René Descartes (1596 to 1650), the French philosopher often called the father of modern philosophy, taught that mind and body are two different kinds of thing, the mind a thinking thing with no extension in space, the body and the whole material world extended things with no thought, working like machines. Animists reject the split because, in animism, everything is made of energy that is alive and conscious, so matter is never dead stuff, the body has its own consciousness and wisdom, and animals, plants and stones are persons, not mechanisms.
Who was Descartes? #
A French philosopher, mathematician and scientist, born in 1596 at La Haye in Touraine, a town since renamed Descartes. His Discourse on the Method came out in 1637, the Meditations on First Philosophy in 1641, the Principles of Philosophy in 1644 and The Passions of the Soul in 1649. That year he joined the court of Queen Christina of Sweden, fell ill early the next year and died in February 1650.1 He set out to rebuild knowledge from a single certain starting point, and found it in the one thing he could not doubt while doubting, that he was thinking. Hence cogito, ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.”2
What did Descartes teach about mind and body? #
That they are two separate substances. In the Sixth Meditation he reasons that he has a clear and distinct idea of himself as “a thinking, non-extended thing”, and a clear and distinct idea of body as an extended thing that does not think; so the mind is really distinct from the body and could exist without it.3 The mind, for Descartes, is the soul, and it is what makes a human being a person. Everything else in nature, including our own bodies, is matter in motion, to be explained in purely mechanical terms, the way we explain a clock.4
The split raised a problem at once. If the mind takes up no space, how can it move an arm? Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia pressed him on this in their letters. In 1643 he answered that mind and body together form a real union, which we know not by reasoning but by living it, in our sensations and movements.5 Three centuries later the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, in The Concept of Mind (1949), mocked the whole picture as “the ghost in the machine”.6
What did he say about animals and the natural world? #
That animals are machines. In Part Five of the Discourse he compares animal bodies to the automata, or moving machines, built by human craftsmen, only far better made. Animals, in his view, have no reason and no mind; they act from the arrangement of their organs, as a clock tells the time.7 And in Part Six he hoped that a practical science of fire, water, air, the stars and all other bodies would let us use them for every purpose they fit, and so “render ourselves the lords and possessors of nature.”8 See Does it matter whether an animal is sentient?
Why do animists reject the split? #
Because, for animism, there is no dead matter for a mind to stand apart from. Everything is made of energy, as physics also says; shamanism goes further in saying, and experiencing, that this energy is alive and conscious, every single atom of it.9 So the world is not a machine with a few thinking beings inside it; it is full of persons, the Animal, Plant and Stone People, with their own consciousness and gifts. See What is animism? and What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
The body is not a machine either. In shamanism the physical body is not some vehicle for the soul, not a thing we happen to inhabit. It has its own consciousness, intelligence, wisdom, needs and drives, and needs to be listened to and respected as much as any other part of us.10 Its atoms are the Stone People, who come together with us for a while and dance, and who go on, with their own intelligence and wisdom, long after we die. See What are Soul, Spirit, the middle-world self and the body?
The split also has a history older than Descartes. With the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer came the sky-religionsSky-religion. The vertical, hierarchical reordering of the sacred that the Fall installed, governed by the spell ‘up is good, down is bad’: transcend the body, escape matter, purify upward. The conditioning Therapeutic Shamanism works to undo. More about this, teaching that up is good and down is bad, that spirit is good and matter corrupt, and that God gave humans the world to use as they see fit.11 Descartes’ thinking soul and mechanical nature can be read as giving that old hierarchy a modern, philosophical form. And it has consequences. If, as the Taker cult says, the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer is not alive and does not matter, then we are free to plunder it as we please.12 His hope that we might become lords and possessors of nature reads, to animist ears, very like the myth of human supremacy. See What is the myth of human supremacy? and What are Taker and Leaver cultures?
Does Therapeutic Shamanism think we are only one thing, then? #
No, and here it differs from simply reversing Descartes. A person is not one substance or two but a community of parts: the Body and the middle-world selfMiddle-world self. The everyday self (ego, persona, head-and-heart), made of our stories and experiences. A genuine and needed part of the Inner Tribe: of service, not in command. Read the full answer, both of the middle-world, the Soul of the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer and the Spirit of the Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer, each with its own needs, none ranked above the others.13 Spirit is not a ghost riding a machine, and the body is not a lesser thing to be governed by the mind. Health is all of them in a balanced, respectful relationship. See What are the different parts of the self in Therapeutic Shamanism?
Did Descartes really think animals feel nothing? #
That is the usual reading, and the one later generations took up, with animals pictured as automata and their cries as no more than the noise of a machine. Some philosophers think it too simple. The philosopher John Cottingham, in an article of 1978, made the case that Descartes denied animals thought, not all sensation, and pointed to passages describing animals as feeling fear, hunger and anger.14 The historian Peter Harrison replied in 1992 that denying animals a rational soul does leave them wholly without feeling in Descartes’ scheme, though he found Descartes cautiously agnostic on the question, not dogmatic.15 Either way, his account left animals without minds, and that is where animism parts company with him.
