Customer Reviews

Treatise of Man (Monographs in History of Science)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

René Descartes' 1629 "Treatise of Man" is a piece of natural philosophy worth noting and reading for a few reasons. Know that I have a long standing antipathy for Descartes for my own personal reasons. In the "Treatise," Descartes attempts to explain the workings of the human body by drawing an explicit comparison between a hypothetical "machine" which operates, ostensibly, "like we do". Descartes spends the best part of the "Treatise" outlining the ways that this machine's senses are informed by the singly material operations of the cardiovascular and nervous systems.

Working on what basically amounts to as a heat-model, Descartes discusses how blood in the heart, and what he calls animal spirits in the brain cause the human machine to function just "as we do" - without the supposed necessity of the soul. He does not dispense with the idea of the soul, however - after all that would get him excommunicated faster than he could have said "cogito ergo sum" - he merely dances around the issue by saying that the major difference between the human machine and "us" is that we have a soul located in its seat, the brain. His purpose, again, is to show how a soul is not necessary to the bodily functions of man - that our bodies all operate the same, and according to rational physical principles.

Descartes can be seen in the "Treatise" as a major contributor to late 17th and early 18th century notions of human passions. To this he contributes the omnipresent image of the filaments with which he says our nervous systems are comprised. Certainly we have all heard phrases like, "tugging on your heartstrings" - this popularly arises out of philosophies like Descartes, who proposes that our physical reactions - to pain, pleasure, etc. - are all the results of these filaments, or cords, within our bodies, which external stimuli act upon, sending messages to our brains. This affects not only reaction, but perception, and even the manifestations of our emotional responses to the external world.

Sight and Touch are Descartes' major focuses in the realm of human sensory perception. Noteworthy in the "Treatise" are Descartes' many example illustrations, scattered generously throughout the text and abundantly provided in this Prometheus Press edition of the "Treatise". From the mundane illustration showing how a person becomes aware of the pain of a fire, to the more unusual visual perception illustrations of a person in profile with one eyeball on top of the other, to the most interesting illustrations of the central "Gland H" in the brain, which becomes erect and points around in response to stimuli - Descartes' illustrations are, for me, the most fascinating part of the "Treatise."

One problem I have with Descartes' "Treatise," is the absolutely arbitrary way he delineates human perception. In Descartes' machine-logic, our perceptions follow and focus on whatever most immediately presents itself to the mind. In this schema - one could be talking to a friend, and completely forget about the friend if a butterfly crosses our line of vision - the ability to focus on one thing for a sustained period of time is something Descartes does not discuss. It leaves the reader, or at least this one, wondering if sustained focus is the province of the soul, which he does not discuss in this work, or if not - how he managed to write so much with the perpetual threat of distraction.