Descartes’ failure to distinguish between logic and reason. Is something logical necessarily rational? Aren’t the two meanings being conflated? A third point of criticism is that Descartes went to great lengths to explore thinking , but he did not have much to say on the subject of being .
This last objection is precisely the point we need to probe. Descartes was an enormously influential philosopher, one of the most influential of all time. Although he was greeted with hostility at first, he came to represent many new ideas about the body, the brain, and the mind. But as skilled as he was in exploring thinking, we now recognize that his weak spot was in conceptualizing the human body. The body, he argued, is really just a useless appendage attached to the head. He got a kick out of informing his readers that bodies are a mere assemblage of limbs that add up to a mechanical device. The organs of the body, in his view, function like seventeenth-century water gardens: nerves correspond to water pipes, brain cavities to storage containers, muscles to mechanical springs, and breathing to the ticking of a clock, all controlled by a little man in the brain, namely the pineal gland. Explaining the human body as a physical mechanism was all the rage in the natural sciences, and Descartes was quite adept at it. Virtually overnight he became the chief ideologist of a new attitude toward the body, and when confronting his mostly religious critics he came across as rational, modern, and progressive . If Descartes were alive today, he would surely have become a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence – or a prominent neuroscientist.
It is intriguing to imagine how Descartes would have perceived the relationship between the mind and the body if he had lived during the twenty-first century. What would he reply to his four-hundred-years-ago self if he were now to go on a meditation retreat and undertake a clear and level-headed quest for theultimate certainties about man and the world? Let us imagine what would happen:
Spring 2007. A white wooden bungalow with a large front yard and lovely green lawn on the outskirts of Boston. This is the home of neuroscientist René Descartes, Jr. He is sitting in his living room near the fireplace. His attire is casual: corduroy pants, checked shirt, sweater. He leans back on his sofa and tells his story:
‘I am in the United States, where my career has taken me after France and the Netherlands. I’ve just returned from an NIH conference in Washington. The new semester hasn’t started yet, and I’m not distracted with lectures and exams, so I have the leisure time to indulge in my own thoughts. And since I have decided to cast doubt on everything that is not clear and unequivocal and not subject to full determination and representation, which is the only path to the truth, I feel compelled to start by doubting the false unsubstantiated “certainties” that philosophy has introduced. Let’s start with the disastrous separation between mind and body that my alter ego may not have invented, but did establish quite radically in philosophy. The fact is that mind and body cannot be separated, and attempting to do so gets you nowhere. The brain is not hardware that comes equipped with mind software; rather, both interact in an inseparable and highly complex manner. The proposition “I think, therefore I am” may be famous, but it has an unfortunate connotation. Not only does it say that I know about myself and my existence only by means of thinking, but it also suggests that thinking and the awareness of thinking are the actual foundations of existence. And since this thinking is supposed to take place in strict separation from the body, the proposition underscores the radical division between the spiritual mind and the biological body. No neuroscientist today would subscribe to what my alter ego wrote back then:
I knew I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is simply to
This last objection is precisely the point we need to probe. Descartes was an enormously influential philosopher, one of the most influential of all time. Although he was greeted with hostility at first, he came to represent many new ideas about the body, the brain, and the mind. But as skilled as he was in exploring thinking, we now recognize that his weak spot was in conceptualizing the human body. The body, he argued, is really just a useless appendage attached to the head. He got a kick out of informing his readers that bodies are a mere assemblage of limbs that add up to a mechanical device. The organs of the body, in his view, function like seventeenth-century water gardens: nerves correspond to water pipes, brain cavities to storage containers, muscles to mechanical springs, and breathing to the ticking of a clock, all controlled by a little man in the brain, namely the pineal gland. Explaining the human body as a physical mechanism was all the rage in the natural sciences, and Descartes was quite adept at it. Virtually overnight he became the chief ideologist of a new attitude toward the body, and when confronting his mostly religious critics he came across as rational, modern, and progressive . If Descartes were alive today, he would surely have become a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence – or a prominent neuroscientist.
It is intriguing to imagine how Descartes would have perceived the relationship between the mind and the body if he had lived during the twenty-first century. What would he reply to his four-hundred-years-ago self if he were now to go on a meditation retreat and undertake a clear and level-headed quest for theultimate certainties about man and the world? Let us imagine what would happen:
Spring 2007. A white wooden bungalow with a large front yard and lovely green lawn on the outskirts of Boston. This is the home of neuroscientist René Descartes, Jr. He is sitting in his living room near the fireplace. His attire is casual: corduroy pants, checked shirt, sweater. He leans back on his sofa and tells his story:
‘I am in the United States, where my career has taken me after France and the Netherlands. I’ve just returned from an NIH conference in Washington. The new semester hasn’t started yet, and I’m not distracted with lectures and exams, so I have the leisure time to indulge in my own thoughts. And since I have decided to cast doubt on everything that is not clear and unequivocal and not subject to full determination and representation, which is the only path to the truth, I feel compelled to start by doubting the false unsubstantiated “certainties” that philosophy has introduced. Let’s start with the disastrous separation between mind and body that my alter ego may not have invented, but did establish quite radically in philosophy. The fact is that mind and body cannot be separated, and attempting to do so gets you nowhere. The brain is not hardware that comes equipped with mind software; rather, both interact in an inseparable and highly complex manner. The proposition “I think, therefore I am” may be famous, but it has an unfortunate connotation. Not only does it say that I know about myself and my existence only by means of thinking, but it also suggests that thinking and the awareness of thinking are the actual foundations of existence. And since this thinking is supposed to take place in strict separation from the body, the proposition underscores the radical division between the spiritual mind and the biological body. No neuroscientist today would subscribe to what my alter ego wrote back then:
I knew I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is simply to
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