Descartes' Dualism

Gordon Baker, Katherine Morris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134854240
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Was Descartes a Cartesian Dualist? In this controversial study, Gordon Baker and Katherine J. Morris argue that, despite the general consensus within philosophy, Descartes was neither a proponent of dualism nor guilty of the many crimes of which he has been accused by twentieth century philosophers.
In lively and engaging prose, Baker and Morris present a radical revision of the ways in which Descartes' work has been interpreted. Descartes emerges with both his historical importance assured and his philosophical importance redeemed.

1

VISIONS

The Programme

It is common knowledge that Descartes was a Cartesian Dualist. (Perhaps it’s nothing more than common sense!) As everyone knows, he held that there are two worlds, one of mental objects and one of material things, including animals and human bodies. The mental objects are ‘states of consciousness’ (e.g., pains, visual experiences, beliefs and desires, fear and joy), the material objects are more or less complex bits of ‘clockwork’. The items in the ‘inner world’ are apprehended through the exercise of a special infallible faculty called ‘introspection’, objects in the ‘outer world’ are perceived by the five senses. Mental states and states of the body are logically independent but causally interrelated: causal interaction is, as it were, the glue bonding mind to body in each individual person.

This conception of a human being is variously developed with much sophisticated refinement in monographs on Descartes. Although the great body of Anglo-American philosophers who subscribe to this general framework of interpretation have severally noted important local misfits and developed some telling objections to this way of interpreting Descartes,¹ like many a Gestalt, this one exhibits remarkable powers of recuperating from severe injury: indeed, it seems able to regenerate amputated limbs. Most of its core elements are frequently repeated in encyclopedias or handbooks, and with even more striking unanimity as a preamble to the ritual refutations of Cartesian Dualism with which many monographs on philosophy of mind or cognitive science begin.

Like most items of ‘common knowledge’, this one is questionable. What we will call ‘the Cartesian Legend’ is, to a first approximation, the view that Descartes held and expounded this conception of a person. The Cartesian Legend should not, of course, be confused with what Ryle referred to as ‘Descartes’ Myth’ (‘the myth of the ghost in the machine’), one version of the position more neutrally called ‘Cartesian Dualism’. Rather, the Cartesian Legend is a second-order myth, a myth about a myth. Our choice of the label ‘the Cartesian Legend’ has multiple motivations.

First, we want to invoke a particular connotation of one meaning of the term ‘legend’, namely the notion of heroic stature. Many commentators who subscribe to the Cartesian Legend, whether or not they count themselves as admirers of ‘Cartesian Dualism’, assign to Descartes a status within the history of philosophy which might aptly be called ‘superhuman’ or ‘legendary’. Whether as a hero or a villain, he looms larger than life: Descartes was held to have expressed Cartesian Dualism ‘with mesmerizing brilliance’ (Hacker 1986: 279); one cannot but be ‘awed at the breathtaking power of an intellect which could propagate, almost unaided, a myth which to this day has such a comprehensive grasp on the imagination of a large part of the human race’ (Kenny 1985: 77).² He is the paradigm of a great dead philosopher … even if usually the paradigm of a philosophical malin génie.³

Second, we mean to trade on another prominent connotation of the term ‘legend’ by using it to distance ourselves from the position under critical investigation. We hope to persuade our readers that the Cartesian Legend is a fiction, if more of a superstition than a mistake. It is not that exponents of the Legend have acted in bad faith. On the contrary, they have proceeded, by their own lights, in a careful and scholarly manner, and they have argued with skill and sophistication. None the less, close textual analysis does not directly support, still less decisively prove, the conclusion that Descartes held the main tenets of so-called ‘Cartesian Dualism’. More importantly, we will suggest that there are forceful reasons for concluding that he couldn’t have held this position. Many of its ingredients (both concepts and presuppositions) are absent from or inconsistent with major elements in the framework of his thinking. The Cartesian Legend has much of the character of a projection of distinctively more modern ideas on to an early seventeenth-century thinker.

Third, we mean both to allude to the well-known label ‘Descartes’ myth’ and to distinguish our target from this myth. Our concern is a view about that myth. Thus ‘advocates (proponents, etc.) of the Cartesian Legend’ are not philosophers who hold Cartesian Dualism to be true (since most, although not all, of them believe it to be seriously flawed, inconsistent or nonsensical), but rather those who hold that it is true that Descartes was a Cartesian Dualist. The Legend offers a beguiling way of ordering or systematizing the various doctrines and chains of reasoning that he presented in his major works. In this book, we focus on the question of how well or badly this pattern fits his texts, and propose a different pattern for making better sense of his thinking, what we call ‘Descartes’ Dualism’. We don’t intend to debate the philosophical merits of either of these conceptions, not at least along the lines of arguments characteristic of contemporary philosophy of mind. Our primary goal is to arrive at a clearer and deeper understanding of what was Descartes’ conception of a person.

