Richard Cumberland and the development of the Cartesian theory of emotions

Introduction

You’ve probably never heard of philosopher and theologian (also trained in medicine) Richard Cumberland, but he was highly respected in his time, particularly for his work in political philosophy. He had a deep interest in the way the natural world worked and in identifying natural ethical laws. He followed many of his contemporaries in a spending tremendous amount of time and ink arguing against the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (even though he shared Hobbes’ mechanistic bent). But the second most influential philosophy on Cumberland was Descartes’ intricate dualist theory of mind and emotions

Cumberland followed but also improved up on the Cartesian theory but his efforts led thinkers such as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume to repudiate the cognitive line of thinking on emotions and morality, paving the way for William James’ wholly visceral account at the end of the 19^th century.

Descartes’ Influence

Cumberland accepts in principle Descartes’ mechanistic philosophy, is an earnest metaphysical dualist, and is an even more avid student of anatomy and physiology than Descartes. But even as he works to further the general Cartesian project on the nature of the emotions he goes beyond Descartes’ theory in ways that undermine core Cartesian beliefs and set the stage for the twin emergences of fundamentally physiological theories of emotion and the sentimentalist ethics. He did so by intentionally making the physical processes of the body even more central to the creation of emotions than Descartes did, and further clouding the role of a separate mind in generating emotions, even as he worked hard to protect the ‘fact’ that the mind in fact did exist separately.

The first significant improvement over Descartes’ positions and arguments is that he starts from the point of view that we ought to compare the similarities and differences between human and animal anatomy and physiology. This immediately makes him less dependent than Descartes on the concept that the soul makes humans fundamentally different from animals.

This starting point also has the benefit of letting him:

1)    Allow for animal souls, beliefs and emotions

2)    Differ with Descartes on the nature of human will and what it can do

3)    Be seriously concerned with a duplex theory of communication between the brain and the viscera

4)    Start with a basic but well-founded conception of two types of emotions

5)    Argue that, properly harnessed, emotions are a wonderful thing

As I explain these five aspects of Cumberland’s work on the emotions we’ll see the good and the bad in it, understand how it extends and grows out of Descartes’ work, and how it sets the stage for the theories of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, and sentimentalism.

How you to cut up the world

Descartes famously – and wrongly – cuts the world up between bodies-qua-machines and human minds (souls). Cumberland, however, takes a more nuanced approach to his ontology, which gives him what amounts to a quantum leap in theoretical sophistication and explanatory power.

Its so groundbreaking for two reasons: first, he’s willing to take human animal physiology seriously, believing that its not right to just think of our bodies as basically the same sort of machine; second, he groups animals with humans as things with mental lives, which means that the world is cut up between animals and humans on one hand and everything else on the other. This fundamentally alters what he can do when he takes up the nature of emotions.

Human and animal bodies are interesting

Cumberland saw what Descartes either missed or ignored; bodies –animal as well as human – are sources of sensation and perception. It’s hard to overstate the importance of Cumberland seeing that animals sense and perceive much as humans do, but as always we’ll focus on the importance for understanding emotions in ethics.

Recall that Descartes’ first error forced him to pack so many abilities into the soul, and make the soul so different than the body, that he was simply unable to tie the mind and the body together convincingly. With his view of human anatomy, Cumberland avoids a lot of this damage, even if he doesn’t completely escape it.

Cumberland remains a dualist, and his version doesn’t convince anyone that the position is true, but it does also go a long way toward helping him avoid the Second and Third Cartesian errors. That’s because his initial position allows him to account for body-level consciousness, which in turn lets him give up a rudimentary but legitimate account of how there are two types of emotions, and how the brain and viscera, mind and body, communicate via feedback loop.

Cumberland seems fine with thinking of animals as having souls, and so beliefs and emotions of a kind. That’s great, but he’s still a Cartesian in that he sees man as special due to our  “spiritual, incorporeal, godlike” minds. That means he doesn’t completely avoid the First Cartesian error, but he makes a connection between mind and body that Descartes couldn’t nail down and that gives him greater latitude for discussing emotions.

