Descartes' Bones Page 18

  Comparing anatomical features would be the foundation on which Gall’s theory would rest. In Vienna he made arrangements to have the police and the mental asylum provide him with the skulls of deceased murderers and “lunatics” so that he could analyze and compare them. Just as important, he believed, was to examine the skulls of people of worthy and notable achievement. Obtaining the heads of great thinkers, artists, and statesmen was not a simple matter, but Gall was persistent and over time he built a collection of three hundred skulls and plaster casts of skulls. The case of Goethe in particular highlights Gall’s tactics and zeal in pursuing choice skulls, for Goethe was still alive at the time that Gall pursued him. Gall was so eager to have the skull of this particular genius that, not content with Goethe’s graciously agreeing to have his head cast, he wrote to the sculptor who made the bust imploring him, in the event of the poet’s death, “to bribe the relatives” to get them to give over the head for his collection.

  Gall was obliged to leave most of his skulls behind in Vienna, but in Paris he promptly began a new collection, avidly pursuing notable examples. Events thus coalesced in a curious way in 1821. The same year that Gall decided he had amassed enough evidence and an impressive enough body of work to make his play for admission to the hallowed ranks of the Academy of Sciences, the skull of one of the most renowned of great thinkers—an object Gall would very much have liked to get his hands on—arrived at the academy.

  Gall’s chances of achieving the first objective were not good. The members were nearly unanimous in looking down on organology and “cranioscopy” (the palpating of the skull to assess a person’s aptitudes and deficiencies). Cuvier in particular found that Gall’s philosophy was speculative rather than based on clinical work; more importantly, as with evolution, he felt organology, with its assigning of so much of human intellect and emotion and predilection to biology, was an affront to what was to him the core, unimpeachable notion of an intelligent creator who bequeathed free will to his creations.

  And indeed, when the question of his membership came up, Gall received only one vote, that of his friend the naturalist Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Bitterness did not, however, prevent him from continuing to beseech the academy. He had submitted the work on the basis of which his candidacy was to be judged on October 15, 1821, just one week after Delambre issued his final report on the skull of Descartes. Gall had probably been aware of the arrival of the skull five months earlier, in the package from Berzelius; he asked to be allowed to make a plaster cast of it. Cuvier granted the request, and Descartes thus became part of the Gall collection, alongside Voltaire and Goethe.

  Gall died seven years later (of a cerebral hemorrhage, no less), having stipulated in his will that his own skull be added to the collection. It may seem curious, considering Cuvier’s decisive rejection of the work with which the collection was associated, that after Gall’s death Cuvier purchased the collection for the Museum of Natural History, but at the time even those who were opposed to the particular arguments of phrenology believed the comparative study of brains and skulls was worthwhile and could advance knowledge of the brain. It was in this same museum that the members of the academy had decided to place the skull of Descartes once they had satisfied themselves as to its authenticity, so that the plaster cast of his skull now joined his actual skull as well as that of Gall, together with the museum’s collection of bones of assorted primates and early homonids.

  In 1821, while Cuvier was serving on the committee that reviewed Gall’s membership, he had also been on a committee examining the scientific submissions of a rising young star in the field of brain research named Jean-Pierre Flourens. Flourens had started by following Gall but shifted decisively away, so much so that his career would involve a sustained attack on Gall and phrenology. Thus as Gall himself faded from the scene, his very head being tossed onto the data pile in the increasingly combative field of brain studies, a successor arose. Flourens was convinced that Gall had erred in a basic way by not grounding his theory in experimentation. Far from denying this charge, Gall had actually believed that the experimental method, because of its invasiveness, led to false conclusions. The hallmark of Gall’s approach was observation. He sat and studied the labyrinthine structures of the brain, and he compared skulls. Flourens, by contrast, believed that scientists needed to be active in their efforts to unlock the secrets of the brain. He performed huge numbers of experiments on the brains of a variety of living animals (ducks, pigeons, frogs, cats, dogs), systematically identified their parts (cerebrum, cerebellum, medulla oblongata, and so on), then either removed the part whose purpose he wanted to understand or probed into the brain to stimulate the specific region (along the way, he also pioneered the use of chloroform as anesthesia), and finally studied the change in behavior of the animal. Antivivisectionism aside, such an approach would seem today to be a logical way for scientific research to be carried out, but Flourens had to defend the experimental method, and in particular he contrasted his approach with that of Gall. Observation alone, he said, was “too limited to be truthful.” He acknowledged that experimentation could lead to false conclusions, but that only meant the experimenter had to be very sure of his method and be willing to revise his conclusions based on follow-up experimentation.

