Punctual Selves, Punctual Death, and the Health-Conscious Cogito: Descartes' Dead Bodies

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Punctual selves, punctualdeath and the health-conscious cogito: Descartes’dead bodies

Thomas F. Tierney

Abstract

This paper reflects critically on the late-modern obsession with health by presentingDescartes as an almost ideal type of the health-conscious subject. Descartes’ life,works and death are interpreted from the unlikely combination of the theoreticalperspectives of Charles Taylor and Jean Baudrillard. Despite significant differences,both of these theorists rely heavily on Weber’s concept of disenchantment, and eachdevelops a ‘punctual’ concept in their analysis of modernity. Specifically, the papercombines Taylor’s ‘punctual self ’, which can remake itself at will, with Baudrillard’s‘punctual death’, which presents death as a meaningless terminus. ViewingDescartes through these punctual concepts, it becomes clear that the extensiveanatomical investigations he conducted throughout his career shaped his uniquelymodern stance towards death and health. However, Descartes maintained anambivalent relationship with traditional conceptions of death and health, whichprevented him from fully embracing modern health-consciousness. The paperconcludes with a reconsideration of Descartes’ ‘premature’ death, which invitescritical reflection on the role that the predictable behaviour of health-conscioussubjects plays in the ever-expanding biomedical order.

Keywords: Jean Baudrillard; death; Rene Descartes; anatomy; health; CharlesTaylor; Max Weber; dissection.

My final observation is that any given movement occurring in the part of the

brain that immediately affects the mind produces just one corresponding

Thomas F. Tierney, The College of Wooster, Wooster, Ohio 44691-2363, USA. E-mail:

[email protected]

Copyright # 2012 Taylor & Francis

ISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 online

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2011.635436

Economy and Society Volume 41 Number 2 May 2012: 258�281

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2011.635436

sensation; and hence the best system that could be devised is that it should

produce the one sensation which, of all possible sensations, is most especially

and most frequently conducive to the preservation of the healthy man.

(Descartes, 6th Meditation, 1984 [1641], p. 60)

We late moderns have become, to a great extent, the very sort of subjects

Descartes envisioned in this epigraph. Individuals in medically advanced

cultures are expected to be seriously concerned with their health and to

respond in a predictable manner to medical advice regarding its preservation,

such as the recommendation in the US of a colonoscopy at the age of 50. To

obtain compliance with such recommendations all that is needed is: a medically

sanctioned announcement about the impact the procedure will have on

morbidity and longevity; the dissemination of this knowledge through the

burgeoning number of journals, television programmes and websites dedicated

specifically to health; and, if possible, a celebrity endorsement � such as the

March 2000 televised colonoscopy of American television reporter, Katie

Couric. Couric’s husband died of colo-rectal cancer in 1998, and she hoped to

raise awareness of the benefits of early screening by broadcasting her

colonoscopy on the popular morning news-entertainment show, Today, which

she co-hosted. Studies on the ‘Couric effect’ found that colonoscopies

increased by 20 per cent in the US for several months after this broadcast

(Cram et al., 2003). While we may not (yet) have reached Descartes’ ‘best

system’, such patterned responses to health stimuli have become virtually

incontestable criteria of responsible agency, and are essential to the develop-

ment of late-modernity’s health-based economy.

To generate critical reflection on this biomedical order, I will uncover the

origins of this health-consciousness by interpreting the life, works and death of

Descartes from a perspective that is informed by an unlikely pair of

contemporary theorists � Charles Taylor and Jean Baudrillard. For good

reason, these two theorists are rarely mentioned in the same breath. In much of

his work Taylor strives to foster an appreciation of the implicit conceptions of

the good that guide modern subjects, which he accomplishes through careful,

nuanced readings of a wide range of historical texts. In contrast, Baudrillard’s

work aims to radically subvert modernity, or, to use his preferred term,

‘political economy’, and his style is much more aphoristic and hyperbolic than

Taylor’s, and certainly less burdened by citations and close exegesis. Despite

these undeniable differences, there are important complementarities between

Taylor’s and Baudrillard’s accounts of modernity that illuminate the origins of

the health-conscious subject.

To begin with, Taylor and Baudrillard are both indebted to Weber’s vision of

modernity as a world disenchanted by relentless rationalization. And though

they develop very different accounts of modern subjectivity from this Weberian

starting point, they each employ in their analysis crucial concepts they qualify,

serendipitously, with the adjective ‘punctual’. In Sources of the self: The making

of the modern identity (1989), Taylor describes the modern individual as a

Thomas F. Tierney: Punctual selves, punctual death 259

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‘punctual self ’, who can take a ‘radical stance of disengagement to himself or

herself with a view to remaking’ that self (1989, pp. 171�2). One of the primary

areas in which punctual selves are currently expected to remake themselves is,

of course, health, although Taylor does not mention this facet of modern

identities in Sources. Baudrillard uses this same adjective in Symbolic exchange

and death [1993 (1976)] to describe the disenchanted conception of death that

grounds modern identities. ‘The irreversibility of biological death, its objective

and punctual character’, Baudrillard claims, ‘is a fact of modern science . . .[that]

is specific to our culture’ (1993 [1976], p. 158, emphasis added). Although

Baudrillard, like Taylor, does not concentrate explicitly on the health-

consciousness of modern subjects, by focusing their perspectives on the vexed

historical figure of Descartes, I will show how the punctual conception of death

helped orient the punctual self towards the pursuit of health.

This paper is organized in three parts, plus a short conclusion. In the first

part I examine Taylor’s account of Descartes’ contribution to the disenchant-

ment of the world and the development of a punctual conception of the self,

paying particular attention to the role he attributes to the moral theory

Descartes presented in his final publication, The passions of the soul (1649).

However, I go beyond Taylor by revealing an underlying tension in Descartes’

thought between the moral tradition and the modern imperative of health. In

the second part I examine Baudrillard’s punctual conception of death, and use it

to identify crucial facets of the punctual self overlooked by Taylor. I extrapolate

from Baudrillard’s insights in the third part, and interpret Descartes’ lifelong

interest in anatomy as a significant manifestation of the punctual conception of

death. I trace the influence that Descartes’ anatomical observations had on the

development of his thought over the entire course of his career, and show that

the Passions was actually grounded in the punctual conception of death. For

Descartes, anatomical experiences shaped his answer to the ‘only question

important for us’ moderns, which Weber attributed to Tolstoy: ‘‘‘What shall we

do and how shall we live?’’’ (Weber, 1946 [1919], p. 143). Descartes’ answer was,

‘preserve our health’.

In examining Descartes’ role in laying the foundation of the health-

conscious subject, my aim is not to join in the ‘holy alliance to exorcise’ the

‘spectre of the Cartesian subject’ (Zizek, 2000, p. 1). As Steven B. Smith

remarks, ‘Descartes has become the universal whipping boy for postmoder-

nists’ and ‘a virtual poster child for every evil from genetic engineering to

environmental devastation’ (2004, p. 572; also Hacking, 2005, p. 155). Rather

than blaming Descartes for the late-modern obsession with health, this

engagement of Taylor and Baudrillard over Descartes’ corpus is intended to

reveal how late-modern individuals have become even more ‘Cartesian’ than

Descartes was himself. In the conclusion I examine Descartes’ much mocked

death and suggest that even at the end of his life there remained in Descartes a

certain tension about death and health that marks him as an almost ideal type of

the health-conscious subject, who ironically invites critical reflection on that

‘best system’ he envisioned.

