Descartes & Animals
Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was a Jesuit-educated thinker with a vision for standing the mediæval world on its head and placing all human knowledge on a new, scientific foundation. He argued that the soul and body are quite distinct things: soul is thought or consciousness, body is extended matter. In human beings souls and bodies happen to be intimately connected, but it is our soul that is vital to us and the source of our identity. Descartes reached these conclusions by using the ‘method of doubt’: everything can be doubted except the fact that I am here doubting it! Because I doubt and think, I must exist. Thus the inescapable conclusion is that I am a thinker who happens to be connected to a living, human body.
This position is directly opposed to the Catholic position that soul and body are a unity, that soul is the body’s life and that consciousness or thought is but one of our essential attributes. Descartes tried hard to undermine our animality. In fact, he thought animals were actually a sort of machine: they did not have consciousness or thought so were simply moving bodies. Instead, Catholics emphasise the continuity of the whole animal kingdom and our unique status as the ‘rational animal’.
Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was a Jesuit-educated thinker with a vision for standing the mediæval world on its head and placing all human knowledge on a new, scientific foundation. He argued that the soul and body are quite distinct things: soul is thought or consciousness, body is extended matter. In human beings souls and bodies happen to be intimately connected, but it is our soul that is vital to us and the source of our identity. Descartes reached these conclusions by using the ‘method of doubt’: everything can be doubted except the fact that I am here doubting it! Because I doubt and think, I must exist. Thus the inescapable conclusion is that I am a thinker who happens to be connected to a living, human body.
This position is directly opposed to the Catholic position that soul and body are a unity, that soul is the body’s life and that consciousness or thought is but one of our essential attributes. Descartes tried hard to undermine our animality. In fact, he thought animals were actually a sort of machine: they did not have consciousness or thought so were simply moving bodies. Instead, Catholics emphasise the continuity of the whole animal kingdom and our unique status as the ‘rational animal’.
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