Nick Fletcher PH100

Does Descartes Succeed in Explaining how Mind and Body Interact?

The enlightenment was an attempt to replace the faith truths of religion and traditional beliefs with
scientific knowledge and reason, as people had become disillusioned with both the ruling aristocracies and the
church, especially in Europe and America. They began to question the previously absolute power that these
institutions held, and soon began to realize that where there had been certainty there was really only ignorant
faith. In this age of uncertainty, Philosophers and laymen alike sought to determine whether mankind could
have knowledge at all, and much of this enquiry began with thinking about the human mind. Descartes was one
of the pioneers of the age of enlightenment; his method of doubt now provides a paradigm example of the
sentiment of the age. As with any pioneering philosophy, Descartes made great headway into modern thinking
about the mind/body union. Whilst he was unable to satisfactorily explain how the mind and body interacted
his work served to provide a starting point from which research and debate on the subject could begin in
earnest.
The immaterialist theory of mind stems from Descartes’ famous Cogito argument. Descartes hoped to
discover via his method of pure enquiry indubitable facts he could use as a starting point for his metaphysics.
However, through his method, he was able only to be sure of the existence of his own intellect, as in the process
of doubting the existence of his mind he proved its existence; ‘cogito ergo sum’. The existence of anything else
could be doubted as reality could well be a highly realistic dream, or reality could be some demon deceiving us.
Thus Descartes established his own existence as a thinking thing, or res cogitans to use the Latin term; as the
res cogitans was the only thing that could not be doubted it must be distinct and separate from everything else
that could, most importantly the body.
Just as the mind is defined in the Meditations as res cogitans, thinking substance, matter is defined by
Descartes in the Principles of Philosophy as res extensa, extended substance (Cottingham, 1988). Descartes is
able to reduce matter to nothing more than ‘dimensionality’ or ‘spreadoutness’ (Cottingham, 1988). Matter is
simply that which occupies space; in this Descartes argues that the concepts of space and the concept of a
corporeal substance are not distinct. He is able to do this by considering the idea of a stone and ignoring any
feature of the stone that was non-essential to the nature of the stone (AT VIII. 46; CSM I. 227). He ignores the
concept of hardness, as the stone can be melted or pulverized causing it to lose its hardness without ceasing to
be a body. He ignores the concept of colour, as diamonds do not have colour and they are examples of stones.
He ignores the concept of weight, arguing that whilst fire is extremely light it is still a corporeal substance.
Finally he ignores the concepts of cold, heat and all other such qualities as these may affect the stone, but do
not cause it to lose its bodily nature. All that is left after this stripping down of properties are the concepts of
length, breadth and depth, or simply the concept of volume. When matter is considered in this way, as just
geometrical space, there is no way that a complex property such as consciousness could be ascribed to it.
Having defined res cogitans and res extensa, Descartes could go on to try and explain how the two
interact. He began by showing how these two seemingly incompatible substances could be brought together to

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form a single person. To avoid doubt, he analyzed the ideas he found within his own consciousness, starting
with the entity that created man, God. Descartes believed that God is a substance that is infinite, eternal,
immutable, independent, omniscient, omnipotent and the creator of all things (AT VII. 28; CSM II. 19).
Descartes ‘proves’ the existence of God by first arguing that ‘there is nothing in the effect that was not
previously presented either in a similar or higher form in the cause’ (AT VII. 135; CSM II. 97); then Descartes
applied this causal adequacy principle to ideas in his mind, particularly their representational context: their
objective reality. Essentially, Descartes believed that the perfections present in his own idea of God must be
present in what caused the idea. Descartes himself could not have been the cause of these ideas, as, for
example, he himself was finite, yet he still had the idea of an infinite substance. Therefore the ideas must have
come from something else, importantly something else that did have those properties. As the idea of an infinite
substance existed in Descartes mind, it necessarily exists in reality, as the idea of God existed in Descartes
mind, God, as Descartes perceived it, must exist in reality.1
From his claim of a perfect God comes Descartes ‘argument from clear and distinct perception’, the principle
argument behind the counterintuitive claim that there is a real distinction between mind and body. Descartes
argued that because he was able to conceive the mind and the body existing separately, then they must be able
to and as such are distinct, separable entities. However, he writes elsewhere that the mind is ‘intimately
conjoined and intermingled with the body’ (AT VII. 81; CSM II. 56). He argues that the mind and body must be
more closely mingled than a sailor controlling a ship, as the sailor perceives damage to the ship via remote
perception. Feelings such as hunger, thirst and pain cannot be perceived by pure intellect, as this would give the
perceiver an explicit understanding of the problems that cause the sensation. Feelings, rather than explicit
perceptions of bodily states, are confused ideas of bodily states; Descartes believed that this confusion arose
from the commingling of mind and body. The mind could not perceive the state of the body via remote
perception, nor could the mind directly perceive the state of the body by virtue of them being one and the same
entity. Thus Descartes is able to use both the counterintuitive claim that the mind and body are separate entities
capable of separate existence and the intuitive claim that they are closely intermingled to develop his
explanation of how the mind and body interact.
However, the idea of the immateriality of the mind posed many problems for Descartes. Firstly, one
could go on forever arguing that the body and mind are completely distinct entities, but everyday experience
serves as proof that people are very much embodied beings. Descartes could not explain this embodiment by
arguing that the mind is in some way diffused throughout the body, as this would imply extension which his

