Abstract
A certain reading of Descartes, which we refer to as ‘the embodied Descartes’, is emerging from recent scholarship on L’Homme, in keeping with the interpretive trend which emphasizes Descartes’s identity as a natural philosopher. This reading complicates our understanding of Descartes’s philosophical project: far from strictly separating human minds from bodies, the embodied Descartes keeps them tightly integrated, while animal bodies behave in ways quite distinct from those of other pieces of extended substance. Here, we identify three categories of embodiment in contemporary readings of Descartes’s physiology: (1) bodily health and function, (2) embodied reflex and memory, and (3) embodied cognition. All present more or less strong versions of the embodied Descartes. Together, they constitute a compelling reading of a Cartesian natural philosophy that, if not expressly antidualist, is an awfully long way from the canonical picture.
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Notes
- 1.
AT VII, 27/CSM II, 18 (our emphasis).
- 2.
Ryle, The Concept of Mind; Williams, Descartes. For a critical discussion of this caricature, see Reiss, “Denying the Body?”. A related, and influential, caricature of Descartes (at least in the later decades of the twentieth century) was that of Richard Rorty, for whom Descartes committed the “original sin of epistemology,” by introducing the modern idea of representation through clear and distinct ideas, thus installing epistemology at the foreground of early modern philosophy while bracketing off matters such as the relation between the body and soul as “not something for philosophy” (Rorty, Philosophy and the mirror of nature, 60–61; see discussion in Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces, 50–55 and in Introduction to Brown, Descartes and the Passionate Mind).
- 3.
Hacking, “The Cartesian Body,” 13.
- 4.
“It is not sufficient for [the rational soul] to be lodged in the human body like a helmsman in his ship . . . but that it must be more closely joined and united with the body in order to … constitute a real human being” (AT VI 59; CSM I 141); cf. Kirkebøen, “Descartes’ Embodied Psychology”, 181.
- 5.
For a reconstruction of an ‘embodied Descartes’ based not on L’Homme but (primarily) on the Sixth Meditation, see Brown, Descartes and the Passionate Mind.
- 6.
Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 29, cf. also 22, 37. For a critique of this narrative, see Snider, “Cartesian Bodies.”
- 7.
Sutton, “The Body and the Brain,” 697–698, elaborating on Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces, 82f.
- 8.
AT XI, 326/CSM I, 327.
- 9.
Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, 106.
- 10.
‘Life’ does not rate its own independent category here, notably because Descartes adopts such a deflationary attitude towards it. Further, our analysis is different from more standard treatments such as Duchesneau’s (Modèles du vivant), which discusses Descartes’s approach to organic life, while we are concerned with a revision of the historiographic and philosophical categories with which Descartes has been interpreted.
- 11.
The human bodies that are the subject of L’Homme are ostensibly ‘just’ automata that God is capable of creating. Given that, automata (or, at least, certain kinds of automata) clearly belong in the same category as human bodies. In addition, it seems unlikely that Descartes has any principled means of distinguishing between animal bodies and automata (see Hutchins, “Descartes and the Dissolution of Life”).
- 12.
Thus prominent scholars such as Gaukroger (Descartes’ System of Natural Philosophy) and Garber (Descartes Embodied) have called attention to the treatment of material bodies in Descartes’s natural philosophy, stressing that Descartes’s work should be understood as that of a natural philosopher (see also the essays collected in the volume Descartes’ Natural Philosophy).
- 13.
Exactly what life consists in for Descartes, or if, indeed, it consists in anything at all, is an ongoing problem in the literature; see most recently, Detlefsen, “Descartes on the Theory of Life” and Hutchins, “Descartes and the Dissolution of Life.” Here, we use the term ‘living’ only to provide a convenient means of distinguishing between human, animal, and plant bodies and other bits of extended substance.
- 14.
AT X, 120/TM 99. As Gaukroger points out in his translation (TM 99, n. 3), ‘earth’ here refers to Descartes’s third element, rather than to macro-scale dirt, mud, clay, etc.
- 15.
TM 99.
- 16.
Sutton, “Body and Brain,” 700.
- 17.
Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces, 56. For more on the fruitfulness of the body-machine analogy see Wolfe, “Le mécanique face au vivant.”
- 18.
Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces, 81, critiquing Marjorie Grene’s claims in her study, Descartes, 47-48.
- 19.
Gaukroger, “The resources of a mechanist physiology,” 386–387.
- 20.
AT XI, 167/TM 141.
- 21.
Fourth Replies (AT VI, 230/CSM II, 161). Cf. Rorty, “Descartes on thinking with the body,” 377–379.
- 22.
