Mind & Desire Episode 11 - Mind and Body in Descartes' Sixth Meditation

It can be easy to get mistaken impressions or even erroneous entire accounts about what it is that a philosopher actually says in their writings, what their position on key topics are, what they thought and stood for.A prime example of that, one that has been on my mind, is Rene Descartes. He is often referenced as a person who buys into what we call mind-body dualism, which is indeed part of his philosophical perspective. But is the idea that the mind and the body are entirely distinct substances, and that we are our minds and not our bodies, the sum of his views on matters? Not if we read attentivelyWhen we read through the whole of his Meditations, all the way to the end, to the sixth meditation, we discover that the analogy of the mind and body being like a person in a vehicle (in this case a pilot or sailor in a ship) doesn’t actually express his point of view. We as minds are, in his view, much more closely connected (even mixed up) with our bodies than a sailor is with a ship, he says, and this connection ends up being quite important throughout that meditation.In fact, he goes so far as to call the interconnection of mind and body a “unity”. This isn’t something he explains entirely to his own satisfaction in the meditations, and perhaps not even later on his his correspondence with Princess Elisabeth or the late work he writes, spurred by her questions and challenges, The Passions of the Soul. But that’s all right. It’s a tricky and complex philosophical problem, after all.The ultimate point is - using Descartes’ views and writings as an example - that we really do need to go to the primary texts themselves, and not just read bits of them, but the whole. Certainly something doable in the case of a book as short as the Meditations on First Philosophy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe