Abstract

In this paper, I propose to examine an important question in the philosophy of Descartes’ life sciences. The question revolves around the nature of the interactions between animals – in Descartes’ conception: natural automata – and their environment, as well as between different parts inside their body. The most pressing issue for us is to understand to what extent these interactions were conceived by Descartes as necessary or contingent events, which is often thought to be tied up with the problem of freedom. These issues arise because the traditional understanding of Descartes’ animal machines has extremely strong necessitarian – one could even say fatalistic – implications, leaving no room for any kind of freedom in their actions. Such readings frequently construe the bête-machine as a pre-programmed or program-controlled device, where the instruments of the supposed pre-programming take a rather rudimentary form: often they are imagined by analogy with simple mechanical devices or with simple hydraulic machines, and the most complex device to which animals are compared is the famous mechanical clock. Admittedly, this is not without some textual foundation in Descartes’ writings, as he himself was fond of the clockwork metaphor. As a result of this conception, however, more elaborate forms of communication between the internal parts of the animal machine – most notably feedback mechanisms – are explicitly excluded from the picture. This is unfortunate because no matter how deterministic the mechanical processes underlying the behavior of animals may be, the effects that more complex systems can generate, and which we observe in their functioning, are tightly interwoven with our modal concepts and with our concept of freedom. It is only natural to ask, then, how one can accommodate any conception of freedom with the strict determinism suggested by the paradigm cases of mechanical explanations in early modern science and especially by Descartes’ machine analogies, which were supposed to establish a close kinship between natural and artificial automata. As we shall see, Descartes’ thinking in these matters was more nuanced than it is generally recognized, and there is a kind of freedom that he attributed to animals and that enabled them, on Descartes’ view, to respond meaningfully to the contingencies of their environment.