Page 163 - Encyclopedia Of World History

descartes, rené 513

Mueller, D. C. (1996). Constitutional democracy. New York: Oxford Uni- in ends, claiming that its capacities, rather, arise from the
versity Press. complex configurations and combinations of physical
Narveson, J. (2003). Respecting persons in theory and practice: Essays on
moral and political philosophy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. particles in motion. He was concerned to defend the
Principe, M. L. (2000). Bills of rights:A comparative constitutional analy- orthodox picture of the soul as nonphysical and immor-
sis. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt.
Schwartz, B. (1995). A history of the Supreme Court. New York: Oxford tal, but denied that life was also due to immaterial pow-
University Press. ers. His posthumous work L’homme (theTreatise on Man)
describes a fictional world of soulless“earthen machines,”
mobile automata like the hydraulic statues in“the gardens
of our kings.” Descartes’ physiology relied heavily on“ani-
Descartes, René mal spirits,” fast-moving but material fluids that flow

(1596–1650) through the nerves and the pores of the brain.
French philosopher Descartes notoriously claimed that the human soul
interacts with the body-machine by way of the pineal
ené Descartes was the leading French philosopher gland, swaying on its supporting network of arteries and
Rof the seventeenth-century scientific revolution. directing the flow of animal spirits through the tubes of
Although now best known, and commonly vilified, for the brain tissue. Even in creatures without souls, he
his defense of mind/body dualism and for his quest for posited, ordinary cognitive processing involves the con-
certainty in the theory of knowledge, Descartes was pri- struction and reconstruction of patterned traces on the
marily interested in studying the natural world and the surface of this gland. Descartes had seen in dissection that
human body. His global influence as the intellectual nonhuman animals also had a pineal gland. So although
point of origin of modern Western subjectivity, the evil he did argue that beasts are machines, he thought that
demon of modern philosophy, is undeniable; but it masks these machines are capable of representation, memory,
the stranger work of the historical figure, who was as puz- and even sentience and dreams. Despite the old story that
zled by meteors and by medicine as by metaphysics and he vivisected a dog on his kitchen table, Descartes offered
method, and more interested in passion, psychosomatics, no justification for cruelty to animals. Far from exclusively
and perception than in rationality and the soul. privileging the rational soul, his work substantially
Born in La Haye (now Descartes) inTouraine, and edu- restricted its role and scope.The bodies of the Cartesian
cated at the Jesuit college of La Flèche, Descartes decided automata are not mere objects cut off from the world,
in his early twenties on a life of inquiry after studying responding passively to the whim of the soul, but are fully
mechanics and music, and after a series of powerful and holistically embedded in the buzzing whirl of the
dreams. He developed a systematically mechanical fluid-filled cosmos.
account of nature, modeling his cosmology and physics Many readers encounter Descartes only through his
on the behavior of fluids, which also play a key role in his writings on metaphysics and epistemology. In the Dis-
remarkable physiological theories. Descartes settled in course on the Method (1637) and the Meditations (1641),
Holland in the late 1620s; by 1632 he was in Amster- Descartes concocts a sequence of radically skeptical sce-
dam,“dissecting the heads of various animals,” to “explain narios to challenge our trust in traditional beliefs, and
what imagination, memory, etc. consist in” (Descartes to conclude that he can know with certainty his own ex-
1985–1991, 40). But when he heard of Galileo’s con- istence as a “thinking thing” (res cogitans). These works
demnation in 1633, Descartes abandoned plans to pub- have considerable literary and psychological power:
lish works on the nature of matter and the body. the Discourse offers an autobiographical fable about
Descartes definitively rejected the Christian-Aristotelian Descartes’ individualistic path to knowledge, while the
idea that biological matter has intrinsic powers or built- Meditations brilliantly uses the jargon of scholastic