Abstract
Marin Cureau de La Chambre is generally considered to be a lesser figure on the intellectual landscape of seventeenth century France, best known for his theory of instinct, animal cognition, and the passions. In this paper, my principal aim is to examine Cureau’s thoughts about the vegetative powers, based on his only work in which he touched upon this subject: The System of the Soul (1664). In that work, Cureau offers a general explanation of how cognition works in living creatures, and – rather unusually – he attributes cognition to every living thing, including plants. Even more unusually, perhaps, he offers an analogical explanation of how orderly and goal-directed inanimate processes might occur in nature, but he claims that here we are only dealing with “the shadow of cognition”. In providing an account of Cureau’s ideas about the vegetative powers, I shall outline his general theory of cognition, based on images; then I will contrast the workings of the vegetative soul with those of the higher order souls; and finally I shall explain the difference between the animate and the inanimate parts of nature, arguing for the conclusion that Cureau wanted to navigate between what was perceived as the Aristotelian tradition and the “moderns” of seventeenth century science, siding more with the latter in attributing a greater independence of the created universe from its Creator.
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Notes
- 1.
See Solomon Diamond’s and Marcus Wild’s works cited below.
- 2.
“la Connoissance est destinée pour jouïr des biens & fuir les maux” (Cureau 1664, 69).
- 3.
I am grateful to Francois Duchesneau, Daniel Schmal and Charles T. Wolfe for calling my attention to the importance of not reading this passage in Cureau as an evidence of an early description of the notion of irritability. One must distinguish between irritability, which is a technical term that came into use only later in the works of Glisson and Haller (cf. e.g. Giglioni 2008), and irritation which had been a frequently used term in the medical tradition long before the importance of irritability was first emphasized. As a physician of the French court, who studied medicine in Montpellier, Cureau was obviously familiar with the medical uses of the term irritation.
- 4.
In general, he had more sympathy towards the novatores, and he even had a mutually cordial relationship with Descartes, despite his disapproval of the latter’s extremely mechanical approach to the living (and despite Descartes’ well-known impatience with respect to any criticism of the foundations of his philosophy – and the mechanical hypothesis was perhaps the most important foundation for him).
- 5.
It is ambiguous, because Cureau thinks his adversaries would say that it partakes in animal nature as well (cf. Cureau 1664, 208).
- 6.
In Cureau’s vocabulary phantoms correspond roughly to what Descartes calls “corporeal ideas” in his early works, most notably in the Regulae and in L’Homme.
- 7.
Cureau, as almost anyone in the period, discusses the cases of “monstrous children” who are defective because copies of the images issuing from the mother’s imagination affect the formative virtue during the pregnancy (cf. Cureau 1664 107 – as is well known, this was a widely shared opinion, equally held by Descartes and his followers, most notably Malebranche).
- 8.
In a yet unpublished paper, currently (4 March 2021) available at: https://www.academia.edu/41899593/SHEEP_AND_MAGNETS_TELEOLOGICAL_CONSIDERATIONS_IN_THE_EXPLANATION_OF_ANIMAL_BEHAVIOUR_IN_DESCARTES_NATURAL_PHILOSOPHY
- 9.
Cureau never discusses the question of what exactly the clockmaker does when she fabricates and arranges the parts of a mechanical clock – he was probably not very interested in the question. From the example of the arrow, it seems clear that it would have to be the entire machinery – wheels, springs, etc. – that should imprint the images of their motion on the arms, but it is less clear what the clockmaker creates when she assembles the materials with which she works in a way that it should be able to bring about the desired effect. One would be tempted to say that it is the potential to produce the motions independently of their creator (after all, that is what defines an automaton), but that would bring that potential dangerously close to a faculty, and would open up the possibility for a reduction of the sensitive and vegetative faculties in living beings to mechanical causes in a more or less Cartesian fashion. Other options are equally problematic. What if the image of the motion imprinted on the arm of a clock is the result of the sum total of the motions of the parts? In that case, one would have to account for the fact that since cogged wheels and springs hardly ever occur naturally in the world, they have to be manufactured out of raw materials that do not have the same “innate images” to imprint the appropriate motion on another part of the device, and eventually on the arm, before they acquire their final shape, elasticity, and so on. But it would follow, then, that human craftsmen either create images (in Cureau’s sense of the term) inside material objects – without being aware of it –, or the images of what a cogged wheel does in a clock are already contained in, say, copper, thanks to Divine providence. What the craftsman does in this case is like Michelangelo who famously claimed to have set free a pre-existing form from a piece of marble to produce a sculpture. Perhaps it is needless to say that the mechanical hypothesis offers a more parsimonious and less problematic explanation of the working of artefacts, than any of the options above.
- 10.
See e.g. Phaedrus 245e.
- 11.
Descartes had a fully naturalized mechanistic account of both of these phenomena, see especially Part IV of his Principles.
- 12.
God’s delegation of certain powers to its creatures comes up already on p. 166. Cureau introduces the topic with so many cautionary remarks that it makes even the current-day reader appreciate what was at stake in the early modern era in such a theologically delicate issue.
- 13.
He goes on to compare the way that the vegetative faculty brings about its effects to the falling of a stone towards the centre of the Earth. In either case, events follow one another necessarily, and it could not be otherwise.
- 14.
There are cases, like the stinging of a bee, that requires immediate reaction, but if you consider sprouting, for instance, the temporal gap between the external trigger (humidity) and the beginning of the growth of a new plant is so large and differs from seed to seed that it suggests a degree of spontaneity to the observer. But even in the case of the bee sting, the point is rather that the triggering cause does not provide the organism with the energy to bring about the reaction, the latter is produced and directed solely by the internal resources of the living being.
- 15.
Cureau speaks there about the instinct of animals, namely the nesting of birds, but there is no reason to believe that the vegetative faculty should work differently in that respect.
References
Cureau de La Chambre, Marin. 1664. Le Système de l’âme par le sieur (M. Cureau) de La Chambre. Paris: Jacques d’Allin.
Diamond, Solomon. 1968. Marin Cureau de La Chambre (1594–1669). Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 4 (1): 40–54.
———. 1974. Four Hundred Years of Instinct Controversy. Behavior Genetics 4 (3): 237–252.
Giglioni, Guido. 2008. What Ever Happened to Francis Glisson? Albrecht Haller and the Fate of Eighteenth-Century Irritability. Science in Context 21 (4): 465–493.
Wild, Marcus. 2008. Cognition of the Vegetative Soul: An Early Modern Theory of Instinct. Vivarium 46 (3): 443–461.
Acknowledgments
The work on this paper was supported by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office, Hungary (grant number K 125012). I am grateful to Charles T. Wolfe for his comments on this paper, and for revising the final draft grammatically and stylistically.
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Kékedi, B. (2021). Marin Cureau de la Chambre on the Vegetative Powers. 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_16
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