Intuition and those who don't have it

Descartes, intellectual and bodily intuition, from machine to soul

I. Two substances, two powers

When Descartes says there are two substances, read it like this: both matter and mind are powerful, having the capacity to act as causes in and of themselves, having the ability to overpower the workings of the other substance. 

We often prevent ourselves from grasping the spirit of a thinker by positing the problem he struggled with in a negative way. With Descartes, we say he wanted to separate mind and body, his problem was: “how to separate mind and body?” Or, what we readers think he meant: “how to make life into death?” We get much closer to the original intention if we flip things on their head: “how to think both mind and body in one philosophy, without collapsing the one on to the other, and thereby reducing the power of the one to the other?” It is a question that seeks to escape from reductionism. We speak today often about this supposed reductionism of modern science, reducing all phenomena to the facts of abstract mathematical physics and so on. But before this type of reductionism exists, reductionism exists as a way of thinking: reducing the reality of one aspect of reality to some other aspect. It is positing that some things are not causes in themselves, but only given their power (which is 0) by some other thing. Descartes is against this, he wants to affirm both sides of reality, both have the power to act as causes. Both are veritable substances. Which is also quite funny because many hate Descartes because he supposedly made nature and the body into a dead object worthy only of rape and plundering, yet with no one else do we find such an unapologetic positing of body as a substance.

A fucked up digestive system has the power to ruin your mind, and a positive way of thought has the power to heal body. Both levels of reality are connected. Descartes says the thoughts of a mother nourish the unborn child by way of the blood. In this blood, bodily and mental energy are one and the same. And so, in Descartes’ universe, nothing is irrelevant, and everything matters. Every interaction in matter has an influence on everything to which it is connected. And likewise, every action by thought has an influence on everything to which it is connected. This is what “there is no empty space” means for reality. 

Often, we critique these 17th century philosophers for their supposed rationalism (conceived of as having the same spirit as contemporary scientism), retroactively positing these thinkers as the cause of today’s bugmen. But there is no reductionism here, and the method of investigation is really not too different from how many of you seek to lead your lives. For you too, just like for Descartes, health has become a problem. And living in a toxic environment, it is not enough to read some Ancient philosopher’s ethical treatise to lead a life of health and vitality. No, you have to understand the body as body. And you have to understand how this influences the unity of mind and body which makes up the mind. You have to consider body as mere extension, all be it only temporarily, as part of a method, in order to eventually restore the lost union between mind and body. Alternatively, you have to consider the power of mind as a true power, capable of overcoming the chains of material causation. If you give over everything to material causes, you’d have to admit you are beyond the point of saving. 

What is interesting with Descartes is a general resistance to those who would like to reduce everything to mere material interactions. De la Mettrie, for example. It is the easy way out. As every mental happening has a parallel in the physical, it is easy to push causation to one side only. This way we won’t have to break our heads over the more mysterious happenings of intelligible substance. On the other side, there are those who like to reduce everything to the mental, saves a lot of time having to learn physiology and physics. In both cases, one denies one half of reality, one lacks holism. 

It is perhaps a law of the history of ideas that the founder of a school of thought has in him many perspectives, and the followers exaggerate one perspective while neglecting others. And so with Descartes you have different types of followers, all trying to solve this ‘problem of mind-body interaction’, and giving different answers on a spectrum of materialism / idealism. But for Descartes, maybe it wasn’t really a problem to be solved, and more like a problem to be affirmed. In many ways, reality is this problematic tension between mind and body. Generally speaking in terms of the history of philosophy, you have all these schools of thought —empiricism, idealism, phenomenology, ‘existentialism’, ‘speculative realism’, cognitivism, and so on. But when you read ancient philosophers, say Plato or Aristotle or Plotinus, there is no separation between these modes of thinking, and all are found together in one holistic fashion. Husserl’s followers cry out: “rational thought is only an abstraction, what is first is the truth of the lifeworld! The lived body!” But well, it all depends. What are we trying to do here? Describe my experience of “being in the world”, or build a world on the basis of mathematics? Perhaps it’d be wise to not choose only ‘phenomenology’ as the one method towards the truth, or we’ll only be left with a conceptual vocabulary that is only fit for describing our personal experiences. If you read Plotinus, in just one treatise you have phenomenology, empiricism, rationalism, and so on, all in one treatise. You have to think, and it is perhaps wise to not limit your thinking with some self-limiting method before you have even started. And so Descartes is also one of these thinkers who thinks all these questions: ‘phenomenology or rationalism?’, ‘Materialism or idealism?’, are really quite stupid. It all depends. Phenomenology, okay fine, great for describing our experiences as unities of mind and body, but good luck doing anatomy as a phenomenologist. Wisdom is knowing when to think in what way.  

