Flesh in the Age of Reason (12 page)

It was in the much later
Les Passions de l’âme
(The Passions of the Soul: 1649) that Descartes finally confronted the psycho-physiological ramifications of the rigid dualism premised by his mechanical philosophy. The soul – that is, the rational soul: the old Aristotelian vegetative and sensitive souls had disappeared in the body-machine – is indivisible and by nature independent of matter (extension). But there is one pocket of the brain, the pineal gland, a unitary structure seated in the mid-brain just behind the main ventricle, where the soul directly operates on the body. The slightest movements taking place in it ‘may alter very greatly the course of these spirits; and reciprocally… the smallest changes which occur in the course of the spirits may do much to change the movements of this gland’. (‘Spirits’ here meant the animal spirits, understood, rather traditionally, as superfine fluids acting as intercessors between the senses and the brain.) The soul, via this pineal gland anchorage, operates throughout the rest of the body by means of the animal spirits in the nerves and blood. Thus, Descartes accounted both for the actions and perceptions arising from the soul, and also for those deriving from the body and the external world.

It was critical to Descartes to chalk out an absolute distinction between the autonomous actions of the soul and what was activated by the body, for fundamentals of responsibility and moral dignity were at stake. Clearly, acts which emanated from the soul were within its power (to perform or forgo). When passions generated in the body
prevailed, it meant that proud
homo rationalis
had succumbed to low appetites or to illnesses, physical or psychiatric, as in the case of fever or delirium. Physical urges (hunger, lust and so on) were provocations to action, prompting conflicts between what they spurred the soul to do and its proper dictates (temperance, continence). What was novel to Descartes (by contrast with Plato) was the view that the soul was quite unitary; the body was a machine pure and simple and had no subaltern (Galenic) souls of its own; the animal spirits and other faculties by which the body channelled sense impressions were themselves attributes of the flesh. Hence, moral conflicts experienced by man within himself were strictly clashes between body and soul, and not between different parts of the soul. ‘For there is within us but one soul,’ he insisted.

The error which has been committed in making it play the part of various personages, usually in opposition to one another, only proceeds from the fact that we have not properly distinguished its functions from those of the body, to which alone we must attribute every thing which can be observed in us that is opposed to our reason.

Ultimately, it was the soul’s job to determine action – freedom of the will was cardinal to Descartes, the supreme affirmation of human dignity.

The importance of Descartes lay in his boldly designating the soul as a philosophical rather than a religious principle, an immaterial thinking subject. In the process the
machina carnis
, the body machine, was laid bare for study in the naturalistic terms of the new science. While upholding the Christian soul, he transformed its status into the
cogito
, rendering it independent of divines and the ministrations of the Church. His was a soul for the thinking gentleman.

Through moves which proved epochal, the soul was thus naturalized and the self set on a rational basis. The ‘I’ stood matchless in all its glory. Small wonder that later generations spun a ‘creation myth’ around Descartes – he had single-handedly created modern man, rather as God’s
fiat
had created Adam. The Cartesian explanation of the hinge of soul and body was, however, a blatant botch
which never carried much credence even among sympathizers, leaving behind the embarrassing problem of the ‘ghost in the machine’.

Descartes’s English impact was potent, notably upon the Cambridge Platonists (discussed in the next chapter) and Sir Kenelm Digby, a gentleman-philosopher whose sponge-like mind soaked up the thinking of the age. Ardent in his admiration of Descartes while also highly devout (he was a convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism), Digby presented in his
Of Bodies
and
Of the Immortality of Man’s Soul
(published as one in 1644) both a scientific account of man and also Christian pieties concerning the soul. Natural scientific in its approach,
Of Bodies
furnished boldly mechanical explanations. Unlike his contemporary Hobbes, however, Digby did not thereby deny the existence of anything beyond matter, or limit knowledge to sense experience. One of his aims, indeed, in representing the body as completely mechanical and fully explicable in terms of matter and motion was to point up the indispensability of an entity not thus explicable – that is, the soul.

