Medicine as practical philosophy

Health, vitality, Descartes, dualism

Philosophy has always been inspired and instructed by medicine. Plato looked at the healers of his time for a model of how the soul could be healed. Descartes was fascinated by anatomy, and searching for the secrets of biological energy, he sought to figure out how we could gain control over the machines we call our bodies. Machines, because, you do not have control over everything that happens inside your body. Like a machine, it runs its own course, and we are caught in the middle. “Who knows what a body is capable of.” 

This —the understanding of our bodies and healing— distorts all of philosophy when wrongly understood. And so it is truly sad when most philosophers believe the nonsense medical dogma being pushed by vaccine-pushing media and academia. If you believe modern allopathic medicine is only a net positive, having saved humanity from extinction or living as a disease-ridden ape, your thoughts on the value of technology will be entirely different from the man who knows medicine can take no such credit. Thoughts about ‘progress’ or ‘decline’ are all influenced by whether or not you think man is getting healthier, and whether or not we as a society take good care of our health. 

I talked recently about Plato’s distinction between slave doctors and the doctors of free men. The first, these are the doctors who help slaves, and their activity consists in prescribing the same medicines for each and every case of disease, never explaining to the patient what is actually wrong with him and what caused the disease. They have no reason to explain this, because the slave-mind is not interested. And so the symptom gets treated, but still living in the same way as before, the symptom eventually returns and the patient is back on his way to the slave doctor’s office. The other doctor, of free men, is different. He treats each patient as an individual case, looks closely at the way of life of the patient, studies the environment in which the patient lives, and determines what it is in this way of life and environment that might have caused the disease. The doctor explains all of this to the patient and gives him a plan to heal himself. This might be a new regimen with prescribed exercise, rest, specific foods to eat or abstain from, and so on. If necessary, perhaps some medicine will be prescribed. The patient listens closely, thanks the doctor for his wisdom, and goes to live a life that will lead to healing. Interestingly, Plato says, the slave doctors always complain about the free doctors, they say: you are not real doctors, you don’t heal people, you just talk to them and expect them to heal themselves, you are more like philosophers!

Now the point I want to make is more the difference between the types of patients. The slave doesn’t care, he just wants to get rid of the symptom so he can go on living. He is even opposed to knowledge, he’d get mad if the doctor started actually explaining what was going on. Just help me get better! He is an entirely unphilosophical type in that he doesn’t want to learn from whatever it is that occurs to him. He just isn’t interested, not even in himself. The free man is different. For him, an episode of disease is an opportunity for healing, for learning, and for living a new life with even more health and vitality than before. 

The man who doesn’t care about his own health, let alone about learning how to achieve it, about what circumstances give it to us, this man is a slave. And for Plato, he is the death of philosophy. The man who is interested, he is a free man, and he lives the type of life from which philosophy can potentially blossom.  

What to say about the philosophers of the last years who told you again and again not to ask too many questions and to just listen to the doctors? Just take the vaccine, even asking for a ‘why’ was considered blasphemy. And what about the doctors who tried to inform people how to live healthier lives so they could avoid getting sick in the first place? They were pushed into silence by the cartel of slave doctors. I remember even such innocent idiots as those talking about useless vitamin supplements being censored. 

Of course, there is a difference between experts and laymen. And of course, the expert’s opinion is to be trusted more than the layman’s, most of the time. But there are two types of experts; there is the slave expert, and the free-spirited expert. And there is the slave layman, and the free layman. The free seek to learn from each other, the slaves seek to maintain each other’s ignorance. 

And of course, when it comes to medical matters, the professional philosopher is usually more ignorant than the professional doctor. But again, what kind of philosopher? The slave or the free man? And what kind of doctor, the slave doctor or the doctor of the free? The free doctor invites questioning, for him each case of disease is an opportunity for learning. Before it is a question of knowledge, it is a question of attitude, spirit, and so on. 

Descartes, we know, was of course fascinated by the body. He said many things for which we hate him, pertaining to dualism and mechanism and so on. But what is always more interesting is not the actual ideas that are written down, but the spirit that gave birth to them. And with Descartes we find someone driven by an extreme fascination for the body, and specifically, for health. How is it, that this body we inhabit, this body which seems inseparable from our souls, determines so much of our lives? When I eat in a certain way, I feel a certain way, Descartes notes. And when I feel or think a certain way, I desire to eat in a certain way, Descartes notes. He mentions somewhere that the greatest end that he hopes he can help to achieve with his philosophy of body is to map the body’s workings so precisely, that a more precise medicine can be born. He says: “the preservation of health has always been the principal end of my studies.”