  What is notable about Flourens’s work—besides the pioneering study he made of the functions of the basic parts of the brain and his contribution to recognizing the importance of the experimental method itself—is the philosophical foundation from which he operated. For Flourens was something of a throwback among nineteenth-century scientists—a complete, unrepentant Cartesian. His many books are replete with references to Descartes, and he wrote, “I frequently quote Descartes; I even go further; for I dedicate my work to his memory. I am writing in opposition to a bad philosophy, while I am endeavoring to recall a sound one.”

  The bad philosophy Flourens had in mind was Gall’s, and he meant not merely Gall’s preoccupation with cranial bumps but what organology implied. If all the categories of human behavior and thought and aptitude corresponded, as Gall claimed, with particular corners of the brain, then the brain must be the mind. This may seem a not terribly notable distinction, but it turns out to be one of the thornier questions of modernity, right down to our day. As the Austrian emperor had feared, such a philosophy would seem to imply that the whole sphere of human action is reducible to the physical level, to bits of matter inside the skull. Humans, then, must be something like elaborate machines, whose functioning can in principle be completely understood and mapped out. Having taken up this view, one can relatively easily dismiss—or devalue or otherwise recategorize—not only the soul but much of human culture and civilization: art, religion, love, marriage and family ties, political and social relationships. Ascribing thought and behavior to the level of biology seemed to take away the foundation from these things, making them mere ad hoc tools for dealing with life, which could be changed or discarded based on other criteria, such as what was most convenient for the individual. The possibility of undercutting social foundations caused alarm, so that there was—in the nineteenth century, as there had been in the seventeenth century with the first airing of modern philosophies—a quake or tremor in society.

  Descartes, perhaps more than any other individual, had set this in motion, in part by choosing to analyze the human body as an object, just like anything else in nature. But Descartes staunchly fought back against critics who accused him of “atheism” (a catch all term for materialism and all it might imply). Because his philosophy was built on a hard distinction between mind and body, and because he included soul in the concept of mind, he believed that rather than draining the meaning from humanity he had in fact maintained the separate integrity of the mind-soul while allowing science to work on the physical side of things.

  Flourens followed Descartes in arguing against identifying the brain with the mind. His reasoning seems a bit curious, for brain-equals-mind would seem to be the logical conclusi
on of someone doing an anatomical study of the brain. You prick this nerve and it causes a contraction in that muscle; you tweak another area and see that it affects speech, or color, or awareness of right and wrong; eventually, seemingly inevitably, you come to believe that you have mapped out, within the physical masses encased in the skull, all of the attributes we associate with the mind. But like Descartes, Flourens believed, despite all his investigations of the brain, that mind was somehow other. Flourens argued that Gall’s organology, with its localizing of functions in various parts of the brain, was little more than a gimmick to please the crowds that came to hear him lecture and watch him run his fingers over people’s heads. Gall’s separate functions, or faculties, weren’t really physically distinct: “Your faculty,” he taunted rhetorically, “is only a word.”

  Flourens recognized that Gall had garnered a great amount of popular momentum for his theory, and he believed that phrenology was bad science and that he, on behalf of the academy, had to stop it. “Each succeeding age has a philosophy of its own,” he said. “The seventeenth century enthroned the philosophy of Descartes; the eighteenth that of Locke and Condillac; should the nineteenth enthrone that of Gall?” Elsewhere he tightened the comparison in a way that suggested a double tragedy: “Descartes goes off to die in Sweden, and Gall comes to reign in France.”