His treatise on the soul was quite different in orientation and method, being based not on sense experience but on deductive reason. It cast the body, in a Platonic manner, as a clog to the soul. Human actions, argued Digby, proceeded from two principles, the understanding and the senses, identified respectively with soul and body and, by inference, with the archetypes of angels and animals. Thus, as for Descartes, moral conflict was waged between body and soul, not among various warring factions within the soul. Digby upheld the hierarchical principle of due subordination: reason was master of the senses and passions. Just as for Descartes, reason could effect no action, however, without assistance from those lieutenants, the animal spirits, pulsing from the brain; and Digby made much of the peril that the soul might be swayed by the imagination.

Such fears applied to the rational soul only in its imperfect, earthly sojourn. Its stay here was merely probationary, however: once emancipated from the body it would be purified. Digby’s discourses on body and soul thus climaxed on a lyrical, almost mystical, note: the soul would ultimately be incorruptible in the highest degree: ‘There
can be no change made in her, after the first instant of her parting from her body; but, what happiness or misery betideth her in that instant, continueth with her for all eternity.’

Digby’s hymn to the soul finds echo in the writings of the physician Sir Thomas Browne who, in
Religio Medici
(1642) and elsewhere, took fideistic pleasure in its mysteries. But all such homage to the autonomous and pre-eminent soul was brought down to earth by a fly in the philosophical ointment, Thomas Hobbes.

The short way, adopted in Hobbes’s most important work,
Leviathan
(1651), and elsewhere, with all such high-flying metaphysical dualism was to cut the Gordian knot and deny that ontology. Man – indeed, nature at large – was wholly physical, entirely without an incorporeal element. No ‘spirit’ existed, as posited either by the Churches or by Descartes, and there were no ‘clear and distinct’ Cartesian ideas independent of sense experience. In his ‘Objections’ to Descartes’s
Méditations philosophiques
(1641), Hobbes rebutted the Frenchman’s tenet that knowledge of consciousness preceded sense-data.

It is not surprising that Hobbes was so bent on drastic philosophical cleansing. He had been driven to despair, indeed into exile, by the bitter carnage of the Civil War, which he blamed on the machinations of the clergy and their mystifying ideological formulas. To counter the diseases of devious dogmatism and the loose or crafty thinking upholding it, what was needed was the brisk purge provided by stringent doses of nominalism and materialism. Only then would all that specious talk of the ‘immaterial’ be recognized for what it was: vacuous, mendacious and deceitful: ‘The
universe
’, proclaimed Hobbes, ‘is corporeall, that is to say, body;… and that which is not Body, is no part of the Universe.’ The religio-political pay-off was dynamite: no immaterial spirit, no lords spiritual, no Church or supernatural realm as traditionally conceived. Long before Nietzsche, Hobbes philosophized with a hammer.

It was through materialist spectacles that Hobbes viewed human nature. Man was simply a machine, mere matter in motion; thoughts and feelings were jolts and reactions in the sense organs induced by
external pressures and producing in turn those brain-waves called ideas. The imagination was the consciousness of ideas which lingered in the mind after the original stimuli had died away; and memory was their recollection (‘decaying sense’, in one of Hobbes’s many memorable phrases). Such motions went on independently of speech, and hence,
pace
Descartes, were common to the animal kingdom, too. This mordant materialism which reduced emotions to motions was aimed at ‘vain philosophy, and fabulous traditions’ – like angels, demons and other ‘abstract essences’ bred by fevered imaginations.

Hobbes nowhere rejected the Christian revelation
per se
, but his attitudes and logic appeared to impugn it, and he was widely taken as a two-faced unbeliever, hypocritically quoting Scripture – as in the very title of his
magnum opus
– but subverting its truths. Though he affirmed God’s existence, he denied that either the Deity or the soul was immaterial: incorporeal spirit – or incorporeal anything else for that matter – was ‘unimaginable’ and hence illusory. Glossing 1 Corinthians 15: 44 (‘it is raised a spiritual body’), the great debunker stated that what St Paul there meant was ‘bodily spirits.… For air and many other things are bodies, though not flesh and bone, or any other gross body to be discerned by the eye.’ Asserting his allegiance to Scripture, Hobbes blamed the fiction of a separate or disembodied soul on the ‘demonology of the Greeks’. It was his own reading, he proclaimed (presumably tongue in cheek), which was truly biblical: soul there was but breath, the life of the body. In the same vein, Hobbes nowhere denied the Christian doctrine of personal immortality. But once again, he insisted, the gospel had been perverted by the conniving clergy. The dead would indeed rise on the Last Day, and the faithful would receive eternal life. Man, however, was not immortal by virtue of his nature (the fallacy of Plato and all subsequent metaphysical theology), but by grace of a God whose essence was power.

