What? Yes, this is what I read in Tristram Stuart’s comprehensive history of modern vegetarianism, The Bloodless Revolution. The man so famous for thinking animals are mere machines lived on a diet of vegetables from his garden! According to his friend and biographer Andrien Baillet, at least at home he ate “vegetables and herbs all the time, such as turnips, coleworts, panado, salads from his garden, potatoes with wholemeal bread.”
Not only was he a de facto mostly-vegetarian, but he apparently accepted a good chunk of the reasoning that leads to ethical vegetarianism. He thought that if animals did feel pain, then we’d be wrong to raise them and kill them for food. I think I’m going to have to atone for my heretofore tendency to vilify Descartes as a completely heartless enemy of animals. Most people today don’t even accept that much of the reasoning for vegetarianism, but he did.
Furthermore, I was astonished to read that Descartes’ thinking about animal minds was partly driven by concerns about ethics and theology. If you think there’s a God who created animals, “and saw that it was good,” it’s very hard to see why he made them out of very tasty meat, practically luring us into acts of violence against them. Apparently this conundrum about God and meat-eating disturbed Descartes. To suppose that animals are mere machines, and feel no pain–as Descartes did–resolves the whole puzzle, just like that. God is acquitted and so are we.
Of course, there’s a lot more to the reasoning that leads Descartes to say animals are non-sentient machines, but thoughts about God and meat-eating were apparently an element. He wasn’t lacking the thought that animal suffering would be a serious barrier to the things we do to animals, and even to theism, if it were real.
Please don’t ask me the meaning of the word “panado.” Apparently it’s something tasty to eat that grew in Descartes’ garden.
Wow… really? So how does he reconcile vivisecting animals with not eating them? Its wrong to eat them because it causes them pain and suffering, be we can dissect them alive, to learn about how they work?
I know, I’m shocked too. But he was just a de facto vegetarian, not an ethical vegetarian. Still, he did think that we would be wrong to eat animals if they DID feel pain. That is giving much more weight to animal pain than most people do! I say we give him a little credit for the vegetarian meals and for believing in the right counterfactuals.
Interesting that you say his views on animals might be a kind of theodicy. It lines up with the thought that Meditations is RD’s attempt to get God out of the problem of epistemological evit, i.e. explaining away why He seems to have set us up to go wrong so easily.
He still seems to have done some nasty stuff to live dogs and rabbits, though.
Evit? I meant ‘evil’.
Now that is interesting. I, too, shall have to revise some of my nastier opinions of Descartes. I’ll have to check out Stuart’s book as well.
I’m always curious about how history like this gets revised or written in the first place. How did Stuart discover the truth about Descartes’ meals? Did somebody keep his menus from when he was hired by the Queen?
Stuart gets this from Baillet, Descartes’s friend and biographer. He had first hand evidence, presumably. But today I was digging around in Descartes trivia, and discovered he lived in something like 24 places over 22 years. Are we to think every place had a garden? Well, maybe so. Maybe that was standard.
In any event, I don’t meant so suggest D. was an out and out good guy. He was a vegetarian for health reasons. I’m just surprised he was one at all, and also surprised that his view of animals wasn’t a function of moral indifference. He actually thought it would be seriously bad to kill and eat animals, IF they felt pain. That’s not exactly indifference.
La panade (It.panata) is a soup made from water, bread and beer or milk occasionally all boiled together. Slang for misery being that it is such poor fare. But then was not Rene a valetudinarian and his delicate stomach may have led him to take up a vegetarian diet.
Hmm… It would stand to reason that he would think that they experience pain…. We experience pain, and that isn’t something that requires a soul, under Cartesian philosophy. Without a soul, we’re nothing more than animals for Descartes. But to suggest that they have some kind of moral import because of their capacity to feel pain is to beat Jeremy Bentham to it.
And if animals do have moral import because of their capacity to feel pain, that would fly in the face of Christianity, wouldn’t it?
Ah, I disagree with you on how Descartes thought about animals. No souls, no pain, just machines. That’s fairly clear in the texts, and that’s how his contemporaries interpreted him.
What he believed is counterfactual: If they DID feel pain, then it WOULD be wrong to kill them.
Christians at his time did have lots of worries about meat-eating, both religious and non-religious. So says Stuart (interesting book!)
Isn’t pain one of those intermingling features of the body and mind, so even without a mind, we could experience pain?
So a boat smashes into a reef, nothing happens to the boat… but a bear gets cut, clearly the bear reacts… Seems kinda silly to say that the bear didn’t feel pain. Maybe I’m being too charitable here? Its been a while since I’ve read the passions or discourse.
Well yes, your mind is all intermingled with your body, and not like a captain on a ship. So maybe you’re thinking the intermingling somehow makes sensations body-ish, or literally body. There’s a passage or two in Descartes that can be read as saying that animals do have purely bodily sensations, but many others can’t. D. does say animals are nature’s automata–they’re robots. Surely he didn’t think robots have feelings. Also the fact that his contemporaries read him as denying that animals have sensations strikes me as a strong clue.
As Michael Reidy says, panado in the seventeenth century is not a vegetable but a dish, what would also be called a pap; the consistency, though, could vary from region to region, and it’s impossible to say whether it would have had a consistency more like a soup of mashed vegetables or more like a pudding. But it would be somewhere in that range.
Descartes held that our usual use of words like ‘pain’ is ambiguous, because we muddle together mental and physical characteristics; in the proper sense it applies only to the conscious feeling of pain, but we often use it to indicate as well the disruption of the body. Animals would have the latter but not the former. We have both, because we are minds with automata. This is actually something Descartes says explicitly to Henry More when he makes the comment about how his view absolves men from the suspicion of a crime in eating animals. The full passage is (AT V, 278-279; CSM 366):
For what it’s worth, there is some controversy about this passage. John Cottingham says Descartes thinks mere body supports some degree of crude feeling. So “I do not even deny sensation” means “I do not even deny crude feeling.” You’ll need JSTOR or the like to look at it, but Peter Harrison talks about all this stuff here: “Descartes on Animals,” The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 167 (Apr., 1992), pp. 219-227.
You’re right that there are some people who try to press this passage, and a few others a bit harder. Cottingham’s interpretation seems to me to run into the ambiguity problem: on the one hand, of course mere body supports some degree of crude feeling: in response to an environmental stimulus you get a tumult of animal spirits, and that’s part of what we think of as crude feeling. But on the other hand, Descartes is very clear that everything we recognize as feeling in ourselves has some mixture of thought in it. This is the one and only reason why he thinks the argument from sensory organs is the one and only reasonable argument for the existence of animal minds; if Descartes thought we ever had feelings that were not partly mental, he could have simply said so to deal with the problem. Instead he argues that our reasons for thinking animals don’t have minds overweigh that one bit of evidence that suggests otherwise. So it does us no good to say that Descartes attributes crude feeling to body unless we clarify what we mean, because in our ordinary use of such terms we muddle together body and mind, as part of our own mind-body union. (Plus, the Latin term Descartes is using here, if I remember correctly, is sensus, which more plausibly means ’sensory capability’ than ‘feeling’.)
I think knowing that one of the most brilliant men of our times will allow vegetarians to know how important it is to be able to live their lifestyle. I found that sharing this type of information allows me to feel empowered. I love the knowledge!
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