ADAM’S SPECTACLES

Nature, Mind and Body

in the Age of Mechanism

Noga Arikha

A dissertation submitted in fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Warburg Institute

University of London

2001

Abstract

This thesis explores the ways in which the mind-body relationship was problematized after Descartes, in the context of the scientific revolution in the second half of the seventeenth century, both in France and in England. It is an attempt to historicize ongoing debates within the cognitive sciences and the philosophy of mind about the problem of consciousness. By reconstructing a history of the status of the self-aware, human mind through the history of scientific explanation, I address the question of whether or not a complete, scientific explanation of higher consciousness is possible.

Adopting a conceptual, rather than chronological framework, I concentrate on figures who played a role in the scientific, theological and philosophical debates of their day, rather than on the subjects studied in modern philosophy curricula, although Descartes, Locke and Malebranche are present throughout. Part I focuses mainly on post-Cartesian views on dualism. Part II relates these theoretical debates to discussions about the nature of scientific enquiry. The thesis begins with Fellows of the Royal Society, including William Holder and George Dalgarno, who discussed the possibility of devising a language for the deaf, as well as the nature of language, ideas and perception. Orthodox followers and later interpreters of Descartes like Gérauld de Cordemoy, François Fenelon and Louis de La Forge also wrote about these issues. Debates over the Cartesian ‘beast-machine’ thesis and over definitions of reason and instinct, are considered next, by looking at the works of Ignace-Gaston Pardies, Antoine Dilly and Pierre Bayle. These discussions were a manifestation of the need to define human nature apart from its physical embodiment. Part II begins with a consideration of the various ways that sceptical traditions informed programmes of scientific enquiry on both sides of the Channel, through the writings of Joseph Glanvill and Bernard de Fontenelle, among others. Arguments about teleology and about the relation between anatomical form and physiological function by thinkers and natural philosophers such as Robert Boyle, Nicolaus Steno and Thomas Willis are treated in the next chapter. These enquiries prepare the ground for the final chapter, which considers texts by physicians and anatomists, including Claude Perrault and Guillaume Lamy, on the physiology of the ‘corporeal soul’.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements4

A note on the text7

Introduction8
I. Signs of mind and the souls of beasts 29

Presentation30

1. Deafness, ideas and the language of thought40

2. From other minds to animal bodies76

3. The beast-machine controversy:

reason, instinct and the causality of motion107

II. Teleology, science and scepticism131

Presentation132

1. Other worlds: the science of knowledge140

2. Understanding function: the organs of cognition 165

in animal and man

3. From sense to soul: God, reason and human will 201

Conclusion242

Bibliography248

Acknowledgements

This project, like many PhD dissertations, has taken a fairly long time to complete. It has been a privilege to be able to spend these years on research, thinking and writing, with few cares in the world apart from the joys and anxieties usually associated with the contemplative life. For better or worse, this is a doctorate I can claim to have needed to write, and I am immensely grateful to all those who have supported me in my wish to pursue this line of enquiry, and who have believed in its potential interest.

The Warburg Institute has been a unique institutional home and a haven of old scholarly values. The topic of the dissertation was conceived here, where the commitment to interdisciplinarity allows for great freedom of thought. Jill Kraye, who has guided this project at the Warburg, is bound to be one of the most available, supportive and dedicated supervisors anywhere. The thesis, such as it is, would not have come into existence without her presence; nor would it have found its shape without her editorial rigour, her intellectual discipline, her measured but constant encouragement, and her interest in helping me find a methodology suitable for the development of an argument more philosophical than historical. Most importantly, she has taught me how to temper my inordinate flights into abstraction, with a dose of the historian’s sobriety here and a dose of passion for clear thinking there. Charles Hope is another member of the Warburg staff to have witnessed the work’s progression from inception to completion, reading chapters as they slowly poured out, with sympathy, interest and a welcome eye for incoherences.

Outside the Warburg, David Papineau generously read the text as it took shape, providing me at regular intervals with necessary philosophical comments and questions on some crucial points. A meeting with Simon Schaffer at the very beginning provided enough material for the next years; Rivka Feldhay’s interest early on was encouraging. Alexander Goldbloom helped me on many occasions from his base at the Wellcome Institute. Talks with Kristine Haugen have been illuminating. Thanks to Georges Rey for a provocative conversation, to Kenan Malik for a provocative argument and to Luca Turin for a provocative remark. I am grateful to Richard Serjeantson, who read and annotated the chapters on animal minds with care and interest. Daniele Derossi has taught me much on Renaissance anatomy. Many thanks to Gloria Origgi for some especially pointed and clarifying comments she made on a few sections of the thesis; to Pia Pera and Adam Freudenheim for reading the introduction; and to Roberto Casati for helpful remarks early on. I am also grateful to David Goodhart and Prospect Magazine for providing me with a ‘real world’ base and to Edmund Fawcett for lengthy lunches and a writing outlet.

