Pilot in a Vessel, Mind Being the Body and a Third Path

I don’t believe that Descartes really offered an account of the mind–body union which would fit the description which Strawson labels as “Cartesian”. But Strawson makes us ask what Descartes does differently. That sets a fertile background for our discussion. For Descartes does consider a comparative view of the role of the mind which he wants to avoid:

Nature also teaches me, by these sensations of pain, hunger and 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 joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit. If this were not so, I, who am nothing but a thinking being, would not feel pain when the pain when the body was hurt, but would perceive the damage purely by intellect, just as a sailor perceives by sight if anything in his ship is broken. Similarly, when the body needed food or drink, I should have an explicit understanding of the fact, instead of having confused sensations of hunger and thirst.26

Descartes is worried in this passage that the readers will pin onto him a view that the mind is an intellectual observer and operator of its body. Descartes’ view of the mind invites that interpretation of the mind–body union because the mind is a purely thinking being whose nature does not involve anything bodily. It would be natural to think that such a thing would only operate its body as it would a tool. Such a mind would be suitable for its body in the same as way a user is suited to its tool.

A thinking being using the body as a mere vessel would perhaps care about the body—but only insofar the body satisfies the intellectual ends of a thinking being. A thinking being is driven by its pursuit of distinctively mental goods which are those of understanding and exercise of its agency. The body of that kind of detached agent would be useful in as much it grants a window for the mind to intellectually explore the world, insofar as the world is an object of understanding. These intellectual benefits of having a body would not be restricted only to the possession of the capacity of sensory perception. They would also encompass the body’s ability to move since that allows the mind to discover new objects of cognition.

In such a model, there would be no immediate care for the body’s wellbeing as such. That is fundamentally what Descartes tries to express in that quoted passage when he points out that the intellectual observer does not feel pain. The sailor of a ship cares about the ship as her means of carrying herself to the destination harbor. The sailor doesn’t feel the damage done to the ship in her mind as hurt or pain that is done to her immediately, but rather that her pursuit of the destination has been disturbed or

inhibited. For the same reason, Descartes cannot allow that the feeling of pain is merely a cognition of damage done to the body.

The pilot-in-a-vessel type of mind–body union is also, I believe, the underlying reason why Descartes doesn’t emphasize the output side of the will in the mind–body union. If the mind’s union to the body was only manifested in acts of will, i.e. we would only communicate with the body by active willing without any feedback from the

pilot type of agent who is operating the body for its own purely intellectual purposes. The reason is that the thinking being has to learn about what the body needs, what it demands from the will, and so on. The union with the body comes with a new mode of being, that is, being at one with the body. The mental being needs to be taught what that new mode of being is since the bodily life is not built into the mind’s nature.

For that reason, Descartes’ account of how the mind is at one with the body focuses on the input side of the will, i.e. sensations and passions. Descartes is concerned about whether he can provide a theory under which the body is related to the mind in such a way that the mind is moved to action which concurs with the body’s action. That must be achieved to meet the constraint of immediacy—the mind cannot be merely an interested user of its body.

The sensation of pain is an interesting pivotal case for Descartes. The sensation of pain, according to Descartes requires something what he calls an intermingling of the mind and the body. By this he means, I believe, that the union involves both the natures of the mind and the body. Notice though that the union is not the same as this

intermingling nor is the union the same thing as any sensation. Instead, he says that sensations arise from the union.27 _{Nevertheless, a sensation of pain does depend on the} body because the sensation is produced in the mind due to some activity in the body, and further, a sensation of pain presents the body in some condition. So, clearly the sensation depends on the body.

Even though the sensation of pain depends on the body, that doesn’t solve the pilot-in-a-vessel problem since one could say that when the intellectual observer cognizes the damage in the body that cognition depends on the body as its subject matter. By that I mean that the intellectual operator could in some sense directly suffer because its

activity of intellectual probing and exploration depends in a direct manner on the body as its subject matter. The body is for the pilot-type agent an intellectual window to the world.

Due that worry, the immediate relationship of pain to the mind must be capable of being understood without any kind cognitive or sensory relation to the body as its object. Even though the pain is internally sensed to be located within the body, the pain is felt in the mind. But pain is a sensation different from, say, seeing red. Pain carries it with information that something is wrong with us. Seeing red doesn’t have this aspect of caring to it. When I see a red lamp on the table, that merely teaches me an observable, inert fact about the world, that the world is in such and such way. It does not

immediately tell us anything about my condition. The fact that there is a lamp on the table can be mediately interesting for me, perhaps because it is too dark, and I cannot see. A feeling of pain, in contrast, is of immediate interest and urgency to me because it

carries with it the information that it is I who has been hurt. Unless I’m suicidal or an otherwise contorted agent, there is no room to question whether suffering and hurting are of importance to me.

However, it is not clear on what account Descartes thinks that a pain felt in the body is a hurt for the mind in an immediate way. Certainly, it is a negative event insofar

the body is the vessel of the mind but that’s not what he is after.

Things would be much easier for Descartes in this respect if he could just say that the mind is the body. If the mind is the body, then obviously any damage to the body is a hurt for the mind. That is because the mind and body are one and the same thing in the strongest possible way—strict identity. In that case, it would be even trivial for Descartes to, say, that any damage to the body is also a hurt for me. After all, the self is the mind, at least with more right than the body. The sameness of mind and body would in this way provide a neat explanation of what the integral connection and concurrence of bodily damage, disturbance and suffering is. However, that kind of move is not available for Descartes since the Cartesian mind does not involve the nature of the body. It is not possible that the two things are the same while their natures are separate from each other.

While it is not particularly insightful to say that possibility would solve Descartes’ problem, it does point out the extreme poles between which he has to find a place for his view. Part of my argument in this chapter and especially in the following chapter is that there is no natural and substantial notion available when relying on separate and

independent notions of the mind and the body which Descartes offers us.