In a recent essay, Crispin Sartwell connects what he sees as the philosophical preference for, and celebration of, one side of a series of dualisms – mind over body, culture over nature, human over animal, etc. – to the denigration and appalling treatment, by white male Europeans, of women and non-white people. He argues that western, male philosophers elevated mind, culture and the human in association with themselves, while relegating body, nature, and animal to everyone else. Accordingly, writes Sartwell, “white supremacy lurks at the heart of Western metaphysics”. Rene Descartes is singled out as particularly bad here because he “separates mind and body as two fundamentally different sorts of things and arranges them in a hierarchy of value”, though in doing so he “echoes” Plato and Pythagoras, who were similarly egregious.
Now, Plato, Pythagoras, and Descartes are three of my three favourite philosophers, so this strikes a chord. My introduction to Descartes as a student was, in fact, dualistic in nature. On the one hand, I was told that he was the “father of modern philosophy” and a centrally important figure in the discipline. On the other hand, he was regularly denigrated, often by the same professors, for his dualism and, in particular, its dismissive attitude toward the body and nature (including animals). He was presented as both important and deeply troublesome, which I frankly found hard to reconcile. It wasn’t just that he was wrong– it is easy to understand how someone could be both important and mistaken – but that he was bad or misleading or retrograde or threatening; these things are hard to reconcile with importance.
So, it is not surprising for me to see any philosopher, even one as talented, thought-provoking and thoroughly engaging as Professor Sartwell, associating Descartes with something as objectionable as white supremacism. This really has been my experience overall: Descartes’ apparent importance seems to be relegated by many, if not most, philosophers to mere historical influence and not to any inherent or lingering value in his work.
Such thoughts have prompted me to reflect on the place of Descartes in the philosophical canon and I have become convinced that philosophers, as a rule, misunderstand, or only partially understand, Descartes. I do not intend to insist that Descartes was morally pure and noble. I do not even wish to question whether he was a white supremacist; I really have no idea. Rather, my topic here is the way in which his dualism of mind and body is typically presented in philosophical contexts. To anticipate, in philosophy, Cartesian dualism is usually presented in isolation of his larger scientific works so that philosophers, accordingly, end up with an incomplete version of his theory that is abstracted, to the point of distortion, from his overall concerns.
To see this, note that Descartes was not just a philosopher but one of the preeminent scientists and mathematicians of his day. He invented analytic geometry and outlined a sophisticated mechanics, cosmology, and theory of gravity. He was one of the main thinkers that Isaac Newton realized needed to be addressed if natural philosophy were to advance. Central to Cartesian physics is the rejection of Aristotelian forms in favour of mechanistic explanations. For Descartes, the idea that bubbles rise in water because air shares a form with a region of space that is above the region for water is as occult and obfuscating as the idea that opium causes sleepiness due to its dormitive virtue. Instead, motion is to be explained by chains of immediate contact governed by deterministic and universal laws of motion, laws that were models for Newton’s own three laws. This mechanical philosophy, when combined with mathematics such as analytic geometry, resulted in a new way of understanding the world, one that had greater predictive and explanatory power than anything that had come before. In short, motion is explained by appeal to mechanical laws and the properties of space, not forms.
Central to this idea is that all of space is governed by the laws of motion, since all of space is connected and isotropic. Indeed, for Descartes, materiality itself is identical to spatial extension: almost any of the physical properties of a body can be eliminated while the body remains material. For example, a piece of wax may change from white to colourless, scented to odourless, solid to liquid, rectangular to shapeless, etc., and remain physical nonetheless. The only property essential to being a physical body is extension in space: whatever changes a physical entity undergoes, it must retain spatial extension if it is to remain physical in nature. Accordingly, anything physical, for Descartes, must be governed by the laws of motion. All motion, all physical change, must be explained by reference to the laws. This is the nature of Cartesian physics and it follows from some pretty rigorous reasoning concerning the nature of space, bodies, and motion.
But here is the problem. Descartes noticed that the production of speech – one could view this as the motion of particles emanating from a human mouth – is utterly immune to mechanical explanation. The mechanical philosophy succeeds better than anything prior in explaining motion and change in the physical world, but it fails to predict human speech patterns. If Descartes is right, and all material entities are governed by mechanical laws, it simply follows that whatever it is that produces speech cannot be material; if it were, then the laws of motion would govern it. Since the mechanical philosophy covers all of space, and spatial extension just is what it is to be physical, anything that is not governed by mechanical laws of motion is not in space.