Health and function might appear to be an outlying category here, in that it seems less obviously pseudo-cognitive than, say, memory. But health and function are goal-directed processes, and, for Descartes, only minds can be goal-directed.
- 23.
See Meditation Four (AT VII, 55/CSM II, 39) and the Fifth Replies (AT VII, 374–375/CSM I, 258).
- 24.
AT X, 197/TM 165.
- 25.
AT X, 144/TM 119.
- 26.
AT X, 201/TM 169. See also Discourse, AT VI, 53/CSM I, 138 (the function of respiration).
- 27.
Descartes to Elisabeth, May 1646, AT IV, 407.
- 28.
Passions II.98, AT XI, 402/CSM I, 363. For further discussion of teleological concepts in Descartes, see Simmons, “Sensible Ends” (on sensation), Brown, “Cartesian Functional Analysis” and Distelzweig, “The Uses of Usus” (on biology and medicine).
- 29.
AT IV, 329/CSMK 275.
- 30.
Shapiro, “Health of the Body-Machine,” 424.
- 31.
E.g. Distelzweig, “The Uses of Usus.” On the charge of inconsistency overall see Sutton, McIlwain et al., “Applying intelligence to the reflexes,” 99n., referring to Grosholz, Cartesian Method, Shapin, “Descartes the Doctor,” and Des Chene, Spirits and Clocks.
- 32.
Shapiro, “Health of the Body-Machine,” 435. In part, Shapiro is responding to Des Chene (Spirits & Clocks, 125ff.), who floats the idea of a dispositional unity of the body (in which its unity is given by the arrangement of its parts), but concludes that, for Descartes, living bodies themselves cannot be fully understood without appealing to teleology, and “[e]nds cannot be entirely supplanted by dispositions, even in animals” (ibid., 140). Shapiro argues that stable intrinsic structure circumvents this, although it is not clear that the stability required really is definable without reference to ends. One can also take elements from Des Chene’s “dispositional unity” and Shapiro’s “structural integrity” to construe the mechanistically understood body as a form of emergent unity contained in the parts. The heart, lungs or liver do not function on the basis of a predetermined end but in accordance with an almost morphogenetically understood law of spatial disposition. In a formula, the mechanical is the functional: a material arrangement of parts (a clock, a bodily organ, a body) is disposed to act in a certain manner. Descartes speaks—to be sure, in strongly spatialist terms—of the “disposition of our organs,” but precisely in order to derive “functions” from them (Descartes, L’Homme, AT XI, 120, 202 and Description du corps humain, AT XI, 226); cf. Des Chene, Spirits and Clocks, 116, 120-121, and Wolfe, “Teleomechanism redux.”
- 33.
Shapiro, “Health of the Body-Machine,” 437. This “way out” is the projectionist reading discussed below.
- 34.
Brown, “Cartesian Functional Analysis.”
- 35.
The account is found in the final section of the Description of the Human Body, a late manuscript in which Descartes reworks the explanations of L’Homme.
- 36.
Brown restricts her analysis on the account of embryogenesis, but interdependence is also central to the physiology of the developed body. See Hutchins, “Descartes, Corpuscles, and Reductionism.”
- 37.
Brown, “Cartesian Functional Analysis,” 86.
- 38.
See Des Chene, “Life and Health”; Manning, “Descartes’ Healthy Machines,” “Descartes’ Metaphysical Biology”; Hutchins, Obscurity and Confusion, Ch. 6.
- 39.
Manning, “Descartes’ Healthy Machines,” “Descartes’ Metaphysical Biology.”
- 40.
Manning, “Descartes’ Healthy Machines,” 261.
- 41.
Hutchins, Obscurity and Confusion, Ch. 6.
- 42.
Namely, Varela, Thompson and Rosch, The Embodied Mind. This is further discussed in Roux’s “L’ennemi cartésien. Cartésianisme et anti-cartésianisme en philosophie de l’esprit et en sciences cognitives.”
- 43.
Canguilhem, Formation du concept de réflexe, 30, 33.
- 44.
Sutton, “Body and brain,” 708; Philosophy and Memory Traces, 75f.; Sutton, McIlwain et al., “Applying intelligence to the reflexes,” 84f. (for the point that the treatment of memory in L’Homme directly rebuts the caricature of the deterministic, input-output model of the Cartesian automaton).
- 45.
Sutton, McIlwain et al., “Applying intelligence to the reflexes,” 84.
- 46.
Sutton, “Body and brain,” 716.
- 47.
Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces, 55; cf. 58, 61, 86f.
- 48.
Sutton, McIlwain et al., “Applying intelligence to the reflexes,” 85, citing L’Homme, AT XI, 185.
