Descartes Reinvented (review)
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The "reinvented" Descartes of the title denotes the spontaneous Cartesianism of those who, knowingly or not, presuppose or adopt positions resembling those of the historical Descartes. The historical Descartes accepted many propositions Sorell thinks we must reject; what remains, he calls "innocent Cartesianism." It is to the defense of innocent Cartesianism that Sorell's work is largely devoted. The task of the book is twofold: to recover from imputed Cartesianisms those claims that have a real historical relation to Descartes, and then to bring those claims, as serious possibilities, into current debate.
Sorell notes that Cartesianism so-called has, like Marxism, taken on a life of its own. Defending or refuting a "Cartesian view" need not, therefore, have much to do with Descartes himself, and there are passages in Sorell's book where one suspects that the real Descartes has left the room. Nevertheless, the historical implication of the term 'Cartesian' is that what is so-called has "something important in common with what the historical Descartes said" (xxi). I would add 'with what Descartes in particular said'. Otherwise 'Cartesian' risks being a mere synonym of 'rationalist' or 'modern'. Some of the theses of innocent Cartesianism—the ineliminability of the first-person perspective—do owe their prominence to Descartes, in particular; others, like the autonomy of reason, seem to me to have been common property in early modern philosophy.
In keeping with its project, Descartes Reinvented confines itself to topics that preoccupy us now. Transubstantiation, theism, and the whole of Descartes's natural philosophy are out; skepticism, internalism and externalism, foundations, consciousness, reason and emotion (which occasions a well-merited critique of Damasio), feminism, and "speciesism" are in. [End Page 498] Sorell's chapter on consciousness offers a fair sample of his method. The unreconstructed Descartes holds that the self or "I"— knowledge of whose existence withstands all doubt—is a substance. It is joined with matter configured into a "body-machine," from which it is nevertheless really distinct—capable of existing even if the body, or all bodies, did not. Sorell's innocent Descartes drops all claims about substance, and holds only that "consciousness is irreducible" (85). What follows is a discussion of Strawson, Nagel, McGinn, Chalmers, and Dennett, whose conclusion is that, because the mind can be identified, if with any physical thing, only with the entire brain, physical, mechanistic explanations will fall short of explaining consciousness—i.e., the "self-intimatingness" exhibited by some of our thoughts.
That is the residue remaining from the historical Descartes. I won't deny that it is Cartesian. But arguments like the one Sorell presents—though they can be found, for example, in Suárez (who holds that no material thing is capable of reflection)—are not prominent in Descartes (though the fifth part of the Discourse does argue that reason—not reflexive thought—is irreducible). Res cogitans is not primarily an explanatory concept for Descartes. All his explaining is of operations we share with animals and plants; these are reducible. The real distinction between res cogitans and res extensa rests on the claim that no mode of mind is a mode of body and conversely; together with the claim that being a res cogitans suffices for being a substance, that yields the distinction. The real distinction between mind and body no more explains why there are reflexive thoughts than it explains why there are motions. Reconstructing an innocent Cartesian concept of mind whose sole function is to explain certain phenomena requires, as Sorell himself notes (87–88), that we shift the emphasis of Descartes's theory of mind from metaphysics to physiology and psychology; that, in fact, is one reason why Descartes himself has been misunderstood.
The chapter I have just summarized would be accepted, I am sure, without qualm not only as philosophy but as history by many philosophers. It includes, after all, a summary of Descartes's view; hence, it is history. It goes on to argue that a claim extracted therefrom is true; hence, it is philosophy. Sorell's work, which is admirably...
