Recovering the Body: A Philosophical Story

5. The Body-Machine: Descartes

chapter v the Body-Machine: descartes rené descartes is a pivotal figure in the history of philosophy. he was born in 1596, just as the renaissance was drawing to a close. he was educated at the Jesuit college of la Flèche at a time when the Jesuits were called upon to counter the protestant reformation through the education of young Catholic minds. From the age of ten, descartes received a classical humanistic education, but he was particularly impressed by the precision and certainty of mathematics. although he was a product of the scepticism of his age epitomized by Montaigne, he resisted it, and some of his writings, in particular his Discourse on Method, are seen by scholars as a direct attack on Montaigne and the uncertainty arising from scepticism. according to richard tarnas, there was a sceptical crisis in French philosophy, which descartes experienced directly and acutely: pressed by the residual confusions of his education, by the contradictions between different philosophical perspectives, and by the lessening relevance of religious revelation for understanding the empirical world, descartes set out to discover an irrefutable basis for certain knowledge.1 this chapter will trace his quest for certainty and, more particularly, outline how that quest for certainty led him to the three prongs of his philosophy that bequeathed to the modern age the body-machine: method, dualism and mechanism. that descartes’ legacy to modernity was a dualistic metaphysics of mind and body—and, as a consequence of that fundamental principle, a 134 the road to MeChaniSM concept of the human body as a machine—is a fact generally recognized by all who write about the body today. But most writers simply refer to his famous statement, “i think, therefore i am,” with its obvious neglect of the body, as what led him, and us, to the body-machine; few take time to analyze the source of his dualism and his mechanism, or their importance to modernity’s ready acceptance of the body-machine as a premise of modern medicine. the purpose of this book is to tell a story about how and why the body-machine came to be, what was lost in the process and what might ultimately be recovered. in relation to descartes, i want to ask the same question asked in earlier chapters: What was descartes trying to explain and why? this is particularly important in the case of descartes, since, while most of the science on which he based his mechanistic conception of the body was ultimately rejected, the paradigm of the body-machine endured. in addition, as we will see in this chapter and the next, descartes’ dualistic conception of the body was highly criticized in his own time—by hobbes and gassendi, among others, as well as by his rationalist successor, Spinoza, who rejected dualism out of hand. Further, as John Cottingham points out, “contemporary onslaughts on the puzzle of consciousness … have all but eliminated Cartesian dualism as a serious contender for an account of the nature and workings of the mind….”2 this raises a further question, then, in relation to the body: Why has the Cartesian body-machine paradigm endured for almost four centuries? Method From his earliest writings to his last, descartes was concerned with the proper method for arriving at certain knowledge, and he was convinced that, once elucidated, the proper method could be applied to any branch of science and learning. Finding this method became his life’s mission, and his commitment to it was confirmed very early in his life and work. right at the beginning of his earliest work, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, descartes states: For the sciences as a whole are nothing other than human wisdom, which always remains one and the same, however different the subjects to which it is applied, it being no more altered by them than sunlight is by the variety of the things it shines on.3 the Body-MaChine 135 this simple statement of what was, in fact, a radically new idea belies the importance that the notion had in descartes’ work and the fact that it “contains within itself the germ of the whole Cartesian revolution.”4 his principle contains assumptions (choices) about knowledge, the mind and man’s relation to the cosmos that are not discussed, argued or proven. in other words, it was for him an a priori principle that was present from the...