DID DESCARTES BELIEVE THAT NONHUMAN ANIMALS CANNOT FEEL?
DID DESCARTES BELIEVE THAT NONHUMAN ANIMALS CANNOT FEEL?
By David Sztybel, Ph.D.
I. Introduction
Traditionally, Rene Descartes has been interpreted as--or perhaps even accused of--maintaining that nonhuman animals cannot feel. Philosopher Bernard Rollin suggests that live dissections of animals were made easier, on the part of the vivisectors, with the belief that the subjects necessarily led painless lives. do have conscious feelings, or that he was somehow unclear about the matter. This essay will show that it may indeed be an exaggeration to say that Descartes denied feelings of any kind to animals, as is traditionally supposed, but it is completely fair to indicate that he denied that animals have any conscious feelings, or feelings that animals would be aware of having.
It follows, if Descartes really asserted conscious feelings in animals, or offered no clear position on the matter, that endlessly many texts would have to be amended, or else partially disregarded, not least of all writings concerning the moral status of nonhuman animals. Descriptions of "the Cartesian view of animals" would have to be replaced with the purely "mechanist" or perhaps "materialist" view of animals, without attributing that view to Descartes. Such a shift would be significant not only to historians of philosophy, but also to users of animals who sometimes resort to such a view even today, 2 to those traditionalists who advocate the humane usage of animals, and indeed to animal liberationists, who are concerned to free animals from an alleged form of oppression called "speciesism." 3 There have been three dissenting views which take issue with the idea that Cartesianism entails that nonhuman animals are without feeling. John Cottingham renders Descartes as holding the thesis that animals can feel. Marjorie Grene, for her part, believes that Descartes' position on the matter is simply "incoherent." More recently, Peter Harrison suggests that Descartes was cautiously agnostic on the whole question.
I hold that these revisionist views are refutable, given a sustained examination of Descartes' relevant writings on the question of animal feeling. It is not enough, however, to provide counter-examples. One might wish to know why these interpreters wrote as they did, and how certain passages were misconstrued, given the overall context of Descartes' work. It turns out that their interpretations are entirely a result of selective attention to some of Descartes' deliberations on animal feeling, while ignoring key passages on the subject--including Descartes' own three-tiered theory of sensation. The aim of this paper is to supply the missing pieces of the puzzle, with the result that the commonplace view of Descartes on nonhuman animal feeling--namely that there is none in any ordinary sense--will finally and clearly be attributed to its author.
II. The Standard Interpretation (SI)
First of all, it will be useful to set out what John Cottingham calls "the standard interpretation" of Descartes, which dictates that nonhuman animals lack any feelings. 4 For ease of exposition, I shall refer to this particular view as "SI." Again, I explore, in this essay, whether or not a certain interpretation of Descartes is correct, not whether or not his alleged contention that animals are unfeeling, in the ordinary sense, is correct. Descartes, as traditionally construed, holds that animals are simply complicated, purely physical machines, which behave in very complex ways, but without any mind. Humans, by contrast, also possess machine-like bodies, but, in addition, we are said to have a mind or noncorporeal soul. Many authors interpret Descartes in this manner, and we shall note some of them here, before deciding for ourselves whatever the textual evidence may indicate. Cottingham cites Norman Kemp Smith as attributing to Descartes the "monstrous thesis" that nonhuman animals "are without feeling or awareness of any kind." 5 Next, Cottingham notes that the animal liberationists, Tom Regan and Peter Singer, attribute SI to Descartes. 6 (In fact, if one consults the edited volume by Regan and Singer that is cited by Cottingham, one further finds Voltaire making the same imputation, in effect: "Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that it may not feel? 7 Finally, Cottingham gives the example of A. Boyce Gibson, who condemns Descartes' model of the animal machine. A HREF="#NOTE8">8
In fact, I find Gibson explicitly to affirm that, in Descartes' view, animals do not feel. 9
A few authors do not a "standard interpretation" make, so I shall presently add to Cottingham's list of SI adherents. L. Beck notes Descartes as holding that animals are machines which lack not only self-consciousness, but also consciousness altogether10--and hence conscious feeling. Gary Hatfield indicates that, to Descartes, "[H]umans have minds and animals do notALERT." 11 This implies that animals lack all feeling, insofar as feelings are of the mind. Bernard Williams also affirms this view, while acknowledging a certain variation in Descartes' text (which, we shall see, fuels Cottingham's, Grene's, and Harrison's revisionist departures from SI):
Descartes took animals to have no souls, no thoughts, or experiences, and to be in fact automata. This is quite certainly his viewALERTeven though there are passages in which he expresses skepticism or takes a milder tone. 12
Williams produces no sufficient textual warrant for this particular interpretation of Descartes, in his book on the philosopher, but such a view, as we shall see, can indeed be substantiated.
