Abstract
According to Descartes, vegetative and sensitive activities, which in the Aristotelian tradition were considered dependent on the soul (the so-called lowest functions of the soul), are pure effects of corporeal dispositions. What is, however, the relationship between this doctrine and Descartes’s metaphysical claim in the Meditations, namely, that the mind is the only cause of thought? In the Meditations, Descartes does not provide a doctrine of vegetative and sensitive functions, and he does not even establish the canonic Cartesian thesis that they are not dependent on the soul. In claiming that the lowest functions cannot be attributed to the soul, the Second Meditation is not making an ontological point. Nevertheless, in spite of this, the Meditations teach us something very important about the lowest functions: that both vegetative and sensitive functions depend on the soul is not, and never will be, a necessarily true proposition.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Descartes to Regius, May 1641, AT III 371, Cottingham III 181: “Primum itaque, quod ibi minus probo, est quod dicas Animam homini esse triplicem; hoc enim verbum, in mea religione, est haeresis”. See, on this, Fowler 1999, 316.
- 3.
See the two classic studies on Descartes and the Aristotelian partition of the soul republished in Descartes. Critical Assessments: W. Soffer 1984, in Descartes. Critical Assessments, 1991, 193–204, at 200: “The lingering doubt concerning body provides the lever to move from the indubitable existence of the cogito to its manner of existence as non-bodily res cogitans. Here occurs the rejection of the Aristotelian soul as responsible for the life of the body”; S. J. Wagner 1984, in Descartes. Critical Assessments 1991, 205–222, at 218: “His conception of thought provides a roughly correct ground for rejecting Aristotle’s partition of the soul. One of the most basic, best known elements in that conception of the unity of mental capacities: the claim that any thinking thing is capable of the full range of mental acts”, AT VII, 28 (however, more correctly, Wagner also adds that “Descartes presumably knew that he lacked a real argument of the unity of mental capacities” […], at 218)”. Or, for instance, Rozemond 2014, 236: “a crucial aim of the Second Meditation is to supplant an Aristotelian concpetion of the soul with a Cartesian one”.
- 4.
See, below, pp. 4–5.
- 5.
See Des Chene 2000. Among the different vegetative functions traditionally attributed to the the soul, Descartes mentions two in the Second Meditation: nutrition and locomotion. With regard to Descartes’s mechanical explanation of them, it is interesting to observe that L’Homme mostly deals with self-motion, and is concerned with nutrition only in the more general context of the circulation of the blood (Meschini 2015). However, in a note in the Excerpta anatomica entitled De Accretione et nutritione dated November 1637, Descartes offers an explanation in terms of internal alteration and arrangement of particles of accretion and nutrition. It is therefore certain that when Descartes composed the Meditations, he had already elaborated his own mechanical explanation of both self-motion and nutrition. See, on this aspect, Baldassarri in this volume.
- 6.
See Des Chene 2000.
- 7.
The original Latin is “Et profecto haec fere vel hujus farina est universa cognitio, quam plerique e Philosophis, tam antiquis quam recentioribus Peripatetics et Scholasticis, de animae essentia se habere profitentur.” (My own translation).
- 8.
The original Latin is: “Illi enim praeter cogitandi facultatem, nutriendi et loco movendi et sentiendi facultatem animae rationali ascribunt, putantes omnem augmentationem, motum ac sensum a sola anima, non autem a corpore fieri. Et has animae rationali proprietates ut actiones ascribebat quoque Philosophus”. (My own translation).
- 9.
I agree with the remark by Gary Hatfield: “We must note exactly what Descartes does and does not claim for this finding about the nature of mind. He claims that the meditator’s knowledge of herself is now restricted to thoughts and that these thoughts can be conceived without reference to body. As already mentioned (and further discussed below), he does not claim that she can know whether human thoughts or a human mind can exist apart from a body. Correspondingly, she presumably cannot know at this point whether the mind actually directs the processes of digestion or provides the active power that contracts the muscles. Such questions are beyond the Second Meditation” (Hatfield 2003, 119). With respect to Hatfield, I would be inclined to be much more categorical: the mind does not know at all whether at this point it actually directs the lowest functions or not.
- 10.
See, above, footnote n. 3.
- 11.
The Latin is: “Sed respondet has proprietates esse corporis, si quod datur; non autem animae, uti vulgus putat; imo addit, quoniam jam corpus suum nullum esse supposuit, nutriri et incedere, respectu sui non esse nisi figmenta”.
- 12.
The Latin is: “Non igitur nutriri, incedere, sentire ad suam naturam, quia tantum res cogitans est, nec corpus habet, pertinent”.
- 13.
See, in particular, Fourth Replies, AT VII 226.
- 14.
In spite of the old, and still dominant interpretation, claiming that in this passage Descartes is invoking his metaphysical doubt concerning the reliability of clear and distinct conception, Harry G. Frankfurt had correctly (in my opinion) argued that here Descartes is not at all concerned with the ontological problem of his essence. The only problem that Descartes is here dealing with is what characteristics may be properly ascribed to him (Harry G. Frankfurt 1970, 113–127). Unfortunately, Frankfurt is not clear in explaining for what reason the knowledge of myself as a thinking thing is not clear and distinct.
- 15.
See S. Landucci 2002, correcting this point in Frankfurt’s interpretation.
- 16.
Cf. respectively, Williams 1978, 59; Harry G. Frankfurt 1970, 134 and 137 f. This aspect of incorrigibility possessed by ‘cogito’ and ‘sum’ has been emphasized by many interpreters, and in order to indicate this aspect, Hintikka proposed his ‘performatory’ or ‘performative’ interpretation of the cogito, which, however, poses problems which have been widely discussed by scholars and will not be addressed here.
- 17.
See Harry G. Frankfurt 1970, 134 and 137 f.
- 18.
See this crucial passage of the Synopsis: “The great benefit of these arguments is not, in my view, that they prove what they establish – namely that there really is a world, and that human beings have bodies and so on – since no sane person has ever seriously doubted these things. The point is that in considering these arguments we come to realize that they are not as solid or as transparent as the arguments which lead us to the knowledge of our own minds and of God, so that the latter are the most certain and evident of all possibile objects of knowledge for the human intellect”. (AT VII 15, CSM II 11).
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Agostini, I. (2021). Vegetative and Sensitive Functions of the Soul in Descartes’s Meditations. In: Baldassarri, F., Blank, A. (eds) Vegetative Powers. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 234. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69709-9_14
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