Lecture 8: Man as a Machine? Empiricism, Mechanical Philosophy, the Rise of Experimentation and the Mind/Body Problem.

Lecture 8:

Man as a Machine? Empiricism, Mechanical Philosophy, the Rise of Experimentation and the Mind/Body Problem

Francis Bacon, 1561 – 1626)

Empiricism: a philosophical stance that holds that all knowledge is rooted in the senses and the experience they provide.

“We do not think that it is any more relevant to the present subject whether the discovery to come were once known to the ancients…than it should matter to men whether the New World is the famous island Atlantis which the ancient world knew… For the discovery of things is to be taken from the light of nature, not recovered from the shadow of antiquity’. (Bacon, Novum Organum)

‘….truth and usefulness are ….the very same things’.(Novum Organum, aph. 124).

‘The true and legitimate goal of the sciences is to endow human life with new discoveries and resources.’ (Novum Organum, aph. 129)

Bacon turns scholastic thinking on its head:

gets rid of

Demonstrative syllogism (deductive)All men are mortal (Major premises)Socrates is a man (Minor premises)Therefore Socrates is mortal (Conclusion)

Bacon criticises scholastic reasoning and introduces the inductive empirical method; this, in turn, becomes the basis for the rise of ‘experimentation’ in the seventeenth century

Experiment, def.: the making of specific trials of phenomena typically with contrived circumstances or apparatus, conducted by oneself in the presence of witnesses who could vouch for the ‘truthfulness’ of them.

‘Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals’(1628) (Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus)

William Harvey, 1578 – 1657

The Rise of Experimentation

Problem: how to convince scholastics that Your conclusion is true?

René Descartes, 1596-1650

1637. Discours de la méthode (Discourse on the Method)

1641. Meditationes de prima philosophia (Meditations on First Philosophy), also known as Metaphysical Meditations

1648. La description du corps humaine (The Description of the Human Body)

1649. Les passions de l'âme (Passions of the Soul). Dedicated to Princess Elisabeth of the Palatinate.

Cartesianism

Descartes obsession with absolute ‘certainty’:

• Feels he needs to refute ‘sceptic’ philosophers of his own time; def. scepticism: a systematic approach that questions the notion that absolutely certain knowledge is at all possible. Exists since Antiquity.

• Solution: ‘I think therefore I am’ (‘je pense, donc je suis’, or ‘cogito ergo sum’)

What does this famous phrase actually means?

‘[W]e cannot doubt of our existence while we doubt … ."

Descartes asserted that the very act of doubting one's own existence served—at minimum— as proof of the reality of one's own mind. There must be a thinking

entity —in this case he himself has to exist —for there to be a thought.

‘The only principles which I accept, or require, in physics are those of geometry and pure mathematics; these principles explain all natural phenomena, and enable us to provide quite certain demonstrations regarding them.’

everything in the natural world can be explained by mathematics and mechanics.

Descartes’s ‘New World’ based on certainty:

For Descartes the totality of all possible existence in the world was being composed of two kinds of substances:

• matter/extension of dead matter

• ‘res cogitans’, thinking stuff, he also refers to it as ‘mind’ or as ‘soul’

This ‘split’ applies to the human body – we are dead matter and mind

“I suppose the body to be nothing but a statue or machine made of earth, which God forms with the explicit intention of making it as much as possible like us.”

…the digestion of food, the beating of the heart and arteries, the nourishment and growth of the limbs, respiration, waking and sleeping, the reception by the external sense organs of light, sounds, smells, tastes, heat and other such qualities, the imprinting of the ideas of these qualities in the organ of the ‘common’ sense and the imagination, the retention or stamping of these ideas in the memory, the internal movements of the appetites and passions, and finally the external movements of all the limbs”

The Body as Machine

Everything can be mechanistically explained in a body:

Remember: Aristotle’s /Galen’s idea of three spirits and three souls (reminder see lecture on possession for more detail)

1. natural spirit: resided in the liver, the center of nutrition and metabolism. (vegetable or nutritive soul).

2. vital spirit was located in the heart, the center of blood flow regulation, heart beat, respiration, and body temperature (sensitive soul.)

3. animal spirit was created in the brain, the center of sensory perceptions and movement (rational soul).

In order to achieve body/mind split Descartes gets rid of two of three souls:

‘…it is not necessary to conceive of this machine as having any vegetative or sensitive soul or other principle of movement and life, apart from its blood and its spirits…,’ (Descartes, Treaty of Man’, 1637)

Descartes accepts only one soul: the rational soul

Rational soul’ resides in the pineal gland’ (know we know it produces the hormone melatonin but Descartes didn’t know that)

He ascribes all kind of function to this pineal gland and its ‘rational soul’ and sees it involved in sensation, imagination, memory and the causation of bodily movements.(anatomically we know know it was all wrong but he and his followers were convinced he was correct)

Descartes radically changes relationship between humans and animals:

“Thus, in animals, there is neither intelligence nor souls as ordinarily meant. They eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing; and if they act in a manner that demonstrates intelligence, it is because God, having made them in order to preserve them, made their bodies in such a way that they mechanically avoid what is capable of destroying them.” (Nicolas Malebranche, The Search after Truth)

Central claim: Animals are machines (automata), they lack the rational soul and are therefore fundamentally different from humans

‘…it is nature which acts in them according to the disposition of their organs, just as a clock, which is only composed of wheels and weights is able to tell the hours and measure the time more correctly than we can do with all our wisdom.‘

How do we know that they have no rational soul? Because they cannot speak and communicate their thoughts and feelings.

This has consequences for how we deal with animals and explains why we began to use them in experimentation:

argument by Cartesians is: they are automata and therefore do not feel pain.

“Thus, in animals, there is neither intelligence nor souls as ordinarily meant. They eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing; and if they act in a manner that demonstrates intelligence, it is because God, having made them in order to preserve them, made their bodies in such a way that they mechanically avoid what is capable of destroying them.” (Nicolas Malebranche, The Search after Truth)

Animals and experimentation

Experimentation with and on animals

The famous air pump experiment

Transfusion of blood from sheep to animal

She is Descartes patron in the Netherlands. He discusses human passions with her and how best to control them due to her suffering from depression.

Descartes and Human Passion

Elisabeth of Bohemia, Princess Elisabeth of the Palatinate, 1618-1680Daughter of Frederick V, Elector Palatine (who was briefly King of Bohemia) and Elizabeth Stuart; lives in exile in the Netherlands

Charles Le Brun, 1619 – 1690Adaptation of Descartes in art theory/practice:Le Brun applies the mechanistical model of affective behaviorbased on the principle of action and reaction. Expression is a matter of reacting to an external stimulus.

‘And in general, all the actions of both the face and the eyes can be changed by the soul, when willing to conceal its passion, it forcefully imagines one in opposition to it; thus one can use them to dissimulate one’s passion as well as to manifest them.’ (Descartes,The Passions of the soul)

The Civilizing Process, Vol.I. The History of Manners, Oxford: Blackwell, 1969

The Civilizing Process, Vol.II. State Formation and Civilization, Oxford: Blackwell, 1982.

Descartes lived in a world of patronage in which The body was increasingly ‘disciplined’ in his movement and expression

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos:

Les Liaisons Dangereuses, 1782

Fantastic movie/book which shows this ‘in action’.

Self-discipline and restraint was the survival technique at court

So, Descartes is not really a lonely genius but someone who thinks and respondsTo a particular culture