III. Three Grades of Sensation and a Revised Standard Interpretation (RSI)
Cottingham and Harrison have their reasons for rejecting SI. Unfortunately, their reasoning omits a consideration of Descartes' background theory: that of the three grades of sensation. Some other relevant background theory is indeed supplied by Cottingham, who correctly notes Descartes' denial that animals are anything other than automata, which goes along with the Cartesian rejection of the ideas that animals can think, use language, or have self-consciousness. 14 Cottingham claims that it is only a certain "fuzziness," in Descartes' own thinking about whether or not animals are conscious, that leads people to attribute to Descartes the notion that animals "are totally without feeling." 15 Let me cast the following problem: if, on Cartesianism, there are only two kinds of substances, thinking and extended, and if thinking is denied to animals, then what room for sensations exists in the realm of the purely extended? Cottingham accounts for this possible anomaly in the following way:
I think the only explanation for this [Descartes' holding animal sensations in spite of the exclusive categories of mind-body dualism] is that Descartes, either inadvertently or willfully, failed to eradicate a certain fuzziness from his thinking about consciousness and self-consciousnessALERThe simply does not seem to bother that terms like pain, anger, etc., which he uses of animals, clearly imply some degree of conscious (though perhaps not 'self-conscious') awareness. 16
It would be uncharitable to call Descartes "fuzzy" about his own dualism if we can find a more plausible interpretation. On the SI view, Descartes does indeed deny conscious feeling to animals, and this creates no "fuzziness" at all in regard to his dualism. Cottingham believes that Descartes "simply does not seem to bother" (in Cottingham's words) that terms such as anger, hope, etc. imply consciousness to most people. 17 As we shall see, Descartes was well aware of the popular associations of such terms, but believed that that he developed a superior, three-tiered way of conceiving of sensations (which includes feelings of the sort that most people usually refer to).
Tom Regan astutely rejects Cottingham's negation of SI, in particular, by citing a passage from the Meditations, namely, a segment of "Reply to Objections VI." In this key passage, Descartes distinguishes between three grades of sensation:
To the first (grade) belongs the immediate affection of the bodily organ by external objects; and this can be nothing more than the motion of the sensory organs and the change of figure and position due to that motion. The second (grade) comprises the immediate mental results, due to the mind's union with the corporeal organ affected; such are the perceptions of pain, of pleasurable stimulation, of thirst, of hunger, of colours, of sound, savour, cold, heat, and the likeALERTFinally the third (grade) contains all those judgments which, on the occasion of motions occurring in the corporeal organ, we have from our earliest years been accustomed to pass about things external to us.
Descartes calls the first grade of sensation, which is purely physicalistic, "common to us and the brutes," 19 and does not say the same of the other two grades of sensation, which involve the mind. 20 Regan points out that Cottingham freely acknowledges Descartes' denial of animal minds, 21 and so it would, in fact, be inconsistent for Descartes to admit that animals have the mentalistic second and third grades of sensation. The second grade of sensation encompasses conscious experiences, such as feeling pain, whereas the third grade appears to denote self-conscious reflection on experiences, such as making a judgment concerning what is perceived. It is only sensations of the second grade that we now commonly consider to be sensations.
This last citation is the only passage provided from Descartes himself in Regan's critique of Cottingham's revisionism, with the exception of a segment from a letter to More (which is also found in Cottingham's article, and which is considered below). Therefore, Regan's criticism may well be apt, but it is offered without sufficient support. A complete survey of Descartes' writing is necessary in order to ensure that no "fuzziness" is present on this whole question, and that he is self-consistent in all of his utterances, denying feeling to animals in the commonplace sense of "feeling." This paper will use the three-tiered sensation theory as an interpretive key. That is, Descartes' briefly outlined theory of the three grades of sensation appears to be more than just an isolated or anomalous paragraph. It coheres very well--and often unmistakably--with all of Descartes' statements on the topic of animal feeling.
It is noteworthy that the "standard interpretation" is that animals lack conscious feelings. But more than that, Cottingham states, above, that on the standard interpretation, nonhuman animals lack any kind of feeling. However, on Cartesianism, animals still might have feelings in a sense associated with the first grade of sensation, since that is not denied to animals. We have noted that Norman Kemp Smith states that Descartes held that animals "are without feeling or awareness of any kind," although again, the first grade may afford a kind of feeling, however oddly construed. Voltaire and Gibson state that animals may not feel, as well. Others are not necessarily so categorical in their denial of animal feeling on Cartesianism, but they might be if pressed, and in any case, omit mention of the three-tiered theory of sensation, which would permit some form of animal "feeling" for Descartes. If failing to take account of the three-tiered model is in keeping with "the standard interpretation," then we must develop a "revised standard interpretation," (RSI) which denies conscious feeling in animals, but not what Descartes construes as first-grade feelings. Regan himself calls "the standard interpretation" the denial of any kind of consciousness to nonhuman animals. 22 It is true that this is part of the standard interpretation of Descartes. But I have established that Descartes is also standardly interpreted to deny feelings of any sort to animals, and that does not match Regan's own revisionist interpretation, which we may label for what it is. Regan seems to underestimate the significance of the three-tiered grades of sensation as something which forces a revision of at least many "standard interpretations." That said, Regan's implicit revisionism is much closer to the standard interpretation than is the explicit revisionisms of Cottingham, Grene, and Harrison.
The three "upstart" interpreters--in common with many of their opponents, who affirm the standard interpretation--ignore the three-tiered model when explicating Descartes' view on whether animals can feel. Yet that same theory was published in The Meditations on the First Philosophy (1641), situated in Descartes' mature system of thought. I suppose that Descartes would have expected scholarly interpreters of his writings to be familiar with this fundamental component of his theory of sensations. It is the overlooking of the Cartesian theory of sensations--as well as several other relevant passages--which causes Cottingham mistakenly to call Descartes' background theory of dualism "fuzzy." Let us now turn to the evidence cited by Cottingham, Grene, and Harrison. I shall have occasion to refer to some passages from the works of Descartes, which these revisionists omit to consider, while I reconstruct their unorthodox views. Other passages which they neglect will occupy Part VII. These three rogue interpreters not only reject the standard interpretation, but also, by extension, they defy the revised standard interpretation, insofar as Cottingham asserts conscious feeling in animals on Cartesianism, and Grene and Harrison claim that Cartesianism has no clear position on conscious feeling in animals.
