As usual, this is something I’ve known implicitly for a long time, but I was just too sluggish and scatterbrained to bring it into focus and realize what it meant:
In a nutshell, Descartes pointed out, correctly, that the other-minds problem (i.e., knowing whether anyone else but myself feels) is just one of the many uncertainties, i.e., the many things that are probably true, but there’s no way to know for sure that they’re true, so there is room for doubt.
All the truths of science — including the law of gravitation and the fact that apples always fall down rather than up — are likewise examples of such uncertain truths, not immune to doubt: probably true on the weight of the evidence, but we can’t be sure.
Yet having solemnly pointed out that it is true of almost all truths (including the truth that other people have minds) that we cannot be certain they are true, Descartes nevertheless went on to proclaim a truth about other minds — and not one that went with the weight of the evidence (such as that apples fall down rather than up) but that went directly against it:
To the eternal misfortune and misery of non-human animals, Descartes confidently assured people with the full weight of his reputation for rationality that, despite all appearances to the contrary, non-human animals do not feel a thing; that despite all the symptoms of agony and suffering indistinguishable from our own, animals are just feelingless reflex automata — just moving, not feeling. So we can do whatever we like with them.
Philosophers have made many mistakes. But never one that has proven so monstrously costly in agony across the ages — and is still doing so to this very day — for countless, helpless, innocent, feeling creatures to whom Descartes — rather like making Pascal’s Wager, but at someone else‘s risk — did not see fit to give the benefit of the doubt .
[Descartes sanctioned it with his authority, but I doubt that most of the animal agony across the ages had much to do with Descartes since people don’t tend to consult philosophers in deciding whether or not to do whatever they feel like doing. Most people mistreated (or supported and continue to support the mistreatment of) animals simply because they like the taste of meat — and because the other-minds problem is such that we can easily ignore another’s pain… But most people do have hearts. So the hope is that in our age of open data and open images the graphic truth of animal agony — and the fact that it is not necessary for our survival or health — will come out in the open, and we will at last opt to do the right thing (by renouncing and outlawing it as we did with slavery, genocide, torture and the subjugation of women).]
– – – –
David Sztybel’s paper pretty much confirms this.
But I have to say that I felt (sic) something close to nausea in trying to sort out Descartes’ arbitrary and idiosyncratic terminology and obiter dicta on the question of whether animals feel.
It’s like trying to follow a formal chain of deductive reasoning where the axioms are all absurd:
Unconscious feelings? What on earth is that? Unfelt feelings?
A “corporeal soul” as distinct from a “thinking soul”? Do robots too have “corporeal souls”? Souls??
And what is this “first grade of sensation”? It sounds like just movement. But then why equivocally call it “sensation”?
The idea of engaging in this hermeneutic exercise, to pin down what Descartes really said and meant, and to see whether he was consistent, seems rather otiose when something substantive and gravely important is really at stake, namely, whether it hurts them when you hit animals.
Let’s pretend we’re being serious about something, rather than just trying to second-guess Descartes’ intentions and sort out his verbiage:
Does it hurt when you hit an animal? A lot seems to ride on that question — for the animal — (and it has nothing to do with weasely nonsense like “first grade sensations” or “unconscious feeling”): It either hurts or it doesn’t.
If it doesn’t hurt — if animals are just going through the motions — then that is not hurting or feeling or sensing, it is merely moving. (But I think most of us would lean toward the conclusion that that is also dead wrong, and always has been.)
But if it does hurt, then animals have full-blown feelings, the only kind there is. And Descartes’ metaphysical and phenomenological speculations have done animals a grievous injustice.
I lean toward Grene’s conclusion, which is that on this question in particular Descartes’ metaphysical and phenomenological categories (“clear and distinct ideas”) are so arbitrary and idiosyncratic that the entire attempt to address the question is incoherent and equivocal, and that forcing it into a formally coherent mold amounts, as noted, to an exercise in textual exegetics rather than a search for truth (which is surely about whether animals hurt, not about what Descartes meant by “first grade sensations” or “unconscious feeling”).
It is a bit of a head-shaker how any of this could ever have been taken as a paragon of rationality.
I still think, though, that the Cogito, properly construed (“sentio ergo sentitur”), was a genuine (and profound) insight. Pity it came wrapped in so much tosh…