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Descartes is often attributed with the coarsest of opinions about animals. Malebranche, one of Descartes’ staunch followers, certainly emphasised this view, “They eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.”[1] A weak, or uncharitable, reading of his work can certainly lead one to such assumptions. The conventional view is summed up by David Sztybel, who writes of Descartes, “A dualist, he believed that only two kinds of substance exist in the universe: mental substance and corporeal, or bodily, substance. Human beings, he thought, are composed of mind (which he equated with the soul) and body. Nonhuman animals, however, he saw as mindless automata or machines. The traditional interpretation is that he even denied that animals have feelings.”[2] Non-human animals, according to Descartes, are nothing but complex automata: they have no souls linking them to the mind of God as do humans, no minds and no ability to reason. They can see, hear, and touch, he concedes, but they are in no sense conscious; they can neither suffer nor feel pain.[3] So goes the argument which elicited such fury from contemporary and subsequent philosophers.
In this essay, I shall attempt to re-assess Descartes’ writings about animals, and show that, in fact, he held no such barbaric and monstrous views. Although not always entirely consistent in his writings on “animal consciousness”, as we would now call it, one can discern a more measured and wholly more “humane” view of our nonhuman relations.
Voltaire (1694-1778), incensed perhaps by the counter-intuitive claim Descartes seems to posit in much of his writing regarding animal feelings, wrote with undisguised disdain, “Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that it may not feel? [H]as it nerves in order to be impassible? Do not suppose this impertinent contradiction in nature.”[4] Criticism has been strong and consistent, and somewhat besmirches an otherwise impeccable philosophical pedigree. Norman Kemp Smith went so far as to call Descartes’ position ‘monstrous’.[5] Indeed, in the century after Descartes, “Cartesian anatomists could blandly claim that the screams of vivisected animals nailed to their work benches were of no more significance than the chimes of a clock, or the piping of a church organ when certain keys were pressed.”[6]
To take the approach explicit in the ‘principal of charity’[7], one needs first to appreciate Descartes’ writing both within its historical context, and in relation to his stated or perceived aims. Descartes was writing in an era when direct observations of nature and behaviour led naturally to mechanistic interpretations. Descartes posited a designer God who had set in motion the processes of nature and was now content to sit and watch the Universe unfold. He makes frequent and detailed comparisons to ‘automata or moving machines’, the following being representative: “they regard this body as a machine which, having been made by the hands of God, is incomparably better ordered than any machine that can be devised by man, and contains in itself movements more wonderful than those in any such machine.”[8] Descartes was also writing with a clear purpose in mind – he was at pains to deny to animals the idea of a soul. The divine nature of humankind was unique and he had to be able to explain animal movement and appearance of will, sense and intelligence in mechanistic terms which could avert the necessity for a soul – and hence immortality, since “...it is less probable that worms, gnats, caterpillars and the rest of the animals should possess an immortal soul, than that they should move in the way machines move”.[9]
This view would appear to exclude non-human animals, not only from having consciousness, reason or thought, but also from having any sort of sensation. If animals are simply moving machines, they can have no sense of self, a concept of ‘I’, for sensations to occur to. Thus no pain is felt, no fear, no joy, no hunger, no anything. This seems intuitively ridiculous. Indeed, it is this traditional reading of Descartes which Cottingham (1978) refers to when he describes the notion that “animals are totally without feeling” as a “monstrous thesis”.[10]
There is good reason for looking for a more charitable reading of Descartes in this regard. His conclusions seem to open the door to a moral-free zone on animal welfare. Many have indeed directly cited Descartes in defence of practices such as vivisection (which he may or may not have performed himself). Any theory which can be so interpreted needs carefully looking at, given the huge implications not just for the moral status of animals but also for human actions in general. Kant, although never conceding consciousness to animals, was quite ardent about the fact that they ought not to be tortured or harmed unnecessarily, due to the effect this behaviour might ultimately have on our actions towards other humans, desensitizing us to brutality and sadism[11]. This is more recently echoed by Carruthers (1992) when he states that such acts as torturing an animal “...betray an indifference to suffering that may manifest itself...with that person’s dealing with other rational agents.”[12]
Cottingham argues that much of the recognised response to Descartes Is based upon a misunderstanding of his position. Harrison (1992) outlines Cottingham’s position by listing assertions as follows:
(1) “Animals are machines.
(2) Animals are automata.
(3) Animals do not think.
(4) Animals have no language.
(5) Animals have no self-consciousness.
(6) Animals have no consciousness.
(7) Animals are totally without feeling.
