In the sixth of his Meditations
on First Philosophy, Descartes famously wrote that "Nature… teaches
me, by these sensations of pain, hunger, thirst and so on, that I am not merely
present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but that I am very closely
joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a
unit." Unlike the pure mental acts of intellection and volition, which are
not in any way dependent on the body, sensation, as well as perception,
imagination and emotion or passion, owe their existence to the union of the
mind with the body. This special and mysterious mind-body union or "intermingling"
is part of what distinguishes the mental life of human beings from that of
angelic beings; for while angels possess intellection and volition, they do not
suffer sensations or emotions — not even when, on earthly missions to communicate
messages to humans, they borrow unused bodies in which to house themselves
temporarily for the journey. As Descartes explained in a letter to Regius,
written in January 1642, "if an angel were in a human body, he would not
have sensations as we do, but would simply perceive the motions which are
caused by external objects, and in this way would differ from a real man."
In other words, unlike real men, embodied angels are like sailors in
ships, inspecting but never feeling what goes on in their bodies. If an
embodied angel were to brush up against some nettles it would not feel stinging
sensations, but would simply perceive the chain of motions that the nettles had
initiated in its body.

One of the outstanding issues in
Descartes scholarship is how to understand what Descartes meant by the "substantial
union" or "intermingling" of mind and body, since he said so
little about it. Of particular concern is whether the union in question is
consistent with his rigid substance dualism. After all, given his view that
mind and body are distinct (types of) substances, and his view that human
beings and embodied angels are both composed of these same two distinct
substances, one naturally wonders how is it that embodied human minds manage to
be so different from embodied angelic minds. How can two distinct substances
intermingle to form a "close and intimate union" in humans, producing
a sensory-rich phenomenology of conscious experience and emotion (vision, taste
and smell; anger, fear and love), which is absent from the more austerely
intellectual embodied angelic mind? (Some may be reminded of Wim Wenders’ film Wings
of Desire, in which an angel faces the dilemma of immortality without
sensuous experience or a mortal life overflowing with it. He desires to experience
human feelings and sensations so strongly that he chooses the latter and his
first course of action with his new mortal coil is to drink a cup of black
coffee.) Is the union simply a matter of a divinely ordained correspondence —
whether causal or occasional — between bodily states and conscious mental
experiences, set up for the welfare and benefit of mankind’s material life on
earth, as some commentators have argued? In other words, is the problem of the
union just the classic problem of the interaction between mind and body, taught
to all philosophy undergraduates? Or is there more to it than that, such as a
vestige of the Aristotelian scholastic hylomorphism Descartes vigorously
attacked, whereby the mind or soul is the form of the living body,
as other commentators urge? Or, more pessimistically, is Descartes’s "primitive
notion" of "union" rather simply a lapse into obscurity borne of
his own bafflement over the exact nature of the relation between the human mind
and the human body?

In Descartes’s Concept of Mind,
Lilli Alanen proposes, for the most part, to set aside this deeply problematic
and contentious ontological issue and to focus on that aspect of Descartes’s
theory of embodiment that concerns the nature of the embodied human mind
itself. Forget for a moment how exactly Descartes thought the human mind
becomes embodied. When it is embodied, during our earthy lifetime, what is it
like, according to Descartes? For too long, Alanen thinks, philosophers,
especially those working in the Anglo-American tradition, have concentrated on Descartes’s
view of the mind as essentially epistemically transparent to introspection,
immaterial, and primarily ratiocinative. But, towards the end of his life,
inspired by his correspondence with the brilliant Princess Elizabeth, he
devoted much attention to the affective side of mental life that is produced by
the union of mind and body, and in his last published work, The Passions
of the Soul, he discussed in detail his views on the psycho-physiological
nature of embodied human experience. Here we find Descartes discussing the
whole range of passions that constitute the human condition: veneration and
scorn, love and hatred, hope, anxiety, jealousy, remorse, pride, shame,
disgust, respect, wonder, astonishment, laughter, joy, sighs and listlessness —
to mention but a few — as well as central issues concerning the will and
reason’s mastery of the emotions. Alanen believes that Ryle’s picture of "Descartes’
myth" of the "ghost in the machine" is itself a myth (an opinion
expressed several years ago by Gordon Baker and Katherine J. Morris in their
combative Descartes’ Dualism) and a distortion of the true Descartes,
who holds the human being to be an "ens per se" rather than an
"ens per accidens," that is, a genuine unity, a real
individual thing in its own right, and not merely a composite or couple of mind
and body (as an embodied angel presumably is). It is Alanen’s aim to detail Descartes’s
anthropology of the human being, for which it is essential to examine his views
on what he considered to be those "confused modes of thought,"
sensation and emotion, which lacked that "clarity and distinctness"
characteristic of pure intellection and volition, and which are produced by the
mysterious intermingling of the mind and the body.

