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).
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.
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.