Duplex Communication

Cumberland’s desire to map communication between the brain and heart, along with his advanced-for-the-time knowledge of anatomy and physiology lead him to a dramatic change in the relative importance of the brain compared to the soul; the brain does much more work than in Descartes. If Cumberland can consistently attribute mental work to the brain rather than the soul, he can be said to have a duplex theory of communication between mind and body, something methodologically impossible for Descartes.

But at the very least, he goes beyond Descartes’ view that the soul/mind is a thinking thing that passively receives information, magically manipulates the pineal gland and thereby the body. Cumberland doesn’t see abstract thought as the only function of the soul but still argues that reason, through the emotions it helps beget, has a serious role to play in creating action, and he can offer a physical reason how.

Two types of Emotion

Cumberland identifies two types of emotion, The first, ‘passions’, are the intense feeling about or the intense force with, the vehemence with which we do – or refuse to do – things. The second type, which he calls ‘emotion’, are the visible disturbances of the body that go along with the passions.

To understand how emotion and passion relate, I’ll explain how Cumberland views cognition and volition, but for now let’s just say that the will is a function of the mind, different than abstract thinking, it is the agent for the thing that does the ‘real work’, and the strong feeling one has about the actions.

Emotions can be Wonderful 

Finally, unlike Descartes, Cumberland believes that properly harnessed emotions are necessary for being moral. One reason for this is a basic disagreement with Stoicism. As he explains, mankind would be better off “left to the sentiments of nature” instead of being forced into a “hardened virtue” that doesn’t recognize that the passions are “divine and gracious…divine virtues, if their objects be things divine” and allowing for sympathy with our fellow man.

Next time we'll unpack this a bit more and then move on to the rise of sentimentalism.

The Last Word on Descartes' Errors

Descartes’ theory of the emotions along with his Stoic tendencies pressure him to recommend that the emotions are fully controllable by the mind. In fact, he goes so far as to say that failing to eliminate them is wrong.

As we’ve explained, Descartes argued that only our thoughts are completely in our power. So that would mean that emotions better be thoughts. If they aren’t, if they’re more like natural appetites or drives, such as for food or sex, then they wouldn’t be under our control.

As he was so interested in providing a materialist, or physical-system explanation of how the mind and body work, Descartes recast the struggle between the natural appetites and the will as a battle between movements of the pineal gland caused by chemicals (body-caused) on the one hand and movements of the pineal gland caused by the will. (soul-caused). In this set up, there are no “parts” of the mind, nothing in the soul to compete against will-guided-by-reason, not even the emotions.

So the Passions of the Soul ends with Descartes trying to explain how some people could completely stop their emotions. But this goal doesn’t really follow from what he argues. The story he tells is that people with stronger souls can more easily “naturally conquer” the emotions. Think of it in terms of a video game – a character like Ryu from Street Fighter can fire an energy blast:

A hadouken, perhaps a useful visualization of the idea behind Descartes' 'emotion-battles'.

Some souls can naturally muster strong than average blasts, and these blasts are typically stronger than the normal blast from an emotion, and so overpower them. But some people can’t or won’t test the strength of their soul in such a battle, they never make their will go head-to-head, blast against blast. Instead, these weaker people try to find a way to manipulate the emotion’s own blast by forcing themselves to have a second emotion. The experience of having two emotions attack each other; if you are ‘attacked’ by sadness, you can attack back with anger, and hopefully they will cancel each other out. So Descartes is saying that a lot of people don’t really conquer or completely eliminate their emotion(s), they don’t totally undermine the emotion that was causing them a problem, they become in a way more emotional in order to deflect the worse emotion.

But the proper weapons of the will, the ones you’re supposed to fight and destroy your emotions with, are “firm and decisive judgments concerning the knowledge of good and evil, which [the soul] has resolved to follow in conducting the actions of its life”. I guess you can think of them as shields protecting the soul from emotions.

Weak people, or people with weak souls –weak in a literal physical/chemical sense it seems –have wills that don’t decide to follow these judgments. Instead they allow these souls continually allow themselves to be carried away by whatever passions are present, even as they oppose one another. This twisting and turning of the soul – again, somehow in a literal sense, make a soul “enslaved and unhappy”.

