How Descartes Screwed Up Our Thinking about Emotions for Centuries, pt I

Recapping the first Cartesian error

In the previous post I explained that the first Cartesian error is the belief that ‘mind’ or ‘mental activity’ is pure cognition and that ‘body’ is an unthinking machine, responsive only to pleasure and pain and having nothing to do with cognition. I say this because Descartes begins the Passions of the Soul with the claim that the soul is the mind, the nonphysical source of thought, and the body is its vehicle; physical, extended, sensitive and mobile.

A couple of other important background points: He believes that by the 17^th century there had been little progress in understanding true human nature, in explaining ourselves to ourselves (You may agree!); and he believes his problem solving method will enlighten us as to the nature of dualism.

Descartes’ method

Descartes’ method, as explained in his justly famous and immensely influential work, Discourse on the Method, has four parts:

1. Never accept anything as true that you can’t obviously accept as true.
2. Divide each of the problems you are examining in as many parts as you can
3. Develop your thoughts in order, beginning with the simplest and easiest to understand
4. When you go to review, make sure you establish every indubitable claim possible and every link you possibly can among them and check that everything you’ve included is correct.

Descartes was convinced that this method, with its fundamental premise of breaking down problems into their smallest possible components, lead him to offer a good explanation why humans’ smallest parts are the nonphysical mind and mechanical body. In his words, “I had little trouble finding which propositions I needed to begin with, for I already knew they would be the simplest and easiest to know”.

It’s of course convenient that this split fit with his bedrock beliefs. However it turned out to be very inconvenient that his method is based on confidence that no falsehoods were accepted.

Unfortunately, Descartes combination of assumptions and methods leads to what he sees as the immediate, unassailable result that the exclusive function of the soul is thought and that everything else is the function of the body – exclusive meaning only the soul can think and the soul can do nothing but think. As we’ll see, his initial assumptions taken together lead to disastrous results.

Descartes’ method absolutely depends on as much rigor as possible in establishing the ‘first principles’ to be used, but he refuses to challenge mind-body dualism because it is obvious to him, partly because he thinks the emotions are actually evidence for it. He argued that emotions are the perfect wedge with which to pry open the secrets of how dualism works, thereby explaining the essence of humanity. And the way he set things up, in this book he had to find a way to show that the emotions are evidence of dualism.

So, to summarize, Descartes method of breaking down problems into their bits leads to a need to understand the two basic parts of a person, the mind and the body. This understanding takes the form of the attribution of functions to each part, and the only function of the soul is to think.

An unforced error

Descartes could have started his project in other ways than breaking the world up into thinking souls and inanimate machines. For instance, he could have started by considering all the capabilities of humans, such as abstract thought, hunting and lifting heavy objects, and categorized them as things that can be done by: only humans, by animals, and by inanimate objects such as pneumatic or water-powered tools.

But because of his deep commitment to dualism and mechanism he decided to categorize all activities as either something we know from experience can be performed by bodies (such as our own), or as activities that couldn’t possibly be done by such inanimate machines. Since his assumptions and method led him to see the human body as nothing more than a machine with interacting parts, that when set in motion can perform various actions, but when not set in motion does nothing, he then asked himself what could a machine never do?

The ‘obvious’ answer is whatever the soul does, because what else is there? You’re probably thinking, wait,common sense tells me that, e.g. dogs and monkeys don't have souls and they aren’t robots – they have mental lives and are capable of all sorts of complicated behaviors. But Descartes couldn’t agree; since animals don’t have souls, and since the best science of the time said animal bodies are machines (that happen to run on hot blood and muscle tension rather than water or rope tension), they are simply robots.

[[A fascinating side note: Descartes was well aware of, and fascinated by, stories of amazingly lifelike automata from Europe and China from as early as the 13^th century. There is even speculation that he himself was deeply involved in creating such robots, but these stories are impossible to verify. But it seems very likely that he knew of Leonardo Da Vinci’s production of robots.]]

Of course, a science that says robots can be complicated enough to live the ‘lives’ of tigers and orangutans and pigs is capable of quite a lot. That’s probably why Descartes concluded that only the body can create and use heat to create movement and the soul, and only the soul, can think: “we do right to believe that every kind of thought within us belongs to the soul” and “it is an error to believe that the soul imparts motion and heat to the body”.

In perhaps his most famous work, Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes gives a bit more explanation, saying that mind is “a thing that thinks…a thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses and which also imagines and senses”. (But not emotes!)

Conclusion

Be clear that the error I’m worried about here is not that he believes in souls, (though I do not), after all there’s many ways to think of souls. The fundamental error here was deciding that thinking has absolutely nothing to do with the body. As we’ve seen, Plato, Aristotle, and Lucretius each gave good reason to believe that thought is dependent upon and deeply engrained with human flesh. But Descartes chose to reject out of hand any evidence of that, and instead to argue for his “obvious” assumptions.

