Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

204 RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM
are dealing with a phenomenon as complex and difficult as consciousness, it
seems far from clear that we are entitled to declare, just by simple reflection, that
its occurrence in the absence of any physical substrate is a coherent possibility.
Moreover, when we start to ponder on many of the key elements that make up
our conscious life—‘internal’ sensations of pain and pleasure, and ‘external’
sensations such as those of vision, touch, hearing, taste and smell—then it becomes
difficult to see how, if at all, these could be attributed to a disembodied entity. 89
Such sensory events do not of course exhaust our conscious experience: there
remain what Descartes called the ‘pure’ cogitations of the intellect —thoughts
about triangles or numbers, for example. But it is by no means clear that such
‘pure’ forms of abstract thought would be enough to constitute an individual
conscious existence. 90 In short, the logical possibility of the continued
independent existence of the Moi—the ‘soul by which I am what I am’—is by no
means as clear and straightforward a matter as Descartes invites us to suppose.
THE RELATION BETWEEN MIND AND BODY
Despite his insistence on the incorporeality of the mind, Descartes both
acknowledged, and made serious attempts to explain, the intimate relationship
between mind and body. That relationship, as he frequently pointed out, is
manifested in the facts of everyday experience:
nature teaches me by these sensations of pain, hunger, thirst and so on, that
I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but that
I am very closely conjoined and as it were intermingled with it, so that I
and the body form a unit. 91
Contemporaries of Descartes were puzzled by this admission: during an
interview which he conducted with the philosopher in the Spring of 1648, the
young Dutchman Frans Burman asked him how the soul could be affected by the
body, and vice versa, given the supposed radical difference in their natures.
Descartes answered that the point was ‘difficult to explain’, but that our own
inner experience was ‘so clear’ that it could not be gainsaid. 92
Reflections on the phenomenology of sensory experience help to identify what
Descartes is pointing to here. When we are thirsty, to take one of his examples,
we do not merely have an intellectual understanding that our body needs water;
we experience a characteristic and intrusive sensation of a distinctive kind—the
mouth and the throat ‘feel dry’. What kind of event is this ‘feeling’? According
to the standard expositions of ‘dualism’ found in modern textbooks on the
philosophy of mind, to have a sensation like thirst is to be in a certain kind of
conscious state; and hence, feeling thirsty is, for the dualist, assignable to the
category of mind rather than body, since all consciousness belongs on the ‘mental’
side of the dualist’s mind-body divide. So familiar has this approach to the
phenomena of ‘consciousness’ become that it takes some effort to realize that