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.

Whew! The last word on the Second Error!

Last time I finished up by saying that because of his interests and assumptions, Descartes was unable to reach the conclusion he wanted, that emotions are purely mental, and that he looked to be forced into one of two other conclusions: 1) that emotions can exist without mental content, or that emotions can exist without the soul; or 2) that his theory contradicts his assumptions because it's actually lends itself fairly well to defending the idea that emotions must be a type of thought and must have a physiological basis. 

Let's have one last closer look. At the very beginning of his book (A1) he explains emotions are "passive events" that happen to the person/soul, but are specifically referring to the person who they happen to. This fits well with his theory of how perception of things like pictures works. However, he also determined that what emotions are made from and how they are made is completely explainable by mechanistic physiology! To put it super-briefly, though he fixes the "home" of emotions in the soul, it is the body and memory that do nearly all, possibly even all, the work of supplying the mental/belief content necessary to start the physical processes that are emotional actions and reactions. This is actually pretty brilliant, but it was a disaster for his beliefs. So he had to find a way out, a way to show that emotions are perfomances of the mind and could not possibly be performances of the body. 

To flesh it out a little more, lets look at how fear would work (A38): he explains that the movements of the body that "accompany" the emotions do not depend on the soul, all that is required to put a passion in the soul is the proper course of certain chemicals towards the nerves in the heart. From there they can then strike the nerves that make the legs move - and sustain the action - which automatically causes movements in the pineal gland, which causes the soul to "feel and perceive" that we are fleeing from danger. This process can be started by a learned response (as a child you saw a bear eat your dog, now you see a bear and you run), or by "dispositions of the organs" (think reflexes or innate behaviors (flinching when you believe you see a snake, even if its a stick). That is, in a word, bodily volition. 

Descartes goes on to explain (A40) that the emotions mainly incite and dispose the soul to will things for which the passions already are preparing the body. To me, that sounds like a rubber stamp, not an instigator.

Perhaps worse, this sort of explanation leads to a very hard question - in what sense is fear a mental object? How is it cognition, the thing that only the soul/mind can do? Consider - don't animals "fear"? If they do, and they don't have souls/minds, how is that possible? (Descartes would say they don' t have souls and don't fear). But beyond that, we've seen that in some cases the body can start and sustain an emotion, like fear, without any direct influence of the soul. So whatever mental content they have is included in them by means other than the soul!

Remember, on Descartes' view, the body is supposed to have absolutely no part in cognition, yet the first two Cartesian errors have already exposed that instead, he's nearly made the mind/soul impotent or redundant, a position that we'll see later fits easily with Sentimentalism in ethics.

While Descartes is making these points, he also tries to tie on a couple of saving moves: 1) He argues that the pineal gland is really where emotions are felt, even though they feel like they are happening in our body (A33-34), and 2) he argues that the only use of the emotions is to inspire volition/will in the soul (A52). If these two things were right, he'd be making a decent case that the emotions provide the initial motivation for volitions, create them and sustain them. BUT at the same time he is denying #2, saying that the emotions incite a "will for" doing actions they already prepare the body to do, and #1 is very hard to believe (much less prove). 

To conclude, bodily voliton exists: In at least some cases the body is already performing and doing what needs to be done in emotion-situations, as well as in day-to-day actions, just from an image in the brain ("bear") + either learned responses or human nature, and though he wants it to be that the souls is ultimately the "decider", it really seems to be a lot less involved than that. Descartes' theory has two arguments smashing into eachother - one explaining how the emotions are of the body, and the soul is irrelevant, and another concurrently arguing that the body is merely the substratum on which the emotions of the soul perform.

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.