No-one disputes the Descartes held (1)-(5). The mistake many commentators have made, in Cottingham’s view, is the assumption that in holding to these weaker assertions, in particular (2) and (3), Descartes was thereby committed to (7).”[13]
The argument hinges on the fact that there is no direct and necessary relationship between the label of ‘automata’ and the notion of a lack of feeling. There is indeed precedent for considering human beings as conscious automata, totally negating the corollary that automata are without feelings.[14] That animals do not think, have no language and are not self-conscious would all be areas of uncertainty today. Research not available to Descartes – indeed unthinkable to him – proves animal thought exists[15], shows that language is utilised[16] and suggests self-consciousness.[17] However, in assessing Descartes’ own position, it is necessary to go back to his own assertions about thought and language. Descartes essentially had two arguments against thought and reason in animals, his Language-Test argument and his Action-Test argument.
For Descartes, occurrent thought and declarative speech were inextricably bound. They are propositional, independent of stimuli and independent of action.[18] Indeed, Descartes assumed that declarative speech was directly indicative of reason: “...it has never been observed that any brute animal has attained the perfection of using real speech, that it to say, of indicating by word or sign something relating to thought alone and not to natural impulse. Such speech is the only certain sign of thought hidden in a body.”[19] Descartes thought that the only explanation for lack of speech (in which he included sign language) in animals was the concomitant lack of thought. His later writing seems to conclude that all forms of thinking and consciousness depend upon thought in this sense, which is the reason many commentators conclude that Descartes hence intended that animals be viewed as mindless machines. One response to the Language-Test is that Descartes failed to consider that dispositional thinking is not dependent upon occurrent thought – the fact that a cat is unable to entertain the thought the bird is in the cage is no reason to doubt that the cat thinks the bird is in the cage.[20]
The Action-Test argument attempted to prove that animals lack reason. Descartes saw reason as “a universal instrument which can be used in all kinds of situations”.[21] So for Descartes, reason is the acting on general principles which can be transferred to a range of novel situations. Descartes thought that although some animals act in agreement with such principals, they do not act for them. Descartes thought that “many animals show more skill than we do in some of their actions, yet the same animals show none at all in many others”[22] constituted evidence that they lacked intelligence – rather than what more recent thought would probably identify as being domain-specific intelligence.[23]
One must remember the context of Descartes’ philosophy. As already stated, he was in the business of denying immortal, non-corporeal souls to animals, as well as using the bête-machine concept to support his cogito argument. Descartes needed to prove that animals operated on a different level to humans. Humanity needed to have an intimate connection to God, in the guise of an immortal soul. Any suggestion that animals also had such a soul would denigrate man. Returning to Cottingham’s list of assertions, we see that Descartes indeed held to (3) and (4), but it is still not clear that he directly supports either (6) or (7).
Whilst Descartes clearly states in his Second Meditation that “what is called ‘having sensory perception’ is strictly just this, and in this restricted sense of the term it is simply thinking,” he is often harshly translated as having said to feel is to think. But Descartes also states, in a letter to Mersenne, that “in my view, the feeling of pain exists only in the understanding”, and in denying thought and understanding to animals, it is perhaps a logical conclusion that they therefore cannot experience pain. However, this quotation from that letter continues: “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.”[24] What Descartes is alluding to is that an animal cannot feel pain in the sense that it is aware that it exists and that it is ‘it’, the specific animal itself, which is feeling pain. He is also making the argument that we cannot assume cause from observations of effects (Russell’s argument from analogy used in support of the existence of other human minds): in a later letter to Gibieuf in 1642, he states, “We observe in animals movements similar to those which result from our imaginations and sensations; but that does not mean we observe imaginations and sensations in them.”[25] This argument, that an assumption of animal feeling based on analogy is untenable, does not amount to a declaration that animals have no feeling whatsoever. He writes clearly in the Sixth Set of Replies: “My critics...say they do not believe that the ways in which the 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 [my italics])”[26] In his February 1649 letter to More, Descartes again stresses that in denying thought to the animals, he is denying neither life nor sensation: “I do not deny life to animals, since I regard it as consisting simply in the heat of the heart; and I do not even deny bodily sensation, in so far as it depends on a bodily organ.”[27] So Descartes is describing animal sensations as a mechanical process, not something occurring in a spiritual soul, and something which can occur outside of consciousness. Descartes’ apparent ambivalence in this regard might in part be explained by the difference in meaning between passions and feelings. It is only the latter he seeks to deny animals, accepting that they can have physical sensations – passions – without being necessarily aware of them in the sense that we are aware of ourselves when we consciously ‘feel’.
