Descartes' Bones (24 page)

Descartes, perhaps more than any other individual, had set this in motion, in part by choosing to analyze the human body as an object, just like anything else in nature. But Descartes staunchly fought back against critics who accused him of “atheism” (a catch all term for materialism and all it might imply). Because his philosophy was built on a hard distinction between mind and body, and because he included soul in the concept of mind, he believed that rather than draining the meaning from humanity he had in fact maintained the separate integrity of the mind-soul while allowing science to work on the physical side of things.

Flourens followed Descartes in arguing against identifying the brain with the mind. His reasoning seems a bit curious, for brain-equals-mind would seem to be the logical conclusion of someone doing an anatomical study of the brain. You prick this nerve and it causes a contraction in that muscle; you tweak another area and see that it affects speech, or color, or awareness of right and wrong; eventually, seemingly inevitably, you come to believe that you have mapped out, within the physical masses encased in the skull, all of the attributes we associate with the mind. But like Descartes, Flourens believed, despite all his investigations of the brain, that mind was somehow
other.
Flourens argued that Gall's organology, with its localizing of functions in various parts of the brain, was little more than a gimmick to please the crowds that came to hear him lecture and watch him run his fingers over people's heads. Gall's separate functions, or faculties, weren't really physically distinct: “Your
faculty,”
he taunted rhetorically, “is only a
word.”

Flourens recognized that Gall had garnered a great amount of popular momentum for his theory, and he believed that phrenology was bad science and that he, on behalf of the academy, had to stop it. “Each succeeding age has a philosophy of its own,” he said. “The seventeenth century enthroned the philosophy of Descartes; the eighteenth that of Locke and Condillac; should the nineteenth enthrone that of Gall?” Elsewhere he tightened the comparison in a way that suggested a double tragedy: “Descartes goes off to die in Sweden, and Gall comes to reign in France.”

Flourens insisted that the mind was not a collection of faculties but a single, whole, indivisible entity. In this, too, he was following his hero. A chief difference between mind and body, Descartes had written, is that “the body is, by its nature, always divisible, and the mind wholly indivisible.” This conclusion was based on Descartes' observations of himself: “When I contemplate my own self, and consider myself as a thing that thinks, I cannot discover in myself any parts, but I clearly know and conceive that I am a thing absolutely one and complete.”

This notion seems decidedly prepsychological. One feature of the modern world is precisely that we think of the self or psyche or person as composed of different parts, the names of which vary with the generations—ego and id, inner child, flower child, father figure, earth mother, Oedipus complex—so there's a sense in which, for all the absurdity of phrenology, Gall was the more modern thinker. His organology
was
a psychological system, a scientific attempt to analyze the individual that predated Freud by nearly a century.

But Flourens, along with the rest of the scientific establishment, was not ready to march in the direction that Gall indicated, for reasons that were both scientific and unscientific. The historian of science Robert M. Young underscores the divide between Flourens' science and his personal philosophy, writing that “Flourens' advocacy of physiological experimentation is complemented by a complete unwillingness to apply the scientific method to the study of mental phenomena.” For all his commitment to the methods of science in the physical workings of the brain, Young goes on to say, “Flourens was not prepared to submit the human character, the mind, or its organ to analysis. Their unity was a necessary basis of his beliefs about man's dignity and freedom.” Flourens was eager to slice the brain apart, but not the mind, and he was unwilling to do the latter because he believed it would lead to a breakdown of civilization.

But if there are political, social, and spiritual crises that come with equating mind and brain, there is an even more elemental problem with keeping them separated. Descartes, too, insisted on a complete split between the two, saying that the physical and the mental are distinct substances. The question that was thrown at him almost at once was that if body and mind exist in different universes, so to speak, how do they interact? How does your stomach's hunger transmit itself to your mind, and how then does your mind tell your legs to walk to the refrigerator and instruct your hand to open the door and direct your eyes to scan the shelves and cause your fingers to reach toward the slice of leftover pizza? In short, how does anyone ever do anything? If so basic a question brings this “mind-body dualism” theory to a halt, then there must be a serious flaw with the theory.

Descartes' solution, based on his own dissecting work, was to identify a small, nut-shaped structure in the center of the brain called the pineal gland as the place where the two came together: “the principal seat of the soul,” he called it, “and the place in which all our thoughts are formed.” His reasoning had a rather disarming simplicity to it, which was based on symmetry. “The reason I believe this,” he wrote,

Descartes had scarcely aired this notion before critics pounced. If “mind” and “body” were truly distinct, how could a physical gland be a conduit of mental energy? This has been the critique ever since, and it does indeed reveal the absurdity of Descartes' effort to join mind and body, but it is worth noting that Descartes did not state categorically that he had solved the conundrum. In fact, not long before sailing off to Sweden, he admitted it might be too vast a problem for the mind to grasp: “It does not seem to me that the human mind is capable of forming a very distinct conception of both the distinction between the soul and the body and their union; for to do this it is necessary to conceive them as a single thing and at the same time to conceive them as two things; and this is absurd.”

