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René Descartes was a brilliant mathematician. He was also a dedicated metaphysician and is considered the father of modern philosophy. Though a fraction of the length, his Meditations on First Philosophy rival Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as a precedent-setting work in Western philosophy. My talk today will focus on Descartes divisive legacy: the downside of his metaphysics or more specifically, his distinction between mind and body, a distinction that has had huge negative consequences regarding how people think of their essential nature.

There have been a number of intellectually pivotal figures in the history of philosophy, beginning with Socrates (469-399 BCE) and going on to Plato (429?-347), Aristotle (384-322 BCE), Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Rene Descartes (1596-1650), and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). In our own Anglo-American epistemology or theory-of knowledge oriented philosophical tradition, names that come readily to mind are Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), and W. V. O. Quine (1908-2000). In the metaphysically oriented Continental tradition, one thinks of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). But however influential these thinkers were, their ideas influenced relatively limited numbers of people, largely academics. The ideas of a few of these philosophers, for instance those of Aquinas and Nietzsche, were woven into religious and political ideologies and affected many people beyond the academy, but not without distortion and embellishment. Descartes was an exception. His most basic philosophical contribution, the drawing of a fundamental metaphysical difference, gave philosophically authoritative formulation and apparent legitimacy to an idea shared by literally billions of people who, for mainly religious reasons, think of themselves as minds or souls temporarily ensconced in often depreciated physical bodies.

The distinction between the mental and the physical is much older than Descartes, but with the exception of Plato, no Western philosopher prior to Descartes drew the distinction as categorically as he did. For instance, Aristotle distinguished between our physical bodies and what he described as our ‘active’ and ‘passive’ intellects. But while distinct and separate from the body, the active intellect was a communal and essentially impersonal life-force that animated individual bodies. It was the passive intellect that made each of us who we are by holding our awareness and memories, and for Aristotle the passive intellect was inherent to the body and did not survive the body’s death. Aquinas distinguished between the body and the immortal soul, but he subscribed to the doctrine of resurrection, of the eventual revitalization of individuals’ physical bodies, and he deemed resurrection of the body necessary to make whole surviving but essentially incomplete souls.

Contrary to Aristotle and Aquinas’ view of us as physical beings enhanced with mentality or consciousness, Descartes saw us as intrinsically mental, as wholly mental or spiritual entities ensconced in physical or what he deemed ‘extended’ bodies—i.e., bodies having dimensions in space. He saw the mental as exhaustive of our nature, not as precious augmentation of some physical bodies.

Just how did Descartes totally divide the mind and the body? To begin with, in his Meditations on First Philosophy (available to some in 1640 but published in 1641, in Latin and later in French) his primary philosophical objective was to establish what can be known as true with absolute certainty and so to offer a method for acquiring indubitable knowledge. Descartes’ mathematical savvy and successes clearly moved him to find what, if anything, outside mathematics could be known with the same degree of certainty as is available within mathematics. The approach he used to achieve this goal was to engage in what commentators call ‘methodological doubt,’ the doubting of everything, of every thought and sensation he had, every belief he held. To support his doubting Descartes even invented a ‘malevolent deceiver,’ a god-like demon intent on deceiving him about everything in his consciousness. The objective of methodological doubt was to discover and isolate intuitively clear thoughts or ideas that once comprehended cannot be doubted because of their evident and unquestionable truth.

Having applied methodological doubt in the first Meditation, Descartes hit upon the most fundamental and undoubtable truth in the second Meditation: the realization that if he thinks, he must exist. This realization, a preliminary form of which Descartes used in his earlier Discourse on Method but later abandoned, is invariably quoted in that earlier form as the famous cogito: “Cogito, ergo sum” or “I think, therefore I am,” and just as invariably is associated with the Meditations. This is the mistake referred to in the blurb advertising this talk. In his 1637 Discourse on Method, Descartes stated the cogito, in French, as “Je pense donc je suis,” or “Cogito, ergo sum” in Latin. The cogito, including the ‘therefore’ and hence as an argument, would have to run something like: “All things that think, exist; I think; therefore I exist,” thus requiring the suppressed premise: ‘All things that think, exist.’ By 1640 and 1641, the time of the Meditations, Descartes understood that the cogito could not be an argument because the suppressed premise could be challenged or doubted. The cogito was and had to be a direct intuition, so he dropped the ‘therefore.’1

However, as indicated, despite Descartes coming to understand that ‘ergo’ made the cogito an argument requiring a suppressed premise, his acknowledging that the cogito is not an argument but a direct intuition, and the ‘ergo’ formulation not occurring in the Meditations, people insist on including the ‘ergo’ or ‘therefore’ quoting or referring to the cogito. Contrary to this, the cogito is properly stated in the second Meditation as “Ego sum, ego existo” or “‘I am, I exist,’ is necessarily true whenever…it is conceived in my mind.”2

In any case, in the second Meditation Descartes finds the indubitable truth he sought and needed to proceed. If his Meditations project had succeeded as intended,Descartes would have provided us with proof of God's existence and a procedure for acquiring unquestionable knowledge. As it worked out, what Descartes accomplished was to restate a traditional argument for the existence of God, more or less invent another, and establish a false understanding of our nature.

The argument for God’s existence that Descartes restated, in the fifth Meditation, is Anselm’s Ontological argument. Both versions are purely conceptual and appeal to reason alone, basically being the contention that to understand the concept of God as perfect is thereby to understand that God must exist. The argument for God’s existence that Descartes more or less invented is presented in the third Meditation and is a causal argument, mainly being that the idea of a perfect God, as an effect, must have a cause adequate to the idea, and that could only be a perfect God. But these arguments are not our present concern. What concerns us is the articulation of the exceptional single truth that neither methodological doubt nor the malevolent deceiver could impugn, which is that it follows necessarily from the fact that Descartes is thinking that he exists.

Recognizing that if he is thinking, if he is doubting what he believes, he must exist while doing so, in the second Meditation Descartes asks himself what he is, what it is that exists as he thinks and doubts. The answer he gives, in the original Latin, is that he is a res cogitans: a thing that thinks. John Cottingham, in his authoritative translation of the Meditations, translates Descartes’ question and answer as: “But what then am I? A thing that thinks.”3

But the term ‘res’ or ‘thing’ is a wholly neutral reference to an existent. By ‘a thing that thinks’ Descartes does not mean a physical thing, a body that thinks; it is a pure mind or soul that thinks. Descartes used ‘mind’ and ‘soul’ indiscriminately,