But Descartes doesn’t think weak people, weak-will souls, are so weak that they are doomed. For him, no soul is so weak that it cannot, when well guided, have absolute power over its passions. The way to do so is to undo the damage done by bad associations – one must undo the connections between specific thoughts in the soul and the movements in the pineal gland that lead to them, and replace them with others by repetition or habituation. So training yourself to have specific thoughts in response to certain chemical reactions in your brain will lead you to be a better behaved person and eliminate your emotions.

Now, we’ve got the whole story and we can better see how this fails as coherent explanation of the emotions. Its not so bad that Descartes’ attempt to explain the emotions way off on the science, its more that its internal problems historically lead other thinkers to start thinking it is hopeless to have a strongly ‘cognitive’ component to emotions and to try to explain it all in terms of physiology and feeling. The worst part, though, is that both his successors and his detractors continually repeat his errors.

In the next series of posts I’ll show you how throughout the 17^th and 18^th century both pro-cognitivist thinkers such as Richard Cumberland and various ‘visceral theory’ thinkers make the Cartesian errors and how this leads to 19^th century thinkers favoring expressivist ethics and purely physiological theories of emotion. As I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, I think this was a huge mistake.

Next up – Richard Cumberland, a Cartesian who knew wayyyy more about the body than Descartes.

Richard Cumberland: philosopher, theologian and expert in anatomy for the 17th century

The Third Cartesian Error – in One Post!

The main development or change in how Descartes understands the mind from Meditations on First Philosophy to Passions of the Soul is that in this latter book his theory makes it possible for the body to act without the mind. In fact, I argue, he doesn’t leave the mind any way to affect the body at all even though he of course wants it to. There are a couple of reasons for this state of affairs. First, as we saw in the first Cartesian Error, he argues that the only thing the mind can do is think, and the body cannot think at all. Then in the Second Error, he argues that emotions aren’t thinking and explains that the human body works in such a way as to be able to start, continue and end emotions and emotion-based behavior. I call this organization, this explanation, an example of half-duplex communication between body and mind, a type of communication I previously said was exemplified by walkie-talkies and text messages. Let’s briefly review why this can’t be a reasonable way to look at how the mind and body interact.

If the mind were like a walkie-talkie, by definition only one end at a time can communicate. So if you had a spider on your leg, what would have to happen for you to get rid of it? First, the body would feel the pressure on your flesh. But for your mind to know the spider was there too would require one of four things, all of which have problems and raise more questions than they answer, (at least for Descartes):

1) That by a stroke of luck, at the same moment when the body felt the pressure, the mind happened to not be communicating out any messages and so is  able to receive transmission, OR

2) The body not only feels the pressure on the skin, but also “knows” that the mind should stop transmitting and instead listen, and can force the mind to do so by accompanying important messages with a message such as “over” to tell the brain to start talking, OR

3) The body itself would just “know” how to stop the bug (like a reflex), OR

4) The body is constantly transmitting messages whether or not the mind is in a position to hear them, and sometimes it listens in for whatever reason.

On the other hand, Plato, Aristotle and Lucretius argued for something different, an interactive and reciprocal communication between the body and the mind (and the emotions), a process I called duplex communication. For them, the mind and the body are both duplex transmitters, such as cellular phones, which allow two constantly running communications to both be understood by their targets.

This not only fits common sense and firsthand experience, but our more advanced understanding of the body tells us this is correct. Duplex communication between the brain and the rest of the nervous system throughout the body allow for immediate response to outside stimuli by real-time measurement and analysis – Plato, Aristotle and Lucretius each saw that the body feels things that don’t quite rouse the mind, and that our bodies are actually sentient – aware – in a way akin to the way the mind is. The duplex process also allows for conscious analysis of the stimuli, the body’s responses, the results of the responses, what goals are being achieved, and what goals might be better, as well as the ability to seek after those goals. The body can run “on its own” but a conscious person can study her reactions and change her behavior to her preference. After all, they are made of the same stuff. Half duplex communication doesn’t allow this.

So 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. More specifically, third error has to do with how Descartes thinks the mind and body communicate with each other.