In this sense, we finally exploit yet another connotation of ‘legend’, namely the idea that legends provide fictitious historical narratives. Perhaps the Cartesian Legend’s continuing to flourish attests less to its intrinsic merits than to the intellectual needs of modem philosophers. Cartesian Dualism is commonly used to set the agenda of philosophy of mind. It is taken to make clear what ‘the mind–body problem’ is by offering a naive but intuitively appealing solution. The thought is that every philosopher begins naturally as a Cartesian Dualist and then, having worked through its defects, arrives at a more sophisticated position. There is a certain intellectual satisfaction to be gained in supposing that ontogeny, individual philosophical progress, recapitulates phylogeny, a kind of collective historical philosophical progress. Into this feeds the picture according to which Descartes effected a revolution in philosophy by putting scepticism at stage-centre and by locating the foundations of knowledge in immediate subjective experience. It is his invention of Cartesian Dualism which is taken to have decisively altered the course of modem philosophy. He made the opening move in a chess-game; Locke, Berkeley, and Hume carried on and played out the middle game; finally, Kant and Wittgenstein (with an assist from computer science) played the Cartesian conception of the mind into checkmate. This whole story depicts in the mainstream of modem European philosophy just the sort of steady progress that philosophy is often accused of being unable to make. Because Cartesian Dualism holds the pivotal position in this narrative, any serious grounds for calling into question the Cartesian Legend would equally raise doubts about the interpretation of every one of the texts that are integral to this tradition. Everything, including the status of modern philosophy of mind, would be thrown into the melting-pot. Thus in various ways modern Anglo-American philosophers have a large investment in the truth of the Cartesian Legend (even if they are equally committed to the falsity of Cartesian Dualism).

Many readers brought up in this tradition may themselves have felt qualms about certain details of the ascription – qualms which they have had to learn to repress. Here, perhaps, is one. It is a staple of the Cartesian Legend, practically the first thing you learn in ‘Descartes for Beginners’, that according to Descartes ‘man is the only conscious animal; all other animals … are merely complicated, but unconscious, machines’.⁴ You may well have found this deeply shocking on first hearing, and might have wondered what on earth could have led a manifestly intelligent philosopher to hold such a manifestly wrong-headed view. (Surely your cat feels pain when you pull its tail; surely it sees the bird in the ivy; surely it remembers where it caught the mouse last spring; surely it is afraid of the neighbour’s dog; and surely these are all ways of being conscious.) The Cartesian Legend has an ingenious answer to this. Descartes (‘notoriously’) confused consciousness with self-consciousness; having correctly noted that animals are not self-conscious, he was moved to deny that they were conscious (Kenny 1989: 9; Williams 1978: 286). This explains how Descartes could have held the position all right, but only at the expense of seeing this ‘great philosopher’ as seriously confused.

If you are at all familiar with Descartes’ texts, you might have further qualms. On the one hand, he never referred to animals as ‘unconscious’ or ‘insentient’; his usual phrase is ‘animals without reason’ (cf. AT VI: 46; CSM I: 134), and most of the discussions of animals in the correspondence concern the questions of whether animals think – ‘I cannot share the opinion of Montaigne and others who attribute understanding or thought to animals’ (AT IV: 573; CSMK III: 302) – or even whether they have immortal souls – ‘if they thought as we do, they would have an immortal soul like us … and many of them such as oysters and sponges are too imperfect for this to be credible’ (AT IV: 576; CSMK III: 304). On the other hand, he frequently referred to animals as feeling passions and what we would call bodily sensations: ‘all animals easily communicate to us, by voice or bodily movement, their natural impulses of anger, fear, hunger, and so on’ (AT V: 278; CSMK III: 366). Indeed he stated explicitly that in ‘denying thought to animals’ ‘I am speaking of thought, and not of life or sensation’ (AT V: 278; CSMK III: 366). The Cartesian Legend has taught us all how to explain such passages away.⁵ By ‘thought’ Descartes meant ‘consciousness’, and that of course includes pain, fear, anger, hunger, and so on. But there again, Descartes’ references to animals ‘expressing passions’ or ‘communicating fear or hunger’ are to be taken with a pinch of salt; he meant these terms in an impoverished sense: ‘These “passions” of animals are to be regarded as purely physical disturbances in the nervous system, which can generate behaviour, but are not associated with experiences’ (Williams 1978: 283).

You might well feel that these ‘explanations’ generate more questions than they answer. Isn’t the word ‘thought’ an odd word for Descartes to use to encompass fear and hunger? (Aren’t ‘reason’ and ‘understanding’ even stranger?) And what bearing does the question of whether animals feel hunger or fear have on the question of whether they have immortal Christian souls? (Surely free will and moral responsibility are the more obviously relevant attributes here?)

There are many other worries that you may have felt about this framework for interpreting Descartes. They should, we think, be taken seriously. We have both a ‘first-order’ aim, to argue for the possibility of a radically different interpretation of Descartes’ Dualism, and a ‘second-order’ aim, to sketch a case for the current philosophical interest of this conception which is independent of whether it is a ‘live option’ for twentieth-century philosophers.

