The Princess and the Philosopher

Abstract

In the synopsis of his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) René Descartes (1596–1650) wrote:

What I have said is sufficient to show clearly enough that the extinction of the mind does not follow from the corruption of the body, and also to give men the hope of another life after death.¹

In order to ‘show clearly enough’ that there can be life after death, Descartes did not have recourse to the alleged discoveries of spiritualists. He did not attend seances, or anything like that. What he did was to shut himself up and think. He thought about what he could, and could not, possibly doubt. He could not possibly doubt that he was thinking, and therefore that he existed. Even an all-powerful deceiver could not have deluded him about his own existence. But such a deceiver, he thought, might well have deluded him about everything bodily. There was nothing in the undubitable fact of his thinking to guarantee that he even had a body. He could think of himself as a purely mental being. And surely it could not be beyond God’s power to have created him as a purely mental being. But in that case his mind and his body are really distinct, even if they happen to be united in this earthly life. But if they are really distinct then one of them, the mind, can continue to exist when the other, the body, is dead and buried.