A digital ecosystem, fueled by serendipity.
While the great philosophical distinction between mind and body in
western thought can be traced to the Greeks, it is to the seminal work of René
Descartes (1596-1650) [see figure 1], French mathematician, philosopher,
and physiologist, that we owe the first systematic account of the mind/body
relationship. Descartes was born in Touraine, in the small town of La Haye
and educated from the age of eight at the Jesuit college of La Flèche. At La
Flèche, Descartes formed the habit of spending the morning in bed, engaged
in systematic meditation. During his meditations, he was struck by the sharp
contrast between the certainty of mathematics and the controversial nature of
philosophy, and came to believe that the sciences could be made to yield
results as certain as those of mathematics.
From 1612, when he left La Flèche, until 1628, when he settled in Holland, Descartes spent much of his time in travel, contemplation, and correspondence. From 1628 until his ill-fated trip to Sweden in 1649 he remained for the most part in Holland, and it was during this period that he composed a series of works that set the agenda for all later students of mind and body. The first of these works, De homine [1] was completed in Holland about 1633, on the eve of the condemnation of Galileo. When Descartes' friend and frequent correspondent, Marin Mersenne, wrote to him of Galileo's fate at the hands of the Inquisition, Descartes immediately suppressed his own treatise. As a result, the world's first extended essay on physiological psychology was published only well after its author's death.
In this work, Descartes proposed a mechanism [see figure 2] for
automatic reaction in response to external events. According to his proposal,
external motions affect the peripheral ends of the nerve fibrils, which in turn
displace the central ends. As the central ends are displaced, the pattern of
interfibrillar space is rearranged and the flow of animal spirits is thereby
directed into the appropriate nerves. It was Descartes' articulation of this
mechanism for automatic, differentiated reaction that led to his generally
being credited with the founding of reflex theory.
Although extended discussion of the metaphysical split between mind and body did not appear until Descartes' Meditationes, his De homine outlined these views and provided the first articulation of the mind/body interactionism that was to elicit such pronounced reaction from later thinkers. In Descartes' conception, the rational soul, an entity distinct from the body and making contact with the body at the pineal gland, might or might not become aware of the differential outflow of animal spirits brought about through the rearrangement of the interfibrillar spaces. When such awareness did occur, however, the result was conscious sensation -- body affecting mind. In turn, in voluntary action, the soul might itself initiate a differential outflow of animal spirits. Mind, in other words, could also affect body.
The year 1641 saw the appearance of Descartes' Meditationes de prima philosophia, in quibus Dei existentia, & animae à corpore distinctio, demonstratur [2]. As is evident from the subtitle, it is in the Meditationes that Descartes first provided a systematic articulation of the metaphysical dualism of mind and body that has long bedeviled western thought. For Descartes, there are two different created substances, body and soul (which he also termed "mind"). The essence of body is extension; that of soul or mind is thought. Body is spatial; the soul is unextended. The body is a mechanism that can perform many actions on its own without the intervention of the soul; the mind is a pure thinking substance that may, but does not always, regulate the body. How spatial body can affect or be affected by unextended mind cannot, for Descartes, be comprehended in either spatial or non-spatial terms. It is either beyond our ability to understand how body and mind are united, or, at best, we are forced back to the common sense conception of their mutual interaction. Vesey (1965) refers to this dilemma as the "Cartesian impasse."
In 1649, on the eve of his departure for Stockholm to take up residence as
instructor to Queen Christina of Sweden, Descartes sent the manuscript of the
last of his great works, Les passions de l'ame[3], to press. Les passions [see
figure 3] is Descartes' most important contribution to psychology proper. In
addition to an analysis of primary emotions, it contains Descartes' most
extensive account of causal mind/body interactionism and of the localization
of the soul's contact with the body in the pineal gland. As is well known,
Descartes chose the pineal gland because it appeared to him to be the only
organ in the brain that was not bilaterally duplicated and because he believed,
erroneously, that it was uniquely human.
In February of 1650, returning in the bitter cold from a session with Queen
Christina, who insisted on receiving her instruction at 5 a.m., Descartes
contracted pneumonia. Within a week, the man who had given direction to
much of later philosophy was dead. By focusing on the problem of true and
certain knowledge, Descartes had made epistemology, the question of the
relationship between mind and world, the starting point of philosophy. By
localizing the soul's contact with body in the pineal gland, Descartes had
raised the question of the relationship of mind to the brain and nervous
system. Yet at the same time, by drawing a radical ontological distinction
between body as extended and mind as pure thought, Descartes, in search of
certitude, had paradoxically created intellectual chaos.
Return to Table of Contents
Citation:
Wozniak, Robert H. "Mind and Body: Rene Déscartes to William
James"
serendip.brynmawr.edu/Mind/;
Bryn Mawr College, Serendip 1995
Originally published in 1992 at Bethesda, MD & Washington, DC by the National
Library of Medicine and the American Psychological Association.
| Forum | Guest
Exhibitions | Serendip Home |