The general first-order aim is to get our readers to see a large-scale pattern which unifies Descartes’ detailed and complicated investigation of issues in physics, physiology, epistemology, ethics, theology, and philosophy of mind.⁶ Although the ideal would be to effect an all-embracing reorientation of reflections on the whole of Descartes’ philosophy, we can’t reasonably undertake to carry out this entire campaign in one book, So we will focus attention on one basic element in his system, namely his conception of the nature of a person. Thus the more specific first-order goal is to make a persuasive case for a particular way of seeing his (metaphysical) dualism, to clarify Descartes’ own distinctive conception of every human being as being a ‘substantial union’ of two distinct substances, a perishable, mechanical body and an immortal, rational soul.

Any interpretation of a set of texts is a matter of finding a certain pattern in them, a pattern that is brought out by highlighting certain passages, sidelining others, comparing or seeing connections between passages from different places, etc. Patterns have a tendency to interfere with one another: once you have seen the duck-aspect of Jastrow’s diagram, you may find it hard to see the rabbit-aspect (cf. Wittgenstein, PI p. 194). Modern Anglo-American philosophy presents Descartes’ conception, with a striking degree of unanimity despite many differences of detail, under the label ‘Cartesian Dualism’. This well-entrenched picture creates an interference; as long as it persists, it eliminates both the desire for seeking and the possibility of seeing any other pattern in Descartes’ work. Hence, by force of circumstance, success at our positive task presupposes achieving a negative aim: breaking the grip of the different pattern now widely superimposed on his texts. So the first part of our project must be critical, in both senses of the word. We will confront this interfering picture with a detailed exposition and analysis of some of Descartes’ texts, and will argue that this schema of interpretation is not forced on anybody by the texts that are regularly held to support it.

This much is, of course, characteristic of patterns. We are not forced by the duck–rabbit drawing to read it one way as opposed to the other. Indeed we are not forced to read it either way: it could also perhaps be seen as a pair of scissors or a nutcracker; it could even be seen as a seriously defective drawing of an oval, with a few extraneous dots and wriggly bits. Cartesian Dualism, as an interpretation of Descartes’ texts, is not definitively provable as the only way of reading them. Nor (by the same token) is it refutable. But interpretations, like ways of seeing line drawings, can also be more or less natural (as opposed to ‘strained’); they can, to a greater or lesser degree, require us to ignore or exaggerate certain lines, or regard them as slips of the pen, or as extraneous or arbitrary. The duck and the rabbit are relatively natural readings of the famous drawing; the defective oval, although possible, is considerably less natural. Cartesian Dualism is, we will argue, a reading of Descartes’ texts roughly on a par with this last example. It doesn’t offer enough friction to allow of any definitive refutation as a way of organizing Descartes’ ideas about persons. With sufficient ingenuity and enough supplementary hypotheses, it can be squared with almost any awkward text. To show (to the extent that such a thing can be shown) that it is a very unnatural reading is not to disprove it, but it ought to make it less attractive, especially if there is an available alternative. This is what we will try to provide.

By the same token, of course, we cannot demonstrate that our interpretation of Descartes’ Dualism is correct. There is no possibility of imposing this way of seeing Descartes’ philosophy on an unwilling reader by sheer force of argument. Our positive first-order aim is simply to make a persuasive case in favour of a different way of developing and organizing the leading ideas of his philosophy. We put a new face on some familiar doctrines (e.g., that animals are automata); spotlight some concepts that have disappeared from view (e.g., the internal senses, Nature); and relate things that are commonly thought to be unconnected (e.g., rationality and moral agency, or metaphysics and logic). The hope is to make perspicuous some neglected aspects of Descartes’ thinking: to make everything look different while adhering as faithfully as possible to his texts. In principle this result might be achieved even if authors who offer divergent interpretations of Descartes, or who ascribe to him some form of Cartesian Dualism, would judge that we have scored no decisive points against them. We are, minimally, trying to break a monopoly in the Republic of Letters by setting up a viable competitor in business. Our case should be judged by the usual (flexible and controversial) criteria for preferring one interpretation of a text to another one. We think that it stands up reasonably well to such critical scrutiny.

A vision of a complex set of texts aims to uncover a vision in those texts: a pattern in the central concepts or the uses of the centrally important words. The vision which the Cartesian Legend finds in Descartes’ philosophical writings, i.e. Cartesian Dualism, is utterly familiar. It, for example, links ‘thought’, ‘consciousness’, ‘sentience’, ‘privacy’, and ‘subjectivity’. We try to lay open to view a quite different, even alien, vision, which we call ‘Descartes’ Dualism’. Its conceptual links ar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and shortened titles
• 1 Visions
• 2 Cartesian Dualism
• 3 A Shadow of a Doubt
• 4 Descartes' Dualism
• 5 Revisions
• Bibliography
• Index of citations from Descartes
• Name index
• Subject index