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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
  
  
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2. Descartes. For almost two thousand years, few
new arguments were propounded in favor of the doc-
trine of the immortality of the soul until Descartes
turned his attention to the problem. In the meantime
the reintroduction to the Western world of Greek
philosophical works, in particular those of Aristotle,
by Arabic scholars about the middle of the twelfth
century, brought with it the first serious threat to the
universally accepted belief in immortality, since these
works, and the commentaries on them, contained
shocking but well-reasoned arguments against immor-
tality of the soul.

The reaction among Christian philosophers to this
threat was exemplified by Siger of Bradant in the
twelfth century, and set the pattern for the next six
hundred years. This reaction considered in the distinction
between the truth of reason and the truth of faith.
Although on rational grounds the immortality of the
soul is, at best, doubtful, human reasoning must yield
to the divinely revealed truth as set forth in the Holy
Scriptures.

Descartes shared the view of the religious apologists
about the morally disastrous effects of disbelief in the
immortality of the soul. In Part V of the Discourse
on Method,
he wrote that “next to the error of those
who deny God... there is none which is more effec-
tual in leading feeble minds from the straight path of
virtue than to imagine that... after this life we have
nothing to fear or to hope for, any more than the flies
or the ants” (Haldane and Ross, trans. throughout).


640

He asserted that “our soul is in its nature entirely
independent of the body, and in consequence it is not
liable to die with it. And then, inasmuch as we observe
no other causes capable of destroying it, we are natu-
rally inclined to judge that it is immortal.” How did
he justify the first assertion? Harvey's discovery of the
circulation of the blood gave Descartes the idea that
both animal and human bodies might be regarded as
“machines.” But, although, according to Descartes,
there is no real difference between a machine and a
living organism, man is much more than just a body.
For he is able “to reply appropriately to everything
... said in his presence” and “act from knowledge,
whereas the animal can do so only from the disposition
of its organs” (Discourse, Part V). What this means is
simply that man alone “thinks.” Thinking, however,
was conceived by Descartes rather broadly to include
“all that we are conscious as operating in us... will-
ing, imagining, feeling” (Principles of Philosophy, I, IX).
And “all that is in us and which we cannot in any
way conceive as pertaining to the body must be attrib-
uted to our soul” (Passions of the Soul, I, IV).

Since the idea that something material may be
endowed with thought is not contradictory and must
have been known to Descartes (it was the view of the
Greek atomists and presented with eloquence by
Lucretius), what were his reasons for attributing
thought to an immaterial soul apart from his commit-
ment to religious dogma? The “proof” that there is
a soul totally independent of the body appears as a
by-product of his revolutionary approach to the prob-
lem of a criterion of certainty. In the Discourse (Part
IV) he describes how he arrived at what he claimed
to be rock-bottom certainty of the cogito ergo sum—“I
am thinking, therefore I exist”: “... I saw that I could
conceive that I had no body, and that there was no
world nor place where I might be; but yet that I could
not for all that conceive that I was not.” Thus he
concluded that he was “... a substance the whole
essence and nature of which is to think, and that for
its existence there is no need of any place, nor does
it depend on any material thing; so that this 'me,' that
is to say, the soul by which I am what I am, is entirely
distinct from the body... and even if the body were
not, the soul would not cease to be what it is.”

The strength of the above argument in favor of a
soul entirely distinct from the body derives from the
ease with which everyone can follow it, and from the
familiarity with the experience described therein, be-
cause everyone at one time or another did have the
impression of being a disembodied “spirit.” The main
objection to Descartes' conclusion is his unwarranted
equating of “me” with the soul. It is a far cry from
the reasoning that “while trying to think everything
false, it must needs be that I, who was thinking this
was something” to the conclusion that this something
was the incorporeal soul, that it was entirely distinct
from the body, and thus will survive bodily death.

It is interesting that Descartes sometimes appears
to have been more concerned with proving the exist-
ence of the soul than with the search for ultimate
certainty. Having been advised by his friend, the
mathematician Father Mersenne, that his cogito, ergo
sum
is not an original discovery since it can be found
in Saint Augustine's The City of God (XI, 26), Descartes
defends himself in a letter to Andreas Colvius (Novem-
ber 14, 1640) by pointing out the difference between
them: “The use I make of it is in order to show that
that 'I' which thinks is an immaterial substance which
has nothing corporeal about it.”

Descartes' difficulties in attempting to explain how
such two radically different substances as the immate-
rial soul and the extended body could interact, since
they obviously do interact, are well known. In them-
selves, they do not invalidate the notion of an incorpo-
real and immortal soul. But he must have felt in the
end that to prove it may be as impossible as to solve
the problem of the interaction between body and soul.
It is significant that he changed the original subtitle
of his Meditations from “In which the existence of God
and the Immortality of the Soul are demonstrated” to
“In which the Real Distinction between Mind and
Body is demonstrated.” But this does not mean that
Descartes gave up his deep conviction that the soul
was immortal.

The belief in immortality did not have to rely on
rational proofs. As early as the ninth century, the Irish
monk John Scotus Erigena held that personal immor-
tality cannot be proved or disproved by reason. A much
more forceful, detailed, and influential statement of the
same position was made by Pietro Pomponazzi in his
De immortalitate animae (1516). After having examined
various arguments in favor of immortality and dis-
cussed several sets of objections to them, he concluded
that the question should be regarded as a “neutral”
one since man's natural reason was not strong enough
either to demonstrate or to refute immortality of the
soul. Pomponazzi added, however, that the question
of the immortality of the soul had been answered
affirmatively by God himself as reported in the Holy
Scriptures. This is, in essence, a reiteration of the
position advanced by Siger of Brabant. Pomponazzi's
conclusion was interpreted by some of his contem-
poraries, and many modern historians have agreed with
them, as implying that Pomponazzi. himself did not
believe in the immortality of the soul. Nevertheless,
the imputation of hypocrisy in Pomponazzi has very
little real evidence to support it.


641

In any case, in spite of the position that the truth
of immortality of the soul should be based on faith
and revelation, and asserted on this ground alone,
philosophers continued to seek proofs of immortality.
However, Descartes' fiasco made it clear to some that
a radically new approach had to be tried, the more
so because of new arguments against immortality.

The most cogent and influential were those advanced
by David Hume. According to Hume, the doctrine of
immortality is suspect since it is so obviously favored
by human desire. Man would not cling so tenaciously
to this belief if he did not fear death. But the very
fact of this fear points rather in favor of the assumption
that bodily death brings with it also the end of the
conscious personality. Since “Nature does nothing in
vain, she would never give us a horror against an
impossible event.” But what is the point of making
us afraid of an unavoidable event? Hume answers that
without the terror before death, mankind would not
have survived. Moreover, why does Nature confine our
knowledge to the present life if there is another? All
the arguments from analogy to nature, Hume dismisses
as being rather “strong for the mortality of the soul.”
Finally, “What reason is there to imagine that an
immense alteration, such as made on the soul by the
dissolution of the body, and all its organs of thought
and sensation, can be effected without the dissolution
of the soul?” (“Of the Immortality of the Soul,” Unpub-
lished Essays
[1777], pp. 401-06).

The last argument was, in essence, the one advanced
also by the French Encyclopedist d'Alembert and by
the materialists, La Mettrie, Cabanis, and d'Holbach.