This rather uncharacteristic burst of modesty aside, Descartes gave dualism its modern form and insisted on it, and Western philosophy and the Western tradition since his time—modernity, in other words—have had the mind-body problem in their DNA, as it were. The problem is so elemental and yet so sweeping that attempts to solve it today run across many disciplines, from computer science to neuroscience to psychology. As both the Austrian emperor Francis and Voetius, the theologian in Utrecht who opposed Descartes, feared would happen, much of the Western world has solved the problem of dualism by coming down on the material side of the equation. Physicalism is the present-day term for the view that the physical or material world is the real world—that nothing exists outside of it—and a lot of scientists and philosophers ascribe to some form of it. People who declare themselves to be atheists and say that what they believe in is science or the physical world or the here and now are adopting a physicalist stance.

Jean-Pierre Flourens tried to hold the line against physicalism by bringing Cartesianism—which had long since receded—into cutting-edge nineteenth-century science. While his effort may seem disingenuous, as though he were putting on blinders to keep from looking at things that were too troubling to his worldview, there was a certain wisdom in his attempt. For, as many current thinkers have pointed out, there are basic problems with the physicalist view. What it leaves out, to state it briefly and bluntly, is me. The present-day philosopher Thomas Nagel puts it this way:

That is to say, human consciousness is the well from which we derive much that is most meaningful to us, so any theory of knowledge that does not take it seriously into account—along with all of the stuff that goes with human consciousness: mourning the dead, petting kittens, bowing to Mecca, cherishing faded love letters, risking your life to save someone else's, subconsciously loathing your mother or consciously hating your boss—is flawed. This is the problem that people today have who decide to solve the puzzle of modernity by rejecting past systems—usually religious systems—and replacing them with a good, firm, “scientific” way of understanding. The classic scientific perspective is one of objectivity, and as Nagel says, “Although there is a connection between objectivity and reality . . . still not all reality is better understood the more objectively it is viewed.” We ourselves—our individual consciousnesses, the very minds that seek an objective view and, having found it, try to hold on to it even as they are bombarded with thoughts and pains and desires—have to be made part of the picture.

The hard fact of modernity is that from the time that Descartes separated the two, nobody has yet come up with a definitive, universally satisfying way to solder mind and brain together again. Descartes declared in 1646 that it may not be possible. In 1998, Thomas Nagel stated flatly that “no one has a plausible answer to the mind-body problem.” In 1808, when Cuvier led the committee that reviewed Gall's first effort to win the approval of the Academy of Sciences, he said much the same thing in his report. The brain, Cuvier and his colleagues wrote with considerable elegance and sophistication in their critique of Gall's science, seems somehow fundamentally different from the rest of the body, so that

There was then, as there is now, what might be termed a liberal-conservative divide in attempts to resolve the problem. Put another way, there is a connection between the esoteric efforts to tackle dualism and the sorts of real-world battles that fill newspapers and occupy TV talk shows. Those on the left have tended to accept the seeming consequences of equating mind and brain: if it means that basic features of society—the self, religion, marriage, moral systems—need to be reconstructed along new lines, so be it. Examples of such renovations in human values might include promoting equal rights for women and minorities, legalizing abortion, advocacy of same-sex marriage and gay adoption, and viewing other cultures and religions as being as valid as one's own. The point is not that mind-equals-brain requires one to hold particular positions on these topics but that it allows for a wide range of moral speculations. The “conservative” stance has been to fight to keep “mind” separate from “body”—to preserve the status quo, whether in matters of religion, the family, or the self, to maintain that there is an eternal, unchanging basis of values. With regard to Descartes, the irony is that the man who was once seen as the herald of the modern program, the breaker of all icons and traditions, had by the nineteenth century become part of the conservative argument, the man who built a protective wall around the eternal verities, keeping them from the corrosive forces of modernity.

The nineteenth-century version of the culture wars was fought on several scientific fronts. First, thanks to the continuing refinement of microscopes, was the development of cell theory, the idea that all living creatures are composed of basic structural units, cells, which divide themselves to form new cells. For materialistically inclined scientists and philosophers, the discovery of these building blocks of life did away with the need for metaphysical crutches; life was the result of a series of intricate physical interactions. The second popular front that opened in the cultural melee of the nineteenth century—Darwinism, and in particular the idea that humans are descended from apes—became the most infamous. Equally as elemental and contentious as cell theory and Darwinism was the area of brain research. At the French Academy of Sciences, Georges Cuvier—who as the permanent secretary was a gatekeeper of science and the established order and who had fought against the theory of evolution in part on religious grounds—seems to have looked on the arrival on the scene of Jean-Pierre Flourens as a godsend. Flourens was a brilliant, incisive scientist, but also one with a deep commitment to preserving the integrity of the mind and thus of the established social system. Cuvier took him up as his protégé and almost at once began grooming him as his successor. In 1832, as Cuvier lay dying, he urged his colleagues to choose Flourens to follow him as permanent secretary of the academy, and they did.