260 Economy and Society

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Taylor’s punctual self and Descartes’ heightened consciousness of

health

In Sources, Taylor draws on a wide range of early-modern and contemporary

theorists to reveal the origins of the ‘modern identity’, but to illuminate the

transition from pre-modern to modern culture he relies primarily on Weber.

He singles Weber out for praise ‘principally because [he has] many fewer

criticisms to make of his theory’ of modernity, which he regards as ‘one of the

most profound and insightful’ (1989, p. 512), and he employs Weber’s term

‘disenchantment’ throughout the text to describe the effect of the moderniza-

tion process (1989, pp. 17, 145�6, 186, 191, 500, 510). To provide a sense of

the pre-modern world, Taylor uses the concept of an ‘ontic logos’, by which he

means a world ‘pictured . . . as a meaningful order, or a text’ (Taylor, 1980, p.

288) that guides human beings.

As long as the order of things embodies an ontic logos, then ideas and valuations

are also seen as located in the world, and not just in subjects. Indeed, their

privileged locus is in the cosmos . . . [and] correct human knowledge and

valuation comes from our connecting ourselves rightly to the significance things

already have ontically.

(Taylor, 1989, p. 186)

This meaningful view of the world prevailed ‘right up to the seventeenth

century’, Taylor claims, ‘when it was pulverized in the scientific revolution’

(1980, p. 288). The radical new knowledge that appeared in astronomy,

geography, optics, mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics and, most

importantly for our purposes, anatomy, led to ‘the dissipation of our sense

of the cosmos as a meaningful order’ (Taylor, 1989, p. 17). Descartes, of

course, contributed important knowledge in many of these fields, but Taylor

focuses on his epistemological work that laid the foundation of modern

science. While empiricists, such as Bacon, naively anticipated the benefits that

would accrue to humanity once the world was revealed as it ‘really’ was (see

Taylor, 1989, pp. 154�65, 212�14, 230�2, 240, 242, 258), Descartes was more

keenly aware than his contemporaries that these intellectual upheavals had cast

into doubt the very possibility of an unmediated experience of the world

(Taylor, 1989, p. 144). Consequently, the method Descartes prescribed in the

Discourse required one to withhold assent from immediate sensory experiences,

and only accept as true those ideas that, upon reflection, present themselves

‘to my mind so clearly and so distinctly that I had no occasion to doubt’ them

(Descartes, 1985, p. 120; also see Taylor, 1989, pp. 144, 163). But, to avoid

embracing claims that would eventually become intellectually embarrassing

(such as Descartes’ theory of the pineal gland, discussed under ‘The influence

of Descartes’ anatomical observations’ below), Descartes realized that our

understanding of the self also had to be subjected to the same sceptical

scrutiny that had been directed at traditional forms of knowledge (Taylor,


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1989, p. 174�5); as he put it in the Discourse, he had to ‘undertake studies

within myself too’ (1985, pp. 115�16). He famously fulfilled this self-reflexive

responsibility in his next publication, the Meditations (1641), where he

subjected to radical doubt every experience, including that of his embodied

self, in order ‘to demolish everything completely and start again right from the

foundations’ (1984, p. 12).

The extremely disengaged stance that Descartes struck in response to the

intellectual upheavals of early modernity is a birthmark of what Taylor

describes as the ‘punctual’ self. This self not only strives to set itself apart from

the ontic logos and traditional forms of knowledge, but also views itself as one

manipulable object among others in the world:

To take this stance is to identify oneself with the power to objectify and remake,

and by this act to distance oneself from all the particular features which are

objects of potential change. What we are essentially is none of the latter, but

what finds itself capable of fixing them and working on them. This is what the

image of the point is meant to convey, drawing on the geometrical term: the real

self is ‘extensionless’, it is nowhere but in this power to fix things as objects.

(Taylor, 1989, pp. 171�2)

While Descartes’ early writings helped establish the epistemological founda-

tion for this punctual self, Taylor’s primary interest lies with moral questions

about how this self ought to live, as reflected in the ‘quite new theory of the

passions’ (1989, p. 149) Descartes presented in the Passions. I will discuss this

important book more fully in the third part, ‘The influence of Descartes’

anatomical observations’, but here I want to focus on the contrast Taylor draws

between Descartes’ theory and the traditional understanding of the passions.

Classical authorities, such as Plato and the Stoics, found ‘the sources of

moral strength . . . outside us’, Taylor emphasizes, ‘where they reside in a world

order which embodies a Good we cannot but love and admire’ (1989, p. 151).

While reason provides access to this good, the passions impede our ability to

understand and embrace it. Consequently, traditional moral thought viewed

the passions with suspicion, and instructed individuals to quiet them in order

to live in harmony with the ontic logos (e.g. Plato, 1973, pp. 125�33). For the

Stoics, in particular, a good life was characterized by apatheia, freedom from

the passions altogether (e.g. Seneca, 2007, pp. 40�2, 165). But for Descartes,

‘the cosmos is no longer seen as the embodiment of meaningful order which

can define the good for us’ (Taylor, 1989, pp. 148�9). In this disenchanted

world, guidance for living a good life could be found only within the punctual

self, in ‘orders that our reasoning capacity constructs according to the

appropriate standards’ (Taylor, 1989, p. 147). So, rather than protecting

reason from the influence of the passions, Descartes instead thought that

‘[r]eason rules the passions when it can hold them to their normal instrumental

function’ (Taylor, 1989, p. 150).


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Though this punctual, Cartesian ‘subject of disengagement and rational

control has become a familiar modern figure’ (Taylor, 1989, p. 160), Taylor

argues that this view of the self is ultimately untenable. It is not possible to

achieve that Cartesian degree of disengagement that would allow individuals to

construct a purely rational order in the world, much less among their passions.

‘[W]e can’t think of human persons, of selves in the sense that we are selves, in

this light at all,’ Taylor claims. ‘They are not neutral, punctual objects; they

exist only in a certain space of questions, through certain constitutive concerns.

The questions or concerns touch on the nature of the good that I orient myself

by and on the way I am placed in relation to it’ (1989, p. 50; also p. 172). From

Taylor’s quasi-Hegelian perspective, these constitutive concerns and goods are

not simply chosen on the basis of reason, but are rather shaped by a moral

horizon of ‘higher-order’ goods that orients reason. Selves, as Taylor claims we

understand them, ‘acknowledge second-order qualitative distinctions which

define higher goods, on the basis of which we discriminate among other goods,

attribute differential worth or importance to them, or determine when and if to

follow them’. He calls ‘higher-order goods of this kind ‘‘hypergoods’’, i.e.,

goods which not only are incomparably more important than others but

provide the standpoint from which these must be weighed, judged, decided

about’ (1989, p. 63).