  Flourens insisted that the mind was not a collection of faculties but a single, whole, indivisible entity. In this, too, he was following his hero. A chief difference between mind and body, Descartes had written, is that “the body is, by its nature, always divisible, and the mind wholly indivisible.” This conclusion was based on Descartes’ observations of himself: “When I contemplate my own self, and consider myself as a thing that thinks, I cannot discover in myself any parts, but I clearly know and conceive that I am a thing absolutely one and complete.”

  This notion seems decidedly prepsychological. One feature of the modern world is precisely that we think of the self or psyche or person as composed of different parts, the names of which vary with the generations—ego and id, inner child, flower child, father figure, earth mother, Oedipus complex—so there’s a sense in which, for all the absurdity of phrenology, Gall was the more modern thinker. His organology was a psychological system, a scientific attempt to analyze the individual that predated Freud by nearly a century.

  But Flourens, along with the rest of the scientific establishment, was not ready to march in the direction that Gall indicated, for reasons that were both scientific and unscientific. The historian of science Robert M. Young underscores the divide between Flourens’ science and his personal philosophy, writing that “Flourens’ advocacy of physiological experimentation is complemented by a complete unwillingness to apply the scientific method to the study of mental phenomena.” For all his commitment to the methods of science in the physical workings of the brain, Young goes on to say, “Flourens was not prepared to submit the human character, the mind, or its organ to analysis. Their unity was a necessary basis of his beliefs about man’s dignity and freedom.” Flourens was eager to slice the brain apart, but not the mind, and he was unwilling to do the latter because he believed it would lead to a breakdown of civilization.

  But if there are political, social, and spiritual crises that come with equating mind and brain, there is an even more elemental problem with keeping them separated. Descartes, too, insisted on a complete split between the two, saying that the physical and the mental are distinct substances. The question that was thrown at him almost at once was that if body and mind exist in different universes, so to speak, how do they interact? How does your stomach’s hunger transmit itself to your mind, and how then does your mind tell your legs to walk to the refrigerator and instruct your hand to open the door and direct your eyes to scan the shelves and cause your fingers to reach toward the slice of leftover pizza? In short, how does anyone ever do anything? If so basic a question brings this “mind-body dualism” theory to a halt, then there must be a serious flaw with the theory.

  Descartes’ solution, based on his own dissecting work, was to identify a small, nut-shaped structure in the center of the brain called the pineal gland as the place where the two came together: “the principal seat of the soul,” he called it, “and the place in which all our thoughts are formed.” His reasoning had a rather disarming simplicity to it, which was based on symmetry. “The reason I believe this,” he wrote,

  is that I cannot find any part of the brain, except this, which is not double. Since we see only one thing with two eyes, and hear only one voice with two ears, and in short have never more than one thought at a time, it must necessarily be the case that the impressions which enter by the two eyes or by the two ears, and so on, unite with each other in some part of the body before being considered by the soul. Now it is impossible to find any such place in the whole head except this gland; moreover it is situated in the most suitable possible place for this purpose, in the middle of all the concavities; and it is supported and surrounded by the little branches of the carotid arteries, which bring the spirits into the brain.

  Descartes had scarcely aired this notion before critics pounced. If “mind” and “body” were truly distinct, how could a physical gland be a conduit of mental energy? This has been the critique ever since, and it does indeed reveal the absurdity of Descartes’ effort to join mind and body, but it is worth noting that Descartes did not state categorically that he had solved the conundrum. In fact, not long before sailing off to Sweden, he admitted it might be too vast a problem for the mind to grasp: “It does not seem to me that the human mind is capable of forming a very distinct conception of both the distinction between the soul and the body and their union; for to do this it is necessary to conceive them as a single thing and at the same time to conceive them as two things; and this is absurd.”

