Abstract
As a practicing life scientist, Descartes must have a theory of what it means to be a living being. In this paper, I provide an account of what his theoretical conception of living bodies must be. I then show that this conception might well run afoul of his rejection of final causal explanations in natural philosophy. Nonetheless, I show how Descartes might have made use of such explanations as merely hypothetical, even though he explicitly blocks this move. I conclude by suggesting that there is no reason for him to have blocked the use of hypothetical final causes in this way.
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- 1.
I use the term “science” and its cognates for ease of expression, mindful of the fact that our meaning of the term most closely aligns with Descartes ’ “natural philosophy”.
- 2.
I use the following abbreviations to refer to editions and translations of Descartes’ works: AT=Descartes 1964–76; CSM=Descartes 1985a; CSMK=Descartes 1985b; SV=Descartes 1989; SG=Descartes 1998.
- 3.
On the meaning of “machine”, specifically with respect to Descartes ’ medical philosophy , see Manning 2012.
- 4.
See Hatfield 1993 and Garber 1992, 13 for this account of the relation between metaphysics and physics. A different way of thinking about the relation between metaphysics and physics is put forth by Stephen Gaukroger who holds that “there was nothing internal to Descartes ’ project of natural philosophy that required metaphysical foundations, and there was nothing crucial to his natural philosophy that could only be generated from such metaphysical foundations” (Gaukroger 2002, 1–4). I leave aside these two competing visions of the relation between metaphysics and physics, since this debate does not impact my current project.
- 5.
- 6.
On this point, see Gaukroger 2000 and 2010. T.S. Hall (1970, 55–56) also points to the fact that Descartes provides reductionist explanations, and while Hall does not explicitly mention that Descartes does not thereby eliminate the category of life altogether, it is strongly implicit in his discussion of Descartes’ account of living bodies.
- 7.
- 8.
I avoid the use of “intrinsic” and “extrinsic”, using “internal” and “external” instead to avoid the technical meaning of the former pair in Descartes ’ philosophy. See Manning 2012 and Manning forthcoming. I engage with Manning’s discuss of intrinsic and extrinsic denominations in Sect. 7.3 below when I expand on what I mean by “internal ends” in Descartes.
- 9.
For a discussion of some of the material I cover herein with the chaos theory in mind, see Hatfield 2008.
- 10.
Des Chene 2000a, 20.
- 11.
Given my focus on the human body, along with other non-ensouled living bodies, my project departs somewhat from a project that focuses exclusively on medical philosophy to the extent that the latter is a field concerned with the health and illness of human beings.
- 12.
As with my use of “science”, I use the term “biology” mindful of the fact that this term and the cluster of sciences we now recognize by this term did not emerge until the late eighteenth century. I use this for ease of expression to capture Descartes ’ writings about living bodies.
- 13.
MacKenzie 1975, 2–3.
- 14.
- 15.
Bitbol-Hespériès 1990, passim takes heat as Descartes ’ theory of life.
- 16.
- 17.
Ablondi 1998, 183.
- 18.
See Bitbol-Hespériès 1990, 71.
- 19.
Thomas Fuchs makes this point (2001, 125). Genevieve Rodis-Lewis (1978) approaches this point too when considering AT II: 525 which allows that crystals may have a middle nature between living and non-living. It may be possible for Descartes to tolerate these grey areas in the same way that we tolerate difficult cases that seem to straddle the life-nonlife divide (such as viruses), but there is no need for this since there is a better theory of life forthcoming which does not require Descartes to accommodate the sort of grey area identified here.
- 20.
There were attempts in the early modern period to find structural equivalents of major organs across all living beings, including plants. The fact of these attempts might blunt the current criticism somewhat. See Delaporte, François [1979] 1982.
- 21.
See Des Chene 2001, 54ff for difficulties in identifying parts in Descartes .
- 22.
This is MacKenzie’s point. She holds that one causal component in Descartes ’ definition of life must be this fully abstract structural complexity, which permits the behaviors definitive of living bodies (MacKenzie 1975, 9).
- 23.
See Ablondi 1998 for an enlightening discussion of the structural complexity criterion.
- 24.
MacKenzie 1975, 10.
- 25.
Ibid. 8–9.
- 26.
Distelzweig 2015.
- 27.
Shapiro 2003, 433–434, including footnote 34.
- 28.
Des Chene 2001, 125ff.
- 29.
Shapiro 2003, passim.
- 30.
