Journal of the History of the Neurosciences

2001, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 192194

0964-704X/01/1002-192$16.00
# Swets & Zeitlinger

Descartes' Error Revisited

Antonio R. Damasio

Department of Neurology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA

When I decided on the title Descartes' Error

(Damasio, 1994; 1995), it occurred to me that
one of the rst reviews of the book, perhaps the
rst, might be titled ``Damasio's Error'', and that
it would be authored by someone offended by my
seemingly unkind treatment of Descartes. Disappointingly, that review never materialized until
now, six years after the fact, and so I must begin
by thanking Geir Kirkeben for making it happen.
Under the circumstances, I approached Kirkeben's text with curiosity and enthusiasm, eager
to learn about some important issue that I would
have overlooked, and that would tell me that
Descartes was right, after all, that he did not
separate irrevocably the mind from the body, as
nearly all of us, practicing neuroscientists or
philosophers, have thought. But on the very rst
page of the text, my hopes for something new
vanished, and by the time I reached the end of the
article, they had not returned.
What Kirkeben says on his rst page is that
``Descartes was, without a doubt, a dualist. He
drew a sharp distinction between the immaterial
soul and a material body''. Well, that is Descartes' error, of course! To admit this much and
not consider this the critical issue is a bit like
the story of the nice couples who were having
tea and chatting and never paused to acknowledge
the fact that a large elephant had joined them at
the table. Dualism, as expressed by Descartes, is
a large and breathtaking idea, and it is with that
idea in particular that I have a serious problem. Descartes presents it unequivocally, in lapidary fashion, as for example in the following
passage:

`From that I knew that I was a substance, the

whole essence or nature of which is to think,
and that for its existence there is no need of any
place, nor does it depend on any material thing;
so that this ``me,'' that is to say, the soul by
which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from
body, and is even more easy to know than is the
latter; and even if body were not, the soul
would not cease to be what it is.' (Descartes,
in Cottingham, et al., 1985)
Since Kirkeben does not refute Descartes' error
what could be the purpose of his text? As I see it,
he wishes to accomplish two goals. The rst, is to
call attention to what Descartes did right, in spite
of his error. The second, is to excuse him for
committing the error. The two goals are in partial
conict and, incidentally, neither demonstrates
that I made an error instead.
Let us begin by considering Kirkeben's case
for Descartes. It is true that Descartes was innovative for his time, as a scientist and as a thinker.
He suspected that brain activity was critical for
generating behavior, and even thought that the
brain and the body proper were likely to interact.
Were Descartes to have had the technical means
to do so, he might have wished to investigate how
the brain contributed to the mind. But it is by no
means clear that his program would have led him
to believe what I do regarding brain and mind,
because his framework was hardly ideal: Descartes would have wanted body and mind to work
together to form an automaton without a conscious mind. An illustration of his views can be
gleaned from his proposal for visual perception,

Address correspondence to: Antonio R. Damasio, Department of Neurology, University of Iowa, 200 Hawkins
Drive, Iowa City, IA 52242. Tel.: 1 319 356-4296. Fax: 1 319 353-6277. E-mail: antonio-damasio@uiowa.edu

DESCARTES' ERROR REVISITED

in which ``different kinds of movement of light

globules'' happening in the brain were transferred
to the pineal gland, from where they triggered
``perceptions''. The perception of whatever Descartes presumed might happen in the brain
occurred only beyond the pineal gland, in an
immaterial ``space''. The innovative connection
between body and brain for which Kirkeben
wants to give Descartes credit, produced a
``man-machine'' without a mind. It is entirely
legitimate to say that, for Descartes, the knowable
mind occurs mysteriously and by stealth, and is,
for all intents and purposes, disembodied. Kirkeben admits that ``the problem Descartes' dualism creates is to answer how mechanical
movements can cause conscious experience'', in
other words, how the brain can cause a mind that
comes to consciousness. But that is not a small
problem; that is the problem. The fact of the
matter is that Descartes ended up denying that
the mind could be physical, which is tantamount
to denying that it could be studied scientically.
No amount of clever playing with the meanings of
words like ``imagining'' and ``thinking'' and
``mind'' and ``soul'', can disguise the essence of
the formulation. Descartes did write of imaginings in relation to possible brain activity, but then
of course these imaginings never became mental
until they were perceived, and only the immaterial
side of the equation allowed for perception to
occur, for thinking to happen, for mind to exist,
for soul to be.
The weakness of Descartes' dualistic formulation was not the funny little device of proposing
that the brain connected with the mind via the
pineal gland. That is quite amusing, but one
should hardly expect Descartes to make informed
guesses about the bridges between, on the one
hand, the biology of brain that we concurrently
investigate with the methods of neuroscience, and
on the other, the biology of the mind that we
currently can only investigate with the methods of
cognitive science. Descartes' weakness lies with
the denial of extension to the mind which rejects
its material, physical, biological nature.
Kirkeben's second aim is to excuse Descartes
for his dualism, by saying that ``this is nothing
new. It is hard to nd anyone among his contemporaries who did not attribute an immortal