IV. Cottingham and the Revised Standard Interpretation
Let us immediately test RSI by examining Cottingham's self-described "strongest" evidence: statements from Descartes which superficially suggest that animals feel, in the sense that we ordinarily understand animals to feel. In a letter to More, 1649, close to the end of Descartes' life, the latter speaks of horses, dogs, and so on, "communicating to usALERTtheir natural impulses of fear, hunger and so on." 23 The letter to More also openly attributes expressions of anger to animals. 24 Similarly, in a letter to Newcastle, 1646, Descartes writes of dogs, horses and monkeys expressing fear, hope, and joy. 25 Cottingham thinks that it is hard to believe that Descartes is speaking loosely or metaphorically in such letters, which are devoted to clarifying his position.
Nevertheless, as against Cottingham's exegesis, it could be said that Descartes, in such instances, is indeed trying to clarify his position, but with his own conception of sensations firmly in mind (whether he was prepared to rehearse or explore that entire background theory in letters to friends is not clear). After all, Descartes did articulate his three-tiered sensation theory in 1641, and both letters which refer to animal feelings (1646 and 1649, respectively) come well after that. It might be speculated that these letters represent a change of mind or heart regarding animal feeling, just before Descartes passed away. However, not only is there no indication of such a "change," but just a year before he died, in The Passions of the Soul (1649), Descartes asserts purely physicalistic animal "feelings." He finds that the bodily functions (in fact, the "animal spirits"; more on this topic below) "serve to maintain and strengthen only the movements of the nerves and muscles which usually accompany passions and not, as in us, the passions themselves." 26 I more fully discuss this noteworthy passage in Section VII. On the strength of the Descartes' never-disavowed theory of sensations, Cottingham's "strongest" pieces of evidence do not hold up as definitely referring to conscious feelings on the part of animals. For Descartes manifestly has established a different way of speaking about feeling in animals, which includes a peculiar, entirely physicalistic first grade. Given this background theory, it would be uncharitable to accuse Descartes of inconsistency, when a self-consistent rendering is readily available.
Still, it may be objected here that more than one kind of charitable interpretation is possible here, and they may be at odds: (1) It would be charitable to avoid ascribing inconsistency to Descartes, as in waffling in his position on animal feelings without explanation; (2) It might be thought to be morally charitable, to the character of Descartes, to allow that at least for a short period of his life, in a few letters to friends, he showed a more "sensible" and compassionate view of animals. This is in keeping with Cottingham's idea that Descartes may not have been "altogether beastly to the brutes." (See the concluding sentence of his article, p. 559) However, we are interested in Descartes' actual view, not in any form of flattery of him. On the second view of charity, Descartes must have, in any case, flipped "back" to a purely physicalistic view of animals without batting an eye (as we saw from The Passions of the Soul passage considered above), showing, it would seem, that he did not have any strong moral feelings on the subject. So we need not worry about offending Descartes' moral feelings on this subject, and must avoid being excessively concerned with our own moral ideals when interpreting Descartes' work. Perhaps one might seek a "higher road" for Descartes in order to defend one's own allegiance with certain of his ideas, even though some of Descartes' notions may be morally suspect. That is not charity of interpretation given the subject's character, but mere and unfounded condescension, which goes against the vast majority of Descartes' actual statements on the subject in question. Again, we wish to know what Descartes actually thought, not whatever, ideally, he should have said about animals. Thus the most charitable thing to do here is to cultivate a self-consistent interpretation of Descartes, especially where that is well-founded.
As for what Cottingham perhaps "should" have wrote, his revised interpretation encounters more and more difficulties. Cottingham is certainly aware that Descartes is regarded as holding that "thinking" includes "toutes les opщrations de l'тme," or all of the functions of the soul, such as willing, imagining, believing, sensation, and feeling. Since Cottingham himself concedes that Descartes denies all thought to animals (since the latter do not use language), 27 does this not mean that animals, therefore, lack all feeling? Rather, Cottingham insists that "thinking" does not include all feeling and sensation, but rather, only those forms which involve reflective mental awareness. Therefore, nonhuman animals, perhaps, could have feelings, but without a higher level of awareness.
Cottingham's speculation is undermined by a passage, written five years before Descartes' demise, which clearly indicates that even unreflective feelings are also "thoughts":
ALERTthe term 'passion' can be applied in general to all the thoughts which are thus aroused in the soul by cerebral impressions alone, without the concurrence of its will, and therefore without any action of the soul itself; for whatever is not an action is a passion. Commonly, however, the term is restricted to thoughts which are caused by some special agitation of the spirits. For thoughts that come from external objects, or from external dispositions of the body--such as the perception of colours, sounds, smells, hunger, thirst, pain, and the like--are called external or internal sensations. 28
The above passage includes as "thoughts" feelings such as pain, which are aroused "without any action of the soul itself." Reflective awareness, by contrast, would seem to require an action of the soul, namely, reflection itself (i.e., thinking about things) 29 On the strength of the above passage, if Descartes denies thoughts to animals, he would also seem to deny conscious feelings of pain. Indeed, the passage speaks of feelings and sensations as aroused in the soul, the "thinking" soul, which is denied to animals (although, as we shall see, he does ascribe to them a "corporeal soul"). The only "feelings" that animals could have are the bodily mechanics which underpin, or perhaps somehow constitute, the first grade of sensation.