A practice of medicine that would allow us total control over the health of our bodies, and therefore, also over our minds and passions. In a letter somewhere, he mentions how he is annoyed by the short-sightedness of his fellow scientists, philosophers, and inventors. Inspired by the new sciences, they attempt to make all sorts of mechanical machines to make industry, medicine, war, and so on easier. But what they should really be doing is trying to understand how the most important machine of all —our body— works. And if we could truly understand how all the parts of our bodies work, how energy flows through us and causes all of our experiences and actions, we could better guide these bodies, and achieve more health, vitality, and consequently, better thoughts and actions. This would be the only ‘applied science’ worthy of the name. A science that teaches us how the vehicle of all application whatsoever works. In the first place, for Descartes, this science has nothing to do with cutting and slashing, it has to do with understanding the flow of biological energy that leads to either health or disease, so we can live in a way that favours health. Descartes was always extremely aware of how his surroundings influenced his bodily and mental health. He notes how the experience of fear distorts his sense perception, making him feel things that aren’t really there. He notes how lack of sleep degrades his quality of thought. He notes how an excess of cold is detrimental to his organism, and he notes how sadness makes him prone to over-eating. Now, what is the body for Descartes? Most simply, it is a machine made up of an almost infinite amount of little nerves woven together as in a web. The center to which all these nerves run, and from which they come, is the brain. These nerves are extremely sensitive to everything that occurs to them. Heat touching the body excites the nerves, which send signals to the brain, and we end up having the sensation of being hot. Food enters the body, gets digested, and the nerves carry the energy gathered from the food through our body, influencing us for the positive or the negative. How is information carried through these nerves and through the web of nerves that is the body? Descartes speaks of esprits animaux, ‘animal spirits’. Not so much little animals, but more like animating spirits. These are the smallest units of bodily energy that flow through the body. And it is the excitation of the nerves with certain intensities that determines how these spirits will flow. Descartes believes that the passions relate to how these animal spirits are flowing through the body. Is the flow impeded? Negative passions can crystallize. Is there a good flow? We open the road to positive passions, and most of all, the capacity to move through passions without being dragged down by them. This is by the way how Descartes thinks about the passions in general; they are the most beautiful things in life and make life worth living, but, it is important to be in control of them, and to not be a slave to the passions. We should be able to welcome and enjoy them when they occur, but not get stuck in them. Feeling hatred can be a positive in that it drives us to action and thought, but it can also get stuck in our bodies, the result being the growth of a sort of resentment that serves no one. 

For this it seems Descartes believes it important that the body is in good health —i.e. energy flows through it effortlessly, and the body doesn’t get clogged up. This clogging up is when we can’t get rid of the passions, they cling to us, they build and start controlling us, eventually dragging us down, draining us of our energy. When the body is in good health, we move through passions effortlessly, fully enjoying what they have to offer, but eventually digesting them so we can live on to have new experiences. In all, the question is if we are strong enough to make good use of what happens to us.

Now, like every philosopher to have ever lived, Descartes was faced with this question, —how do body and mind relate to each other? The ‘hard problem of consciousness’ and all of that. It is a quite complex problem for Descartes, and for a few reasons. For one, we can effectively think our mind, soul, or consciousness as separate from our bodies. But, it is undeniable that body and soul are so closely knit together, that it is equally reasonable to say that they are inseparable. Imagine dropping a heavy weight on your toe, your consciousness is your toe in this moment. But you can also imagine yourself sitting on the beach in a relaxed and stress-free state, contemplating, drifting away into thought, almost forgetting about your body. So, this is the problem, both of these things are true. Mind and body are separate, yet they are also one. If mind and body are separate, two distinct substances, how can they also be one? Because they interact with each other through this little gland in the brain —the famous pineal gland. The function of this gland is interesting in that it both ensures the union of mind and body, but also their separation. It connects mind and body to each other, but it also ensures that the mind and body can clearly communicate with each other as two separate entities, and that the mind stays in control of the body. Mind-body interaction and unity is like a spectrum. The question is not: are mind and body connected or not? It is a question of: how connected are they at this specific point in time? How separate are they at this specific point in time? 

