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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Belief in life after death is implicated, for the typical ‘Wittgensteinian’, with Cartesian dualism, and the latter seen to entail a private inner subject that cannot survive the anti-private language argument. But Descartes does not really suffer from this defect and belief in life after death is not merely a product of ‘confused’ Cartesian metaphysics. Descartes is presented as an intellectual analogue of the formation of the concept of ‘soul’ in spiritual contexts. Just as metaphysical reflection forces us to conclude, for Descartes, that we are only contingently flesh and blood beings, so it is only under the condition of recalcitrant experience that exemplary practitioners seem forced to forge a distinction between body and soul, thus revising influentially their view of themselves as single beings both conscious and extended.
1 See, for instance, most recently, Phillips', Dewi paper in this journal ‘Dislocating the Soul’, Religious Studies 31 (1995), 447–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 Wittgenstein was talking here of the consciousness of sin, despair and salvation through faith, but I shall be giving his words another application.
3 A notion which is for both of them critically different from that of ‘life after death’.
4 ‘Successfully criticised and rejected by both Sartre and Wittgenstein’ (Dilman).
5 In Philosophical Investigations, vol. 17, 1994.
6 See Phillips (1995), p. 453.
7 I quote from the recent Penguin translation of his moral essays, Plutarch: Essays, (1992), translated by Robin Waterfield, edited and introduced by Ian Kidd (who cites Broad, p. 248).
8 See also ‘On God's Slowness to Punish’ at 563D (pp. 283 et seq).
9 In The Life and Teaching of Naropa, Boston and London, Shambhala, 1986.Google Scholar Guenther makes use of metaphysical categories (derived from Buddhism and expressed in phenomenological language), which tend to subvert those I am operating within here for the sake of the argument.
10 Guenther comments: ‘the oozing of blood or lymph at the fontanelle opening is a phenomenon as yet unexplained by the medical sciences, though well attested by all who have performed this practice’ (p. 201).
11 In his Lectures in Psychical Research, London, Routledge, 1962.Google Scholar
12 Which I distinguish from so-called ‘near death experiences’.
13 We should distinguish the cases referred to by Broad from the sort of experience reported by St Paul in 2 Cor 12 or by Plotinus in Enneads 4 8 i. In making such distinctions in a more comprehensive discussion one should need to introduce the degree of samadhi or concentration of the practitioner undergoing the experience. It is worth noting, also, that in the Buddhist tradition, knowledge of previous births, and the passing of others from one birth to another, is claimed to be dependent upon a particular stage of meditational attainment.
14 For a thorough and scholarly discussion of these issues I would refer the reader to John Cottingham's Descartes (Blackwell, 1986)Google Scholar and his ‘Cartesian Trialism’, in Mind, XCV (1985).Google Scholar
15 I am using Descartes: Philosophical Writings, translated by Anscombe and Geach (Nelson, 1954). The relevant letters are to be found between pages 274 and 282. Descartes's letters are from Egmond, 21 May and 28 June 1643, nos 302 and 310 in the Correspondence edited by Adam and Milhaud.
16 See also ‘Principles of Philosophy’, LXXI (Anscombe and Geach, pp. 196–7).
17 Although Descartes refers Princess Elizabeth to the union of body and soul to explain the interaction that delivers voluntary acts, there is nevertheless a problem of interaction that still eludes him, viz., how two such dissimilar substances as mind and matter can produce a union in the first place.
18 For an interesting discussion of the distinction between exclusion and abstraction see Murdoch, Dugald, ‘Exclusion and Abstraction in Descartes’ Metaphysics', in The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 170, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
19 I have benefited from conversations about Descartes with Pauline Phemister and I am grateful for critical comments on earlier drafts of this paper to Peter Winch, David Cockburn and members of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King's College London.