Descartes’ half-duplex theory argues that the mind/soul is united to all parts of the body, not just the pineal gland (If you read carefully this theory is also there in Meditation VI) but that the soul is able to exercise its unique function – thinking – best in the pineal gland (and its my opinion that he really does think of it as more physically extended than he is usually given credit for). He says that the soul and body act on each other by taking turns “radiating”: as in the soul “radiates” into the rest of the body from the pineal gland. Think of it as sort of like an x-ray in reverse. Instead of shooting x-rays through our body to give us an image of our body, things like bears shoot ‘bear-rays’ at our eyes. A similar process happens from the pineal gland to the soul and vice versa. This is completely incorrect but such particulars don’t really matter. What matters is that he has in mind a physical process by which he thinks we receive our sensory information, and it works like in the diagram above. Think of sending a text or SMS message to a friend with your cell phone. Basically, what happens is that a message goes from your phone to an SMS site, and the site attempts to deliver your message to the other phone. If it is ‘delivered’, your friend can read and reply in the same manner.

Here is a “play by play” of his argument:

1) the soul is truly joined to the whole body, no part is excluded,

2) because of the centrality of the [pineal] gland’s location the soul can perform its function in a more particular way there than anywhere else,

3) The central location of the pineal gland allows the soul to “better alter the course of the spirits (chemicals) with the slightest movement”.

4) Similarly, the slightest change in the course of the spirits can greatly change the movements of the pineal gland, affecting the soul greatly.

5) This activity can happen because of the “mediation” of the spirits and the nerves and blood that carry them.

6) Our bodies use “fire” or “heat” to make all possible movements, and it is wrong to think that the soul can impart either to our bodies (A5-A8).

So what we’ve learned here is that because

A) Descartes has a complete, purely physical account of how sense perception and muscular movement are possible,

B) we have all manner of non-conscious motion (eating, breathing, walking aimlessly, etc) and

C) He firmly argues the soul imparts no motion to the body,

then it is fundamentally impossible on his theory for duplex communication to occur between the mind and the body. In fact, it seems impossible for him to seriously, coherently defend any meaningful communication between them. At best what he has is a “half-duplex” system, but that doesn’t match reality and it couldn’t work, as we discussed briefly in the sections on Lucretius.

The next post, the last one to focus on Descartes, will discuss the ethical implications of the three Cartesian Errors.

The Second Cartesian Error: Inability to bridge the gap between physical and mental

Descartes’ basic position in the Passions of the Soul is that the emotions are cognitive because they are activities of the soul or mind. One of his problems is distinguishing between other abilities or activities that could seem cognitive, like sensations and perceptions, which to him are not cognitive because they are activities of the body; they are always either focused on the body or objects outside the body.

After all, he thinks, any time you sense something, it’s either your body you sense, or some other object in the world. But you don’t sense your mind or your thoughts. He thinks the same goes for perceptions. In fact, in his earlier book, Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes said perception was ‘non cognitive’, because it provided little more than basic ‘shapes’ for the soul to interpret. However, he does change this in view in quite important ways in Passions of the Soul, and it will seriously affect his conclusions regarding the emotions.

The physical aspect

On Descartes’ account emotions happen in the soul, and therefore are “psychic events”. However, he also explains that they have a physical basis. Though the details of his physical account are now hopelessly wrong, the general idea was pretty interesting and we need to have an idea of how it works to see how he gets in trouble reconciling the physical and mental aspects of emotion.

Descartes explains that emotions are caused and continued by chemicals, which he calls spirits, coursing through the body. These spirits can literally cause the soul to move by flowing to and moving the pineal gland, where he thinks the soul sits in the body. The soul feels the pineal gland move, and these chemicals and movements are also how the soul is presented with images and ‘shapes’, for example, of a bear. If the souldetermines a particular shape or set of shapes to be frightful, it excites the soul into a state of apprehension. This is not itself an emotion, such as fear, but the soul needs to be in apprehension for it to develop an emotion.

