Descartes, Soul and Body

Some highlights from a recent TLS article on Descartes by Desmond Clarke:

1) Personally, Descartes was a mess. An exile from France for most of his life, he never held any paid position except for a brief stint in the military. He was unmarried, nearly friendless, depressive. Irascible and hyper-sensitive, he “lived alone, ate modestly, slept until midday, avoided contact with the busy commercial world around him.” Just the kind of guy, you might think, who would lock himself in a room and try to convince himself that his life was all an illusion.

2) Descartes is often characterized as radically separating the body and the soul, but Clarke suggests another interpretation. Descartes was fundamentally at war with explanations that were no more than redescriptions of the things to be explained – as if, a la Moliere, one could explain how a sleeping powder has its effect by appealing to a “dormitive power.” Thus, it will not do to explain memory, say, by saying that humans have a “thinking faculty.” Clarke says that the view often attributed to Descartes – that he explained thought by reference to a “thinking substance” – violates his basic agenda.

Instead, Descartes suggested that perceptions left some sort of physical impression on the brain or nervous system, “a condition of the brain that corresponds to the brain states that occurred” at the time of the initial perception. To figure out whether this hypothesis is true, Descartes gathered the heads of slaughtered animals in hopes that studying brains under a microscope could locate the physical effects of the perception.

3) The problem for Descartes was not that he wanted to separate mental from material; the problem was the idea of matter that he shared with his contemporaries: “Descartes and his contemporaries conceived of matter has having almost none of the fundamental properties that are described in a modern book of physics or neurology.” On this account of matter, it was impossible to explain mental phenomena in material terms, but Descartes investigation leaves open the possibility that some later account of matter might be able to account for mental events.

As Clarke puts it, “Descartes could have drawn two different conclusions from the failure of his attempts to explain mental experiences: either (a) that mental experiences are irreducible to bodily functions, or (b) that, despite his failure, it remained possible in principle to provide a scientific explanation of mental experiences. One coherent reading of his texts is that his conclusion was (b), and that he canvased the viability of (a) only in the limited context of the Meditations .”

4) The Meditations must not only be seen in the context of Descartes’s wider concern to provide a scientific account of mind, but also in the context of his inordinate fear of censure from the Catholic church. Looking for some way to mollify the church after the suppression of his Copernican The World , he wrote the Meditations were offered to provide a philosophical account of the immortality of the soul (the subtitle was “in which God’s existence and the distinction between the human soul and the body are demonstrated”).

5) Calvinist critics believed Descartes’s arguments in the Meditations so shoddy that they assumed he was really offering an inverted brief for materialism and atheism. Clarke suggests that instead Descartes had a limited goal: “his failure to provide a scientific explanation of mental activity provided some evidence to show that mind and matter are really distinct . . . He explicitly stopped short of claiming to have shown that the human mind is immortal; he concluded merely that – given the concept of matter that he was working with, and his limited knowledge of how the brain works – the mind is sufficiently distinct from the body for immorality to be possible.”