Cottingham himself cites the following from Descartes: "I should like to stress that I am talking of thought, not of sensation; forALERTI deny sensation to no animal, in so far as it depends on a bodily organ." 30 Cottingham thinks this is evidence in favour of his thesis. Yet Descartes seems firmly to locate animal sensation in the physical workings of organs: he implies that he denies any sensation of an animal which goes beyond this, into the second and third grades of sensations. He admits the existence of animal sensations, which depend on bodily organs--but not on minds. Therefore, his dualism is self-consistent, in that it does not permit conscious sensations in animals. Certainly, Cottingham's evidence is no sufficient basis for either denying RSI or rendering Descartes' mind-body dualism "fuzzy" in its reference to nonhuman animals. Cottingham confesses that this "fuzziness" is a "major difficulty" in defending his own interpretation. 31
Cottingham further speculates that "Descartes was never completely comfortable with strict dualism, however emphatically he affirmed it," as the commentator holds that "strict" dualism "makes nonsense of Descartes' common-sense attribution of feelings like hunger to animals." 32 He goes so far as to hold that "Descartes may not have been completely consistent." 33 Calling a philosopher inconsistent, and indicating that the thinker who is most definitively identified with the very idea of dualism did not himself wholly identify with that doctrine is quite an interpretive leap. By contrast, RSI fits neatly with Descartes' profession of mind-body dualism. There is simply no room for conscious sensations in animals, on Descartes' dualistic view, and Descartes would not have it any other way. On the Cartesian world view, animals are nothing other than mechanized, and wholly nonconscious, extended substances.
Cottingham, however, acknowledges Descartes' distinction between animal joy, which is purely physiological, and the feeling of joy that we, as humans, experience. The latter-day commentator criticizes Descartes for using the term "joy," which is "an inescapably 'mental' predicate." 34 However, Descartes is merely consistently applying his three grades of sensation. As odd, or counterintuitive, as that usage might be, Descartes is neither being inconsistent, nor "fuzzy," at least not in the way that Cottingham alleges. On RSI, we experience the first, second, and third grades of joy, but nonhumans, at most, only instantiate the first grade.
V. Marjorie Grene's Alleged "Incoherence"
Grene, seven years after Cottingham's article (which she does not cite), is also sensitive to the apparent variances in Descartes' writing about feeling with respect to animals. As we have seen, the variance is only that animals do not nearly have the same kind of feeling as humans. As Grene would have it, however, Descartes' stance is simply "incoherent":
ALERTwhen [Descartes] does talk about animalsALERT, 'passion' language creeps into his discourse about these alleged automata, in a way in which, in earlier pronouncements about beasts, it had not done. Such encroachment reflects, I believe, a fundamental incoherence in the Cartesian teaching about emotion,ALERT35
The alleged "incoherence," on the part of Descartes, is said to follow from both his asserting and denying that animals can feel. Thus we find that the second chapter of her book, Descartes, is entitled: "Cartesian Passions: The Ultimate Incoherence." 36 Her view, like Cottingham's, makes reference to some of the puzzling statements from one of the letters of Descartes (to More) which Cottingham considers, which suggests that animals can feel anger. After all, she asks, how can anger be interpreted other than as a feeling? 37 At the same time, she acknowledges the Cartesian "doctrine of the bete machine, which denies feelings of any kind to the beastsALERT." 38 Recall, on a related note of incoherence, that Cottingham holds that animal feeling may implicitly be inconsistent with dualism. In any case, the fate of SI and RSI would be rendered uncertain, on Grene's view, which, in turn, might lend itself to Harrison's opinion (examined next) that Descartes himself did not know what to think on the question of animal feelings. However, upon ever closer examination, we shall see with even more surety that Descartes is always in agreement with RSI--although perhaps not SI. Never does he reject the substance of RSI, nor express any actual uncertainty about it.
VI. Harrison's Case Both For and Against RSI
Another seven years after Grene's book, Peter Harrison (who, in turn, does not cite Grene's work) questions both SI (and, by extension, RSI), and also Cottingham's revisionist view. Descartes is simply agnostic on the issue at hand, according to Harrison. Is this alternative revisionist view borne out? Harrison adduces three new pieces of evidence that allegedly support Cottingham's view: (1) Descartes never states that, since animals cannot suffer, therefore God cannot rightly be blamed for their suffering; (2) Descartes had a dog whom he treated well, and with "much affection," and (3) Descartes makes no succinct statement about animal awareness. 39
I shall respond, in order, to each of these claims. Let it be noted, first, that it does not matter whether or not Descartes draws such an explicit theological corollary to his view. We are concerned with what he does say, not with what he does not write. What he does affirm supports a somewhat modified version of the traditional interpretation, which will be even more evident upon considering a wealth of further evidence, in the next section, which Cottingham, Grene, and Harrison fail to address. As for the second point, it seems fair to say that human affection is variable enough to account for Descartes doting upon his dog. It is even possible that Descartes may have marveled at his pet as a wondrous, divinely crafted "machine," and loved him accordingly. No succinct statement is made about animal awareness? Actually, we will soon learn that this is false. However, to the extent that such statements are absent, Descartes' is a complex view, one that needs to be comprehended systematically, including with reference to his three-tiered model of sensation. It would seem, then, that these three bits of "evidence," in support of Cottingham's position, are altogether insubstantial.
