Soul and Body in Plato and Descartes

Soul and Body in Plato and Descartes

Introduction

• Plato and Descartes are often paired as eminent dualists in the Western tradition when discussing mind-body relations.
• This pairing is useful for contrasting with non-dualist views.
• However, a direct comparison of their theories reveals fascinating and important differences.

Similarities

• Both argue that humans consist of an incorporeal entity (mind or soul) united with a physical body.
• Both identify the self ('I') with the incorporeal component.
• Both believe the mind/soul survives the death of the body.
• Both may hold that the mind/soul can exist independently of the body, although Plato's stance on this may have varied.
• Both are concerned with the immortality of the soul.

Terms

• Plato consistently refers to the soul (\psi\upsilon\chi\eta).
• Descartes uses 'soul' in a theological context, referring to the human individual minus the biological body, which is subject to sin, judgment, and salvation.
• Descartes equates immortality with the immortality of the mind or intellect.
• He distinguishes mind from soul in philosophical contexts, using 'soul' to describe what animates the body, a principle he either denies or reduces to a physical configuration.

Descartes' View of Mind and Body

• Descartes views the biological difference between a living body and a corpse as a purely physical difference, like a machine working versus broken.
• He posits a mind whose role is to think and imagine, not to animate a corporeal system.
• Descartes identifies himself with this thinking mind and initially doubts his mind's ability to exist without the body.

Dependence of Mind on Body

• The mind's existence or thinking activity might depend on the body in some way.
• The body could give life to the mind, similar to how an arrangement of particles creates a magnetic field.
• Later, Descartes asserts that his clear and distinct ideas of mind and body show that neither contains or refers to the other.
• He believes that everything he clearly and distinctly perceives is true.

Separability and Immortality

• Descartes concludes that the mind is separable from the body, forming the basis for proving the mind's immortality.
• This conclusion depends on resolving his initial doubt about the real existence of the body.

The Role of Doubt

• If the physical world is merely a dream object of his mind, it cannot exist independently.
• In that scenario, it's difficult to prove that the finite mind can be free of dreaming.
• If the physical world exists independently, it is reasonable to hold the body responsible for the physical appearances present to the mind.
• In that case, these appearances would cease upon the separation of body and mind.
• If the physical world's existence is uncertain, these appearances are either generated by the mind itself or caused by God.
• Since the mind cannot be separated from God, the cause of appearances is always with the mind, so it's unclear why the mind would ever be without the appearances.

Sensory Appearances

• In the sixth Meditation, Descartes states he can understand himself as complete even without sensory and imaginational appearances.
• He concludes his mind can exist without that faculty and its objects.
• The source of these appearances must be a corporeal substance that exists independently of Descartes' mind.
• These appearances fade when absorbed in pure mathematics or thoughts of God and pure mind, but they always return.
• It might be the nature of the mind to conjure them up or be repeatedly receptive to effects caused by God.
• If so, Descartes' claim that the mind can attain a clear idea of itself free of empirical appearances would be mistaken.
• Cartesian doubt prevents him from viewing these appearances as more than phenomenal, but the phenomena themselves persist.
• The self's body and physical environment may be as immortal as the human mind in a phenomenalist sense.

Securing Mind-Body Separability

• To show that the mind is separable from the body, Descartes relies on the idea that 'real' or 'externally' existing body causes empirical appearances.
• It is unattractive to suppose that God deceives or frustrates a finite mind like Descartes'.
• If Descartes cannot help taking the empirical appearances to be of independently existing bodies, God would be a deceiver if Descartes is always mistaken.
• Even if Descartes escapes the deception through systematic doubt, God would be cruel to make the escape so difficult.
• Mind is separable from body if: (1) mind is not existentially dependent on really existing body and (2) body really exists and is the separable cause of mind's corporeal experiences.

Universality of Cartesian Separability

• Descartes claims more than a given mind can exist apart from a given body; separability is guaranteed by the essence of mind and body in general.
• Any mind can exist apart from any body, and vice versa.
• Every human soul will face the Last Judgment either without a body or with a supernatural one.
• Phenomenal separability is also universal because a mind is subject to corporeal appearances only because of an associated real body causing them.
• Once the causal link between mind and real body is broken, the mind is separated from both real body and all corporeal appearances.

Mind's Linkage to Corporeal Things

• The possibility of a human mind being linked to or not linked to corporeal things stems from the nature common to all human minds.
• A mind's linkage is based on whether it stands in a causal relationship with something metaphysically external.
• Linkage is not determined by internal mental dispositions but is a discovery through practices like Cartesian doubt.
• Descartes' proof of separation is a truth that holds regardless of individual thoughts or feelings.