Alanen begins, in the first
chapter, by outlining the unintegrated mechanistic physiology and cognitive
psychology found in Descartes’s earliest writings (the Rules for the
Direction of the Mind, in particular); then, in chapter two, she turns to
his mature view of the mind as embodied and his views on the knowledge of the
embodied mind. Of particular interest here is Alanen’s discussion of Descartes’s
claim that the union of body and mind is the third simple and primitive
metaphysical notion alongside thought and extension, the
respective "principal attributes" of mind and matter. Unlike these
latter two notions, which can be clearly and distinctly known by the intellect
(aided perhaps by the imagination), the mind-body union cannot be an object of
true knowledge but only experienced. The emotions and sensations, the products
of the union, are thus "confused" modes of thought. Each of us is
intimately acquainted with the union and its confused mental products, and thus
it has a common sense character rather than a scientific one. Alanen argues
convincingly that, for Descartes, "thought and extension are technical
notions, serving specific epistemological and scientific purposes, whereas the
notion we have of ourselves as human persons is a non-technical, natural notion
that cannot be explained in terms of these technical notions (p.74). We cannot conceive
it, clearly and distinctly, but only experience it as embodied agents in
the world. Somewhat less convincingly, she suggests that this conceptual inexplicability
need not necessarily be seen as a failure to give a scientific account of the
union, because "his doctrine of three primary notions can be welcomed as a
healthy admission of the inability of metaphysics and physical science to
account for every thing we experience and have to deal with, and thereby also a
recognition of the role and value of other equally important domains of
properly human experience" (p.77). No doubt there are certain aspects of
human nature that are better understood through literature and art, say, than
from cognitive science; but it is not at all clear that the mind-body problem
can be taken to be one of them. Descartes’s failure, and the failure of
contemporary physicalist theories of mind, to account for the phenomenal character
of conscious experience, indicate, to my mind, the need rather for a radical
conceptual innovation in philosophy and science themselves.

Chapters 3, 4 and 5 deal with
various aspects of Descartes’s broad notion of thought (which for him was not
restricted to ratiocination but included sensation and emotion), such as
consciousness, language, the intentionality of thought and sensation, and the
issue of animal mentality. With respect to the latter, Alanen argues, quite
correctly, against such commentators as Zeno Vendler and Norman Malcolm, that,
while Descartes may well have equivocated on the notions of ‘thought’ and ‘sensation’
and their cognates, and this contributed to his notorious denial that animals
have thoughts or sensations, the equivocation in question was not a matter of
sliding between "propositional" and "non-propositional"
thought. Descartes certainly did not equate all thought with propositional
thought and then deny any thought at all (including sensations) to animals
because they cannot entertain propositions. This anachronistic and rather
wooden interpretation is a product of reading too much twentieth-century
philosophy of language into Descartes. In a well-known passage in the Sixth
Replies to Objections to the Meditations, Descartes distinguishes among
three "grades" of sensory response, only the third of which can be
taken to be "propositional" (because it consists of perceptual
judgments about external objects). The second grade consists in what we might
now call the conscious or phenomenal or subjective experience associated with
sensory perception, which clearly need not be, and, pace currently
fashionable "representationalist" theories of phenomenal
consciousness, probably is not, propositional in structure. Though Alanen does
not venture to say in what the alleged equivocation consists, it is pretty
clear, I think, that Descartes does not equivocate between two sense of ‘sensation’
so much as deliberately distinguish between two sides to sensation: a material
side, which is a mode of extended animal bodies, and a mental side, which is a
mode of thought. Embodied humans have both; non-human animals have only the
former, which can be explained purely mechanistically, as can all modes of
extension. As he wrote in a letter to Mersenne, on 11 June 1640, "I do not explain the feeling of pain without reference to the soul. For in my view pain
exists only in the understanding. What I do explain is all the external
movements which accompany this feeling in us; in animals it is these movements
alone which occur, and not pain in the strict sense …". This is not quite
the end of the matter, of course, for the picture Descartes draws is further
complicated by his definition of thought as "everything which we are aware
of as happening within us, in so far as we have awareness of it" (Principles
of Philosophy I.9); and the fact, if it is one, that this kind of
self-consciousness cannot be attributed to animals.

The last two chapters, 6 and 7,
which are the most novel in the book, concentrate on issues often neglected by
other commentators: Descartes’s view of the passions or emotions — which, as Alanen
observes, "more than any other thoughts… testify to our embodied condition"
(p. 165) — as well as his conception of the will and the role of reason in the
exercise of virtue and the control of the passions. Some of the specific topics
covered include: the context and novelty of Descartes’s approach to the
passions, the function and classification of the passions, the mastery of the
passions, reason versus passions, conflicts of soul and will, Descartes’s
notion of a free will, moral agency and moral therapy, and generosity as a
virtue and a passion. Throughout there are many informative comparisons of Descartes’s
views with those of the Stoics, Platonists, Aristotelians and Thomists, as well
as those of William James.

As I mentioned, Alanen says she
will not attempt to discuss the nature of the union relation. But who, after
all, could resist saying something about it, especially in such as book as this?
She says she wants to "insist on the institution of the mind-body union,"
which somehow "goes beyond the interactionist view." But how,
exactly, does it go beyond it? All we are offered is the following: "Since
the mind-body union, and hence the human body, has ends and goods of its own,
sensations and other phenomena depending on this union presuppose this finality
and cannot be constituted by mere causal interaction between independently
describable bodily and mental states" (p. 69). But why not? God has
managed to construct embodied angels in such a way that does not require them
to have confused modes of thought, such as pain. So why did God take the
further step of "intermingling" us with our bodies? Why does the fulfilment
of our ends and goods demand an intermingling? Alanen’s tantalizing ideas cry
out for further development. The only other lament I have is the lack of a
bibliography, which, in a book that contains nearly a hundred pages of
substantial footnotes where citations are referenced in full only the first
time they occur, makes chasing down references more difficult than they might
otherwise be. These minor shortcomings aside, there can be no doubt that Alanen,
drawing on the best of both English and French scholarship, does a wonderful job
of articulating a comprehensive vision of Descartes’s metaphysical,
epistemological and ethical views on the embodied mind. Descartes’s Concept
of Mind is a rigorous and imaginative work, and a worthy corrective to the
popular image of Descartes’s philosophy of mind as narrowly concerned only with
the indubitably known immaterial mind of the solitary meditator.

© 2004 Sean
Crawford

Sean Crawford, Ph.D., Centre for
Philosophy, Institute for Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy
(I.E.P.P.P.), Lancaster University, UK

Categories: Philosophical