Now, when we look at Descartes’ works on physiology, he seems to be saying that the more distressed the body —that is, the more impeded the flow of spirits— the more energy will have to be spent on whatever it is that is impeding the flow, and the less energy there will be flowing through the rest of the body. The control center of the brain —the pineal gland—, where mind and body meet each other, and where all the nerves run to and from, there will also be less energy here. Say we ate some shit food full of toxins, it is hard to digest, and it just sits there rotting in the intestines. It impedes the flow of energy, we feel physical pain, and the blockage in this area of the body leads to a certain depressed mood. Remember, while all of this is happening, the impeded circulation of animal spirits will make it so that there is less energy in the brain. And consequently, there will be less energy in the pineal gland too. Less energy = less function. The function of the pineal gland is to ensure this separation of mind and body, but also their communication, so that the mind remains in control of the body, as a driver in his seat. But with less energy, the proper relation between mind and body will shortcircuit. You drop heavy weight on your toe and it crushes your toe, immediately a ton of bodily energy flows to the toe, and you are entirely your toe. In this moment, no way you can talk about mind - body dualism. Or take the example of bad digestion, your body is clogged and you can’t think properly, the negative bodily sensations cloud your thoughts. And also with intense passions, love and hate and so on, it is hard to think clearly. When something impresses the organism with such force that it cannot be easily assimilated in the normal flow of bodily energy, all mental-bodily energy has to be focussed on it, and clear thought is impeded. This is also why Descartes is sceptical of this cliché that philosophy starts with wonder. Wonder, in most simple terms, occurs when something appears out of the ordinary. We encounter something we have never seen before, or we see a line of reasoning which we had never thought of before, and we are completely awe-struck. What is this? How could it be? How does this fit in with everything else I already know, or how does this disprove what I thought I knew? In this moment of wonder, all energy is focused on the object of wonder, and it gains an exaggerated significance, just because it is new. What makes it new? The fact that it is so different from what we already knew. But is something better or more worthy of thought just because it is different and new? What about ourselves, we have been with ourselves all our lives, does this make our self less worthy of investigation than the newest philosophical theory? And what about God? As all that is and the essence of all that is, God has always been with us. Does this make God less worthy of investigation than the ‘news of today’? You see, this ‘wonder’ can impede clear thought and proper valuation because the force of the new involves the passions in the investigation, it exaggerates the importance of things and prevents clear thought, just like a physiological stressor which the body can’t immediately absorb impedes the functioning of the body as a whole. 

Now why do I talk to you about Descartes’ physiology? Well, I think it is important for understanding the broader characteristics of Descartes’ philosophy, and it is also important for seeing how a philosopher’s thoughts on what health looks like give us insight into his theoretical philosophy.

What follows is in part my interpretation. The idea is that this question of ‘dualism’, are mind and body one or are they distinct? Well, it depends, you could say. How are you constituted, how healthy are you, how is energy flowing through you? Did you just drop a heavy weight on your toe, I’d doubt your mind and body are distinct at this moment, unless of course you have some extreme level of self-control or have sage-level meditation skills. The more healthy the flow of bodily energy, the more freedom there can be. The more impeded the flow, the more the mind is dragged down into the body, and the less clearly it can think. Mind-body dualism and the union of soul and body are two ends of a spectrum. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that mind-body being separated is the same as health. We can imagine the brain lacking energy and the pineal gland not functioning properly, leading to the person being dissociated from his body. So it is a question of the right type of relationship, balance, and knowing how and when. In mathematics for example, one has to dissociate from body to a certain degree to think abstractly. But in sports, you have to be more ‘in your body’.

There is this book, voyage du monde de Descartes, a sort of sci-fi parody about the man’s philosophy. In it, Descartes consumes a bit too much tobacco snuff, and he feels his mind dissociate from his body. In this state, he has the realization: “dualism! Mind and body are two distinct substances!” The book is partly made to ridicule Descartes, but maybe there is something in this that accords quite well with his actual philosophy. In certain states of the body, energy flows through it better, and the mind can better realize its role as master over the body. And the body can better realize its role as the vehicle of the mind. 