However, Harrison also concedes key points in favour of SI (and, in effect, RSI) which, of course, count against Cottingham's own view. Harrison, like myself, stresses Descartes' statement: "I do not deny sensation [in animals], insofar as it depends on a bodily organ." I find that Harrison's thoughts on this passage accord, to an extent, with my own. He writes: "sensation is a feature of bodily organs. For Descartes this meant that animal sensation was to be understood as a mechanical process, not as something which took place in the soul. As such, sensations need not be conscious." 40 We have already seen that this obvious subtext of the passage somehow escaped Cottingham's scrutiny. Harrison himself makes no reference to the three grades of sensation, but nonetheless comes to the idea (which the passage itself clearly implies) that animal sensations are, in any case, somehow physical. He additionally notes that Descartes denied that animals can think, and cites, unlike Cottingham, an important passage from a letter to Mersenne (discussed below), which states that pain exists only in the understanding. 41 This would seem to deny that animals, who are presumed to lack all understanding, can feel pain. However, this does not manifestly count in favour of Descartes holding an agnostic position, as Harrison would have it, on the question of whether animals can suffer.
After giving reasons both (putatively) for and against the idea that animals can (consciously) feel, Harrison does not conclude that Descartes was "fuzzy-minded," but rather, "cautiously agnostic on the whole question." 42 So Descartes entertained at least two competing lines of reasoning, and remained undecided as to which is the most cogent? Harrison concludes: "[Descartes] did not adamantly insist that animals could not feel (and this is why few passages can be found to this effect), but rather showed that there are no irresistible reasons for asserting that they do." 43 This is Harrison's main contention, which neither accounts for the clarifying effect of applying the three-tiered model, nor for a number of other passages that are considered below. That Harrison did not at all succeed in reinforcing Cottingham's own troubled view also tells in favour of RSI.
VII. A Body of Omitted Evidence in Favour of RSI
A wealth of material is left out of account by the three renegade Descartes scholars in assessing their subject's position on animal feeling. All of it well coheres with RSI, and perhaps not at all with its rejection, if the body is considered as a whole. Some of these bits of evidence occur after the 1641 statement of the three-tiered theory of sensation, and others before. The coherence here suggests that Descartes bore in mind a view that was in complete agreement with the formal statement of the three grades of sensation, long before he explicitly articulated this theory in his Meditations. In any event, the idea that animals only somehow have "physical" or "organic" passions and sensations is unmistakable from very early on in the Cartesian corpus. Although some interpretation is required, in light of Descartes' three-grades-of-sensation theory, I hold that RSI can plausibly be borne out, in the end. For example, consider the following passage, from a letter by Descartes to the Marquess of Newcastle, in 1646:
As for the movements of our passions, even though in us they are accompanied by thought because we have the faculty of thinking, it is nevertheless very clear that they do not depend on thought, because they often occur in spite of us. Consequently they can also occur in animals, even more violently than they do in human beings, without our being able to conclude from that that animals have thought.
Even though it is asserted, here, that animals have "passions," it is hinted that they do not have the same kind as those of human beings. Animals' passions "do not depend on thought," and so would seem to be nonconscious, first-grade sensations. In The Passions of the Soul, Descartes writes that "passions" are physical aspects of the circulatory system, a kind of rarefied blood. So it is unsurprising that the mechanist should attribute such "passions" to nonhuman animals. We consider passions, here, for to Descartes, feelings are considered to be passions, as well as sensations. 45
Another passage suggests that animals have passions, but may also superficially be taken to imply that animals think:
The passions almost always cause the goods they represent, as well as the evils, to appear much greater and more important than they are, thus moving us to pursue the former and flee from the latter with more ardour and zeal than is appropriate. Likewise, we see that animals are often deceived by lures, and in seeking to avoid small evils they throw themselves into greater evils. 46
Let it be noted, straight off, that "seeking" does not occur in the original text. 47 Descartes is not, therefore, attributing the mental function of intending to animals. However, the idea that animals are "deceived by lures" is, indeed, an accurate translation by Cottingham, and it would seem to imply that animals have the wrong mental impression of a situation. Does this mean that animals can think, in Descartes' sense of the term? Rather, Descartes probably holds a mechanistic idea which foreshadows B. F. Skinner's "stimulus-response mechanism." The seventeenth-century thinker may have thought of lures as things that are "sensed" by animals, according to the first grade of sensation, which cause "animal machines" to react in the way that their Craftsman intended. This is the physicalistic way in which Descartes always spoke of passions in animals, even though he compares humans and nonhumans with the comparative, "likewise," in the above passage. The Cartesian framework suggests a rather narrow basis for comparison, here, pertaining to how passions can mislead, rather than to any notion that nonhuman animals have the same sorts of passions as humans.
The interpretation that animals do not have full-fledged passions, as humans do, is borne out in the following passage from the Discourse of Method: "And we must not confuse speech with the natural movements which express passions and which can be imitated by machines as well as by animals." 48 This passage would suggest that Descartes' statements that animals express joy, and so forth, as cited by Cottingham, are really statements that animals merely imitate the passion of joy in the full, (self-)conscious sense of joy. That is, animals lack the second and third grades of joy, but their bodies may still dance about, or they may call out in ways that are suggestive of elation. However, the first grade of joy would only amount, perhaps, to certain forms of physical movements and dispositions.
