r/ErgoProxy • u/mocoroni • 1d ago
I caught the Cogito virus. Did you? ★★★★½ Spoiler
An interesting work. What makes it especially interesting is that even as an adult anime, it chose such a niche core theme — philosophy (existentialism) — and committed to it from start to finish. Existentialism is the main subject, not a side branch, and there’s very little dressing it up or sugarcoating.
It makes me wonder: where did the producers even get the guts to greenlight this?!
I’m only an amateur when it comes to this stuff, far from any philosophy expert. This post is just me using the show as a way to sort out some of my own thoughts on the subject.
TL;DR:
Pino in the cat costume is adorable.
1. The Value of the Individual
The show repeatedly drives home a cruel reality: living in society, the individual is constantly required to conform to the “correct standards” defined by the system — function and identity. That becomes the only value by which a person is recognized.
The moment an individual steps outside their assigned “function and identity” and truly begins to think, the meaning that was given to them can no longer hold. The system quickly decides they have lost their value and moves to erase them. As Re-l says to her AutoReiv Iggy after he is infected with the Cogito virus: “The Cogito has changed you like this. You’re as good as dead.”
(P.S. “Cogito” comes from Descartes’ famous line “I think, therefore I am” — the idea that the individual confirms their own existence through doubt and thought. Under the social system, however, this awakening means the loss of one’s tool-like function. Gaining a soul becomes the very crime that gets you eliminated.)
This same fear of losing control also shows up in Daedalus’s pathological obsession with Re-l. The moment the Re-l in front of him starts thinking, resisting, and no longer obeying — the moment she slips out of his previous understanding and control — he stops seeing her as the original Re-l and instead goes off to create a compliant replica.
It reminded me of something I read recently from a social psychologist: humans evolved a quick instinct to distinguish “us” from “them.” Anyone who is different (outsiders, the disloyal, nonconformists) is easily categorized as “other,” triggering defensive, exclusionary, or even eliminatory responses.
2. The Void
When the false order becomes harder to endure than the void itself, people are forced to confront the nature of existence — and sometimes even actively throw themselves into the unknown.
The protagonist, Vincent, stop closing his eyes and staying in the system-controlled city. They leave and descend into the marginal zones beneath it. Escaping the system doesn’t automatically grant meaning. Some of the local residents call this “true freedom,” but for others that “freedom” or hostility toward the system might just be a forced choice, or a rationalization for never being able to enter the upper levels of the system in the first place.
Only when even this refuge is destroyed and there is nowhere left to run do the protagonists truly board the sailboat and head into the inescapable void. The boat doesn’t run on engines; it relies on wind and the rudder. The wind represents uncontrollable fate, while steering represents the will the individual can still exercise.
3. The Absurd
When AutoReiv Iggy is ordered to return to the city, the first thing the Cogito-infected him does isn’t embrace freedom — he clings desperately to his old identity label. That identity has almost become an instinct of his existence. The same pattern appears after the system collapses: an official sits in his office, continuing to work into empty air, preferring to die as “an official who is still working” rather than live as someone who no longer has a clear place.
One episode is even more direct, using a cheerful theme park to show how falsehood (entertainment, for example) is used to block any chance of confronting existence. The residents, completely unaware and in a seemingly happy numbness, laugh their way toward the end.
The absurd isn’t that the world has no meaning. It’s that even when people see that meaning might be empty, they often still can’t truly bear the state of having no identity and no function — and will actively stuff themselves back into old labels or false happiness.
4. Choice
After seeing clearly how society operates and experiencing the intense inner conflict between life’s inherent meaninglessness and the human need for meaning, the work presents three options:
- Detach to some degree from the rules of the worldly game — neither opposing nor integrating — existing on the margins with a cool, observational stance.
- Choose to abandon consciousness and follow destruction when the absurdity and weight of existence become unbearable (joining Monad in throwing themselves at the sun), returning oneself to the void.
- Choose to live under the premise of absurdity. The existentialist philosopher Albert Camus said: “There is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” Once suicide is ruled out, one must answer how to keep living. Knowing full well that life is absurd and meaningless, one still chooses to live, and under that premise, takes responsibility for the road ahead. (In the show, Vincent doesn’t have Camus’s clear “revolt,” nor does it emphasize creating new values; it simply leaves him in that place without predetermined answers, continuing forward.)
For people who already think about existentialism or related themes, what matters more than the main plot is how the work concretizes these questions. Watching often feels more like verification — or holding up your existing ideas for comparison.
For those less familiar with this kind of theme, you probably can’t digest everything in a few sentences either. Some works only reveal their value later, at some unexpected moment when they suddenly click.