As examples of modern hypergoods Taylor mentions ‘universal and equal

respect’ (1989, p.71) and ‘unconstrained freedom’ (1989, p. 489), but I want to

suggest that health has become a hypergood, and that Descartes contributed

significantly to this elevation of health. Taylor actually comes close to

recognizing this point, at least in a textual sense. In discussing Descartes’

epistemology Taylor quotes a ‘famous passage’ from Part 6 of the Discourse,

where Descartes claimed his method would ‘‘‘render ourselves the masters and

possessors of nature’’’ (quoted in Taylor, 1989, p. 149). However, in the very

next sentence, which Taylor does not quote, Descartes claimed that knowledge

produced by his method

is desirable not only for the invention of innumerable devices which would

facilitate our enjoyment of the fruits of the earth and all the goods we find there,

but also, and most importantly, for the maintenance of health, which is undoubtedly

the chief good and the foundation of all the other goods in this life.

(Descartes, 1985, p. 143, emphasis added)

Although Taylor overlooks this identification of health as a hypergood, it does

mark a significant divergence from the moral tradition. It would be too much,

however, to claim that Descartes’ stance towards health broke cleanly with that

tradition, for he maintained a taut ambivalence towards it throughout his

career, beginning with the Discourse. Alongside its epistemological claims, this

early text also offered moral guidance, as indicated in the full title, ‘Discourse

on the method of rightly conducting one’s reason and seeking the truth in the

sciences’ (1985, p. 111, emphasis added). After tracing the path that led to his


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new method in the first two parts, Descartes described in the third part

the ‘provisional moral code of three or four maxims’ he used to construct

‘some other place where [he could] live comfortably’ (1985, p. 122) as he

employed this method. The first two maxims were pragmatic principles that

accepted prevailing opinions when certain knowledge was not yet available, but

the third and final maxim was rather different, in that it embraced the

traditional Stoic ideal of attuning oneself to the meaningful order of nature, or

ontic logos.

In this third maxim Descartes claimed that, as he employed his new method,

he tried

always to master myself rather than fortune, and change my desires rather than

the order of the world. In general I would become accustomed to believing that

nothing lies entirely within our power except our thoughts, so that after doing

our best in dealing with matters external to us, whatever we fail to achieve is

absolutely impossible so far as we are concerned.

(Descartes, 1985, p. 123)

He acknowledged ‘that it takes long practice and repeated meditation to become

accustomed to seeing everything in this light’ and praised ‘those philosophers

who in earlier times . . . [t]hrough constant reflection upon the limits prescribed

for them by nature . . . became perfectly convinced that nothing was in their

power but their thoughts’ (1985, pp. 123�4). But, despite this acceptance of the

limits of nature and praise for the Stoic ideal of independence from things

beyond one’s control (autarkeia), there was one area in which Descartes clearly

differed from the Stoics, for chief among those things that the Stoics treated as

beyond one’s control was health. Like wealth and fortune, the Stoics considered

health as neither good nor bad, but as an external condition towards which

individuals ought to be indifferent (adiaphoron) (Ferngren & Amundsen, 1985,

p. 17).

Beyond elevating health from a matter of indifference to a chief good, the

Discourse further diverged from the tradition by recommending a novel

approach to moral improvement. Rather than relying on moral suasion to help

individuals attune themselves to the ontic logos, Descartes instead claimed in

Part 6 that ‘even the mind depends so much on the temperament and

disposition of the bodily organs, that if it is possible to find some means of

making men in general wiser and more skilful than they have been up till now, I

believe we must look for it in medicine’ (1985, p. 143). Indeed, so committed

was Descartes to the improvement of physical and mental health that in the last

paragraph he ‘resolved to devote the rest of my life to nothing other than

trying to acquire some knowledge of nature from which we may derive rules in

medicine which are more reliable than those we have had up till now’ (1985, p.

151). As we will see, Descartes remained true to this calling throughout his life.

To understand how Descartes gained enough critical distance from the

moral tradition to identify health as the hypergood that would orient his


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intellectual endeavours, we need to consider the way death was disenchanted as

the ontic logos was ‘pulverized’ in modernity, but unfortunately Taylor is of no

help here. Actually, it is surprising that he does not take into account the role

that the experience of death played in shaping modern identities. For there is a

very influential line of thought, extending from Hobbes through Hegel to

Heidegger, that placed death at the very foundation of modern subjectivity, and

Taylor has at times acknowledged the significance of this facet of modern

identities. In his earlier book, Hegel (1975), Taylor discusses in some detail the

role that death played in Hegel’s Phenomenology of spirit [1977 (1807)], and

claims that ‘the short, three-page . . . passage in which Hegel deals with’ the

slave’s transformation through ‘the fear of death and disciplined work’ is one of

the most important in the book (1975, p. 154). He notes that the humanistic

strain in Marxism developed the phenomenological importance of work, but

Hegel’s claim about the fear of death ‘was not taken up in the successor

philosophy’ (1975, pp. 154�5). Heidegger, however, took up precisely this

relationship between death and subjectivity in Being and time [1962 (1927)],

where he presented anxiety-in-the-face-of-death (which he distinguished from

the fear of death found in Hobbes and Hegel) as the key to an existentially

authentic existence. Taylor cites Being and time at numerous points in Sources

(1989, pp. 47 with 527 n. 26, 528 n. 34, 463�4 with 585 n. 22), but he never

discusses the centrality of death in Heidegger’s seminal work. Though Taylor’s

Hegelian insight into the role death played in shaping modern identities is

inexplicably undeveloped in his later text, in the next section I will raise the

spectre of death that haunts Taylor’s Sources by linking his discussion of the

punctual self with Baudrillard’s punctual conception of death.

Baudrillard’s theory of symbolic exchange and the punctual

conception of death

Like Taylor, Baudrillard relies heavily on Weber to frame his understanding of

the transition from pre-modern to modern culture. In his study of Weber’s

influence on Baudrillard, Nicholas Gane argues that ‘the key historical

problem for both thinkers [and perhaps Taylor too] is essentially the same:

the progressive disenchantment of magical religiosity (the symbolic form) by

‘‘rational’’ science’ (2002, p. 140). But, as one would expect, Taylor and

Baudrillard interpret this disenchantment quite differently. Where Taylor

illustrates the meaningful pre-modern world in terms of an ontic logos,

Baudrillard does so in the very different terms of ‘symbolic exchange’, which

he derived from Marcel Mauss’s observations on archaic gift-exchange

societies. Baudrillard developed his theory of symbolic exchange in a series

of essays from the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he was working on ‘a

sociological analysis of ‘‘consumption’’’ (1981 [1972], p. 30) that would

transcend the limitations of structuralist and Marxist accounts of political

economy, both of which remained trapped in an individualistic logic that views


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human beings primarily as producers (Baudrillard, 1996 [1968], 1998 [1970]).

Building on Mauss’s insights into the competitive, obligatory form of gift

exchange that was the primary form of social integration in pre-modern

societies (Mauss, 1990 [1923�4], pp. 3�6), Baudrillard recognized vestiges of

this rivalry and competition in late-modern consumption patterns. ‘This

mechanism of discrimination and prestige is at the very basis of the system of

values and of integration into the hierarchical order of society’, he claimed.

‘The Kula and the Potlatch have disappeared, but not their principle, which we

will retain as the basis of a sociological theory of objects’ (1981 [1972], p. 30).

