I Think, Therefore I Am (?)

That famous phrase by René Descartes - to be exact - "I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am" ("Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum") established the philosophy for the existence of man.

Descartes is often regarded as the first modern thinker to provide a philosophical framework for the natural sciences as these began to develop. In his Discourse on the Method he attempts to arrive at a fundamental set of principles that one can know as true without any doubt. To achieve this, he employs a method called methodological skepticism: he rejects any idea that can be doubted, and then re-establishes them in order to acquire a firm foundation for genuine knowledge.

Initially, Descartes arrives at only a single principle: thought exists. Thought cannot be separated from me, therefore, I exist. Therefore, Descartes concluded, if he doubted, then something or someone must be doing the doubting, therefore the very fact that he doubted proved his existence.

Descartes concludes that he can be certain that he exists because he thinks. But in what form? He perceives his body through the use of the senses; however, these have previously been proven unreliable. So Descartes concludes that the only indubitable knowledge is that he is a thinking thing. Thinking is his essence as it is the only thing about him that cannot be doubted. Descartes defines "thought" as "what happens in me such that I am immediately conscious of it, insofar as I am conscious of it". Thinking is thus every activity of a person of which he is immediately conscious.

In the middle of the 17th century, a Dutch philosopher, Baruch de Spinoza took on Descartes and lost. He disagreed with Descartes' famous dualist theory, human beings were composed of physical bodies and immaterial minds. In The Ethics, his masterwork, published after his death in 1677, he argued that body and mind are not two separate entities but one continuous substance. Reason, insisted Spinoza, is shot through with emotion. More radical still, he claimed that thoughts and feelings are not primarily reactions to external events but first and foremost about the body. In fact, he suggested, the mind exists purely for the body's sake, to ensure its survival.

For his beliefs, Spinoza was vilified and - for extended periods - ignored. Descartes, on the other hand, was immortalized as a visionary. His rationalist doctrine shaped the course of modern philosophy and became part of the cultural bedrock.

Lately, scientists have begun to approach consciousness in more Spinozist terms: as a complex and indivisible mind-brain-body system. Back then in the 17th century, Spinoza had anticipated one of brain science's most important recent discoveries: the critical role of the emotions in ensuring our survival and allowing us to think. Feeling, it turns out, is not the enemy of reason, but, as Spinoza saw it, an indispensable accomplice.

Thus, the emergence of the current phenomena of what is known as the Emotional Intelligence. Perhaps, instead of "I think, therefore I am", it is now more apt to say "I feel, therefore I am".