Philosophy is always about ways of thinking, and the history of philosophy is a great library of ways of thinking, and how certain ways of thinking emerge in certain climates. 

II. Unity

This ‘way of thinking’, methodological dualism or however you want to call it, influences Descartes’ medicine. So, there is the mind, the body, and then there is the union of mind and body which we experience in everyday life. Both of the first are known through various forms of theoretical thought, with varying degrees of experience mixed in —anatomy, philosophy, physiology, and so on. But, living everyday life as we do, we experience it as a unity of soul and body. This experience of this unity, Descartes seems to say it is the most primordial, in that this is how children experience the world before they are capable of purely theoretical or experiential-scientific thought. It is the perspective of the life-world, as phenomenology would say. I mentioned somewhere else that medicine, in the end, pertains to this unity of soul and body. For disease is always known through a malfunctioning of this unity, i.e. we feel bad, we experience disease. When this happens, it is good to go look for causes by way of thought, we look at the workings of our bodies through biology and so on, and we see if we might be living in a way that could be causing problems in our system. The same goes for the soul; are certain thoughts, people, stressors, etc., bogging us down? In the end, the ideal is to return to better health this unity of body and soul, to retrieve this childlike state of soul and body, to retrieve this lost unity of soul and body. This seems to be the ideal of health, this pre-critical child-like way of being in the world; full of wonder, strong metabolism, and the remarkable ability to feel and let go of passions without being bogged down by them. The theoretical side of medicine, its purpose is only to gain greater knowledge of the roadblocks that are preventing us from living in this way. 

Today, you see often these simple conflicts in thinking about medicine. On the one hand you have the allopathic ‘science-based’ medicine that seems to have failed everyone that actually had a problem, and that tells you you’ll be healthy if you go for a run, eat enough green things and maybe a protein bar each day. Entirely disillusioned by this, people go the other way entirely. They start hating science and revert back to pre-critical ways of thinking about medicine. “It’s all in the mind”, or other shit like this. I’m not saying it isn’t. But it isn’t just in the mind. 

So there’s this condition of health, mind and body working together in unison, relaxed, energetic, able to metabolize everything that happens to it. It is, ideally, the state of the child. But the child is of course influenced by the health of its parents, primarily through the blood of the mother, so things can go wrong quite early in the game. We do things or things happen to us and we experience disease, and we are forced to think about the cause which leads us to the science of body, and to the philosophy of the soul. But what this teaches us is not just that we should treat ourselves as a machine to be operated on. It tells us to live our unity of soul and body in a different way. For living the way we did led to disease, so we have to start living in a different way. Where did it go wrong? When did I lose this effortless unity of soul and body that I had as a child? When did I start getting bogged down by my passions, instead of just moving through them? When did I stop digesting food properly? And so on. 

Note that this connection to the mother is quite important for Descartes, and at the time many thinkers were fascinated with the topic: how the behaviour and constitution of the parents influences the child and so on. He mentions in a letter a case of a woman who had broken her arm while pregnant, and when she gave birth the child’s arm was broken in the same place. The doctor then treated them separately but with the same remedies and healed them both. Many such cases exist, you hear this often with scars. The mother, or the father even, having a certain scar and the child having it too. 