When he first revealed this symbolic dimension of consumer culture,

Baudrillard was confident it could effectively challenge the ‘logic of produc-

tion’ that governed political economy (e.g. Baudrillard, 1975 [1973], pp. 45,

51). By the mid-1970s he became less sanguine about such opposition, and

presented symbolic exchange in a more pessimistic Weberian tone as an

enchanted form of social organization that was increasingly repressed in the

highly mediated political economy of late modernity (Gane, 2002, p. 140). This

shift is most visible in Symbolic exchange, which, Arthur Kroker claims,

‘represents a great rupture in Baudrillard’s intellectual discourse. . .After this

writing, Baudrillard is resigned to the loss of the symbol as an upsurge against

the simulational’ (1985, p. 82 n. 1; cf. Gane, 2002, pp. 146�7).

In Symbolic exchange, Baudrillard identifies the disenchantment of death as

the crux of the historical transformation from symbolic exchange to political

economy. Life and death were not mutually exclusive states of being and non-

being in pre-modern cultures, according to Baudrillard, but were instead

bound together in a meaningful order (i.e. Taylor’s ontic logos) that recognized

symbolic interaction between the living and the dead. ‘Every other culture’

than modernity, claims Baudrillard, ‘says that death begins before death, that

life goes on after life, and that it is impossible to distinguish life from death’

(1993 [1976], pp. 158�9). As an example of such symbolic interaction he cites

the Capuchin convent in Palermo, where for centuries thousands of

disinterred, fossilized corpses were arrayed in corridors according to their

worldly rank, creating a ‘a place for dominical walks for the relatives and

friends who used to come to see their dead, to acknowledge them, show them

to their children with the familiarity of the living, a ‘‘dominicality’’ of death’

(1993 [1976], pp. 181�2). However, as societies go through the modernization

process, ‘little by little, the dead cease to exist. They are thrown out of the

group’s symbolic circulation. They are no longer beings with a full role to play,

worthy partners in exchange, and we make this obvious by exiling them further

and further away from the group of the living’ (1993 [1976], p. 126).

This termination of any reciprocal obligation between the living and the

dead is, for Baudrillard, the key to understanding political economy. ‘At the

very core of the ‘‘rationality’’ of our culture’, he exclaims, ‘ . . . is an exclusion

that precedes every other, more radical than the exclusion of madmen, children

or inferior races, an exclusion preceding all these and serving as their model:

the exclusion of the dead and of death’ (1993 [1976], p. 126). Although Taylor


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does not acknowledge it, this absolute separation of the living and the dead also

influenced the formation of the punctual self. The severing of any meaningful

relationship with the dead meant that the living were removed from a web of

ancestral narratives and obligations that could direct and guide their lives.

While such a separation may be portrayed positively as the liberation of

rational subjects from the dead hand of tradition and superstition, Baudrillard

and Taylor both recognize that such disengaged subjects still need a story

about their identity. As Taylor puts it, the ‘self-understanding’ of even the

punctual self ‘necessarily has temporal depth and incorporates narrative’ (1989,

p. 50). What Baudrillard adds to Taylor’s story is an account of the role the

punctual conception of death plays in this narrative.

Once symbolic interaction between the living and the dead was eclipsed,

Baudrillard claims, the punctual conception of death as an absolute terminus,

or rupture, was required to ground those identities that were no longer bound

up with the dead in a larger meaningful order.

Only in the infinitesimal space of the individual conscious subject [i.e. Taylor’s

extensionless point], does death take on an irreversible meaning. Even here,

death is not an event, but a myth experienced as anticipation. The subject needs

a myth of its end, as of its origin, to form its identity.

(Baudrillard, 1993 [1976], p. 159)

One can trace the formation of this myth in that line of thought that runs from

Hobbes’ treatment of death as ‘the chiefest of natural evils’ (1839, II, p. 8; also p.

25), through Hegel’s presentation of ‘the fear of death’ as ‘the absolute Lord’

that causes the subject to ‘[tremble] in every fibre of its being’ (1977 [1807], p.

117), to Heidegger’s anxiety-inducing thought of death as ‘the possibility of no-

longer-being-able-to-be-there . . . of the absolute impossibility of Dasein’ (1962)

[1927], p. 294).1 Despite their important differences, each of these philosophers

sought to ground modern subjectivity in the fear or anxiety generated by the

myth of death as an abrupt and absolute ending.

When death is viewed as a punctual, irreversible terminus, a corresponding

expectation emerges that death should occur at the proper point in a person’s

life. ‘An ideal or standard form of death, ‘‘natural’’ death, corresponds to the

biological definition of death and the rational logical will’, writes Baudrillard.

‘This death is ‘‘normal’’ since it comes ‘‘at life’s proper term’’’ (1993 [1976],

p. 162). But what is natural or normal is no longer determined by some

timeless standard; rather, the ‘very concept’ of a natural death ‘issues from

the possibility of pushing back the limits of life: living becomes a process of

accumulation, and science and technology start to play a role in this

quantitative strategy’ (Baudrillard, 1993 [1976], p. 162). This idea of a natural

death that is deferred to a point deemed appropriate by medical science, such

as ‘average life expectancy’, was crucial for the complementary development

of political economy and the health-conscious subject. ‘From this point on,’

Baudrillard claims, ‘the obsession with death and the will to abolish death


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through accumulation become the fundamental motor of the rationality of

political economy’ (1993 [1976], p. 146). What is ultimately accumulated in

the health-oriented economy of late modernity is neither capital nor

commodities, but time itself: ‘Value, in particular time as value, is

accumulated in the phantasm of death deferred’ (Baudrillard, 1993 [1976],

p. 146).

Baudrillard illustrates the irrationality of this quantitative stance towards

death by invoking Weber’s famous 1919 lecture, ‘Science as a vocation’, where

he explained disenchantment by discussing Tolstoy’s thoughts about death.

Weber claimed that Tolstoy asked, in ‘the most principled form’, the question of

whether there was any meaning to ‘this process of disenchantment’. In

answering this question Tolstoy’s ‘broodings increasingly revolved around the

problem of whether or not death is a meaningful phenomenon. And his answer

was: for civilized man death has no meaning.’ For Tolstoy understood, and

Weber appreciated, that when life becomes nothing more than the accumulation

of time, when it is ‘placed into an infinite ‘‘progress,’’’ death is meaningless

(Weber, 1946 [1919], p. 139). Weber developed Tolstoy’s insight by contrasting

the enchanted, pre-modern experience of death with the disenchanted

experience of modernity, and Baudrillard quotes this contrast in full:

Abraham, or some peasant of the past, died ‘old and satiated with life’ because

he stood in the organic cycle of life; because his life, in terms of its meaning and

on the eve of his days, had given to him what life had to offer; because for him

there remained no puzzles he might wish to solve; and therefore he could have

had ‘enough’ of life. Whereas civilized man, placed in the midst of the

continuous enrichment of culture by ideas, knowledge, and problems, may

become ‘tired of life’ but not ‘satiated with life.’ He catches only the most

minute part of what the life of the spirit brings forth ever anew, and what he

seizes is always something provisional and not definitive, and therefore death for

him is a meaningless occurrence. And because death is meaningless, civilized life

as such is meaningless; by its very ‘progressiveness’ it gives death the imprint of

meaninglessness.