- 49.
For more on animal spirits, see Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces, 102f. For a more developmental perspective, see the chapters on Descartes in Emanuela Scribano, Macchine con la mente (Roma: Carocci, 2015). Scribano argues that Descartes modified his theory of knowledge and perception over time, in search of greater ‘scientific’ coherence, particularly in a neurophysiological vein (an emphasis already present in Sutton’s 1998 book), but she has a less naturalistic reading of the union than Sutton does. Thanks to Claudia Matteini for discussion of this text.
- 50.
Sutton, “Body and brain,” 709.
- 51.
Ibid.
- 52.
Sutton, “Body and brain,” 709. Sutton notes that Amélie Rorty still divides “informational and maintenance systems” in her otherwise embodied vision of how intertwined “epistemology and physiological homeostasis are” in Descartes’s “thinking with the body” (Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces, 92). For Rorty, “The criteria for identifying a medically sound body might sometimes vary, depending on whether the body is considered primarily and solely as a homeostatic machine, or as a homeostatic machine designed to serve an epistemically sound information system” (“Descartes on thinking with the body,” 385). Sutton notes that Rorty does not address the way that animal spirits, themselves information-bearing entities, are generated by non-cognitive bodily processes.
- 53.
Sutton, McIlwain et al., “Applying intelligence to the reflexes,” 99n; Sutton, “Body and Brain,” 701-702, referring also to L’Homme AT XI, 177.
- 54.
Reiss, “Denying the Body?”, 603.
- 55.
Descartes specifies only “grottoes and fountains in the royal gardens” (AT XI, 130/TM, 107), but the description fits those at Saint-Germain. See Gaukroger, Descartes, 63–64. On Descartes’s use of the fountain analogy, see Des Chene, Spirits & Clocks, Ch. 6; Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces, 94f.
- 56.
AT XI, 131–132/TM 107.
- 57.
TM 107, n. 19.
- 58.
AT VI, 59/CSM I, 141. Descartes famously repeats the point in the Sixth Meditation (AT VII, 81/CSM I, 56).
- 59.
Kirkebøen, “Descartes’ Embodied Psychology,” 174 (our emphasis). Kirkebøen also provides a wealth of details concerning Descartes’s influence on experimental psychology, in figures such as Pavlov, Sherrington and McCulloch (179, 188); Hatfield, “Descartes’ Machine Psychology,” also notes Descartes’s influence on William James and Pavlov.
- 60.
Rorty, “Descartes on thinking with the body,” 372.
- 61.
Ibid.
- 62.
Simmons, “Sensible Ends,” 60. See also “Re-Humanizing Descartes,” 63.
- 63.
Cf. Principles, Part II, 25.
- 64.
Rorty, “Descartes on thinking with the body,” 376; cf. Grene, Descartes.
- 65.
Rorty, “Descartes on thinking with the body,” 377.
- 66.
See, e.g., Alston, “Foundationalism,” 384.
- 67.
Simmons, “Re-Humanizing Descartes,” 57.
- 68.
Cf. AT VII, 81/CSM II, 56.
- 69.
See also Simmons, “Re-Humanizing Descartes.”
- 70.
Brown, “Descartes and the Embodied Self,” 245.
- 71.
Ibid., 240.
- 72.
Cf. Hutchins (Obscurity and Confusion, Ch. 4), who argues that our natural, embodied state has a certain epistemic priority over our minimal state.
- 73.
Des Chene, “Life and health in Cartesian natural philosophy,” 723. Note that psychosomatic medicine involves altering bodily memory, on which see Sect. 18.3.1 here. See also Sutton, “Body and brain,” 715, on Descartes’s infamous psychosomatic self-cure for his heterotropia fetish.
- 74.
On the moral side, see Brown, Descartes and the Passionate Mind, Ch. 8.
- 75.
Des Chene, “Life and health in Cartesian natural philosophy,” 724.
- 76.
A further option which goes beyond the boundaries of this chapter is to explore whether Descartes actually “requires us to contract full intimacy with our own body and our own peculiar past,” so that “paradoxically, Descartes himself could hint at the possibilities and the perils of what’s become known as ‘post-Cartesian agency’” (Sutton, “Body and brain,” 699, 700).
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Partial support for this research was provided by the Israel Science Foundation grant 469/13.
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Hutchins, B.R., Eriksen, C.B., Wolfe, C.T. (2016). The Embodied Descartes: Contemporary Readings of L’Homme . In: Antoine-Mahut, D., Gaukroger, S. (eds) Descartes’ Treatise on Man and its Reception. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 43. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46989-8_18
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