In seeking to deny animal souls, Descartes was operating within the context of few alternatives. He needed to make animals different from humans, and sought to do this at the level of thought. To the suggestion that animals might think as we do, he wrote in a letter to the Marquis of Newcastle that, “This is unlikely, because there is no reason to believe it of all animals without believing it of all, and many of them such as oysters and sponges are too imperfect for this to be credible.”[28] Descartes was perhaps guilty of lack of vision, failure to recognise the possibility of a continuum of consciousness, rather than a black and white dividing line, but almost certainly was not suggesting, for example, that vivisected animals felt no pain at all. The passage oft cited to suggest this, referring to the cries of an animal as being akin to the sound from a church organ, was a direct reference to self-consciousness. Writing to More, Descartes state that, ‘though I regard it as established that we cannot prove there is any thought in animals, I do not think that it is thereby proved that there is not, since the human mind does not reach into their hearts.”[29] Descartes, then, lays out his case – he has attempted to show that animals cannot think as we do, in order that they can have no claim to equality under God, but feels it cannot be proven one way or the other. Harrison (1992) concludes that “Perhaps the most accurate way to characterise Descartes’ view is to say that he was cautiously agnostic on the whole question. He did not adamantly insist that animals could not feel ...but rather showed that there are no irresistible reasons for asserting that they do.”[30]
Descartes wrote about animal consciousness in the context of his religious beliefs and the prevailing dualistic view of his time. He wrote about automata and machines as a direct response to observations of nature, and from the necessity to defend human divinity. Even so, he was no brute. He questioned the grounds for attributing consciousness to animals. He never claimed that they could feel, but that their feeling somehow did not matter, which would have been a crueller thesis. Perhaps Descartes had become so obsessed with the idea of consciousness, that he was guilty of missing a more important point, one famously and eloquently put by Bentham: “The question is not, can they reason? nor can they talk? but, can they suffer?”[31]
Bibliography
Bentham, Jeremy Selected Writings on Utilitariansim Wordsworth Classics 2000
Cavalieri, Paola and Singer, Peter (Ed) The Great Ape Project St. Martin’s Griffin Edition 1996
Cottingham, J et al (trans) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Volume 1 CUP 1985
Cottingham, J et al (trans) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Volume 2 CUP 1985
Cottingham, J et al (trans) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Volume 3 CUP 1985
Cottingham, John Descartes Blackwell Publishing 1986
De Fontenay, Elisabeth Le silence des bêtes Fayard 1998
DeWaal, Franz Primates and Philosophers Princeton University Press 2006
Gaukroger, Stephen, Schuster, John and Sutton, John (Ed) Descartes’ Natural Philosophy Routledge 2000
Hursthouse, R. ‘Ethics, Humans and Other Animals’ Routledge 2000
Sunstein, C.R. and Nussbaum, M.C. (Ed) Animal Rights OEP, 2004
Williams, B. Descartes – The Project of Pure Enquiry Routledge 1978 (This edition 2005)
Website resources:
Dawkins, Marian Stamp, “Animal Minds and Animal Emotions” American Zoologist, Vol. 40, No. 6 (Dec., 2000), pp. 883-888 Oxford University Press http://www.jstor.org/stable/3884335 Accessed: 08/03/10
Harrison, Peter “Descartes on Animals” The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 167 (Apr., 1992), pp. 219-227. Blackwell Publishing for The Philosophical Quarterly http://www.jstor.org/stable/2220217 Accessed: 27/02/10
Lurz, Robert, “Animal minds” IEP 2009 http://www/iep.utm.edu/ani-mind/
Murray, Michael J. and Ross Glenn “Neo-Cartesianism and the Problem of Animal Suffering” Faith and Philosophy Journal, University of Notre Dame 2006, VOL 23; NUMB 2, pages 169-190 http://edisk.fandm.edu/michael.murray/Animal.pdf Accessed 01/03/10
Southwell, Gareth “Talking clocks and Deranged Springs” PhilosophyOnline.co.uk 2008 http://www.philosophyonline.co.uk/philosophy-study-resources/descartes-meditations/further-reading/#philosophical
Steiner, Gary “Descartes on the Moral Status of Animals” published in Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie. Volume 80, Issue 3, Pages 268–291, ISSN (Online) 1613-0650, ISSN http://www.referenceglobal.com/doi/abs/10.1515/agph.1998.80.3.268 (Print 0003-9101, 1998)
Thomas, Marion “Are Animal Just Noisy Machines?” Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Autumn 2005) pp425-460 http://www.jstor.org/stable/4331965 Accessed 08/03/2010
Walter, Sven “Epiphenomenalism” 2007 http://www.iep.utm.edu/epipheno/ Accessed 12/04/2010
Wilson, Scott – “Animals and Ethics” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2010 http://www.iep.utm.edu/anim-eth/ Accessed 09/03/10
[1] Nicholas Malebranche, Œuvres complets Ed Rodis-Lewis Paris J. Vrin 1958 2, p. 394 quoted in Harrison, Peter “Descartes on Animals” The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 167 (Apr., 1992), pp. 219-227.
