Competing Interpretations of Descartes

Magnificent in aspiration, philosophy is miserable in execution. Thus one of my aphorisms. Not only do competent practitioners disagree about every issue, we also disagree about the interpretation of the great philosophers.

The infirmity of finite reason in a fallen world kicks us humans to the ground where we learn doxastic humility. Or at least some of us do. Etymology:

human (adj.)

mid-15c., humain, humaigne, "human," from Old French humain, umain (adj.) "of or belonging to man" (12c.), from Latin humanus "of man, human," also "humane, philanthropic, kind, gentle, polite; learned, refined, civilized." This is in part from PIE *(dh)ghomon-, literally "earthling, earthly being," as opposed to the gods (from root *dhghem- "earth"), but there is no settled explanation of the sound changes involved. Compare Hebrew adam "man," from adamah "ground." Cognate with Old Lithuanian žmuo (accusative žmuni) "man, male person."

humility (n.)

early 14c., "quality of being humble," from Old French umelite "humility, modesty, sweetness" (Modern French humilité), from Latin humilitatem (nominative humilitas) "lowness, small stature; insignificance; baseness, littleness of mind," in Church Latin "meekness," from humilis "lowly, humble," literally "on the ground," from humus "earth," from PIE root *dhghem- "earth." In the Mercian hymns, Latin humilitatem is glossed by Old English eaðmodnisse.

 

The following verbatim from a SEP entry by Gert-Jan Lokhorst:

One would like to know a little more about the nature of the soul and its relationship with the body, but Descartes never proposed a final theory about these issues. From passages such as the ones we have just quoted one might infer that he was an interactionist who thought that there are causal interactions between events in the body and events in the soul, but this is by no means the only interpretation that has been put forward. In the secondary literature, one finds at least the following interpretations.

1. Descartes was a Scholastic-Aristotelian hylomorphist, who thought that the soul is not a substance but the first actuality or substantial form of the living body (Hoffman 1986, Skirry 2003).
2. He was a Platonist who became more and more extreme: “The first stage in Descartes’ writing presents a moderate Platonism; the second, a scholastic Platonism; the third, an extreme Platonism, which, following Maritain, we may also call angelism: ‘Cartesian dualism breaks man up into two complete substances, joined to another no one knows how: one the one hand, the body which is only geometric extension; on the other, the soul which is only thought—an angel inhabiting a machine and directing it by means of the pineal gland’ (Maritain 1944, p. 179). Not that there is anything very ‘moderate’ about his original position—it is only the surprising final position that can justify assigning it that title” (Voss 1994, p. 274).
3. He articulated—or came close to articulating—a trialistic distinction between three primitive categories or notions: extension (body), thought (mind) and the union of body and mind (Cottingham 1985; Cottingham 1986, ch. 5).
4. He was a dualistic interactionist, who thought that the rational soul and the body have a causal influence on each other. This is the interpretation one finds in most undergraduate textbooks (e.g., Copleston 1963, ch. 4).
5. He was a dualist who denied that causal interactions between the body and the mind are possible and therefore defended “a parallelism in which changes of definite kinds occurrent in the nerves and brains synchronize with certain mental states correlated with them” (Keeling 1963, p. 285).
6. He was, at least to a certain extent, a non-parallelist because he believed that pure actions of the soul, such as doubting, understanding, affirming, denying and willing, can occur without any corresponding or correlated physiological events taking place (Wilson 1978, p. 80; Cottingham 1986, p. 124). “The brain cannot in any way be employed in pure understanding, but only in imagining or perceiving by the senses” (AT VII:358, CSM II:248).
7. He was a dualistic occasionalist, just like his early followers Cordemoy (1666) and La Forge (1666), and thought that mental and physical events are nothing but occasions for God to act and bring about an event in the other domain (Hamilton in Reid 1895, vol. 2, p. 961 n).
8. He was an epiphenomenalist as far as the passions are concerned: he viewed them as causally ineffectual by-products of brain activity (Lyons 1980, pp. 4–5).
9. He was a supervenientist in the sense that he thought that the will is supervenient to (determined by) the body (Clarke 2003, p. 157).
10. The neurophysiology of the Treatise of man “seems fully consistent […] with a materialistic dual-aspect identity theory of mind and body” (Smith 1998, p. 70).
11. He was a skeptical idealist (Kant 1787, p. 274).
12. He was a covert materialist who hid his true opinion out of fear of the theologians (La Mettrie 1748).

There seem to be only two well-known theories from the history of the philosophy of mind that have not been attributed to him, namely behaviorism and functionalism. But even here one could make a case. According to Hoffman (1986) and Skirry (2003), Descartes accepted Aristotle’s theory that the soul is the form of the body. According to Kneale (1963, p. 839), the latter theory was “a sort of behaviourism”. According to Putnam (1975), Nussbaum (1978) and Wilkes (1978), it was similar to contemporary functionalism. By transitivity, one might conclude that Descartes was either a sort of behavorist or a functionalist.

Comments

[BV]

I'd like to hear Ed Feser's take on #1.

[Richard Norris]

I'd simply say that Descartes made a modern confusion popular in mistaking the mind for the soul, when it is the soul that is the unitive principle between mind and body.