Animals as Machines

Rene Descartes believed that only humans have souls. Thus, only humans are capable of thought: animals are entirely mechanical.

When you think that your dog is thinking, then, you are actually just confused by the marvelous intricacy of the machinery.

I used to think that this was a rather straight-forward idea. There would be times when I thought it idiotic and times when I thought it represented a fairly subtle sort of mistake: but in either mood I thought it easily enough grasped. It was, as Descartes himself said of ideas he approved, "clear and distinct."

But recently I encountered an article by John Cottingham that persuades me that getting right what Descartes has to say about animals is a bit complicated. There are ambiguities here.

I should confess here that the Cottingham article is no very new contribution to scholarship. It was published in 1978, and has evaded my attention until this week. Still ... here we are.

 In Part V of RD's DISCOURSE he explains that living bodies in general (including our own) are machines, any one of which "having been made from the hands of God, is incomparably more orderly ... than any of those ... invented by men." Thus, as Descartes said in a letter to Henry More, "all the motions of animals originate from the corporeal and mechanical principle."

Our own bodily machine has a ghost rattling around inside of it, a ghost that can tell itself "I think" and therefore can become aware of --indeed, philosophically certain of -- its own existence. Animals don't have that.

All of this leads to the inference that there is an absolute difference between humans and animals, turning on who can be self conscious and who cannot. But it doesn't necessarily lead to the conclusion some have found therein, that animals are (as Kemp Smith has put it) "incapable of experiencing the feelings of well-being or the reverse, hunger or thirst...."

Cottingham raises the issue of the distinction between consciousness and self-consciousness.  Descartes, at the least, did not unambiguously conflate the two. Animals, their mechanical and soulless nature notwithstanding, may on Cartesian premises be conscious enough to feel.

Cottingham quotes a letter RD wrote to Newcastle: "[A]ll the things which dogs, horses, and monkeys are made to do are merely expressions of their fear, their hope, or their joy; and, consequently, they can do these things without any thought."

So "fear" for example is a feeling not a thought. It is consciousness of a sort but not self-consciousness.

Yet, as Cottingham also tells us, Cartesian metaphysics would be more logical and internally consistent if animals were without feeling. Allowing them consciousness introduces a "strange fuzziness" in Cartesian metaphysics. Not so clear or distinct any more.