III. Intuition: intellectual and bodily

In Descartes’ universe, there is an important role for what we can call instinct or intuition. This is so in both the domain of the unity of soul and body, and in the philosophy of the meditations that pertains to the mind only. There are certain things, such as what thinking means, or what being is, which don’t need a definition, because these notions are so clear to us in and by themselves, and we can just intuit them. I am, and therefore I have intuitive knowledge of what it means to be. I am thinking, and therefore I have intuitive knowledge of what it means to think. So there is this type of intuition,  the certainty of which grounds all of Descartes’ philosophy. Next to this, there is a sort of biological instinct, which has its origins in the workings of the body and makes itself known through the lived experience of the soul and body. Think of inclinations, feelings, instincts, desires, intuition, and so on. Pertaining to medicine, Descartes mentions that when someone is sick, he does well to listen to his instincts. Because these instincts are nature speaking, and nature knows best. He has a very positive and hopeful attitude, believing nature’s natural direction is towards wholeness. And when we are diseased, nature guides us by speaking to us through our instincts and inclinations. We might have an unusual desire for sleep, nature telling us to take some rest. We might have an unusual desire for a certain food, nature telling us we are deficient in something the food has. This is similar to what Michel Henry calls the ‘language of Life’, which for him is the way in which God speaks to us, through our feelings we are guided by God every step of the way he thinks. We just have to know how to listen! Disease is nature telling us to listen, and the inclinations we have, nature guiding us back towards health. This is not to say that we can’t be misguided in our interpretation of our instincts. A lot can go wrong here… but behind every inclination there is a legitimate need. Plotinus says even the basest desire of matter carries in it a desire for the Good, it just doesn’t know where to look, and seeks to find it in all the wrong places. 

Now, Descartes’ thoughts on these instincts, it carries over to his opinion about doctors; they shouldn’t interfere too much and try treatments that conflict with the patient’s natural instincts. No, the doctor has to learn how to listen to the nature of the patient, and help it wherever needed by removing obstructions and allowing it to heal the patient. If the body starts certain processes to heal the patient, the doctor shouldn’t be too quick to prescribe pills that might interfere with these processes for example. So the doctor must be very skilled in seeing what processes are healing processes, and what processes are actually threatening to the patient and should be fought. Appearances can be deceiving, and what looks like a terrible disease is often only a symptom of the body healing. Alternatively, what looks like life rejuvenating can sometimes be a sign of disease approaching. The doctor should also know to interpret the inclinations of the patient, what is it that his body really wants? 

Descartes is quite traditional in this regard, read Paracelsus: 

“For it is my intention concerning this philosophy that nature is the disease itself; and for this reason it alone knows what the disease consists of. It alone is the medicine. It knows the ailments of the patient. Who, lacking knowledge of these two things, could possibly be a physician? For the disease does not come from the physician, and from him there also proceeds no medicine. Yet to the same degree he can cause an illness, to that same degree he can effect health. Who is a better teacher in this than nature itself? Nature has knowledge of such things and nature provides for a palpable understanding of all things. From the palpable understanding, the physician is instructed.”

(Paracelsus, Paragranum, preface.) 

Now all of this might seem strange, and outright contradictory, with what you know about Descartes —his idea that the senses deceive us, and that we shouldn’t listen to our instincts, but only to reason. It is true, this is what Descartes believes, but there is a dynamic aspect to his philosophy. The senses often deceive us, but when to they do so? When we are sick. When our bodies are in disorder, unhealthy, we can’t trust our instincts. For the instincts originate in the processes of the body. It is also important to keep in mind the different ‘orders of reality’ Descartes speaks about. In the domain of pure theoretical philosophy, we should never listen to instincts and so on. Here we are concerned with absolute certainty, and even the slightest chance that the senses could be deceiving us, we can’t accept this. Pure thought, pure doubt, pure certainty. But, in the context of life, in the domain of the unity of soul and body, the domain of your lived experience where you act and evaluate and create. Here, the instincts are real guides, but only when you are in good health. The same can be said for all types of knowledge that are tied to the senses. Under the influence of different hormones, people’s instincts change, and they even think differently.

Descartes’ world-view is dynamic, and just as these questions concerning the relation between mind and body are dependent on the point of view from which we are talking, so too these questions ‘are the senses to be trusted?’, ‘Is man free?’, and so on, many of these philosophical questions, the answer depends. Are the senses to be trusted? Well, they better be, but probably not for the schizophrenic. Should we let ourselves be guided by our inclinations? Well yes, but perhaps someone suffering from some obsessive-compulsive disorder shouldn’t. Is man free? Ideally, yes, and ultimately, yes, but when a problem of indigestion is controlling his every move, this changes things. 

So we start with very little, the certainty of the cogito, itself born out of an extreme doubt that stretches itself out to all things. And with cogito, a little light appears. This is what we know, I think, I am, everything else is darkness. Of the outside world, we know almost nothing. But we do know that next to our certainty of ourselves, there is extension. And, knowing extension, we can get to know the material world through scientific models. The world is still dark, but we now have a map. Increasing our knowledge of the world in this way, we can gain greater knowledge of our bodies, of all the machinery that regulates our instincts and desires and senses and so on. And, we can use all this knowledge to approach a greater degree of health. We can find a state of being in which the machine of our body works so fluently, that it will allow us a way of life that is more closely connected to the truth. And so, this medicine based on the science of body, it is really practical philosophy, in the sense that using it to heal our bodies, we come to live in closer proximity to the truth. This is the ideal.