(Weber, 1946 [1919], p. 140, quoted in Baudrillard, 1993 [1976], p. 163; see also

Weber, 1946 [1919], p. 356; Baudrillard, 1993 [1976], pp. 145�6, 1981 [1972],

pp. 33, 192)

Although Baudrillard never mentions it, one of the most potent ways in which

death was transformed from a meaningful, integrating experience into a

meaningless terminus was through the dissemination of the image of the

dissected body. While the anatomized cadaver is now primarily used to train

medical students, in the early modern period this image was displayed

publicly, in a symbolically enchanted context (Tierney, 1998). During the

sixteenth century lavish anatomy theatres were erected in most major

European cities, such as Montpellier (1556), London (1557), Pisa (1569),

Ferrari (1588), Basel (1589), Padua (1594), Bologna (1595) and Leiden (1597)


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(Ferrara, 1987, p. 72 n. 26). Through the seventeenth century these theatres

displayed the dissected bodies of hanged criminals as objects simultaneously of

sovereign punishment, of religious mercy and, ultimately, of scientific

knowledge. A more purely scientific presentation of the corpse was also

disseminated to a learned audience through expensive anatomy texts, like

Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica (1543), the first fully illustrated

manual of the human body. Cheaper anatomical publications were also

available, such as the popular Epitome of Vesalius’ text, which presented the

bodily systems in a series of twelve prints designed for those who had not

studied anatomy (Saunders & O’Malley, 1950, pp. 204�27). By the end of the

eighteenth century the dissected human body had lost this symbolic public

presence and had largely become an inert object from which scientific

knowledge was extracted in private by medical students. In the next section I

will show how Descartes’ extensive anatomical research contributed to this

disenchantment of death and the dissemination of the punctual conception of

death as a meaningless terminus.

The influence of Descartes’ anatomical observations on the

development of his thought

Though neither Baudrillard nor Taylor discusses Descartes’ interest in

anatomy, it would be difficult to overstate the extent to which he was influenced

by, and contributed to, this new form of knowledge. Descartes’ curiosity about

anatomy was piqued soon after he moved to the Netherlands in 1628. On 15

April 1630 he wrote to the monk Marin Mersenne, his primary correspondent

in France while he resided in Holland, informing him that ‘I am now studying

chemistry and anatomy simultaneously; every day I learn something that I

cannot find in any book’ (1991, p. 21). He moved to Amsterdam at the end of

1630, and began performing dissections on a variety of animals, a practice he

continued for the rest of his life. In fact, he became so well known for his

anatomical investigations that his critics used this predilection to cast aspersions

on his character. In a 13 November 1639 letter to Mersenne, Descartes

complained that some had charged him with travelling through Dutch villages

to see the slaughtering of pigs, as if this revealed some perversity on his part. He

denied that he searched villages for slaughtered animals, but did acknowledge

that he regularly went to the butchers’ stalls and arranged to have sent to his

dwelling those parts he wanted to dissect. He followed this pattern in the other

places he lived in Holland, and was not ashamed of doing so, telling Mersenne

‘it was no crime to be curious about anatomy’ (Baillet, 1691, I, pp. 196�7, my

translation; also Descartes, 1972, pp. xiii�xiv; Gaukroger, 1995, p. 227).

It is not clear whether Descartes dissected human bodies, although some

suggest he may have done so in Amsterdam in the early 1630s with his friend,

the Dutch physician Vopiscus-Fortunatus Plemp (Adam, 1910, p. 124; Bitbol-

Hesperies, 2000, p. 374; Descartes, 1972, p. xiii n. 9). The most unambiguous


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statement supporting this possibility comes from Richard Watson, who claims

‘Descartes assisted in the dissection of human cadavers in Amsterdam in the

1630s, in an amphitheater just like the one Rembrandt painted in his famous

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp of 1632’ (2002, p. 15). Although I would

certainly like to be, I am not convinced that Descartes ever dissected a human

body with Plemp, or anyone else,2 for, in a letter to Mersenne from June 1637,

he remarked that he had ‘not had the opportunity to make observations on

human organs’ (1991, p. 59). While he may not personally have performed

human dissections, he did indicate in a later letter to Mersenne that sometime

in 1637, in Leiden, he witnessed the dissection of a woman at close proximity. I

will discuss this one corroborated human anatomical experience of Descartes’ a

bit more fully below; here I want only to suggest that, given his avidity for this

new knowledge, it seems quite likely that he would have at least attended

public dissections of hanged criminals at the famous anatomy theatres of

Leiden and Amsterdam when he lived in those cities. Whether or not he

performed human dissections, Descartes nevertheless considered himself well-

versed in human anatomy. As he boasted to Mersenne on 20 February 1639:

I have taken into consideration not only what Vesalius and the others write

about anatomy, but also many details unmentioned by them, which I have

observed myself while dissecting various animals. I have spent much time on

dissection during the last eleven years, and I doubt whether there is any doctor

who has made such detailed observations as I.


Far from being an idle pastime, Descartes’ interest in anatomy had a profound

impact on almost all of his writings, beginning with the posthumously

published Treatise of man (1662), which some consider the first French

physiology text (Wilkin, 2003, p. 42). He produced this work as the second of

three treatises he planned for The world, a project he initiated in 1629 and

abandoned in 1633 after learning of Galileo’s condemnation by the church. He

completed only the first (Treatise of light) and second treatises; the third

treatise, on the ‘rational soul’, was never completed (Descartes, 1972, pp. xxiv,

112, 1976, p. xxiii, 1985, pp. 79, 131�41, 1991, p. 40; also see Gaukroger, 1995,

p. 226). In the Treatise of man Descartes described the processes of digestion,

respiration and circulation in close detail, and, though the Galenic humoral

tradition influenced his understanding, he relied primarily on his own

anatomical observations of these processes. As he wrote to Mersenne in

November or December 1632, while he was still working on this project, ‘My

discussion of man in The world will be a little fuller than I had intended, for I

have undertaken to explain all the main functions in man. . .I am now

dissecting the heads of various animals, so that I can explain what imagination,

memory, etc. consist in’ (1991, p. 40).

While the Treatise of man was not published until a dozen years after his death,

Descartes included some of this anatomically informed knowledge in many of his


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published works, including his first philosophical publications, the Discourse and

Essays. In Part 5 of the Discourse he used his ‘explanation of the movement of the

heart and the arteries’ from the Treatise of man as an example of the type of

knowledge produced by his new method. ‘[S]o there may be less difficulty in

understanding what I shall say,’ he advised at the beginning of this discussion, ‘I

should like anyone unversed in anatomy to take the trouble, before reading this,

to have the heart of some large animal with lungs dissected before him (for such a

heart is in all respects sufficiently like that of a man), and to be shown the two

chambers or cavities which are present in it’ (1985, p. 134). And in the Optics,

after describing how images are formed on the back of the eye, he told his readers

that ‘you may become more certain of this, if taking the eye of a newly dead

person (or failing that, the eye of an ox or some other large animal), you carefully

cut away the three surrounding membranes at the back so as to expose a large

part of the humour without spilling any’ (1985, p. 166).

