Does Descartes Have a Principle of Life? Hierarchy and Interdependence in Descartes’s Physiology

Abstract

Descartes repeatedly refers to a "principle of life" and appears to make grand claims for its role in his natural philosophy. These claims have been taken at face value in the literature. This paper argues that there is no single principle underlying the operation of the Cartesian body. I show that Descartes's account of physiology explains the operation of the living body through multiple interdependent systems, with no one system more fundamental than any other. As such, Cartesian physiology is incompatible with a hierarchical conception of a body whose operations are driven by a single underlying principle.

Life, Mechanization of

“…I don't mean to imply that the motive power of the body is the fundamental issue in the mechanization of living things (my own position is that there is no single fundamental operation of the living body (Hutchins, 2016)). But there are certainly good reasons to think that early modern mechanists took it to be fundamental, and Descartes himself, following Aristotelian tradition, explicitly refers to it as the "principle of life" (at, e.g., AT 11, 202) 2 .…”

“…I've argued elsewhere (Hutchins, 2015(Hutchins, , 2016) that, if we reconstruct an account of thermogenesis in the Cartesian heart on the basis of the drying hay mechanism, we end up with system-level dependencies, i.e., the account cannot be given purely in terms of efficient causation between bits of matter, and no single element in the system can be picked out as the source of motion. Somewhat similarly, Brown (2012) has argued, on the basis of Descartes's account of embryogenesis, that he can help himself to a mechanical conception of teleology, but only via the system-level property of mutual dependence.…”