Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

advance by their design. By contrast, ‘reason is a universal instrument’

that allows us to respond appropriately to an almost unlimited range of

situations. Descartes appeals at this juncture to the fact that machines need

to be designed or programmed for each specific task that we want them to

perform. His argument hinges on the assumption that it would be close to

impossible for any machine to store in its memory all the responses that it

would need in order to simulate human behaviour. ‘It is morally impossible

foramachine to have enough different dispositions to make it act in every

human situation in the same way as our reason makes us act’ (vi.).

This argument was not an attempt to decide whether animals are con-

scious, or to describe what the subjective experiences of animals may be

like from the perspective of the animals. The argument focused exclusively

on anexplanationof the overt behaviour of animals, and on what must be

postulated about their brains and sensory systems in order to explain their

behaviour. Descartes could not deny that animals listen and respond to

sounds, that they call out to each other, and, in many ways, that they seem

to behave as human beings do. However, he distinguished between natural

signs – such as the cry of pain of a wounded animal – and the conventional

signs used by human beings. As long as this distinction holds, between

the creativity of human language and the inflexible, ‘natural’ signs used

byanimals, Descartes concluded that animals ‘have no intelligence at all

and that it is nature that acts in them in accordance with the disposition

of their organs’ (vi.).

When asked by Newcastle to address this question again nine years

after publishing theDiscourse, Descartes identifies two of the most promi-

nent protagonists of animal thought as Michel de Montaigne and Pierre

Charron (–). He had been given a copy of Charron’sThree Books

of Wisdomin, and, perhaps contrary to his usual practice, he had read

some of it on his travels during the winter of–.Inthe case of Mon-

taigne, it was impossible for any educated Frenchman not to have perused

some pages of his voluminousEssays. Both authors had extolled the inge-

nuity and even the superiority of animals over man and had claimed that

animals have their own languages that we fail to understand in the same

way that they fail to understand us. It was not surprising that they were

viewed in Paris as more or less discreet advocates of the libertine cause.

Descartes’ defensive response, therefore, was consistent with his apolo-

getic objectives in theMeditationsonbehalf of the immateriality of the

human mind.