Descartes’ anatomical observations even influenced his next, most meta-

physical, publication, the Meditations (1641). Since he famously cast into doubt

all sensory knowledge in this book, he did not explicitly rely on anatomical

observations to support the rigid mind-body dualism he proclaimed in the

Second Meditation. However, he elliptically revealed in this very meditation

that his understanding of the mind-body distinction was ultimately grounded

in a punctual view of the dead body as a meaningless object. When he made

that modern turn discussed by Taylor, away from the ontic logos and into the

self, Descartes tried to establish a ‘sufficient understanding of what this ‘‘I’’ is’

by asking, ‘what is a man?’ In answering, he ‘concentrated[d] on what came

into my thoughts spontaneously and quite naturally whenever I used to

consider what I was. Well, the first thought to come to mind was that I had a

face, hands, arms and the whole mechanical structure of limbs which can be

seen in a corpse, and which I called the body’ (1984, p. 17). In the Sixth

Meditation Descartes discussed the ‘real distinction between mind and body’,

and in doing so muddled the dualism he had established in the earlier

meditation: ‘Nature also teaches me, by these sensations of pain, hunger, thirst,

and so on, that I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a

ship,’ he wrote, ‘but that I am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled

with it, so that I and the body form a unit’ (1984, p. 56). He did not offer any

explanation of the nature of that ‘union . . . of the mind with the body’ in the

Sixth Meditation, but hinted at his anatomical understanding of it when he

observed in passing

the mind is not immediately affected by all parts of the body, but only by the

brain, or perhaps just by one small part of the brain, namely the part which is

said to contain the ‘common’ sense. Every time this part of the brain is in a

given state, it presents the same signals to the mind, even though the other parts

of the body may be in a different condition at the time. This is established by

countless observations, which there is no need to review here.

(Descartes, 1984, pp. 59�60)


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By ‘common sense’ Descartes was referring to the Aristotelian notion of the

sixth sense, or sensus communis, which unites sensory impressions into images

that are communicated to the soul. While Aristotle identified the heart as the

sensus communis (Lokhorst & Kaitaro, 2001, p. 8), Descartes concluded very

early in his career, after dissecting the heads of various animals, that the

common sense was found in the pineal gland, or conarium, a small gland

situated amid the ventricles of the brain. Although he identified it only as ‘little

gland H’,3 he discussed the pineal gland at great length in the Treatise of man,

claiming it was ‘the seat of imagination and common sense’ and the point where

‘the rational soul’ is joined ‘to this machine’, the body (1972, p. 86 with n. 135,

emphasis in original; also see pp. 19�21, 36�37 with n. 64, 40�1 n. 72, 76�110). In his correspondence from 1640�1, when he was preparing the

Meditations for publication, he explicitly identified the conarium as the site

of the common sense (1991, pp. 143�4, 145�6, 149, 162�3, 180). In one such

letter to Mersenne, from 1 April 1640, he not only discussed the little gland,

but also provided the only clear evidence that he witnessed a human dissection:

I would not find it strange that the gland called the conarium should be found

decayed when the bodies of lethargic persons are dissected, because it decays very

rapidly in all the other cases too. Three years ago at Leiden, when I wanted to see

it in a woman who was being autopsied, I found it impossible to recognize it, even

though I looked very thoroughly, and knew well where it should be, being

accustomed to find it without any difficulty in freshly killed animals. An old

professor who was performing the autopsy, named Valcher, admitted to me that

he had never been able to see it in any human body. I think this is because they

usually spend some days looking at the intestines and other parts before opening

the head.


As the site where the soul and the body are joined, the pineal gland figured

prominently in the moral theory Descartes presented in his final publication, the

Passions. He produced this treatise at the behest of Princess Elisabeth of

Bohemia, whom he first met in 1642 at the Hague, when she was 24 years old.

Although at 47 he was nearly twice her age, they formed a very close friendship

and corresponded regularly from 1643 through 1649 (Rodis-Lewis, 1998, pp. 96,

151; cf. Gaukroger, 1995, p. 385). In the summer and autumn of 1645 he wrote a

series of letters to Elisabeth concerning the ‘supreme felicity’, and at first

thought ancient authorities were worth consulting on this moral question. He

initially recommended that Elisabeth read Seneca’s On the happy life (1991, p.

256), but quickly abandoned this Roman Stoic in favour of Epicurus, Zeno and

Aristotle, whose ‘views can . . . be accepted as true and as consistent with each

other’, he claimed in a letter from 18 August, ‘provided they are interpreted

favourably’ (1991, p. 261). In the autumn he again shifted focus, from the

supreme good to the passions, and in this correspondence his ambivalence about

the moral tradition was even starker than in the earlier Discourse.


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In his first letter on the passions, from 1 September 1645, Descartes still

endorsed apatheia, telling Elisabeth that ‘[t]he true function of reason . . . in the

conduct of life is to examine and consider without passion the value of all the

perfections, both of the body and of the soul, which can be acquired by our

conduct’ (1991, p. 265, emphasis added). However, he struck a decidedly non-

Stoical tone in the conclusion of this letter: ‘I do not think that . . . one should

free oneself altogether from the passions. It is enough to subject one’s passions

to reason; and once they are thus tamed they are sometimes the more useful

the more they tend to excess’ (Descartes, 1991, p. 265; also see 1985, p. 404).

Taylor acknowledges this tension in Descartes’ theory between rejecting and

ordering the passions, describing it as a form of ‘detached engagement’ (1989,

p. 151), but he emphasizes that Descartes ultimately broke with the tradition

by ‘not [calling] on us to get rid of our passions’ (1989, p. 150). Elisabeth,

however, was perplexed by Descartes’ ambivalence, and in her response on 13

September asked him ‘to . . . define the passions’ and ‘explicate how the force

of the passions renders them even more useful when they are subject to reason’

(Shapiro, 2007, pp. 110�11). Descartes responded by producing a treatise on

the passions during the winter of 1645�6, which he presented to Elisabeth the

following spring (Gaukroger, 1995, pp. 399�401). But he was not completely

satisfied with this initial account, as he explained in a letter he wrote to her in

May 1646, after sending the treatise:

I did not mention all the principles of physics which I used to work out the

particular movements of blood accompanying each passion. This was because I

could not properly prove them without explaining the formation of all the parts

of the human body; and that is something so difficult that I would not yet dare

to undertake it, though I am more or less convinced in my own mind of the

truth of the principles presupposed in the treatise.

(Descartes, 1991, p. 285; Gaukroger, 1995, pp. 400�1)

Although he did not include ‘the principles of physics’ in this initial draft,

Descartes’ thoughts on the passions were, from the beginning, bound up with

his understanding of anatomy. In fact, in October 1645, just as he was about to

begin working on his response to Elizabeth’s request, Descartes informed the

Marquis of Newcastle that he still planned on writing the ‘treatise on animals,

on which I began work more than fifteen years ago’ (1991, p. 274). Towards

this end he continued his anatomical observations at Egmond, his Dutch

residence from November 1644 until he departed for Sweden in August 1649.

According to the Excerpta anatomica,4 he performed dissections there as late as

1648, and was so deeply involved in anatomical research at Egmond that he

responded to a guest’s inquiry about his current reading by leading him ‘‘‘to a

yard out behind his lodging. He showed him a calf, which he would spend the

next day dissecting’’’.5 Clearly, the aim of this anatomical research was, in part,

to discover new medical knowledge. Echoing the commitment he announced in

the Discourse, he told the Marquis that ‘[t]he preservation of health has always


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been the principal end of my studies, and I do not doubt that it is possible to

acquire much information about medicine which has hitherto been unknown’

(1991, p. 275). But Descartes also realized that a thorough grasp of human

physiology was crucial for a sound understanding of the passions and moral

philosophy. In a letter from 15 June 1646, he told his friend Pierre Chanut, the

French ambassador to Sweden, ‘in confidence that what little knowledge of

physics I have tried to acquire has been a great help to me in establishing sure

foundations in moral philosophy. Indeed I have found it easier to reach

satisfactory conclusions on this topic than on many others concerning

medicine, on which I have spent much more time’ (1991, p. 289).

