“He did indeed. The word ‘mechanic’ comes from the Greek word ‘mechane,’
which means machine. It is remarkable that neither Hobbes nor Newton saw any
contradiction between the mechanistic world picture and belief in God. But this was
not the case for all eighteenth- and nineteenth-century materialists. The French
physician and philosopher La Mettrie wrote a book in the eighteenth century called L
‘homme machine, which means ‘Man—the machine.’ Just as the leg has muscles to
walk with, so has the brain ‘muscles’ to think with. Later on, the French
mathematician Laplace expressed an extreme mechanistic view with this idea: If an
intelligence at a given time had known the position of all particles of matter, ‘nothing
would be unknown, and both future and past would lie open before their eyes.’ The
idea here was that everything that happens is predetermined. ‘It’s written in the stars’
that something will happen. This view is called determinism.”
“So there was no such thing as free will.”
“No, everything was a product of mechanical processes—also our thoughts and
dreams. German materialists in the nineteenth century claimed that the relationship of
thought to the brain was like the relationship of urine to the kidneys and gall to the
liver.”
“But urine and gall are material. Thoughts aren’t.”
“You’ve got hold of something central there. I can tell you a story about the
same thing. A Russian astronaut and a Russian brain surgeon were once discussing
religion. The brain surgeon was a Christian but the astronaut was not. The astronaut
said, ‘I’ve been out in space many times but I’ve never seen God or angels.’ And the
brain surgeon said, ‘And I’ve operated on many clever brains but I’ve never seen a
single thought.’ “ “But that doesn’t prove that thoughts don’t exist.”
“No, but it does underline the fact that thoughts are not things that can be
operated on or broken down into ever smaller parts. It is not easy, for example, to
surgically remove a delusion. It grows too deep, as it were, for surgery. An important
seventeenth-century philosopher named Leibniz pointed out that the difference be-
tween the material and the spiritual is precisely that the material can be broken up into
smaller and smaller bits, but the soul cannot even be divided into two.”
“No, what kind of scalpel would you use for that?” Alberto simply shook his
head. After a while he pointed down at the table between them and said:
“The two greatest philosophers in the seventeenth century were Descartes and
Spinoza. They too struggled with questions like the relationship between ‘soul’ and
‘body,’ and we are now going to study them more closely.”
“Go ahead. But I’m supposed to be home by seven.”
Descartes
... he wanted to clear all the rubble off the site…
Alberto stood up, took off the red cloak, and laid it over a chair. Then he settled
himself once again in the corner of the sofa.
“Rene Descartes was born in 1596 and lived in a number of different European
countries at various periods of his life. Even as a young man he had a strong desire to
achieve insight into the nature of man and the universe. But after studying philosophy
he became increasingly convinced of his own ignorance.”
“Like Socrates?”
“More or less like him, yes. Like Socrates, he was convinced that certain
knowledge is only attainable through reason. We can never trust what the old books
tell us. We cannot even trust what our senses tell us.”