Union of Cartesian Separables

• The finite mind does not connect itself with a body through its own agency or will.
• Descartes' unrestricted will only consists of choosing to assent or deny propositions that are clear and distinct.
• The unrestricted will cannot take sensed or imagined things as its objects because such things are present to the mind only when united with the body.
• The union cannot be explained by the mind wanting to connect with a particular body because without sense experience, there is no idea of a particular body.
• The union cannot be explained by body itself because body is powerless to connect itself with a mind.
• Only God can cause a union between mind and body.
• Mind and body do not fall within a single system, so their union is supernatural.
• The finite mind is as passive and inert as matter.

Plato's View of Soul and Body

• Plato identifies thinking soul with animating soul.

Analogy Between Thinking and Animating

• Thinking might be analogous to animating if thinking is the exercise of intelligence, and the practical sphere is the arena for exercising intelligence.
• A person of practical intelligence is switched on to practical demands like a perceptually sensitive organism is switched on to signals.
• Someone unresponsive to things that interest most people is said not to be properly alive.
• Being alive presupposes being biologically alive, so one might fail to distinguish what thinks with what animates the body.

Plato's Paradigm of Intelligence

• For Plato, the paradigm exercise of intelligence is theoretical, dealing in universals and abstractions.
• Plato believes the soul thinks best when dissociated from the body.
• We cannot engage in thinking when physically active.
• The soul has latent knowledge it gained before birth.
• The best thing that can happen to the soul is separation from the body upon death.

Intellect as Animator

• It seems absurd to suggest that something both animates a body and is a pure intellect that functions best away from the body.
• The belief that the soul is an intellect that functions best away from body is one assumption that lies at the base of Plato's equation of intellect with animator.
• The second assumption is that this self-same intellect is also intimately connected with the body.
• It is natural to identify oneself with their intellect.
• If we could think best without exchanging thoughts, we would not need bodies.
• However, each person knows himself to be connected with a body.
• The self that is Socrates' intellect is the self bound up with his body.
• Intellectual activity waxes as bodily involvement wanes.
• Bare biological animation is the limiting case of a soul's bodily involvement.
• The soul that can function as pure intellect is the same as the soul that keeps the body alive.

Determining the Soul's Function

• If the soul can function both as unembodied intellect and as animator, what determines it to one function rather than the other?
• If neither function is essential to it, we have been told nothing of the soul's nature.

The Soul's Involvement with a Body

• The soul becomes involved with a body because it desires to live in a way in which it only can if it has a body of suitable kind.
• The soul fails to understand its existence can be complete as a pure intellect.
• It feels incomplete and desires non-intellectual activity.
• The soul finds itself with a body to enable it to live in the way it thought would bring it completeness, but which in fact does nothing of the kind.
• If the soul continues to misunderstand its nature, it seeks to be in a body.
• On physical death, the soul is reincarnated as another human or lower animal.
• The embodied soul may incline towards disembodiment by practicing intellectuality and rejecting physical enthusiasms.
• The philosopher should be glad to die because he has practiced for death by losing himself to intellectual activity.

Separability in Plato

• Every embodied soul is separable from its current body.
• Every soul is in principle separable from body altogether.
• Some embodied souls cannot live separate from a body suited to their desires, while others can.

The Body as Instrument of the Soul

• The body is simply the instrument of the soul.
• The soul fashions and animates its body for physical action, sensation, and experience.
• The soul has a limited omnipotence, so if it wills a certain kind of life, it comes to be equipped with what is necessary.

Essence of Soul

• The soul is essentially a valuing power to create and maintain its lifestyle. Its intellectual and animating functions represent different bents.
• In general, it is contingent whether a soul is embodied or pure intellect.
• What is essential is the soul's self-determinability in contrary ways.
• For an individual soul, its determinate condition is fundamental, reflecting its values and affecting its experiences.

Taking on a Body

• The soul 'weaves' a body for itself, informing certain materials that grow and organize themselves.
• A previously embodied soul may start with matter from its previous body.
• Plato does not hold that the soul creates its body ex nihilo.

Idealism

• The soul dreams its body and physical environment.
• Souls share a world with each other even if they dream different physical dreams.
• From a Platonic ethical perspective, it makes no difference whether the soul chooses to dream its embodiment or chooses life mediated by a real body.
• The soul gets what it wants and is misguided if the body is independently real or its fantasy.

Comparing the Purposes of Plato and Descartes' Arguments

• Plato offers the Phaedo argument as an intellectual exercise to loosen the soul's attachment to the body.
• It is an exercise in soul-saving, reflecting the soul's misunderstanding of happiness.
• Descartes' reasons for declaring the mind separable from the body are different from the intellectualization he undergoes to reach the proof.
• His purpose is to establish 'something firm and lasting in the sciences', i.e., mathematics and mathematical physics.

Mathematics and Divine Revelation

• Descartes hopes to show the rest of us that mathematical science carries the same authority as divine revelation.
• Abstract studies express God as reason or the natural light.
• Plato would agree it is not secular but could not imagine the historical context that made it important for Descartes to distinguish priest and mathematical scientist.