On 20 November 1647 Descartes sent a copy of the original treatise on the

Passions to Chanut, for delivery to Queen Christina of Sweden (1985, p. 325;

1991, p. 327 with n. 1). At this point he still thought the moral tradition was

worth studying; for in the accompanying letter to Christina he announced his

intention to ‘reconcile the two most opposed and most famous opinions of the

ancient philosophers � that of Zeno . . . and that of Epicurus’ (1991, pp. 324�5).

But by the time he published the Passions in 1649, just a few months before his

death in Sweden, Descartes changed his mind about the ancients. According to

the preface to the Passions, which is comprised of an exchange of letters between

Descartes and an anonymous friend concerning its publication, Descartes

claimed he ‘spent more time in revising the little treatise’ during the winter and

spring of 1648�9 ‘than I had previously spent in composing it’ (1985, p. 327;

Rodis-Lewis, 1998, pp. 74, 186; cf. Gaukroger, 1995, pp. 399, 468 n. 76). The

very first sentence of this revised version of the Passions proclaimed: ‘The defects

of the sciences we have from the ancients are nowhere more apparent than in

their writings on the passions.’ For these teachings are ‘so meager and for the

most part so implausible, that I cannot hope to approach the truth except by

departing from the paths they have followed’ (1985, p. 328).

The Passions’ most significant divergence from classical authorities was not,

from my perspective, the generally instrumental stance towards the passions

that Taylor emphasizes. Rather, the fundamental point on which Descartes’

final publication broke with the tradition was precisely the point of death.

Classical authorities, such as the Stoic Chrysippus, taught that ‘‘‘[d]eath is the

separation of the soul from the body’’’ (quoted in Long, 1996, p. 236; Wilkin,

2003, p. 63 n. 18). Descartes, however, learned from his anatomical

observations that the source of corporeal life was not the soul, but the heat

produced by the heart. Contradicting those ancient philosophers from whom

he now explicitly tried to distance himself, Descartes claimed in the Passions

that ‘the soul takes its leave [of the body] when we die only because this heat

ceases and the organs which bring about bodily movement decay’ (1985, p.

329). To illustrate this radical claim he invoked a potent new image that

Baudrillard identifies as the iconic representation of the punctual conception of

death. Descartes urged his readers to


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recognize that the difference between the body of a living man and that of a dead

man is just like the difference between, on the one hand, a watch or other

automaton (that is, a self-moving machine) when it is wound up and contains in

itself the corporeal principle of the movements for which it is designed, together

with everything else required for its operation; and, on the other hand, the same

watch or machine when it is broken and the principle of its movements ceases to

be active.

(Descartes, 1985, pp. 329�30)

Without mentioning Descartes, Baudrillard claims that in contrast to the

traditional imagery that fostered symbolic interaction between the living and

the dead, such as the Capuchin convent, ‘our modern idea of death is

controlled by a very different system of representations: that of the machine

and the function. A machine either works or it does not. Thus the biological

machine is either dead or alive’ (1993 [1976], p. 159).

While this punctual image of the dead body as a broken machine draws a

very stark distinction between the soul and body, Descartes offered his most

detailed, anatomically grounded explanation for the soul-body union in the

Passions. He defined the passions very broadly in this text, including not only

that narrow, traditional class of emotions such as love and revenge; he also

treated as passions our experiences of objects in the world, which ‘produce

certain movements in the organs of the external senses and, by means of

the nerves, produce other movements in the brain, which cause the soul to

have sensory perception of the objects’ (1985, p. 337). All of these passions

emerge, on Descartes’ account, through the movement of the pineal gland.

‘[T]he most lively and finest parts of the blood, which have been rarefied by

the heat in the heart, constantly enter the cavities of the brain in large

numbers’, Descartes claimed (1985, p. 331). When these ‘very fine parts of the

blood [that] make up the animal spirits’ (1985, p. 331) move the pineal gland,

they produce the passions through which the soul and the body communicate

with each other:

[T]he small gland which is the principal seat of the soul is suspended within the

cavities containing these spirits, so that it can be moved by them in as many

different ways as there are perceptible differences in the objects. But it can also

be moved in various different ways by the soul, whose nature is such that it

receives as many different impressions � that is, it has as many different

perceptions as there occur different movements in this gland. And conversely,

the mechanism of our body is so constructed that simply by this gland’s being

moved in any way by the soul or by any other cause, it drives the surrounding

spirits towards the pores of the brain, which direct them through the nerves to

the muscles; and in this way the gland makes the spirits move the limbs.



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These animal spirits generate different patterned responses in each individual,

such that the same sight excites fear in some and courage in others, but

Descartes thought the soul could control these patterns. He illustrated this

point with the example of a dog that can be trained to invert its initial passions

to run towards a partridge and away from a gunshot.

These things are worth noting in order to encourage each of us to make a point

of controlling our passions. For since we are able, with a little effort, to change

the movements of the brain in animals devoid of reason, it is evident that we can

do so still more effectively in the case of men. Even those who have the weakest

souls could acquire absolute mastery over all their passions if we employed

sufficient ingenuity in training and guiding them. (Descartes, 1985, p. 348)

And as we saw in the epigraph, the ‘best system’ for Descartes was one in

which the brains of punctual individuals were trained to make those choices

most conducive to a healthy life. But, as I will show in the conclusion,

Descartes did not carry the health-oriented ordering of the passions to the

point where it completely disenchanted the ontic logos and became irrational

in the sense that Tolstoy revealed to Weber and Baudrillard.

Conclusion: Descartes’ death

The extensive anatomical observations that Descartes conducted over the

course of his career contributed both to his punctual understanding of death,

represented in the image of the human corpse as a broken machine, and to his

punctual conception of the self, represented as an organism whose passions can

be ordered through proper training of the pineal gland. This punctual

combination laid the foundation of the health-conscious subject, whose

behaviour predictably aims at the political economic goal of maximum

temporal accumulation. Descartes himself displayed this modern subjectivity

in his correspondence with one his closest friends, Constantin Huygens, a

Dutch statesman and scholar whom he met in Amsterdam in 1632, and ‘who

acted as a kind of confessor to him’ (Gaukroger, 1995, p. 293). In a letter from

4 December 1637, the year when the Discourse was published, Descartes told

Huygens:

Whereas I used to think that death could deprive me of only thirty or forty years

at the most, I would not now be surprised if it were to deprive me of the

prospect of a hundred years or more. . .I am now working on a compendium of

medicine . . .I hope to be able to use this as a provisional means of obtaining

from nature a stay of execution.

