Descartes: A Biography

c CUNYB/Clarke     December, :

 Descartes: A Biography

Apart from these popular discussions of scepticism and metaphysics,

Descartes may also have seen a need for a pre-emptive strike in defence of

his philosophy of human nature, much of it still unpublished. His criti-

cism of scholastic philosophy and his novel studies on human and animal

behaviour raised doubts about the traditional account of the human soul.

Descartes acknowledged this danger by including a lengthy discussion

of the essential distinction between animals (and other automata) and

human beings in theDiscourse. Unfortunately, this merely drew atten-

tion to the possibly unorthodox implications of his anthropology for those

who, otherwise, might never have noticed them. Accordingly, in the years

betweenand,heoften had occasion to explain the distinc-

tion between ‘animals without reason...automata’ and human beings,

and he tried to do this without reverting to the scholastic language of

forms.

In contrast with these efforts, the Jesuit priest Louis Richeome pub-

lished a typical treatise on the soul in, which he dedicated to

Richelieu:The Immortality of the Soul, certified by natural reasons, by human

and divine testimonies, for the Catholic Faith against Atheists and Libertines.

Richeome referred to the Lateran Council (), as Descartes also does,

which condemned those followers of Aristotle who claimed that the ‘intel-

lectual soul is mortal, or is one in all human beings’.The Jesuit apolo-

gist argued that God created human souls naturally immortal. Therefore,

although it would have been possible for God to annihilate them, it would

imply an unreasonable change of mind on God’s part if He were to do

so.As one might expect, Richeome’s description of the human soul does

not deviate significantly from what had been taught at La Fl`eche when

Descartes was a student. The soul was said to be ‘the primary act and form

of the human body, substantial and spiritual.’

Richeome explains the scholastic term ‘form’ as follows: ‘the form of

gold is the essence and perfection of gold which gives, with its essence, its

accidents, the colour yellow, the low sound, and the softness for melting.’

In a similar way, the human soul determines both the essence of what

counts as human and explains why we have our characteristic properties.

Richeome assumed some version of the body/soul distinction to con-

clude that ‘no soul is bodily, even though the soul of animals and plants

is material’.There were innumerable ways in which the language of

the scholastic tradition – of forms, essences, and suchlike – could have

been used to express the conclusion that Pope Leo X had invited Catholic