Flesh in the Age of Reason (11 page)

This championship of the rational soul shows how Willis, while a staunch advocate of the ‘new philosophy’, underwrote the Christian orthodoxies of the day: he came up with the physiological rendering
of orthodox theological truths. Immaterial and immortal, the rational soul was ‘poured’ by God into the body. It also enjoyed, nevertheless, a well-defined place in empirical natural philosophy, explaining as it did features that would later be called psychological. Through authors like Willis, science and medicine would gradually replace churchmen as the accredited interpreters of the human.

Just how widely read were Willis’s books is unclear, nor is it relevant. What is significant is that thinking such as his was becoming ensconced and diffused. Late-seventeenth-century élites were more or less aware that the old ways of talking about one’s body and its experiences – in terms of humours, ‘substantial forms’ and qualities – were on the way out, being challenged by new models, metaphors and focuses of attention (for instance, the nerves). As the fluids (humours) declined in prominence by contrast to the solids (organs), the guts, belly and bowels (those humoral containers) lost their ancient importance as referents for one’s self and its feelings, to be replaced in polite thinking by the head, the brain, and the nervous system. Thereafter, it was vulgar or plebeian to be preoccupied with such ‘low’ parts. Such shifts may have been reflected in speech. The old customs of declaring that one felt something in one’s ‘bowels’, or of appealing to the ‘bowels of Christ’, were waning. No longer were the viscera or ‘vitals’ where the essential self lay. The new centre of symbolic gravity lay up in the head, the brain and the nerves.

Descartes’s philosophy certainly met the need for a philosophical vindication of the autonomy and dignity of the soul, reason or self, independent of interdenominational wranglings. But it did so at the cost of reducing to mere ‘extension’ the whole of the rest of Creation – and that included the human physique. It was a tendentious claim which brought in its wake endless enigmas and created more problems than it solved. English readers found such solutions as Willis’s more palatable, with their reassuring sense of man’s continued location on a well-defined and traditional Chain of Being, midway between humanoid brutes and the divine – apes and angels.

The mechanical metaphors spun by Willis were both powerful
and attractive, and they carried with them significant implications, not least for free will. Was man just a machine? What did this imply for accountability? It was such problems as these which exploded over the coming century.

Self
is that conscious thinking thing… which is sensible or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends.

JOHN lOCKE

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The Proper study of mankind is Man.

ALEXANDER POPE

What is Man?
Gnothi seauton
, ‘know thyself’, spake the Delphic oracle,
nosce teipsum
, as it came to be Latinized; but that could seem less a plan of action than an invitation to paradox, as with Pope’s
Essay on Man
.

As just seen, any definition of that ‘self’ evidently had to include the mortal coil and what made it tick. But,
pace
Coleridge’s dismissal of the tribe as ‘
shallow
animals, who having always employed their minds about Body and Gut… imagine that in the whole system of things there is nothing but Gut and Body’,
*
doctors like Thomas Willis certainly did not maintain that man was made of flesh alone – far from it. For its part, Christian divinity taught that the apex of Creation, made in God’s image, was
homo duplex
– if he was the fallen son of Adam, a pilgrim in this vale of tears, yet he was also a seraphic soul scripted into an apocalyptic epic. Whether biologically or
theologically, man was obviously hard to plumb and puzzling – was, as Pope put it, ‘the glory, jest and riddle of the world’.

Gaining prominence from the seventeenth century was a further model of man, one which did not so much negate as complement the alternatives already discussed. Philosophers, too, were developing their own visions of the self, principally figured not in terms of the fabric of the flesh or the salvation of the soul but in respect of consciousness. Not just the stuff man was made of (‘substantial form’, as Aristotelian scholasticism put it) nor his role in the divine comedy, but how he thought and felt – perception, sentience and thinking – also defined who he was, indeed might be truly definitive of it. Such a view was hardly new, of course – its antecedents lay as far back as Socrates and Plato – but what was significant was that, from the rise of Renaissance humanism, such philosophizings increasingly stood on their own two feet, independent of the prop of theology, in what became in time the burgeoning domains of epistemology, cognitive science, ethics and psychology; in short, the core human sciences.

Society too, for official purposes, needed formulations of its own as to what constituted a public person, a legal entity, a bearer of privileges and obligations. Matters of subjecthood and status, judicial and contractual accountability, property ownership, transfer and inheritance, marriage and family law, guardianship and trusteeship, guilt and punishment, the franchise and citizenship – all these required rulings as to who was to count as an independent unit, blessed and burdened with rights and responsibilities.

The humanism of Shakespeare’s day prized self-knowledge. ‘My self am centre of my circling thought/Only myself I study, learn and know’, reflected Sir John Davies in his
Nosce teipsum
(1599), just before Shakespeare’s play recorded Polonius’s gratuitous advice to his son. For seventeenth-century philosophers, the solution to the riddle of identity would be sought along the road to knowledge. The self which could be known was necessarily the knowing self – the answer to the oracle’s
nosce teipsum
would come through exploration of
what
could be known about existence at large and
how
. Rejecting alike the chop-logic
ex cathedra
metaphysics of churchmen and schoolmen, and the sceptical seductions of gentlemanly Pyrrhonism (Montaigne’s diffident ‘
que sçais-je?
’), philosophers intrepidly armed themselves with reason.

First outlined in
The Advancement of Learning
(1605), the empiricism of Francis Bacon – that aristocrat among English intellectuals – boldly claimed (
contra
the sceptics) that sufficiently reliable knowledge could be achieved by disciplined recourse to experience: man had the capacity, right and duty to know the world, the human epitome included, through the five senses. To parry any clerical jealousy over what might be taken as prying into God’s secrets – forbidden knowledge – the philosophical Lord Chancellor made a discreet and dutiful concession: investigation ‘must be bounded by religion, or else it will be subject to deceit and delusion’. But man was charged to read the Book of God’s Works no less than the Book of His Words: Nature as well as Scripture was a God-given fount of truth.

