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Consciousness

Souls, Minds, Bodies and Planets (part 2)

In which Mary Midgley discusses the nature of consciousness and argues that the legacy of Descartes is disasterous for our view of ourselves and our planet.

Whatever we decide about the relationship between mind and body, we need to be aware that our decision has a moral dimension. Descartes supposed himself to be abstracting from all local influences, designing a priori a timeless, impartial picture of human knowledge. But the most abstract thinkers still take the premises of their reasoning into their ivory tower with them. As we have seen, Descartes was in fact responding to certain quite particular pressures of his own time. He devised his dualism in order to fit the new science into European culture without harming its Christian background.

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