- 31.
See Carriero 2005.
- 32.
For a development of these points and their impact on Descartes ’ conception of the mind-body human composite, see Detlefsen 2013 .
- 33.
See, for example, Aquinas [1265–72] 1952–4.
- 34.
Manning (2012, 252) notes that it is a “serious misreading” to interpret Descartes ’ extrinsic denominations, such as the health or illness of a human being, as entirely mind-dependent and in no way in the human being itself. I agree, though I do not focus on extrinsic denomination.
- 35.
Manning (2012) deals with this section of Meditation VI by focusing on the historical meaning of “extrinsic denomination” and “intrinsic denomination”. My project, as will come clear, is a different one, and I believe it is, for the most part, compatible with Manning’s approach. There is one point of departure from Manning’s reading, which I address below.
- 36.
See Hatfield 2008, 416–17.
- 37.
I have chosen to focus on living and dead humans, and their symmetry with working and broken watches, rather than to focus on the dropsy case because of the special, theological, context of the Sixth Meditation, where Descartes is trying to make sense of God’s goodness in the face of apparent biological mistakes. While important (Brown 2013, 90ff), and I shall address this passage briefly below, I wish to keep the focus on the nature of living bodies and the ways in which understanding clocks can help us understand certain features of living bodies.
- 38.
For historical context that helps to bolster this idea, see Manning on extrinsic denominations (2012).
- 39.
- 40.
For helpful material on Aristotle on many of these points, see Kosman 1987.
- 41.
Michael Della Rocca has suggested (in correspondence) that in creating the eternal truths, God has imposed natures on things, thereby endowing them with an intrinsic character. Indeed, in the case of God’s creations, it might be more plausible to make the claim that his products can embody internal purposes. This would bolster my interpretation here, though my argument proceeds by analogy from the familiar case of human-made machines to the case of God-made machines.
- 42.
Tad Schmaltz has recently developed a convincing argument in favor of an unconscious, Aristotelian-type internal finality in human composites. See “Descartes ’s Critique of Scholastic Teleology ” (manuscript). The current conception of intrinsic ends relies more upon a conscious agent’s ability to signal her purposes, through very specific uses of matter, to another conscious agent. The current form thus leans more toward a Platonic form, albeit with the Aristotelian element of the purposes also being embodied in a non-conscious being.
- 43.
Brown 2013, 89–90.
- 44.
In Dialogues on Natural Religion, David Hume, of course, considers this question and provides a response that is especially interesting for the chaos theory, which I note is beyond the scope of this current project.
- 45.
Manning’s (2012, 262) approach to the issue of health in the human and extension of this teleological notion to non-human living bodies, is to employ the historical conception of extrinsic denominations to attribute teleological notions of health and illness to human bodies themselves, and then extending these conclusions to animals due to their likeness to the living human body. My approach is to focus on the process of making machines, and the intentional imparting of purposes in that process, and to find a way we can depend upon that without depending upon knowledge claims about God’s purposes.
- 46.
- 47.
- 48.
There is a moment in the Principles when he seems to allow for the latter use of hypotheses , but a careful reading of this passage leaves open the distinct possibility that what is going on in the passage is Descartes ’ recognition of their lack of certainty, not their mere instrumentality. (See PP III, §44; AT VIIIa, 99/CSM I, 255). The preponderance of Descartes’ claims indicates that he takes the role of the natural philosopher to be the pursuit of true causes of phenomena.
- 49.
For accounts of Descartes ’ maturation on the relation between hypotheses and scientific epistemology, see Clarke 1989, chapter 7, and 2011 and McMullin 1990, 2000 and 2008. For a much earlier account of many of these themes recently developed by Clarke and McMullin, including a discussion of hypotheses, see Garber 1978.
- 50.
Mariotte 1678, 624.
- 51.
Du Châtelet 1740, chapter 4.
- 52.
For discussions on why Descartes ’ hypotheses are not merely speculative, see for example, McMullin 2008, 89 and Clarke 1989, 141–4. The latter makes a distinction between arbitrary and reasonable hypotheses, with reasonable hypotheses being assumptions, which can be systematized and unified into a system, ideally bound by laws.
- 53.
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Detlefsen, K. (2016). Descartes on the Theory of Life and Methodology in the Life Sciences. In: Distelzweig, P., Goldberg, B., Ragland, E. (eds) Early Modern Medicine and Natural Philosophy. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 14. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7353-9_7
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