Abstract reason was unsatisfactory because arrogant, and so science had to be grounded in modest experience – modelled not on the solipsistic spider spinning her web from within herself but on the busy bee gathering nectar from the flowers. Empirical knowledge, too, had its weaknesses, and Bacon warned of the distortions, both individual and collective, inherent in the senses, highlighting the four ‘idols’ (or illusions) which warped perception: those of the cave, herd, theatre and market-place. (The philosophical anti-idolatry that so animated Bacon clearly mirrored its Protestant iconoclastic twin.) This did not mean that the testimony of the senses was to be rejected; rather, it had to be kept on the straight-and-narrow by methodical fact-gathering, recourse to the supports of instrumentation, crucial experiments and submission to collective judgement.

Bacon’s programme for the advancement of learning thus sidestepped the uniquely divine soul and occupied itself with the role of the ‘sensitive’ soul, the operation of the senses. Indeed, that wily statesman ceded the soul to the divines: ‘true knowledge of the nature and state of the soul’, he shrewdly allowed, ‘must come by the same inspiration that gave the substance.’

*

More concerned than the utilitarian Bacon with theorizing as an end in itself was René Descartes. Educated by Jesuits who introduced him to natural philosophy, including the Galilean astronomy, he initially enlisted as a gentleman-soldier before settling to the scholarly life, taking up mathematics and the physical sciences. By his mid-twenties his brilliant mind had glimpsed the possibility of combining algebra and geometry into analytical geometry; and on 10 November 1619, in a quasi-mystical experience recounted in his
Discours de la méthode
(Discourse on Method: 1637), he solemnly dedicated himself to the pursuit of truth, determining to doubt all conventional beliefs root and branch, and to build philosophy afresh on the basis of indubitable first principles. Beginning with the one thing so self-evidently true it could not possibly be questioned, his own consciousness –
cogito ergo sum
: I am thinking, therefore I exist – he aimed, through the rigorous logic of introspection, to establish principles so ‘clear and distinct’ that the mind of man ‘cannot doubt their truth’.

In developing his method of universal doubt and his remarkable claims for the power of reason, Descartes tried to avoid treading on ecclesiastical toes – not for him Galileo’s fate. He thus avowedly restricted his account to the rational soul, not meddling with its theological and heavenly twin; the two were complementary, not rivals.

Unlike Bacon, Descartes deprecated sensory knowledge, which could not shake off the uncertainty of subjectivity. Because ‘the notion of thought precedes that of all corporeal things and is the most certain’, it must be the conscious mind (
res cogitans
) which formed the essential ‘I’. This Platonizing ennobling of reason above the senses meant that the two were effectively treated by Descartes as ontologically distinct. Since the senses were unambiguously of the body, there yawned a radical chasm: the flesh was divisible, the rational soul, like that of the Christian, was indivisible; the essence of the bodily was extension (
res extensa
: matter, what filled space), that of the mind, consciousness. In a single intrepid stroke of thought, Descartes had disinherited almost the whole of Creation – all, that is, except the human mind – of the attributes of life, soul and purpose which had
infused it since the speculations of Pythagoras and Plato, Aristotle and Galen.

While discounting it as the source of definitive truth, Descartes did not neglect the corporeal; far from it. It was man’s duty to study it; and, since it was quite inert, what objection could be raised against it? While living close by the butchers’ quarter in Amsterdam he often dissected carcases, and he produced three works devoted to the study of living things:
Tractatus de Formatione Foetus
(Treatise on the Formation of the Foetus: posthumous, 1662),
La Description du corps humain
(Description of the Human Body: 1648), and
Traité de l’homme
(Treatise of Man: 1648). This last outlined a mechanical model of the human animal: drawing analogies with clocks and automata, he proposed, in a tactfully expressed thought-experiment, how an ‘artificial’ man could be conceived with physiological operations identical to those of humans, fully explicable in terms of matter in motion. Animals for their part did not possess souls (incapable of speech, did they not evidently lack consciousness?) and so were indeed such mechanical automata pure and simple. Dogs yelped when kicked because yelping was built into their mechanism (‘programmed into them’, we would say today). Mind was what distinguished humans from all other earthly beings, proposed the savant in a naturalization of the Christian doctrine of the uniqueness of the human soul.

While thus preaching the bleakest of dualisms, Descartes acknowledged that in going about his daily life, man does not constantly perceive himself as a self divided, composed of two completely disconnected halves (
res cogitans
and
res extensa
). Through pain, hunger, thirst and other such sensations, a person would find that he (that is, his
cogito
) was not only housed in his body but was so intimately united with it that the two seemingly composed a unity. This familiar experience could be explained only through the symbiotic interaction of soul and body: it was that for which Descartes had to account next.

His early
Règles pour la direction de l’esprit
(Rules for the Direction of the Mind: 1628) proposed that the five senses received external stimuli just as wax took an impression. This imprint was then instantly conveyed to the ‘common sense’, which functioned as a seal, and
made its mark on the fancy or imagination. The retention of such images explained memory. The process also worked in reverse: the fancy could activate the nerves, which stemmed from the brain where the imagination was seated.

This account, however, explained nothing more than the mechanism for receiving sense impressions; acts of cognition and ratiocination were something different, ‘purely spiritual, and not less distinct from every part of the body than blood from bone, or hand from eye’. The mind was thus duly honoured by the
Règles
, but in a way which restated rather than resolved the dualism at the core of Descartes’s thought-world.