Descartes calls disease the error of nature. For one, if nature always strives towards wholeness and health, then disease can be considered as a ‘wrong turn’. But also in a different sense, when afflicted by disease, we are removed from knowing the truth of nature, which consists in a clear grasping of the real by way of our bodies and minds.

Now this dynamic state, where the more healthy the body, the more we can trust the senses. Could it be the same for truths of a more intellectual nature, say, those spoken about in the Meditations, about the Cogito and so on? 

IV. From machine to cogito 

In The Search for Truth, Descartes’ dialogue, there are three characters. Eudoxus, representing Descartes. Epistemon, a learned philosopher from the schools. And Polyander, a layman. They have a conversation, and it is basically Polyander who complains that he knows nothing and he would like to know some truths from philosophy and the sciences, and so he goes to these two great thinkers. And Eudoxus tries to show him that he should not feel less than them just because he hasn’t read as many books or didn’t go to school, if he just puts in the effort to truly and honestly think, he can get to know the most important truths. And so he lets him go through the proof that leads to the famous cogito. I can doubt everything, but I can’t doubt that I am doubting. Doubting is a form of thinking. So I can’t doubt that I am thinking. I am thinking, this is certain. And if I am thinking, I exist. I think, I am. Voila. Epistemon constantly interrupts, he shames Polyander for thinking he can get to know the nature of reality in a few hours of reasoning, while he himself doesn’t even know it and he has been studying his entire life. And Epistemon criticizes Eudoxus (Descartes); “who are you to philosophize in this simple way?”, he says, “you say ‘I think, therefore I am’, but what ‘thinking’ means, and what ‘being’ is, do you even know this?” Eudoxus responds: “I have never met someone so stupid in my entire life that they first had to be told what existence or thinking is, before they could conclude that they themselves exist or think.” In the end, Epistemon can’t accept it, and Eudoxus is bewildered how these types of ‘idiots’ can exist. What it comes down to is two different ways of thinking; for one, Descartes’, there are things so self-evident that we can know them through intuition. I know what being is because I myself am. I know what thinking is, because I myself am thinking. I don’t need an explanation for this, because in actually thinking I am already so closely connected to what thinking is, that it is clear in itself. The proof is in the fact that I am doing it. What else do you need? The type of philosopher like Epistemon, they can’t accept this. No, for them, nothing is ever evident. And the fact that I myself experience these things (thinking, existing), this least of all can serve as proof. My own experience, how could this ever serve as proof? Better to refer to conceptual analysis and logical proofs, to the books taught in the schools, and so on. 

So there are two different types of thinkers, what constitutes their difference? Descartes, I don’t think he believed it was merely a thing of reason, of arguments, of intelligence, and so on. Which is precisely why he wrote The Search for Truth, to show that it was about different types of life, different types of thinkers, different types of man. The one, confident in his own ability to grasp the truth through his own intuition. The other, he doesn’t believe he has an affinity for the truth, he always has to rely on something outside of himself —studies, authority, books, logic, and so on. At least, this is the picture that Descartes wants to give us; of himself as this free-thinker as opposed to the boring man of books. The truth of the cogito is grasped through an immediate act of (intellectual) intuition, but why do some people lack this intuition? This is Descartes’ question. Could it be that this too is to be explained in terms of health? Could it be, if the instincts, the intuition in the domain of the life-world, of unity of soul and body, are trustworthy in a state of health, and liars and deceivers in a state of disease? I think a case could be made, a reading of Descartes that would be absolutely grounded in his own words, that whether or not one accepts the intellectual intuition of cogito (and eventually of God) has to do with a type of health, largely dependent on the state of the body, but also on one’s own attitude and belief in oneself. In The Search For Truth, at first, Polyander the layman doesn’t believe he is capable of attaining any truths by way of his own mind. Eventually, he firmly believes he has been able to find certain truths (cogito and so on). What happened in between? Eudoxus helped him have confidence in his own abilities to find the truth, and he helped him have faith that God has ordained things in such a way that he has a natural affinity for the truth. In all, whether or not one accepts certain truths of intellectual intuition, it seems to have little to do with the intellect for Descartes. It has to do with certain dispositions of the soul; confidence, belief, will, and so on. You know what thinking is because you yourself are thinking, but are you willing to trust yourself? This is the question. At first, Polyander is not willing to trust the truth of his own life, no, why would he? He is only an idiot who’s never been to school, why would he trust his own mind and experience? Isn’t it more likely that all these guys interpreting Aristotle and Scripture in the schools know more than him? And so he doesn’t have the confidence in his own thought. Later, it changes.