Now of course, with all of this, you can say that I am circumventing the problem and grossly distorting Descartes’ philosophy. For if the state of the body determines whether or not there is dualism, then there is no dualism at all. Perhaps. But maybe not necessarily. One could compare it with a sailor on a boat at sea. The sailor being the mind/consciousness/will, the boat being the body, and the sea and the weather being the external stressors acting on the body and mind. If the boat is in a good condition and the weather is favourable, the sailor can easily be in control of his boat. But if the boat is broken, holes in the sails and so on, and the weather is bad, he will be less in control, he will feel like a victim of the sea, not a master of his own path. In both cases, the sailor, the boat, and the sea/weather are distinct. It is just a question of how well this distinction is realized. Now if the boat is full of holes and the weather is bad, the sailor lacks control, and he is at the mercy of his boat and the weather. They control him. If the weather is good and the boat is strong, he is in control. But paradoxically, in the second scenario, the sailor feels more at one with his boat. It moves where he moves, and he moves where the boat moves. So, not a question of ‘dualism or not’, but a question of the health of this relation between mind and body. Still, mind and body are distinct. But the more interesting question is how they are relating to each other in certain situations.

Before you google how to de-calcify your pineal gland, let me return to the topic from which we started. Philosophy is always informed by medicine, that is, by the practice of how to live a life of health and vitality. And so it was with Descartes. He realized that both body and mind act differently when afflicted by disease, or when in good health. With Cartesianism in general, the material realm seems to become a great nothing. Matter = extension, res extensa, opposed to res cogitans. The mind is a thinking and unextended thing, pure quality, no quantity. Matter is only extension, and nothing else, no quality, no soul, no nothing. Things have been said about this, the reign of quantity and so on. But what is connected to res extensa in Descartes is a great idea of potential. If body is only res extensa, everything is possible. That is, if there is no definite form given to matter for once and for all, everything is possible. Hence why Descartes is the philosopher of science-fiction, dreaming of new possible worlds, his treatise on the world itself announced as a fable. If body is pure extension, then everything is possible with it. It can shape itself in a certain direction, as a result of various material causes (& causation by res cogitans), and it can shape itself in a different direction. Who will say where the possibilities end? It is not like we can investigate the material world and come up with definite types once and for all. At the essence we only find extension, which is nothing but the idea of infinite possibility, just as number represents an infinite possibility of combinations. When body is formed in a certain way, I feel a certain way. And when body is formed differently, I feel a different way. Who knows where the possibilities will end? This is Descartes’ question. And it is the one Leibniz will take up when he speaks of an infinite number of possible worlds, and  talks about his characteristic idea of infinite perfectibility. The difference is that Leibniz, answering the question for how and why matter is formed in the way it actually is formed (and not in any of the other possible ways), talks again about souls and monads, and eventually God as this great selecting mechanism that chose this world. Descartes’ is much more of a humanism; why is matter shaped in this way and not in some other way, well, because we chose to form it in this way, and we could just as well build something else. The idea of freedom. Which, for Descartes, is intimately tied up with the idea of body as res extensa. This is the aim of all of Descartes, how to be free, how to realize the supreme virtue of generosity (knowing ourselves to be free and acting on our freedom, taking full responsibility for the lives we choose to create). It starts from realizing that we are not free at all, for the flow of bodily energy in us determines everything we do. But because it is merely an abstract flow, flowing wherever it is caused to flow, we can also change the flow of esprits animaux. And so, we can arrive at a point where the body and mind are in harmony, and the mind can take up its true role as master of the body, creator of its own life. Descartes said: “the preservation of health has always been the principal end of my studies.” Because health is freedom, and true health is true generosity. Descartes characterized disease as the “true error of nature.” And just as he sought indubitable certainty in cogito, he sought truth in health. If nothing else, philosophy is about thought, and “if it is possible to find some means of making men in general wiser and more astute than they have been up till now, I believe we must look for it in medicine”, says Descartes, “we might free ourselves from an infinity of diseases, both of the body and of the mind, and perhaps even from the infirmity of old age, if we had sufficient knowledge of their causes and of all the remedies that nature has provided us.” In his letters to Elizabeth, discussing how to actually heal the body and mind, akin for him to practical philosophy, he speaks mainly about exercise, diet, mental exercises (‘positive thinking’), and so on. What is remarkable is a, by today’s standards unimaginable, belief in nature’s capacity for self-healing. So much for the body and nature-hating Descartes…

If the truth of the cogito is self-thinking thought, the truth of the body is self-healing. 