That is the argument. It is derived from what was at the time the most successful approach to physical theory in existence and the observation that a certain kind of pattern in the world isn’t explained by the theory. Like a good scientist, Descartes posited something that would explain the anomaly, which in his case was a non-spatial substance that nonetheless had causal powers (i.e. the power to produce speech). An alternative, of course, would have been to expand the theory, but that seemed hopeless: how can one explain human speech in terms of inertia and energy? To this day we don’t know how to integrate a good theory of human speech (and thought) with a causal/nomological view of reality. The mind-body problem remains unsolved, and certainly, to Descartes, there appeared to be no way to broaden physics, which is predictable and deterministic, to cover speech production, which is unpredictable and creative. Another alternative would have been to simply drop the physical theory, but the alternative was occult and obfuscating to Descartes. He concluded that there must be more here than the theory covers. So, he made a posit.
There is, so far as I can tell, nothing particularly objectionable about this kind of reasoning. When one notices something that one’s theory doesn’t predict, it is not unreasonable to consider that maybe there exist things that are, at that point in time, outside the scope of one’s theory. This is particularly plausible when: (1) the theory is massively successful in its domain of application; and (2) there appears no plausible way to extend the theory to the new cases. At the end of the day, one may have to reject the initial theory in favour of something new, but at the early stages of the discovery, positing something otherwise inexplicable, and then seeking a theory of this new posit, is perfectly legitimate. Consider the case of dark matter. It was proposed because scientists noticed that observable matter was insufficient to explain the gravitational properties of the universe. So, rather than give up Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which is massively successful in its domain of application, cosmologists posited that there must exist something more to reality, dark matter, that manages, somehow, to exert gravitational force but is otherwise quite unlike ordinary matter. This helps us to explain what we observe – the gravitational structure of the universe at the largest scales – but opens up new mysteries, which is to say, new avenues of investigation (what is dark matter, exactly? Why is it so hard to detect directly? Etc.?). This is very much like what Descartes did, and it is sound scientific reasoning.
So, whatever moral, political, or social hay people tried to make out of Cartesian dualism – and I take no stand here on this issue and am willing to grant that it was put to bad use – the impetus and thought process that led to it was that of scientific investigation. In particular, Descartes was not a dualist solely for the reasons outlined in his Meditations, which was written later than his major scientific works. It is not the result of reflection on perceptual error or the conceivability of thought existing without anything material (though the arguments in the Meditations do have something in common with his earlier arguments for the identification of physicality with extension and the infinite extension of space). These considerations buttress the case for dualism, but they are not the primary driver.
Now, once one is driven to account for those aspects of human nature unaccounted for by the best physics – language and thought – it is natural to place a special kind of value on those aspects. Language and thought are, unsurprisingly, taken by Descartes as what is central to being human. This is not surprising; after all, one’s own thought and speech are central to the particular person one is. It does not follow from this that there is a hierarchy of race or gender, but it is not obviously wrong to suppose that the creative, non-mechanical aspects of human nature matter more than, or are special in some way compared to, the mechanical aspects, which we share with everything else in space-time. Something that is unique and unusual is typically valued more than something common and ubiquitous. I can certainly understand the fear Sartwell voices: once we separate out what is special to us – creative thought and speech – there may very well be an inclination to rank people’s possession of these special features on irrelevant bases, such as skin tone, and then form a moral hierarchy of race. And Descartes certainly supposes that animals, lacking speech, lack the non-spatial substance that violates the mechanical philosophy and, so, lack minds of any kind. All the same, the scientific argument for dualism has no such direct implications: it is entirely compatible with Descartes’ reasoning that animals possess a spontaneous nature that cannot be captured by his laws of motion. A two-part hierarchy of mind over body does not necessarily lead to a fine-grained hierarchy based on species, gender, or skin colour. Anybody who made that move solely on the basis of Descartes’ reasoning – even Descartes – is making a mistake. Mind-body dualism does not entail that male/female or white/non-white form a hierarchy of value. There is nothing in Descartes’ scientific works that justifies such a hierarchy, and as natural as it may be for some unsavoury types to draw this conclusion, it cannot be said to rest at the ground floor or heart of Cartesian metaphysics.
So, Descartes was primarily being a reasonable, responsive, and exploratory scientist in positing the existence of a non-spatial substance governed by non-mechanical laws. While his final position may have much in common with earlier, theological, moral, or metaphysical arguments for the existence of the soul, there is really no ground for saying that his view was motivated by or centred on white supremacism. Philosophers have long recognized that there is a problem reconciling explanation of human behaviour with that of other physical bodies in the universe. The mind-body problem has prompted many to suppose that there is something to people that distinguishes them from the rest of the natural world. Descartes was in a relatively unique position, however, as one of the chief architects of the modern scientific view of reality. When he noticed that even it could not reconcile human and non-human behaviour, he was quite understandably driven to posit something, i.e. some substance, that would account for what is observed. Whatever immoral stances others have justified by appeal to mind-body dualism should not be blamed, by association, on Descartes’ scientific work. Considered in its context, and properly understood, Descartes’ reasoning toward dualism is one of the most interesting case studies in the history of science.
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