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  • Descartes on Mind-Body Interaction: What’s the Problem?
  • Marleen Rozemond

1. INTRODUCTION

For Descartes the mind is radically different from the body—it is an incorporeal, thinking thing. One of the most frequently raised questions about this view is: how can mind and body interact if they differ in this way? This question has troubled numerous philosophers, and Descartes himself addressed it on several occasions. Many have charged that his dualism is incompatible with mind-body interaction. Bernard Williams has used the phrase “the ‘Scandal’ of Cartesian Interactionism.”1 In a more moderate vein, I will follow R. C. Richardson and speak of the Heterogeneity Problem.2

This problem is often treated as if it was new with Descartes’s dualism because his view that the mind is incorporeal is usually approached as if new. But the incorporeity of the mind or the soul was surely not a novelty introduced by Descartes. In the history of Western philosophy it is at least as old as Plato—a fact often ignored in discussions of Descartes’s dualism. More directly relevant to Descartes, the incorporeity of the mind was generally accepted by the Aristotelian scholastics, although their conceptions of mind and body were also different in important ways. And, what is particularly interesting for my purposes here, the scholastics saw serious obstacles to mind-body interaction.

In this paper I will focus on only one direction of interaction, the action of body on mind, which Descartes discusses most frequently in relation to sensation. I will focus in this paper on sensation. In discussions of the Heterogeneity Problem in Descartes it is usually assumed that there is just one question, which concerns interaction in both directions.3 But we shall see that both [End Page 435] Descartes and the scholastics treated the two directions of interaction in very different ways. Nevertheless for the sake of brevity I will sometimes speak of mind-body interaction where only the action of body on mind is at stake.

A question we must ask ourselves is: what exactly is the problem with mind-body interaction for the view that the mind is incorporeal? The first purpose of this paper is to examine what Descartes and the scholastics thought about this question. I will argue that neither saw the Heterogeneity Problem, the brute fact that mind and body are radically different, as a source of trouble. The scholastics thought that there is a very specific problem that affects the action of body on mind, but not the action of mind on body. Matters are more complicated in Descartes. He offered some rather dismissive remarks about the Heterogeneity Problem, but on the other hand, his descriptions of mind-body interaction have suggested to interpreters that he did worry about the Heterogeneity Problem. Thus he referred to bodily states as occasions for sensation, and he spoke of brain states giving signs to the mind to form ideas. The apparent tensions generate a confusing picture. I will contend that this confusion can be cleared up if we recognize that Descartes’s talk of occasions and signs in his accounts of sensation is not at all motivated by a preoccupation with the Heterogeneity Problem, or, indeed, any kind of problem that arises from the difference between mind as thinking and body as extended. Descartes was concerned about a very different problem.

Although Descartes and the scholastics were preoccupied with different problems, we will see that there is overlap between the solutions they offer. I will focus on Descartes and argue that he offers a complex model of causation to explain the production of ideas in the mind in response to the occurrence of brain states. On this model the brain state does function as a cause, but the explanation of an occurrence of the corresponding idea includes a substantial causal role for the mind. I will argue that proper understanding of this model removes some of the tensions that seem to plague Descartes’s account of sensation.

Before we start, it is helpful to remind ourselves that Descartes’s conception of causation is pre-Humean: for him there are genuine causal powers and causation is not merely a matter of regularities...

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