Daily interaction with members of the Warburg, whether staff or students, is bound to have left much more than an academic mark on life after the PhD. François Quiviger’s friendship over the years extends far beyond the Institute; his insights and our exchanges on topics we both have battled with have been formative in countless ways. Surrounded by art historians, I have not had time to miss the images absent from this thesis; but I have learned how to begin understanding them better. Ending the day in the photographic collection invariably revived the mind and gaze; thanks to Paul Taylor, Mariana Giovino and Rembrandt Duits for their catching enthusiasm. My sense of belonging to a wonderful community was due in large measure to the affection of Liz McGrath and that of Ruth and Nicolai Rubinstein, as well as to Nico Mann, who, as Director of the Institute, contributed much to this sense of belonging. I thank him for giving me the opportunity to spend these marvelous years here. Working in the bright second-floor student room of the Warburg building, overlooking the squares of Bloomsbury, has been a remarkably joyful experience; the company of Annie Giletti, Marika Leino, David Porreca and Alessandro Scafi over the last year of work has sweetened the rush to completion. Daniel Andersson’s many appearances were energizing; I thank him for comments he made on the subject of this thesis and for bibliographical advice. Guido Rebecchini was a supportive accomplice earlier on, as was Julie Boch, who sojourned further along the corridor and shared her insights on Enlightenment literary history.

The process of conceiving and writing this doctorate has been marked by numerous friendships and conditioned by timely, crucial meetings. I can only mention a few here. It is fair to say that the seeds of the project were sown when I first met Israel Rosenfield and Catherine Temerson some eight years ago - before I had even decided to pursue postgraduate studies - at the end of a formative internship at the New York Review of Books. While there, I had already begun developing an interest in the history and philosophy of the mind sciences; but it was fed over the following years by many conversations with Israel, by his scepticism about our capacity to understand minds and brains and his knowledge of the role of history in shaping our beliefs about them.

More people than I can name here helped the thesis grow, directly or indirectly. I am grateful to John Armstrong, Guido Branca, Robyn Davidson, Anthony Dworkin, Edmund Fawcett, Adam Freudenheim, Eva Hoffman, Toby Mundy and Turi Munthe for stimulating talks and for their interest; to Jeff Spier and Monique Kornell, Katia Basili, Mira Margalit, Pia Pera, Benedetta Tournon, Ute Wartenberg and Margrit Wiesendanger, present even from abroad; to my upstairs neighbour Larry Dreyfus for practicing his viola da gamba at home; to Daniele and Susanna Derossi, for their generosity. I have relied much on Alain de Botton’s insightfulness. Ian Buruma has influenced me over the years more than he might imagine. I met Claudia La Malfa in the second-floor student room at the Warburg, and she knows what her presence means. Miriam Rothschild’s passion for science has fanned my curiosity for well over a decade; week-end long conversations and her encouragement have been a great source of inspiration. Laura Bossi, whose thinking is close in spirit to mine, has also been encouraging in a most positive way. Finally, another serendipitous encounter occurred just over a year ago, with Gloria Origgi and Dan Sperber; in many ways, meeting them has been like finding another home.

I was told that the last year would be hell; but it was not. It is most probably thanks to Enrico Galliani that I have been able to hold on to sanity and finish the thesis at last; he knows how grateful I am for his patience, criticism and loving support. My sister Alba Branca and her family have more than tolerated me throughout these doctoral years and have given me sustenance, joy and encouragement. But without my parents, I simply would not have begun at all. They have believed in it from the start and have been interested readers, attentive listeners, inspiring and constantly present. There are no words to thank them for everything they have always provided in all ways, material, emotional, moral, intellectual. It is to my parents, Anne and Avigdor Arikha, that I dedicate this thesis.

A note on the text

  • Full bibliographical references are given at their first appearance in each one of the two sections; they are then in short title for the remainder of the section.
  • In the footnotes as well as in the bibliography, the place and date of publication in the first set of parentheses following the title are those of the first edition or of the edition most often used or referred to, including translations. Any further date is that of the edition used in the text, either in the original or in a modern edition. In the case of a modern edition, the place and date of publication are indicated as well.
  • All quotations from original sources follow the spelling of the edition used. In the case of seventeenth-century editions, original spelling and punctuation are followed in all cases except in the use by some authors of ‘u’ instead of ‘v’. In translations, quotations are modernized in both spelling and punctuation. In the case of Descartes, a modern-spelling edition has been used throughout.
  • All translations into English are the author’s, except where stated otherwise.