193

soul to man.'' Since Kirkeben wishes to excuse

Descartes' error on the grounds that his contemporaries thought the same, let me point out that
this is just not so. Spinoza, for example, who was
a contemporary of Descartes and an assiduous
student of his texts, was not a dualist (Spinoza,
see Chief Works). He heaped scorn on Descartes'
dualism and on the pineal gland mechanism; he
believed that mind and body were two aspects of
the same living substance; and he did not think the
soul was immortal either. But I agree that his was
not a popular perspective at the time, and that is
one reason why Spinoza left no intellectual descendants and Descartes did. Thomas Hobbes,
another contemporary and an acerbic critic of
Descartes, also rejected dualism rmly (Cottingham, 1993).
Now, I could help Kirkeben in his excuse of
Descartes by wondering whether Descartes truly
believed in his dualism, and suggesting that there
are really two Descartes rather than one. It may be
that the dualistic formulation, which came late in
his career and diverges somewhat from his writings up to 1633 (the time of the condemnation of
Galileo), was an accommodation designed to
offset possible religious persecution. Descartes
was no longer in France, of course (he had left
in 1628), and was far from Rome, but the Dutch
Reformed Church, although more tolerant than
the Vatican, was not as open as he may have
wished when he took intellectual refuge in Holland. The innovative Descartes that Kirkeben so
admires was received with some alarm in Amsterdam and Leiden and may have been forced to
dissemble. Several hints suggest this may have
been so not the least of which is his chosen
epitaph but it does not matter. The issue is not to
attribute blame or praise to dead philosophers.
The issue is that, for whatever motives, Descartes
is the author of an idea that is emblematic of a
certain view of mind in neuroscience. Of course
we may like many of his other ideas, but the
fact remains that Descartes is known to most
neuroscientists because of that idea. The intellectual stature of Descartes, then and now, and the
fact that he did have a following in philosophy,
made this idea all the more respectable. The fact
that the idea is wrong, made it all the more
pernicious.

194

ANTONIO R. DAMASIO

When Kirkeben comments on the contemporary scientic scene and states that ``the way in
which so-called scientic psychology divides
things up [meaning mind and brain] nds its
major expression in Descartes' dualism'', he
comes close to acknowledging the unwitting,
but still negative, inuence of Descartes all the
way to the present. Some form of Cartesian dualism persists and although we should agree that it
would always be easier to be a dualist than not,
whether or not Descartes ever existed, Descartes'
formulation provided an anchor for the idea.
In closing, let me make the point that Descartes' formulations, the pure man-machine view
and the dualist view, have viable alternatives. It is
possible to conceive of mind states as biological
phenomena, which means that they are material,
physical, and have a denable spatial and temporal extension. The challenge for science today
is to acknowledge that while these phenomena are
specialin the sense that they are only knowable
in the rst-person, by the subject who owns the
organism in which they arisethey are nonethe-

less physically denable. The challenge is enormous, the gap between what we know about
neural patterns and what we experience as mental
patterns has not been lled in, but we do not need
to believe, as Descartes did, that the gap is an
intransposable abyss between the material and the
immaterial. We do not need to believe that our
imaginings are only knowable ``within an immaterial soul''.

REFERENCES
Cottingham J (1993): A Descartes Dictionary. Oxford,
Blackwell.
Damasio AR (1994): Descartes' Error: Emotion,
Reason, and the Human Brain. New York, Putnam.
(also New York, Harper Collins (1995))
Descartes R (1985) In: Cottingham J, Stoothoff R,
Murdoch D, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volumes 1 and 2. Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press.
Spinoza B (1887): The Chief Works of Benedict de
Spinoza. London, G Bell.

Copyright of Journal of the History of the Neurosciences is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content
may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express
written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.