In the next post we’ll take up the second Cartesian error

Introducing the Early Modern World: Major Progress in Science, Epic Failure on Emotions

Setting the table

So far we’ve discussed three theories of emotion: visceral – the theory implicit in Homer, pluralist – the theory traceable through Plato, Aristotle and Lucretius, and cognitivist – the Stoic and to an extent Epicurean views.

Now that we’ve laid all this ground work, its time to chart the fate of these competing camps in the Modern World. The 17^th century was a fascinating age in philosophy and science with luminaries such as Bacon,Galileo, Hobbes, Kepler, Leibniz, Locke, Newton, Pascal and Spinoza (just to name a few) all flourishing during the period. And none of them was more influential regarding theorizing on the emotions than René Descartes.

Like most of his contemporaries, Descartes was amazed by the advances in empirical research and he, like they, firmly believed that most if not all of the world could be explained in terms of mechanics and mechanisms, a view sometimes called the Mechanist or Mechanistic philosophy. But Descartes and his cohorts were more radical than they might sound today.

For example, Descartes claimed to commit himself to breaking from all previous theories of emotion and start thinking on the subject anew. But what he actually did was combine his ardent belief in a strict mind-body dualism, which we just saw in Stoicism with the mechanistic philosophy that dominated his times. There’s certainly novelty there, but it’s not nearly a complete break from the past.

The result of Descartes’ combination of mechanism and dualism was a severely flawed but highly influentialtheory of emotions. It – unintentionally – turns the mind into the equivalent of the scent that accompanies a cup of coffee, what we in philosophy call an epiphenomenon and makes the emotions and volition almost completelyvisceral ­– functions of the internal organs and muscles, and not of the brain.

The Cartesian theory of emotions was and remains immensely influential and reaction to it was and  is basically two-fold. People either agree with him that mind is some sort of non-physical, but real, thing and then try to fit it into what they know about physiology, or they say, sure that’s the best way to talk about ‘mind’, but it’s a hopelessly bad idea based on total B.S. so we shouldn’t talk about ‘mind’ (and often not emotions, either) as real things at all.

I believe, as I’ll explain in a few posts, that this pair of reactions to the Cartesian view were a major influence on the rise of sentimentalism in ethics: basically the idea that we ‘get’ right and wrong in the same way we ‘get’ smells and colors; through a special sense and not through reasoning. And thus they ignore the development of and benefits to the P-A-L view of things.

I’ll explain how it came to be that by the end of the 18^th Century David Hume, taking the second reaction to the Cartesian view puts forth a full-grown sentimentalist ethical theory in combination with a worked out theory of emotion and cognition that is related pretty closely to the visceral theory of Homer.

I’ll come right out and say what you probably already get – I find the Cartesian theory, and the responses to it, deeply troubling. The fundamental reason I have such a dislike for both Descartes’ and Hume’s theories is that they share a fundamental problem: the want to but cannot drop the cognitive element in emotions and remain coherent.

In the end, they slip the cognitive component of emotion back into the visceral account by means of ad hocconcepts and/or mechanisms, moves they are not entitled to, and which makes them at best internally inconsistent and at worst useless. That is, at best these theories have several claims that don’t agree with each other and it may even be that these and other problems make these theories incapable of offering us any positive guidance regarding the nature of thought, emotion, or right and wrong.

The Passions of the soul

Descartes wrote an entire book dedicated to the nature of the emotions, The Passions of the Soul. In the next few blog posts I’ll explain the theory he puts forth in the book and identify three serious problems for it. I call these “Cartesian Errors” (the phrase is my own, and chosen for obvious reasons, but what I call the ‘first’ error is also the error referred to by the title of the book Descartes’ Error by Antonio Damasio, though I explain and develop it much more than he did). The Cartesian errors not only make the theory untenable, but worse, Descartes should have known better, and worse still, they became embedded in thinking on the emotions and remain so to the present day. Let’s wrap up this post with a brief introduction to the three Cartesian errors.

The three errors

The first Cartesian error has as much to do with his way of solving problems as it does with his commitment to dualism and the mechanistic philosophy: the belief that ‘mind’ or ‘mental activity’ is pure cognition and that ‘body’ is an unthinking machine, responsive only to pleasure and pain, and having nothing to do with cognition.

The second Cartesian error is that his theory irreparably separates emotion from cognition and therefore is forced into an untenable ad hoc distinction between calm and violent passions in order to sneak intelligence into some emotions. As a result of this split, he can’t find much good to say about the emotions as far as ethics is concerned and so basically takes the position that emotions should be eliminated.

The third Cartesian error is that the theory cannot explain how the mind and body could have duplex communication, which the P-A-L theory gave an excellent argument for, and which I conclude is a fundamental aspect of the emotions backed up by contemporary research.