Introduction

1. Subject-matter, methodology and purpose

This dissertation presents a history of the mind-body problem in the context of the new corpuscularian philosophies of nature which characterized the Scientific Revolution. It concentrates on the period immediately after Descartes’s death in 1650 until the late 1690s, just before the fully fledged establishment in France and England of Enlightenment society, culture, science and philosophy. Its main concern is to historicize some key concepts in current discussions about the mind.

The mind-body problem as it stands today is the outcome of a puzzlement growing out of the increasing sophistication, precision and refinement with which we are able to comprehend the nature of matter, of our bodies and of our brains. It addresses the question of how a precise understanding of matter can yield, or correspond to, a precise understanding of what it is to be human - to have consciousness, subjectivity, a self, memory, a mind.[1] But apart from representing a battle on the ground of science’s new capacity to identify, gather and interpret data about our brain and about our mental life, the mind-body problem constitutes one of the great chapters in the history of ideas, because it sits at the confluence of scientific and humanistic pursuits. In its earlier guise - from Plato and Aristotle on - this enduring question centred on exploring what sort of relation could possibly exist between soul and body (rather than between mind and brain), given that we were both embodied and capable of thought, positioned somewhere between beasts and angels. But the idea that matter alone could be amenable to scientific scrutiny and that it was entirely separate from the self-aware, conscious, immaterial mind is known to have begun life in its modern form with Descartes. He split apart matter and mind, forcing human higher cognition into a realm available only to individual introspection. The philosophical and theological debates which followed among natural philosophers and men of letters alike in the mid- and late- seventeenth-century were momentous, and the issues they engaged with are ones we still consider unresolved.

It is these debates, in the wake of Descartes’s hypothesis of mind-body dualism, which I shall attempt to reconstruct, moving between England and France and often comparing the discussions in each country. If these debates can help us put into historical, contingent context our own perplexity about the power of scientific enquiry to shed light on human nature, it is because they took place at a time when the disciplinary boundaries which prevail today in the academic world did not yet exist. These disciplinary boundaries ensure that the plentiful scholarship on the history of that period’s science and philosophy often fails to inform the prodigiously rich and varied work that has been emerging in the new fields which constitute the cognitive sciences, the neurosciences and the philosophy of mind.[2] Standing at a juncture between the histories of science, medicine and psychology, the history of philosophy, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind itself, I do not claim to contribute new material to either of these fields, nor to offer a synthesis of the existing scholarship growing every day within them. What I have tried to do, instead, is to transcend disciplinary and methodological barriers that did not exist in the period covered here; failing to do so would be, in effect, to distort from the outset the nature of the mind-body problem at that time.

Analysing what this ‘problem’ was about during the period between 1650 and the 1690s entails studying a variety of texts which participated in configuring the cultural debates around the questions inherent in the very plausibility of positing an hypothesis such as Cartesian mind-body dualism, that is, the strict distinction between the body, defined as res extensa, and the soul, defined as res cogitans. These texts concern - in order of appearance in the dissertation - effects of sense-impairment on experience and thought; language use and language acquisition; learning and education; animal minds and animal souls; definitions of scientific observation and scepticism; teleology and functionalism; the modalities of sense-perception and second-order cognition. Research into all of these aspects of mental activity would be pursued in the eighteenth century, a period when materialist creeds became consolidated and atheism more widespread; and in the nineteenth century it would lead to the first attempts at a scientifically modern neurology. These same issues continue to be investigated today by cognitive scientists, whose assumptions about the nature of the mind are, however, informed by research into a biological universe that was unknown, and arguably inconceivable, until recently, whose relevant history is not entirely contained within the historiography of biological sciences and medicine.

What made it impossible for the mind’s contents to be a concern of biology before the modern era is one concrete historical question that this dissertation seeks to answer.[3]A thorough treatment of this question would obviously require an in-depth study of the decisive events in the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science, medicine and philosophy. The story told here is concerned instead with the background to these developments. Criss-crossing disciplines rather than centuries, I attempt to unravel the relation that late seventeenth-century empirical observations of the mind’s workings bore to the period’s philosophical, theological and ethical concerns. Such an approach should help us understand the nature of the assumptions underlying early modern, foundational philosophical enquiries which, eventually, made it possible to devise questions and methods for the scientific investigation of cognition through analysis of the brain and nervous system, as well as through the study of the psyche and the observation of behaviour. Nevertheless, our desire to comprehend the mind-body relation is still not wholly satisfied by the increasing ability of the neurosciences and cognitive psychology to tell us what we are made of.[4] It is hard to interpret the data, partly because we do not know exactly what data to look for and partly because the bounds within which science can explain us to ourselves are not fixed.