked skepticism because they had uses for it in
constructing their own systems.^13 If skepticism did not exist, it would have had
to be invented. As it happens, they went looking for what sources of skepticism
they could find.
The fame of the Cartesian cogito gave rise to a number of adaptations in
France, where Descartes became nationalistically enshrined in the educational
curriculum. Maine de Biran (ca. 1815) substitutes the formulation “I will,
therefore I am.” This is not an argument from the self-limitation of skepticism,
but a means of breaking free from the empirical associationist psychology until
then dominant in France. Invoking Hume, Maine holds that external sensations
give no necessary causal connections; it is the inner experience of will over-
coming resistance that reveals the immediate certainty of causality. A more
explicit analogy to Cartesian omni-skepticism is Camus’s existentialism (ca.
1940–1950), which transfers the cogito from epistemology to the sphere of
values. In his dramatized language, the only fundamental issue is suicide,
because this calls into question all values of living. But the very impulse to
nihilism reveals its limits: I reject the world as meaningless; therefore a standard
of meaning exists. Breaking through to the social dimension, Camus goes on:
I rebel, therefore we, a moral community, exist.
The cogito is found in many world networks but not all. There is no famous
use of the cogito in China; this is not surprising, given the fact that its networks
did not progress very far in the epistemology-metaphysics sequence. Nor do
we find the cogito in Greek philosophy (at least as far as we know, which is
to say that it never made an important part of the attention space); it occurs
only with Augustine, at the very end, about 1,000 years (30 generations) after
Thales. In India there is no notable use of the cogito during the time span that
corresponds to the Greek networks; if we count from the time of the Upan-
Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas^ •^817