And, this difference between people’s relation to intellectual intuition, perhaps it also has to do with certain dispositions of the body. We know the pineal gland might be the seat of the soul. It would make perfect sense, in Descartes’ vision of man, for the physiological state of the pineal gland and the rest of the body to determine the degree to which one even believes in the soul and our ability to grasp its existence through intellectual intuition. If the body is so rotten or if the body is under so much stress that it has to waste all this energy in trying to just bring itself back to homeostasis, will there even be energy left for the pineal gland? I doubt it. Such a human would be entirely disconnected from his soul. The brain uses up quite a lot of energy, and today most people don’t even eat enough protein required for their brain to function properly on a daily basis. Descartes mentions that certain maladies of the spirit could be attributed to alterations in this gland. He writes: 

“It happens often that people become troubled in their minds without any known cause - which could be attributed to some malady of this gland […] Moreover, all the alterations which take place in the mind, when a man sleeps after drinking, for instance, can be attributed to some alterations taking place in this gland.” (Descartes to Mersenne, July 1640)

Although not given to us as such, explicitly, if one would try to create a more coherent portrait of Descartes, I think it is warranted to combine these physiological observations with Descartes’ enduring question: why do people not accept the most simple and self-evident of proofs? Namely, the proof of their own existence, proven at every moment of their existence by the mere fact that they are existing. And an entire practical philosophy grows out of it, infused by medicine, trying to answer this question. 

For this was Descartes’ entire project, —to come up with truths so simple and self-evident that even the greatest idiots could accept them. Yet, what does he realize, there are actually quite a lot of people who won’t accept it, who don’t have the common sense he values so deeply. If you look today at how most people look at Descartes, the situation has gotten even worse. For Descartes it is a question of intellectual intuition, an immediate grasping of your own existence because you are existing. You have the most intimate knowledge imaginable of ‘thinking’ or ‘being’, because you are thinking, and you are. It is self-evident in the strongest sense, is this not enough? By all measures, it accords with the criteria for absolute truth established since ancient times, “a knowledge which knows itself”, as Plato says.

How is it, that people lack this self-awareness? How is it, that they, like some third world David Hume, take pleasure in denying the existence of their own souls? It doesn’t make sense to Descartes. But, through his medical writings, he tries to give an answer. 

When Elizabeth is confused, Descartes says she should go outside and relax, and all the most important truths of philosophy shall become become clear to her, — the nature of the soul, how intimately it is connected to the body, and so on.

There is this body, which works quite automatically, like an intricate machine made by an artisan much more skilled than any human. This body is like a web of nerves, nerves which lead to the brain. The brain, where this little pineal gland is located, this pineal gland is the seat of the soul. When the nerves register something, food entering the body or something being perceived through the senses, the nerves register it and send a signal to the brain, the pineal gland acts like an interface that translates information registered by the body so that the soul can perceive it. And in a second movement, from the pineal gland there flow esprits animaux that move the muscles of the body in response to signals from the nerves. When the body is in good health: the blood flows well, digestion is strong, the heart pumps like it should, new stressors are easily assimilated and the body returns to homeostasis. But, when under too much stress, the system gets clogged up. All sorts of things happen. Bodily information fails to properly reach the soul, and the person is left disconnected from what is going on in his body. Esprits animaux have nothing to work with, and action becomes impossible. And also, as there is a general lack of energy in the brain, there is also a lack of energy in the pineal gland. And thus, man loses connection to his soul. Descartes knew that thought takes up quite some energy and can be quite a stressor. This is also what I meant previously with Descartes being an anti-philosopher. Thought, if not held in check, can turn against life. If the thinker, spending all his days thinking, has too little energy… all this thinking will just wear him out, exhaust him, dragging him further away from the truth instead of closer to it. Who is thinking? With what energy is one thinking?

And so there is behind his words this speculation; maybe this is why people, especially philosophers and scientists, cannot accept my simple proof, their system is fucked and they should take some rest and go for a walk. A simple treatment for a simple problem.