Written by Richard A. Watson


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Written by Richard A. Watson

Mechanism versus Aristotelianism

Cartesian mechanism was opposed to scholastic Aristotelian science, which was supported by both Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians. These thinkers held that, because all things are created by God with a given nature, there can be no evolutionary development of animals or of the universe as a whole. For Aristotle, all living things possess a spirit or “soul,” which is the form, or organizing principle, of the matter out of which the organism is composed, as well as the source of its powers of growth and development, nutrition, perception, and (in humans) cognition. The soul is the essence, or nature, of the organism and its final cause—i.e., its purpose, or goal. Thus, the development of an acorn into an oak tree is explained by the fact that the acorn possesses a form that directs it toward this end.

Descartes rejected both the teleological, animistic view and the related theory of alchemy that there are vital forces in things. Cartesians denied the existence of what they considered occult or magical forces, insisting instead that only God and humans have spirits, wills, purposes, and ends. They conceived both animate and inanimate bodies as having no goals but as simply being pushed around passively. For Cartesians, science therefore consisted of looking not for final causes but rather for the laws that govern the motions of bodies.

By insisting on human free will, Descartes placed the human soul or mind, like God, outside deterministic nature. Because the body is a part of nature, however, the mind’s evident ability to control the body’s movements is, on Cartesian assumptions, inexplicable and miraculous and thus inconsistent with mechanistic determinism. Ironically, in Descartes’s system this ability is itself an occult or magical force.

Mind, body, and humanity

Most Cartesians believed that the mind and body interact. When asked how this is possible, Régis gave the standard Cartesian reply: human beings experience the interaction, and God can and does make it take place, even if we cannot understand how. As for the question of how ideas represent objects, Rohault spoke for all Cartesians when he asserted that God can make ideas represent material bodies without resembling them; no further explanation is necessary. In both of these replies, the Cartesians can be seen to abdicate philosophy for mysticism and theology.

According to the Thomists (adherents of the Aristotelian philosophical and theological system developed by St. Thomas Aquinas), the soul or mind is the form of the body. Although for Aristotle the form of an object is inseparable from the matter of which it is made, the Thomists held that the human soul is a “substantial form” that is miraculously able to exist independently of matter and thus to survive the death of the body. Descartes, by contrast, contended that the notion of substantial form is contradictory, because it assumes the separate existence of something that by definition can exist only in unity with matter. For Cartesians, the mind or soul is a substance existing in itself, independently of matter; thus, they were able to explain immortality without having to rely on the dubious assumption that the soul-form is a kind of substance. This view, however, creates a serious problem concerning the ultimate nature of human beings. According to Cartesians, sensible ideas arise from the union of mind and body for the sole purpose of preserving the body by presenting harmful things as painful and beneficial things as pleasurable. Human beings learn by experience what to seek and to avoid, and the memory of these experiences is preserved in the brain. Once the body dies, however, both the need for sensible ideas and their memory traces in the brain are destroyed. All the soul knows of matter after death is the general idea of extension. Because all bodily associations and memories are eliminated, however, individual personality is lost; each human being survives death only as an impersonal soul, identical to all other bodiless souls. Like the notion that animals are mere machines, the Cartesian conclusion that the sensible manifestations of this life are neither continued nor remembered in the next was unpopular.

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