The soul will develop an actual emotion based on three factors, any one of which can be the determining factor in what specific emotion develops:

1. The natural temperament of the specific body (your body, mine, Descartes’, etc)
2. The strength of the soul (how naturally strong your mind is)
3. Previous success in dealing with the thing, or similar things, by defense or flight. (learning from memory)

The cognitive aspect

Descartes explains that similar to perceptions, which are not actions of the soul or willed by the soul, emotions are thoughts that happen to the soul. Only what the soul itself wills, what it does, is full on thinking. Knowledge only comes from the soul acting, not being acted upon. Basically, an act of willing, what he calls a volition, isdirectly caused by the soul itself, whereas the proximate cause of the emotions is a specific agitation of chemicals. At the same time, just because passions are received into the soul just like perceptions and sensations doesn’t make them perceptions and sensations; emotions are way stronger. In fact, he argues that nothing can excite the soul as much as the emotions. Given this dual physical and mental aspect of emotions, Descartes sails into some choppy waters trying to explain what sort of psychic events emotions are, and his theory sinks

The problem

You’ll remember that the fundamental thesis Descartes wants to defend was the emotions are of the soul, but in the way he sets about explaining how they are accounted for physically, he’s inadvertently – inescapably – set it up so that they can be completely physically explained. This is a disaster and will take another post to fully explain, but let’s get started on the basics.

In the ‘physical aspect’ section above, we learned that experience can predispose the brain so that chemicals hitting the pineal gland flow directly into one or more of three parts of the body such that in every emotion, some particular movement of the proper chemicals in the brain is the principal cause of that emotion. These chemicals do not contain any ‘mental content’ such as thoughts or judgements, instead they simply make the soul to feel. And as we’ll see next time, the system as he describes can totally bypass the soul and create emotions of all kinds based simply on memory, perception and natural born tendencies in you.

To escape this conclusion, Descartes has to commit the Second Cartesian Error. He must insist that these coordinated actions are not really emotions, but emotion-like behavior. An immediate problem is that the behaviors we’re talking about, for example feeling a cold sweat, your stomach in knots, turning and running, etc are more complicated than other clearly non-mental activities such as breathing, swallowing, blinking, or even absentmindedly walking about. 


If we can be show that these behaviors do have mental content above the ‘shapes’ of simple perception, Descartes would seem forced to accept that in some sense the soul is involved in them. The thing is, because of how he’s defined things, he only has two choices for what to call the behaviors, volitions or emotion. Since the soul does not choose to do these physiological things, they can’t be volitions. That only leaves emotions. But then the soul isn’t really involved in emotions.


To avoid this result, he has to accept that these behaviors caused ‘merely’ by memory, perception and natural born tendencies are emotions. Even if they have nothing really to do with the soul. But then, on his theory, they can’t have any ‘mental content’ or ‘thoughts’. The only other option is to admit a contradiction, which of course is no good either, so he needs to find some way out of the dilemma.


 In short, his great interest in mind-body dualism says emotions must be mental, must be of the soul. Yet he created a mechanism to explain the physiology of what happens to us in emotional states that makes this unnecessary. We’ll finish this up next time.

The Second Cartesian Error and a discussion of Ad Hoc Hypotheses

I also told you that the Second Cartesian error is the irreparable separation of emotion from thinking, which forces Descartes to make up a way to sneak intelligence into emotions once he realizes he’s made it possible for emotions not to involve the soul. Over the next couple of posts, I’ll explain why it’s a very bad mistake, but I'll begin by saying that I started this whole project with the plan to show that it is incorrect to separate emotions from cognition.

I say its incorrect because I think emotions and emotional behavior clearly demonstrate thinking or cognition. And in previous posts I fleshed out a theory, which I called P-A-L, that treats emotions as a type of cognition while also accounting for the fact that they are also physiological phenomena. I also explained how Stoicismrose to challenge that theory and put forth the competing idea that the emotions are purely mental phenomenon, purely thought and have nothing to do with the body. Descartes’s goal is to further this project by adding a highly sophisticated attempt at a scientific look at how the body works. You could even go so far as to say that when it was written, Descartes theory of the emotions was state of the art for science and medicine at the time. Because of that, and even though it is hopelessly wrong in the specifics of physiology, we need to get some familiarity with what he thought was going on.

