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extended. So much, indeed, seems to be true, and it is an import-
ant consequence of it that to say that a mental image of a square
(for instance) is like, or resembles, a square, is either false or
totally contentless. If we ask, then, what makes the mental image
of a square the image of a square, we must turn away from
notions of resemblance.8 The alternative notions we must use in
272 mind and its place in nature
answering the question are not obvious, but the most promising
candidates seem to be notions of intentionality, or meaning, or
designation.
The paradigm of a thing that means or designates is language.
Descartes himself took it that language designated only because
conceptual thought, which is what is expressed in language, desig-
nates. It is possible that what he took the mental aspect of a per-
ceptual or sensory image to be was a confused piece of conceptual
thought, which in no way resembled or pictured a corporeal thing,
but had the only relation to such a thing that conceptual thought
can have, that is, meaning or designation. If so, then the thought
involved in such imagery is confused in more than one way: it is
not obvious to unreflective consciousness that this is what the
thought is, and it is not obvious what it designates. Its immediate
designation is, in fact, a state of one s body. On this view, to have an
image of a square is to have a confused conceptual thought about a
brain-state which is a picture of a square  a picture, at least, in that
it is extended and representational, though its exact degree of
straightforward resemblance may not matter.
Pains, emotional disturbances, bodily sensations of pressure, and
so on, will have to be treated in the same way. They will be con-
fused conceptual thoughts about states of the body, and a pain  in
the foot will be an unclear (or, more strictly, indistinct: see the
distinction between clarity and distinctness, Princ. i 46) thought
about there being something wrong with my foot. Although there
may be something in a theory of this general type, it cannot be
adequate: it does not, for instance, say enough, or anything, about
why or how pains are disagreeable. Moreover, such a theory, as it
stands, leads very readily to Descartes s conclusion about animals.
If the conscious side of all these events is an application, even if
confused, of the power of conceptual thought, then animals, who
lack that power, have no conscious thought, and Descartes s all-or-
nothing view of the soul becomes more comprehensible.
If Descartes was disposed to see all conscious experience as con-
sisting of some kind of conceptual thought, this will also help to
explain the notorious confusion to which he is subject between
mere consciousness and reflexive consciousness: the confusion that
mind and its place in nature 273
we found him making earlier in a letter to Plempius (3 October
1637: I 413, K 36; see p. 212) between consciousness in seeing and
consciousness of seeing. All conscious processes are  accompanied
by consciousness, but Descartes was disposed to equate that truism
with the falsehood that they must themselves be the objects of a
reflexive consciousness. That latter will certainly be an application
of conceptual thought, and so this idea by itself will, once more,
exclude the animals. If first-order and reflexive consciousness are
regarded as being both of the same basic type, conceptual, then that
is a factor to encourage the confusion of the two types of
consciousness.
Descartes had in fact another, more external, reason or motive
for denying souls to animals. For him, soul meant separable soul,
and separable soul meant the possibility of immortality. Metaphys-
ics can prove no more than the possibility  that there is actually
immortality depends on God (to Mersenne, 24 December 1640: III
265, K 87; this relates to the subtitle of the Meditations, for which
see above, p. 113 note 2). He expressly says that the idea of an
animal soul would encourage the absurd idea of animal immortal-
ity, and  it is less probable that worms, gnats, caterpillars and the
rest of the animals should possess an immortal soul, than that they
should move in the way machines move (to More, 5 February
1649: V 277, K 244; cf. Discourse Part v: VI 59, HR1 118).
We should now turn from the details of Descartes s treatment to
consider the general conception of the kind of interactionism which
he introduced. It is often said, and was certainly felt by many of
Descartes s contemporaries and successors, that there was some-
thing deeply mysterious about the interaction which Descartes s
theory required between two items of totally disparate natures, the
immaterial soul, and the gland or any other part of an extended
body.  How the body causes something to happen in the soul or
vice-versa, Leibniz wrote,9  Descartes had given up the game on
that point, so far as we can know from his writings. The scandal of
Cartesian interactionism helped to encourage both Malebranche s10
 occasionalism (which had God intervening on each occasion to
bring about appropriate changes in mind or body), and also the
theory of the  pre-established harmony , suggested by Arnold
274 mind and its place in nature
Guelincx and developed with much self-congratulation by
Leibniz, according to which the states of mind and body unfolded
harmoniously in step with one another.
Descartes s doctrine is certainly mysterious, but it is important
that there are two different levels at which it is unsatisfactory. The
first level, most frequently discussed, concerns the obscurity of the
idea that immaterial mind could move any physical thing. This
obscurity would be involved just as much in cases other than the
workings of the embodied mind: for instance, in the supposed phe-
nomenon of psychokinesis, in which an agent s thought allegedly
influences the movement of material things quite separate from
him. This conception has a characteristic property of magic, that it
is the intentional significance of a symbol, rather than particular [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]