The next piece of evidence, from The Passions of the Soul, further confirms the idea that the passions in animals are thoroughly physicalistic:
And the same [disposition of the brain through habit] may be observed in animals. For although they lack reason, and perhaps even thought, all the movements of the spirits and of the [pineal] gland which produces passions in us are nevertheless present in them too, though in them they serve to maintain and strengthen only the movements of the nerves and muscles which usually accompany passions and not, as in us, the passions themselves. 49
This last piece of writing (which was introduced very briefly in Section IV) clearly suggests that, for animals, the movements of the physical (i.e., animal) spirits, and of the pineal gland (which produces passions in us), lead to movement of the nerves and muscles, but not--as in the case of humans--to the passions themselves. So animals lack authentic passions, in the usual sense, although they may have them in Descartes' peculiar first grade of sensation. The qualification, "as in us," is significant, in that it does not rule out the first grade of sensation for animals, but only passions as we experience them.
Descartes is equally as skeptical about the nature of sensations in animals as he is about their passions. We have already noted that both of these terms encompass feelings. The logical implication is that animal pain is not only of the first grade of sensation, but also, insofar as sensations and passions overlap, of the "first grade of passions" (although Descartes never uses that locution). We have just seen that animal passions are different from our own, and are said to lack thought, only involve physical movements, and mimic, at most, the full-fledged passions of humans. Now we move on from Descartes' use of the term "passions," and on to his explicit consideration of "sensations." In the following words of Descartes, he seems to deny any but, perhaps, a first grade of sensation in animals:
We observe in animals movements similar to those which result from our imaginations and sensations; but that does not mean that we observe imaginations and sensations in them. On the contrary, these same movements can take place without imagination, and we have arguments to prove that they do so take place in animals, as I hope to show clearly by describing in detail the structure of their limbs and the causes of their movements. 50
This passage might suggest that animals only seem to have imagination or sensation, based on the bodily movements of these creatures. Rather, Descartes appears to propose a purely physical explanation of bodily movements, based on "the structure of the limbs," and also, presumably, other organic factors. The first sentence does not deny sensation in animals, but merely denies that animal movements entail the existence of imagination and sensation in such beings. Yet the denial of conscious sensation seems to be implicit in the rest of the passage, in which it is stated that Descartes hopes to prove that movements can take place without imagination. Whether he means that all of their movements occur without imagination is not explicitly stated. However, the fact that he seeks to investigate apparently nonconscious animal movements by clearly describing "the causes of their movements," rather than "the cause of many of their movements," is suggestive of a vision of animals as moving machines, without any sensations that extend beyond the first grade.
The hypothesis that Descartes seeks to "explain away" all ascriptions of conscious sensation, in animals, is confirmed in the following piece of evidence:
My critics go on to say that they do not believe that the ways in which beasts operate can be explained 'by means of mechanics without invoking any sensation, life or soul' (I take this to mean 'without invoking thought'; for I accept that the brutes have what is commonly called 'life', and a corporeal soul and organic sensation)ALERT51
Importantly, Descartes attributes "organic" sensation to animals, and this would seem to indicate, as before, that sensation is accorded to animals only "in so far as it depends on a bodily organ." That is, on Descartes' usage, corporeal, first-grade sensation. Note, too, the concession that animals have a "corporeal soul." The latter is purely physical or mindless. 52 Indeed, Descartes follows the Bible in holding that the souls of brutes are "nothing but their blood," after Leviticus 17:14, and that "their blood is their soul," as stated in Deuteronomy 12:23. 53 Descartes writes that "animals lack a mind. So the term 'soul' is ambiguous as used of animals and human beingsALERT"54 I do not suppose that Descartes is quite so "fuzzy-minded" as Cottingham thinks. Rather, the former thinker holds that animals have a purely physical soul, and that the animal realm of sensation is also of the physical, as described by bodily movements, impacted organs, the flow of blood, animals spirits, and so on.
Moreover, RSI is epitomized, unmistakably, in the passage which follows. It is remarkable that this segment of the corpus is omitted by Cottingham as an obvious counter-example. Harrison, to his credit, considers the passage, 55 but unfortunately concludes that Descartes is an "agnostic" on the question of animal feeling. It is also curious that the passage is not used by animal liberationists, such as Tom Regan and Peter Singer, who fail securely to implicate Descartes in denying animal feelings in the ordinary sense. Consider the following:
I do not explain the feeling of pain without reference to the soul. For in my view pain exists only in the understanding. What I do explain is all the external movements which accompany this feeling in us; in animals it is these movements alone which occur, and not pain in the strict sense. 56
It is impossible to reconcile Cottingham's and Harrison's respective theses with this passage, and the fact that it coheres with all of Descartes' utterances also counts against Grene's "incoherence" thesis. Pain is first associated with the soul, but recall that the soul associated with animals is strictly corporeal. Therefore, pain in animals would have to be on the first, physicalistic level of sensation, even though Descartes, by his use of given examples, places pain in the second grade, in his passage which actually differentiates these grades. The assertion, "pain exists only in the understanding," further indicates that pain is associated with the incorporeal soul that thinks--which animals lack, to Descartes. Note that "understanding" and "thought" are often used interchangeably, in Descartes' writings. 57 Finally, the last two sentences of the piece of evidence now under review leave no room whatsoever for animals having any conscious feelings of pain (and, therefore, conscious feelings per se, insofar as pain is paradigmatic of such experiences). For it is stated that, if one considers the external movements in humans which accompany our pains (one may think, here, of wincing, writhing, screaming, and so forth), it is only such physical movements that occur in nonhuman animals, clearly implying that the conscious feeling itself is absent. There is no "logical space" here--to use a Wittgensteinian phrase--for conscious feeling in animals on the Cartesian world picture. The certainty here overrules both Cottingham's assertion of conscious animal feeling in Descartes, and Grene's and Harrison's claim that Descartes was not, himself, clearly decided on the issue.