Descartes believed strongly in the soul’s influence on the body; when we are angered or struck by any other intense passion, it often leads to a corresponding change in the body. But also, the body has an equally strong influence on the soul. When we eat bad food, it stresses the intestines, and depression can follow. This is also one of the virtues of dualism, because soul and body exist in this paradoxical relation of being separate substances, yet still influencing each other and being a sort of unity, it can be said more easily that bodily influences can overpower the soul, and reversely, that the soul can overpower the body. Yet one can at the same time maintain the unity of both. You have to be able to explain everything. With radical materialism, how will you explain the cases of people healing themselves through thought? And with radical idealism, how will you explain the cases of the body’s constitution determining thought? This is the virtue of dualism.

Descartes writes to Elizabeth:

“I know no thought more proper for preserving health than a strong conviction and firm belief that the architecture of our bodies is so thoroughly sound that when we are well we cannot easily fall ill except through extraordinary excess or infectious air or some other external cause, while when we are ill we can easily recover by the unaided force of nature, especially when we are still young.”

But as much as he believed so strongly in having a positive mental attitude, Descartes generally recommends starting with the body. At a certain point in their correspondence, discussing the more traditional philosophical theme of how mind and body relate, Elizabeth feels terribly confused and depressed even by all the questions that pop up, and the fact that there seems to be no clear answer. Descartes’ advice is simple: go for a walk, look to the sun, listen to the birds, your mental turmoil will be silenced, and you will know everything you need to know about the relation between mind and body. 

Descartes likes to endorse exercise because it increases circulation of the blood and animal spirits. And the better things flow, the better we can flow through and past the passions that afflict us. The general idea is that nature knows how to heal herself, it is her natural direction. The problem is that we get in the way with our thoughts, and by poisoning her. Descartes mentions that when someone is ill, they usually do well in following their own inclinations as to what food to eat, how much rest to take, and so on, because this is nature guiding the person towards health through intuition. “With her perfect internal awareness of herself, she knows better than the doctor who is on the outside.” Even though medicine and philosophy consist in trying to figure out how the body works and what is best for it, in the end, our knowledge is never as complete as nature’s knowledge of herself. Just as, for Descartes, science always only offers us a map, a theory. But the map is not the territory. And the physics of the world we create is only a fable. Descartes’ message comes with a critique of those doctors who act too intrusively, thinking they know the patient’s body better than the patient himself. But, after all, it is the patient who lives in closer proximity to his body, and it is the patient’s nature that will have to do the actual healing. Remember what we said about Plato and slave doctors.

The point of medicine is to know ourselves and the nature of our bodies. For it is this self-knowledge that will heal us. And in the end, the task of the doctor is only to help us achieve this self-knowledge. 

I wanted to mention these things partly because when speaking about the horrors of contemporary medical dogma, one often points back to men like Descartes who made the body into a ‘mere machine’ to be experimented on etc. Perhaps, but consider this, a machine is an automaton, that is, something that in and by itself knows what to do. It runs its natural course. What is also interesting is how Descartes' thoughts and experiences with healing seem to deeply influence his theoretical philosophy of dualism. Positive thinking can influence the body, and so can negative thinking. And good bodily health can influence our thoughts, as can bad bodily health. These are some of the observations that motivate Descartes to seek an answer to this question: how do mind and body relate to each other? It might be slightly exaggerated, but one can ask: would Descartes really have believed in mind-body dualism, if he did not have the experiences of the mind’s power to influence bodily health, and if he did not have the experiences of the body’s power influencing our thoughts and passions? Point being; one’s thoughts on healing and achieving a life of vitality can deeply influence one’s philosophy. We can imagine someone who doesn’t consider the power of the mind as much and believes the body is all there is, a more material philosophy could follow. For example, Ray Peat’s friend, De la Mettrie. One can also consider someone who thinks that things just happen, entirely uninterested, the unphilosophical type of the slave and his doctor. 

So you have at once in Descartes this idea of freedom and the malleability of matter, but it consists first and foremost in returning to a natural state of mind and body where both exist in a healthy relation, where bodily energy flows freely and where the soul is able to maintain the body’s health through thought and will. This is the idea of freedom. The closer to its natural state the body is, that is, the freer the flow of biological energy, the freer the mind becomes, and the freer both mind and body are to do what is right in whatever circumstances we are presented with. And it all starts with knowledge of one’s self and nature. And more essentially, an actual interest in knowing what true health feels like. What Descartes calls ‘practical philosophy.’