[2] Sztybel, David Descartes,Rene http://sztybel.tripod.com/Descartes.html March 13th 2010
[3] Midgley, Mary “Descartes' Prisoners” Newstateman 24 May 1999 http://www.newstatesman.com/199905240041.htm March 13th 2010
[4] Woolf, H.I. “Voltaire – Animals” The Philosophical Dictionary 1995 (capital [H] mine) http://history.hanover.edu/texts/voltaire/volanima.html
[5] Steiner, Gary “Descartes on the Moral Status of Animals” published in Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie. Volume 80, Issue 3, Pages 268–291
[6] Cottingham, John Descartes 1986 p108
[7] see Hursthouse, R. ‘Ethics, Humans and Other Animals’ Routledge 2000 p4
[8] Cottingham, J et al (trans) Descartes - The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Volume 1 CUP 1985
Discourse on the Method V p139 NB All quotes from Descartes are taken from Vol 1 or 2 of this work.
[9] From correspondence to More 1649, quoted in Williams, B. Descartes 1978 Routledge p273
[10] Cottingham, J. “A Brute to the Brutes?: Descartes’ Treatment of Animals Philosophy 53 (1978) p551 quoted in Murray m.J. and Ross G. “Neo-Cartesianism and the Problem of Animal Suffering” Faith and Philosophy Journal, University of Notre Dame 2006, VOL 23
[11] see Wilson, S. “Animals and Ethics” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2010
[12] Curruthers, P. The Animals Issue: Morality in Practice (CUP – 1992) quoted in Wilson, S 2010 ibid
[13] Harrison, Peter “Descartes on Animals” The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 167 (Apr., 1992), p221.
[14] “Huxley agreed with Descartes that animals are automata, but he was unwilling to accept that they are devoid of mentality: “Sleeping dogs frequently appear to dream. If they do, it must be admitted that ideation goes on in them while they are asleep; and, in that case, there is no reason to doubt that they are conscious” (Huxley 1898, 125). Huxley therefore segregated the question of consciousness from the question of the status of an automaton: animals do experience pain, but that pain is, like their bodily movements, just a result of neurophysiological processes. Animals are conscious automata. In contrast to Descartes, Huxley argued that considerations similar to those about reflex actions in frogs also suggest that we are conscious automata.” Walter, Sven “Epiphenomenalism” 2007 http://www.iep.utm.edu/epipheno/
[15] see, for example, the research of Boutan in Thomas, Marion ‘Are Animals Just Noisy Machines?’ especially p451
[16] see, for example, Fouts, R.S. and Fouts D.H. ‘Chimpanzees’ Use of Sign Language’ pp 28-39 in Cavalieri, Paola and Singer, Peter (Ed) The Great Ape Project St. Martin’s Griffin Edition 1996
[17] see, for example, DeWaal, Franz Primates and Philosophers p69 appendix B – Do apes have a theory of mind? 2006
[18] Lurz, Robert, “Animal minds” IEP 2009 http://www/iep.utm.edu/ani-mind/
[19] Letter to More, 5 February 1649, in Cottingham, J et al (trans) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Volume 3 CUP 1985 p366
[20] Lurz, op cit
[21] in Cottingham (ed) Vol 1 op cit Part Five 57 p 140
[22] in Cottingham (ed) Vol 1 op cit Part Five 59 p 141
[23] Lurz, op cit
[24]Letter to Mersenne, 11 June 1640, in Cottingham (ed) Vol III op cit p148
[25] Letter to Gibieuf, 19 January 1642, In Cottingham ibid p 203
[26] in Cottingham (ed) Vol II 426 p288
[27] Letter to More, February 1649, in Cottingham (ed) Vol III op cit p 366
[28] Letter to the Marquis of Newcastle, 23 November 1646 in Cottingham Vol III op cit p 304
[29] Letter to More, 5 February 1649 op cit
[30] Harrison, Peter 1992 op cit
[31] Bentham, Jeremy. Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation 1780, in Selected Writings on Utilitariansim, chapter XVII, footnote p284