The fact that Descartes, here, denies animal pain in the strict sense also indicates that he did not take very seriously his peculiar, first grade of sensation, which is purely physical. By "strict sense," he might have meant how the term "pain" is popularly used, or commonly understood, i.e., as a conscious experience. If first-grade pain is not pain in "the strict sense," then it is hard to see how first-grade sensation, as a whole, could be construed as sensation in the strict sense. In any event, Descartes' passage which delineates the three grades of sensation does, again, consign the example of pain to the second grade, so it is not obvious from such a classification that animals, which are confined to the first grade (and the passage currently under consideration also confines animals solely to the physical realm), could feel pain in any sense at all. One might recall that such a logically possible denial would be true of SI, which denies any kind of feeling to animals. However, RSI is another matter. The three-tiered model would perhaps allow for purely physical sensations, or passions of a painful sort, in a way that accords with the several examples of animal "feeling" which we have already considered from Descartes' own writings. Such "physical pain" may not be pain "in the strict sense" (or in accord with the orthodox way of using the term, "pain") but it might still have a peculiar place in Cartesian metaphysics.
In the end, it is not only self-conscious feeling, but all conscious feeling, which is denied to animals by Descartes. This is nothing more nor less than RSI. Harrison may consider the last passage cited to fall short of a "definitive statement," as he would have it, because he may find that denying animals pain only "in the strict sense" leaves some uncertainty--or room for pain in some other sense. Another sense of "pain" does indeed exist, but it is neither vague nor indeterminate, nor is it conscious: it is of the first grade of sensation. The three-tiered model of sensation, duly applied, leaves little or no room for indeterminacy of interpretation here, but rather, a fuller, fairer, and more precise statement of Descartes' actual view. Any seeming ambiguities in the bits of evidence considered, when placed in their overall context, resolve themselves into the form of the revised traditional interpretation. Cottingham cannot rightly persist with his contention that, to Descartes, animals lack self-consciousness, but do possess consciousness, not least of all on the strength of this last relevant pronouncement of Descartes: "ALERTwe refuse to allow that [other animals] have any awareness of things, but merely grant them a purely corporeal imagination." 58 This quotation is from very early in Descartes' philosophical career, 1628. The passage is to be found in Cottingham's renowned translation of Descartes' philosophical writings, The Philosophical Works of Descartes, but not, alas, in Cottingham's essay on Descartes and nonhuman animals. The statement in question clearly implies that animals have no consciousness at all--of pain, or anything else--but are purely physical beings, which both act and react mechanically. Descartes, for all that we can charitably and attentively interpret from his work, held this view from early on until his death.
VIII. Conclusion
Very few people today actually undertake to defend the idea that nonhuman animals cannot feel. Harrison himself takes this view. 59 Descartes, if he were alive today, would willingly side with this frequently despised minority position, although with some qualification. (Animals can supposedly "feel" in the first grade of sensations.) He has not been "rescued" from his epistemically and ethically dubious view by his revisionist interpreters--nor would he wish to be. He would, however, not be content to be labeled "agnostic" by Harrison nor "inconsistent" by critics such as Cottingham and Grene. He would perhaps be indignant that these commentators (including one of his most eminent French-English translators, namely Cottingham) did not pay sufficient attention to his work. Inconsistency is a most basic philosophical error, a serious charge which Cottingham and Grene bring to bear without acceptable substantiation.
Still, the standard interpretation, which denies all feelings to animals, does indeed encounter difficulties, and it is these seeming paradoxes which fuel the three revisionists considered in this paper. Their own efforts provided a service, perhaps, in leading to a more plausible view than the so-called "standard interpretation." The revised standard interpretation of Descartes on animal feeling encounters none of the traditional difficulties. RSI in some ways favours the standard interpretation, but in a far more nuanced manner. This essay is not concerned with the (un)acceptability of denying conscious feelings to animals, of metaphysical dualism, or of Descartes' idiosyncratic three grades of sensation. Nonetheless, his theory of sensations, in particular, may seem idiosyncratic at best, and wildly implausible at worst. On the face of it, purely "physical" feelings may not even seem intelligible. However that may be, what has been vindicated here is the historical fact that, in what Descartes calls "the strict sense," he thought animals to be unfeeling brutes.
Notes
1.Rollin writes: "Much of the appeal of Descartes' notion that animals are machines without mental lives must have derived from the mollifying effect which this view of animals must have had on the psyche of researchers in the growing field of physiology, who were forced to work invasively on animals without anesthesia." Bernard Rollin, The Unheeded Cry: Animal Consciousness, Animal Pain and Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 24.
2.See, for example, Peter Carruthers, The Animals Issue: Moral Theory in Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). On p. 53, using a neo-Cartesian model, he disputes the idea that "animals do genuinely have interests to be considered."
3.The most prominent works in this field, which are in keeping with the traditional "Cartesian view of animals," include Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, 2d ed. (New York: Avon Books, 1990), p. 10; Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 3-4; S. F. Sapontzis, Morals, Reason and Animals (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), p. 33; Bernard Rollin, Animal Rights and Human Morality: Revised Edition, 2d ed. (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1992), p. 59; Evelyn B. Pluhar, Beyond Prejudice: The Moral Significance of Human and Nonhuman Animals (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 14.