  This rather uncharacteristic burst of modesty aside, Descartes gave dualism its modern form and insisted on it, and Western philosophy and the Western tradition since his time—modernity, in other words—have had the mind-body problem in their DNA, as it were. The problem is so elemental and yet so sweeping that attempts to solve it today run across many disciplines, from computer science to neuroscience to psychology. As both the Austrian emperor Francis and Voetius, the theologian in Utrecht who opposed Descartes, feared would happen, much of the Western world has solved the problem of dualism by coming down on the material side of the equation. Physicalism is the present-day term for the view that the physical or material world is the real world—that nothing exists outside of it—and a lot of scientists and philosophers ascribe to some form of it. People who declare themselves to be atheists and say that what they believe in is science or the physical world or the here and now are adopting a physicalist stance.

  Jean-Pierre Flourens tried to hold the line against physicalism by bringing Cartesianism—which had long since receded—into cutting-edge nineteenth-century science. While his effort may seem disingenuous, as though he were putting on blinders to keep from looking at things that were too troubling to his worldview, there was a certain wisdom in his attempt. For, as many current thinkers have pointed out, there are basic problems with the physicalist view. What it leaves out, to state it briefly and bluntly, is me. The present-day philosopher Thomas Nagel puts it this way:

  For many philosophers the exemplary case of reality is the world described by physics, the science in which we have achieved our greatest detachment from a specifically human perspective on the world. But for precisely that reason physics is bound to leave undescribed the irreducibly subjective character of conscious mental processes, whatever may be their intimate relation to the physical operation of the brain. The subjectivity of consciousness is an irreducible feature of reality—without which we couldn’t do physics or anything else—and it must occupy as fundamental a place in any credible world view as matter, energy, space, time, and numbers.

  That is to say, human consciousness is the well from which we derive much that is most
meaningful to us, so any theory of knowledge that does not take it seriously into account—along with all of the stuff that goes with human consciousness: mourning the dead, petting kittens, bowing to Mecca, cherishing faded love letters, risking your life to save someone else’s, subconsciously loathing your mother or consciously hating your boss—is flawed. This is the problem that people today have who decide to solve the puzzle of modernity by rejecting past systems—usually religious systems—and replacing them with a good, firm, “scientific” way of understanding. The classic scientific perspective is one of objectivity, and as Nagel says, “Although there is a connection between objectivity and reality . . . still not all reality is better understood the more objectively it is viewed.” We ourselves—our individual consciousnesses, the very minds that seek an objective view and, having found it, try to hold on to it even as they are bombarded with thoughts and pains and desires—have to be made part of the picture.

  The hard fact of modernity is that from the time that Descartes separated the two, nobody has yet come up with a definitive, universally satisfying way to solder mind and brain together again. Descartes declared in 1646 that it may not be possible. In 1998, Thomas Nagel stated flatly that “no one has a plausible answer to the mind-body problem.” In 1808, when Cuvier led the committee that reviewed Gall’s first effort to win the approval of the Academy of Sciences, he said much the same thing in his report. The brain, Cuvier and his colleagues wrote with considerable elegance and sophistication in their critique of Gall’s science, seems somehow fundamentally different from the rest of the body, so that

  we cannot expect a physiological explanation of the action of the brain in animal life comparable to that of the other organs. In these other organs the causes and effects are of the same kind; when the heart causes the blood to circulate, it is one motion that produces another motion. . . . The functions of the brain are of a totally different order; they consist in receiving, by means of the nerves, and in transmitting immediately to the mind the impressions of the senses, in preserving the traces of these impressions, and in reproducing them . . . when the mind requires them, [and] lastly, in transmitting to the muscles, always by means of the nerves, the desires of the will. Yet these three functions suppose the always incomprehensible mutual influence of divisible matter and the indivisible self, an unbridgeable gap in the system of our ideas and an eternal stumbling block to all our philosophies.