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It must be noted here that Descartes had overlooked the possibility of his idea of an infinite substance could simply
have come from his idea of a finite substance. To use another example, if I encounter an object that is rough, I would be able to
postulate the existence of an object that is not rough, an object that is smooth, without having to encounter such an object.
Descartes had encountered an object that was finite, himself; as such he was able to postulate the idea of something that was not
finite, an infinite object, God, without having to encounter such an object.

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Nick Fletcher PH100

theory of mind will not allow. Instead, Descartes postulated a physiological argument that the mind acts on the
body via the pineal gland in the brain. He chose the pineal gland as he believed correctly from intuition that the
mind is centered in the brain, and because he believed incorrectly that only human beings had pineal glands,
that animals possessed neither minds nor pineal glands. Also, Descartes observed that the pineal gland was
situated in the middle of the brain, and was suspended above a passage through which he believed the spirits in
the brains anterior cavities communicate with

those in its posterior cavities (Cottingham, 1988). He believed that movements of the pineal gland would
release ‘animal spirits’ that would travel down the nerves as a sort of fine gas and activate the muscles of the
body. He believed that these spirits moved through the nerves as he observed that sensation was always created
by movement. Pain can be caused by a knife moving against the skin, a bang on the head can cause a person to
see stars and stopping up a person’s ear causes him to hear murmuring (Kenny, 1968). Descartes had theorized
a broadly correct view of the function of the nervous system, and whilst the details of the theory may be
fanciful, the basics of it are true of the modern electro-chemical account of nervous function. However, by
postulating that the pineal gland was the ‘seat of the soul’ Descartes had not even begun to theorize how res
cogitans was able to act upon res extensa, how these two wholly alien substances interacted; he had merely
sidestepped the question.
Unfortunately, a Cartesian explanation of how these two substances interact appears impossible
(Cottingham, 1988). One of the arguments central to Descartes proof of a perfect God mentioned above, that
‘there is nothing in the effect that was not previously presented either in a similar or higher form in the cause’
(AT VII. 135; CSM II. 97) would mean that there must be some similarity between the res cogitans and the res
extensa in order for them to interact. However, as res cogitans is pure thought and res extensa is pure shape
there can surely be no similarities between the two. According to the Cartesian model that spawned the ideas
the two substances cannot interact. Faced with this insurmountable ontological problem, Descartes postulated
that it is God that allows the two to interact; ‘God could have made the nature of man such that this particular
motion of the brain indicated something else to the mind’ (AT VII. 88; CSM II. 60), as though God provided
some kind of divine dictionary that acted as a translator between mind and matter.
Descartes view that the mind is a non-physical entity has been a controversial one ever since the time
of its conception. A contemporary of Descartes, Gassendi, believed that the immaterialist theory of the mind
had been asserted without proof and wrote to Descartes that ‘the onus is on you [Descartes] to prove that you
are unextended an incorporeal’ (cited by Cottingham, 1988 pp116). In the Fourth Set of Objections (1641)
Arnauld, another contemporary of Descartes, gives his geometrical counterargument (Cottingham, 1988),
whereby someone who does not know the Pythagorean rule that the square of the hypotenuse of a right angles
triangle equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides could envisage a triangle where the rule does not
apply, and even perhaps suppose that such a triangle could be constructed. This shows that just because
someone can conceive of X without Y (the triangle without the Pythagorean property) does not prove that Y is