4.John Cottingham, "'A Brute to the Brutes?': Descartes' Treatment of Animals," Philosophy 53 (1978), p. 551 (hereafter cited as "A Brute").
5.Cottingham, "'A Brute," p. 551. See Norman Kemp-Smith, New Studies in the Philosophy of Descartes (London: Macmillan, 1952), pp. 136 and 140. In fact, the quote that animals are "without feeling or awareness of any kind" is from p. 22, which Cottingham does not cite in his article.
6.Cottingham, "'A Brute," p. 551. See Tom Regan and Peter Singer (eds.), Animal Rights and Human Obligations (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1976), p. 4.
7.Voltaire, "A Reply to Descartes," in Animal Rights and Human Obligations, eds. Tom Regan and Peter Singer, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1989), p. 21.
8.Cottingham, "'A Brute," p. 551. See A. Boyce Gibson, The Philosophy of Descartes (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1932), p. 214.
8.Gibson, p. 204.
10.L. J. Beck, The Metaphysics of Descartes: A Study of the Meditations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 268.
11.Gary Hatfield, "Descartes' physiology and its relation to his psychology," in The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 345.
12.Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1978),
p. 282.
13.Strictly speaking, however, Descartes did accord nonhuman animals a "corporeal" soul, as I discuss below.
14.Cottingham, "A Brute," pp. 551-52.
15. Ibid., pp. 175-6.
16. Ibid.
17.Ibid., p. 558.
18.Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 2-3. See also AT VII 436-7; C II 294-5. (Note: for the purposes of notation, "AT," will refer to the Adam and Tannery translation of Descartes, and "C" will refer to Cottingham (trans.), The Philosophical Works of Descartes, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
19.AT VII 437; C II 295.
20.Regan, p. 4.
21. Ibid.
22.Ibid., p. 3.
23.Cottingham, "'A Brute," p. 556.
24.Ibid.
25.Ibid., pp. 556-57.
26.Descartes, Passions of the Soul. AT XI 369-70; C I 348.
27.Cottingham, "'A Brute," p. 556.
28.Descartes to Princess Elizabeth, 6 October, 1645 (AT IV 310-11; C III 270).
29.Indeed, this active view of thinking is reflected in the Meditations IV, in which judgment is an act of will, or giving assent or denial to various ideas.
30. Ibid., p. 557.
31.Ibid., p. 557.
32.Ibid., p. 559.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35.Marjorie Grene, Descartes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 23.
36.Ibid.
37.Ibid., p. 51.
38. Ibid., p. 38.
39.Peter Harrison, "Descartes on Animals," Philosophical Quarterly 42 (1992): 220-2.
40.Ibid., p. 224.
41. Ibid., p. 222.
42.Ibid., p. 227.
43. Ibid., p. 227.
44.Descartes, to the Marquess of Newcastle, 23 November, 1646. AT IV 573-4; C III 303.
45.Cf., for example, Descartes to Princess Elizabeth, 6 October, 1645 (AT IV 310-11; C III 270). The same feelings are also considered sensations in the passage, cited above, which distinguishes the three grades of sensation.
46.Descartes, Passions of the Soul (1649). AT XI 431;C I 377.
47.See Descartes, Les passion de l'тme (U.R.S.S.: Editions Gallimard, 1969), p. 123. In article 138 of this work, Descartes writes: "nous voyons aussi que les betes sont souvent trompees par des appats. et que pour eviter [in order to avoid--not they are "seeking to avoid" as Cottingham translates] de petits maux elles se precipitent en de plus grands;ALERT" The avoidance may be purely mechanical, on this reading, and need not involve any conscious "seeking."
48.Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637). AT VI 58; C I 140-1.
49.Descartes, Passions of the Soul. AT XI 369-70; C I 348.
50.Descartes to Gibieuf, 19 January, 1642. AT III 479; C III 203-4.
51.Descartes, "Sixth Set of Replies," 1641. AT VII 426; C II 288.
52.Technically, this belies Cottingham's claim, p. 557, that Descartes does not attribute souls to animals.
53.Descartes to Plempius for Fromondus, 3 October, 1637. AT I 414; C III 62.
< A NAME="NOTE54">54.Descartes to Regius, May 1641. AT III 370; C III 181.
55.He reproduces the passage, in French, in a footnote, apparently without carefully considering the full implications for Descartes' view. Harrison notes, p. 222, that the passage is "the closest Descartes comes to a definitive statement of his position," however, it is definitive--full stop--as I believe I demonstrate.
56.Descartes to Mersenne, 11 June, 1640. AT III 85 C III 148.
57.E.g., consider the following from Descartes to Newcastle, 23 November, 1646. AT IV 573; C III 302. "I cannot share the opinion of Montaigne and others who attribute understanding or thought to animals." Even if thought and understanding are not used synonymously here, it is clear that they are both associated with higher functions denied to animals, so it follows that if pain "in the strict sense" exists only in the understanding, then it cannot exist in animals.
58.Descartes, "Rules for the Direction of the Mind," 1628. AT X 415; C I 42. This passage is also cited in
Norman Kemp Smith's book, p. 22.
59.Cf. Harrison's "Theodicy and Animal Pain," Philosophy 64 (January 1989): 79-92, and "The Neo-Cartesian Revival: A Response," Between the Species 9 (Spring 1993): 71-6.
University of Toronto, Canada