(Descartes, 1991, p. 76, see also p. 131)


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Descartes’ confidence in deferring death grew over the course of his career, as

his anatomical understanding increased. After spending three months in 1647�8 with Descartes at Egmond, the Abbe Picot reported that Descartes believed

he was on the verge of extending the lifespan to 400 or 500 years (Descartes,

1909, pp. xi, 671; Baillet, 1691, pp. ii, 448; Lindeboom, 1979, p. 95; cf.

Descartes, 1976, pp. 50, 119�20).

Such claims led many to mock Descartes after he died unexpectedly in

Stockholm on 11 February 1650, at the age of 53, less than six months after he

travelled to Sweden at Queen Christina’s request. As one Belgian newspaper

put it, ‘‘‘in Sweden a fool had died who had claimed to be able to live as long as

he liked’’’ (quoted in Lindeboom, 1979, p. 94; also Wilkin, 2003, pp. 40, 63 n.

17). While it might be tempting to join in here, and treat Descartes as a

contemptible example of a health-conscious cogito who thought he could

indefinitely postpone death, I would urge against this temptation. For, despite

the confidence he expressed to Huygens and Picot, Descartes also displayed a

humble ambivalence about the ability to defer death. For instance, on 9 January

1639 he wrote to Mersenne, ‘should God not grant me the knowledge to avoid

the discomforts of old age, I hope he will at least grant me a long enough life

and the leisure to endure them. Yet all depends upon his providence, to which,

pleasantry aside, I submit myself with as much courage as Father Joseph would

have done’ (1991, p. 131). And to Huygens he wrote on 6 June 1639: ‘As for

death, which you draw to my attention I am well aware that it may take me by

surprise at any moment; yet, by the grace of God, my teeth are still so firm and

strong that I do not think I need fear death for another thirty years, unless it

catches me unawares’ (1991, p. 136). Finally, he claimed in a letter to Elisabeth

from 9 October 1649, shortly after arriving in Sweden, ‘although I have a great

veneration for Her Majesty [Queen Christina], I do not think that anything is

capable of keeping me in this country longer than next summer; but I cannot

completely guarantee the future’ (1991, p. 383).

While death did keep him in Sweden, it seems resentful to ridicule Descartes’

‘premature’ death. Throughout his life he acknowledged that death was

ultimately beyond human control, and, though he explicitly broke with the

ancients in the Passions, he seems never to have abandoned their fundamental

lesson � that one ought not fear death. As he told Mersenne in 1639, ‘One of the

main points in my own ethical code is to live life without fearing death’ (1991, p.

131). And, rather than undermining that lesson, Descartes’ anatomical

experiences actually reinforced it, for in the 15 June 1646 letter in which he

confided to Chanut that his anatomical observations had proved more helpful in

moral philosophy than medicine, he claimed that the primary lesson he learned

was that ‘instead of finding ways to preserve life, I have found another, much

easier and surer way, which is not to fear death’ (1991, p. 289). So, rather than

mocking Descartes for foolishly thinking that he could extend life or, worse,

unreflectively carrying on his life-extension project, I think we ought instead to

recognize him as a figure on the cusp of the health-conscious subject, who kept


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one foot in the traditional ontic logos as the other sought to defer death through

medical knowledge. In contrast, the year after Descartes died Hobbes

legitimated the fear of death in Leviathan (1651) as the primary passion that

leads out of the state of nature and into civil society, and Hegel followed suit in

the early nineteenth century by presenting the fear of death as one of the

primordial moments of truth in the development of self-consciousness. By

presenting death as a fearsome terminus, Hobbes and Hegel both contributed

more unambiguously than Descartes did to that meaningless, accumulative

stance towards life criticized by Tolstoy and Weber. While Heidegger

responded to this meaninglessness by raising ‘anxiety in the face of death’ as

the key to existential authenticity (1962 [1927], p. 311), Baudrillard appro-

priately criticizes this stance as ‘the terrorism of authenticity through death’,

where ‘by means of dialectical acrobatics, consciousness recuperates its

‘‘finitude’’ as destiny’ (1993 [1976], p. 190 n. 22).

While finitude may not be our destiny, we may be fated to an irrational,

disenchanted immortality as we avidly pursue healthy lifestyles, and anxiously

wait to transform ourselves through genetic interventions and stem-cell

therapies, all in order to further defer death. Indeed, the final word of

Nietzsche’s last men may be, not ‘we have invented happiness’ (1954, p. 129),

but rather ‘we have invented immortality’ � and then we blink. Ironically,

Descartes may actually be of some help in forestalling such a fate. Although I

am not suggesting we can recover the ontic logos that grounded Descartes as

he contributed to its disenchantment, perhaps we can recover some of his

ambivalence, and avoid the completion of his best system, by learning from the

lesson he offered Elisabeth on 4 August 1645:

We do not desire to have, for example, more arms or more tongues than we

have, and yet we desire to have more health. . .The reason for this is simply that

we imagine that the latter, unlike the former, can be acquired by our exertions,

or [is] due to our nature. We can rid ourselves of that opinion by bearing in

mind . . . that sickness and misfortune are no less natural to man than . . . health.


Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the College of Wooster for a research leave that provided the

time to finish this paper, and the Centre for Biomedicine and Society at King’s

College, which provided a very productive environment in which to complete

this work. I would also like to thank the three anonymous referees from

Economy and Society, as well as the editor, for their helpful comments and

suggestions. Support for this project was provided by a New Directions Grant

from the Great Lakes Colleges Association.


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Notes

1 Baudrillard does not discuss these three philosophers in any detail in Symbolicexchange; the identification of them as proponents of the punctual conception of death ismy interpretation of Baudrillard’s work.2 In personal correspondence Watson acknowledged that the most that canconfidently be said is that Descartes witnessed human dissections while living inHolland.3 Here Descartes followed Gaspar Bauhin, who used ‘H’ to label the pineal gland inTheatrum anatomicum (1592) (Bitbol-Hesperies, 2000, p. 358).4 The Excerpta anatomica is a collection of nearly 100 pages of Descartes’ anatomicalobservations, dating from 1631�48, which were copied by Leibniz and discovered in hislibrary after his death (Descartes, 1909, pp. xi, 545�634).5 This story was recounted in a 1658 letter from Samuel Sorbiere to Pierre Gassendi,and is quoted in Rodis-Lewis 1998, p. 158; also see Descartes, 1909, pp. iii, 353; Baillet,1691, p. 273, 1693, p. 214; Gaukroger, 1995, p. 270.

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Thomas F. Tierney studied political theory at the University of Massachu-

setts/Amherst. He has taught political and social theory at Illinois Wesleyan

University and Concord College, and is currently an Associate Professor of

Sociology at the College of Wooster, in Wooster, Ohio. He has also served as a


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National Endowment for the Humanities (US) Visiting Scholar at Otterbein

College and as a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Biomedicine and Society,

King’s College, London. He is the author of The value of convenience: A

genealogy of technical culture (State University of New York Press, 1993), as well

as numerous articles in Body & Society, Theory & Event, Philosophy and Social

Criticism, the Journal of Classical Sociology and other journals. His research

interests lie with the social and ethical disruptions surrounding advanced

biomedical techniques, as well as the biopolitical order that is developing

around those techniques.


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Punctual Selves, Punctual Death, and the Health-Conscious Cogito: Descartes' Dead Bodies

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Transcript of Punctual Selves, Punctual Death, and the Health-Conscious Cogito: Descartes' Dead Bodies