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not essential to X’s nature. To determine what is essential to X’s nature may well require much more
investigation than simple conception. This seemingly unanswerable counterargument removes the very
foundations of Descartes argument for the immaterial mind.
Descartes himself believed that philosophizing was not the best way to determine how the mind and
body interact. In a letter to Queen Elizabeth he argues that the union between the mind and body could be better
perceived by sense rather than intellect (Kenny, 1968). Elizabeth herself had argued that it was easier to matter
and extension to the mind than it was to attribute the ability to move matter and be moved by matter to an
immaterial mind. Descartes reply to this was disappointing; that it was fine to attribute matter to the immaterial
mind as that was to conceive that the two were united. However, extension could not be an attribute of the mind
as, by Descartes own definition, extension is divisible and the mind indivisible. Also, the existence of extended
substance requires it to fill a space in the physical plain and exclude any other extended substance from that
place, the extension of thought does not.
A more modern objection to the Cartesian mind/body dualism describes it as ‘Descartes error’
(Damasio, 1994). The term, coined by Damasio, stems from his physiological study of people with certain
types of brain damage. Damasio studied the case of Phineas Gage, a man who had an accident that damaged the
part of his brain that enabled him to fee emotion. He demonstrated that whilst Gage’s intellect had remained
undamaged after the accident, his ability to reason had been significantly reduced as he was no longer able to
use his emotions in the process. Using the example of Gage amongst others, Damasio had shown that not only
was the mind divisible, but also that the state of the mind was a refection of the state of the body and therefore
the two were not as distinct and separate as Descartes believed.
Another common argument against dualism is the idea that since human beings began their existence
as entirely physical or material entities and as nothing outside of the domain of the physical is added later on in
the course of development, then we must necessarily end up being fully developed material beings. The human
species evolved, as did all other species, from a single cell made up of matter. Since all the events that led to
the formation of our species can be explained through the processes of random mutation and natural selection,
it is difficult to determine when and why some non-material, non-physical event could have intervened in this
process of natural evolution. Had Descartes been presented with this argument he would have most probably
argued that it was God who intervened, but this is smacks of aporia.
Finally, there are many philosophers who would argue that the Cartesian mind/body dualism is
ontologically extravagant. The idea of Okhams Razor is that all things being equal, the simplest solution tends
to be the best one. In other words, when several competing theories are equal in all other respects, the theory
that has the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest ontological entities is the best one. This sentiment is
found in all other sciences, under the guise of parsimony. It would be difficult for Descartes to show why it is
necessary to postulate two distinct ontological entities, the mind and the body, when other thesis exist that
provide a simpler explanation.

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It is clear that Descartes was unable to satisfactorily explain how the mind and body interact. His
philosophy, whilst immensely important historically and truly beautiful, is highly flawed. Descartes unshakable
faith in the perfect God, the God that would not deceive him is the source of these flaws. Faced with an
inability to believe anything except the cogito, Descartes would have been in danger of losing his faith in the
God that he loved; how could the Christian God, the God of revelation and love, create a world in which
nothing could be certain, except the lonely existence of ones own intellect? Thus, Descartes made an
ontological leap of faith using his causal adequacy principle to ‘prove’ that his God existed. It is on this highly
dubitable principle that the rest of Descartes explanation of how the mind and body interact is based. The parts
of Descartes explanation that concerned the physical aspect of the mind/body interaction are remarkably similar
to the scientific explanations of modern times. Descartes was able to postulate the existence of a nervous
system controlled by the brain, and backed up his theory with scientific evidence such as the phenomenon of
phantom limbs. It is when Descartes tries to explain the nonphysical part of the mind/body interaction that his
ideas lose their foundation. However, whilst modern science has been able to determine the exact chemical
processes that produce thoughts and feelings, we are by no means closer to determining how these chemical
processes produce consciousness. To conclude, Descartes was able to produce a surprisingly scientifically valid
explanation of the physical side of the mind/body interaction, he was unable to postulate a convincing
explanation of the spiritual side, but nor has any philosopher, scientist or religious figure since.

References:
Damasio, A.(1994). Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain.
Cottingham, J. (1988). The Rationalists.
Kenny, A. (1968). Descartes, a Study of his Philosophy.

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