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Articles

Souls, Minds, Bodies & Planets

The first installment of a two-part article by Mary Midgley.

What does it mean to say that we have a mind-body problem? Do we need to think of the relation between our inner and outer lives as business transacted between two separate items like this, rather than between aspects of a whole person?

‘Mind’ and ‘matter’, conceived as separate in this way, are extreme abstractions. These terms were deliberately designed by thinkers like René Descartes to be mutually exclusive and incompatible, which is why they are so hard to bring together now. In Descartes’ time, their separation was intended as quarantine to separate the new, burgeoning science of physics from other forms of thought that might clash with it. But it was also part of a much older, more general attempt to separate Reason from Feeling and to establish Reason (mind) as the dominant partner, Feeling being essentially just part of the body. That is why, during the Enlightenment, the word ‘soul’ has been gradually replaced by ‘mind’, and the word ‘mind’ has been narrowed from its ordinary use (“I’ve a good mind to do it”) to a strictly cognitive meaning.

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