Earlier, I explained why it was a mistake for Descartes to completely split mind and body the way he did, calling it the First Cartesian Error. But if you think about it, its really two separate errors in one decision. Consider that though Descartes decided that only the mind could think and could do nothing but think, he could have argued for a split that did more sharing of cognitive abilities. Unfortunately, the way he chose to do it splits emotion from cognition or thinking. Enough background, let’s start unpacking the Second Cartesian Error.

Descartes ties himself in knots trying to maintain his strict mind-body dualism while at the same time trying to explain the physiological aspects of emotions and emotionally charged actions. To get out of the knots he has to find some way to imbue emotion with intelligence, since they are supposed to be “of the soul”. Unfortunately, his solution is ad hoc.

What’s an Ad Hoc Hypothesis?

An Ad Hoc hypothesis, claim or distinction is the use of an unsubstantiated claim or hypothesis to defend your preferred theory or explanation from fact that contradict it. I’ll give two examples, one where its easy to see that an ad hoc hypothesis is being used, and that it is unfair, and another where it is unfair but is harder to see at first.

Easy case

Imagine the following argument between Sue and Tom:

Tom: Sue, I’m going to use our last $20 bucks to play roulette because I know what the winning number will be.

Sue: I wish I could agree, but there’s no way to predict the roulette and the odds of winning are so low that it’s really a waste of money. Let’s just go get a drink and call it a night.

Tom: (Bets on roulette and loses)

Sue: See, I told you you can’t predict a winning roulette number.

Tom: I only failed because you didn’t have faith in my ability. Your negativity made me lose focus and obscured by vision.

Sue: (Rolls eyes and sighs).

As you probably already get, Tom’s argument has problems. First, there is no way to prove that lack of faith or “negativity” caused him to fail. Second, his argument doesn’t even really address the facts Sue’s criticism depend on– games of chance such as roulette are basically random, there’s no skill involved in guessing the outcome; and there’s no credible evidence for clairvoyance. Tom says nothing about how he might be able to pick numbers, so there’s no reason to believe him in the first place. But given that he does believe in his ‘ability’, when it doesn’t work out, he’s the one who needs to explain why. In this case, he simply makes up a reason why he wasn’t wrong about his ability. A reason that can’t be tested and that doesn’t even address the criticisms of his theory.

Complicated Case

Imagine the following situation:

Sue asks Tom to pick up a 6-pack of their favorite beer from Seller Bob’s on the way home. Tom meant to but got caught up listening to his favorite podcast and arrived home forgetting to grab the beer. Sue asks why he didn’t go to Seller Bob’s and since he was afraid of making her mad, he lied and said he did go, but that they were out of the beer. That is, his explanation for not having beer is “I went but there was none”.

Sue was confused by this because she’d called Seller Bob to make sure they had the beer just before calling Tom with her request, and the manager assured her they had plenty. She explains this to Tom and Tom realizes that while his explanation is now in some doubt, it’s not clearly false. So he tells Sue that what probably happened was that a bunch of the local college kids probably swarmed the place and grabbed all of that beer before he arrived. So he’s changed his explanation to “I went, but I others beat me to it and when I arrived there was none.” Now, if Sue was sufficiently upset or skeptical of Tom, she might go to the store herself and see if there was any left, and ask about recent sales. Or she might just not care enough and move on.

So why is Tom guilty of ad hoc arguing? He wanted to get the beer but failed. He wanted to hide his mistake so he offered a hypothesis about why he didn’t have the beer. His story might have been true but Sue came up with a strong objection to it. One that didn’t disprove it, but that required more evidence for the theory. Tom takes Sue’s objection and makes it a part of his theory, he adjusted his original theory in the face of objections. This isn’t wrong on its own, but in this case, Tom knew the theory was probably not factually true, and that he only put it forth because wanted Sue to believe it. However, even if Sue accepts his new theory, it doesn’t take away the fact that he simply made up the explanation of the afternoon’s events.

Here’s a good website discussing ad hoc hypotheses if you’d like to read more. We’ll stop here for now and next time we’ll work to understand Descartes’ theory and what I argue is his ad hoc attempt to save it.