Another Mind-Body Problem: A History of Racial Non-Being by John Harfouch (review)

Another Mind-Body Problem is concerned with a staple issue of early modern philosophy: the mind-body problem. However, its aim is quite different than most other works written on this topic. Rather than proffering a new solution, or a new interpretation of a canonical philosopher’s proposed solution, Harfouch aims to transform the meaning of the problem itself. The standard story focuses on the topic of interaction—a focus that Harfouch takes to stem from the contemporaneity of this question in analytic philosophy of mind (1–2). The problem is still widely debated, and historians of this period have for the most part followed this interest, producing a great deal of historical work on this topic. However, this reference to contemporary philosophy already indicates a possible difficulty here. Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and others were not contemporary philosophers of mind, and any attempt to connect their work to the most recent developments in an only tangentially related subfield of philosophy risks turning into bad history.

To be clear, Harfouch is not denying that the traditional version of the mind-body problem exists, either in contemporary philosophy or within the canonical early modern texts. The argument, rather, is that we should understand the philosophy of mind-related interaction-problem as just one component of a wider mind-body problem, which encompasses not only the metaphysical and epistemological questions that remain the focus of the canonical narrative of modern philosophy, but also broader issues having to do with its relationship to the life sciences. In addition to the question of how the mind and the body interact, Descartes faced the more fundamental, and arguably more difficult question of how minds and bodies come to be attached to each other in the first place. For Harfouch, questions of generation, regeneration, reproduction, and ensoulment—that is to say, questions of sex—should be considered as much a part of the mind-body problem as the question of interaction. If anything, these issues are even prior to the traditional one because the problem of interaction presupposes that mind and body have already been co-generated.

Harfouch focuses on a rather striking passage from the Passions of the Soul where Descartes tries to explain the joining of the soul and the body in terms of a love that the soul has for the blood as it enters the heart (6). He analyses Descartes’s extraordinary account of the mixing of the male and female semen which together create heat, begin to harden and form a crust, and as they swirl around together cause the heart to form cavity by cavity (25). It’s long been known that Descartes’s account of reproduction is not very convincing, and Harfouch’s analysis reconfirms this point. I tend to think of this as an intrinsic limit of Descartes’s mechanism, which is governed by the leading metaphor of the “machine.” On this model, all life-processes are described through analogies with the automata that so impressed Descartes: muscles are like a system of pulleys, lungs are like a pair of bellows, teeth are like a set of pincers and so on. These analogies were taken very far in the life sciences of his day and were extraordinarily successful at explaining many new things that could not be explained well by previous paradigms. But the mechanistic tradition always struggled to explain reproduction, for a simple reason: machines cannot reproduce. The central metaphor guiding Descartes’s inquiries made this problem very difficult to solve, which led to what can only appear to us as increasingly desperate solutions, like Malebranche’s “Russian-doll” theory of preformationism that has God creating all possible future generations stacked inside one another at the initial moment of creation, or Leibniz’s theory of “transcreation,” a special divine act that transforms an animal soul into a human by endowing it with reason.

The subsequent chapters deal with other...