Contemporaries mistrusted Hobbes’s lip-service to Christianity: to deny the essential incorporeality and immortality of the soul – was this not to sap the faith? His short answer to the enigmas of Cartesian mind–body dualism – that there was no such autonomous thing as
mind – was repugnant to his contemporaries; it was too belittling to human dignity and destructive of all morality. Nor did they endorse his view that ‘immaterial substance’ was ‘unimaginable’ and that only the ‘imaginable’ – that is, what was capable of being represented pictorially – was the stuff for discourse. After Hobbes, no one could ignore the spectre of libertine atheism conjured up by his denial of the soul’s immateriality; indeed, Restoration rakes found in him a kindred spirit, exonerating their immoralism.

Hobbes threw down a further sly challenge to man’s self-esteem. It concerned the status of a person. ‘
Persona
in latine’, he commented,

signifies the
disguise
, or
outward appearance
of a man, counterfeited on the Stage; and sometimes more particularly that part of it, which disguiseth the face, as a Mask or Visard… So that a
Person
is the same that an
Actor
is, both on the Stage and in common Conversation; and to
Personate
, is to Act, or Represent himself, or an other.

How offensive to reduce a legal personage to an actor, impersonator or pretender! It was an issue taken up by Locke.

John Locke (1632–1704) was by far the most influential philosopher of the late seventeenth century. In his early years a conservative Oxford don, Locke was subsequently radicalized by the reactionary politics of post-Restoration years, and played a decisive role in the politics of the years following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when he published key writings championing constitutional government, religious toleration, rational Christianity, liberal economics and currency reform. The coping-stone of his
œuvre
lay, however, in his vision of man.

His master-work, the
Essay concerning Human Understanding
(1690), set out a persuasive model of the new man for the new age, through a radical analysis of how the mind achieves sound knowledge. There were no
a priori
absolute verities, no eternal fitnesses or ‘innate truths’. Far from affirming with Descartes that the mind possessed an intuitive knowledge of the indivisibility of the soul, Locke even doubted that we could know anything of its nature – hence, personal identity was a problem he had to address. Claims made from Plato onwards for
objectively existing Ideas, self-evident to reason, did not square with experience; and the same held for Descartes’s clear and distinct ideas. The inescapable fact of the kaleidoscopic diversity of human beliefs and opinions, at different times and in different places, made nonsense of all such claims. Take a new-born infant: was not its mind like an ‘empty cabinet’, a ‘
tabula rasa
’, or a piece of ‘white Paper’? Knowledge was partial, and acquired only by experience, that is to say, through the five senses:

methinks, the
Understanding
is not much unlike a Closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external visible Resemblances, or
Ideas
of things without; would the Pictures coming into such a dark Room but stay there, and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion, it would very much resemble the Understanding of a Man.

Lack of certitude did not drive Locke, however, to scepticism, despair or a reactive rationalism. The experience of the senses led to the accumulation and consolidation of probable truths sufficient for God’s purposes for man. Similarly, although no moral absolutes were graven upon the heart or head, the psychological mechanisms of pleasure and pain, desire and aversion, did in fact bring about a sound-enough practical grasp of good and bad, vice and virtue. Hence, touting the methods of empirical science as championed by Bacon and the Royal Society, Locke aimed to rescue epistemology and ethics from the follies of dogmatic error and rehouse them in solid structures, and his legacy to the eighteenth century was a cautious confidence in the educability of man as a progressive creature. Man was malleable, and he could change for the better.
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