Spirits and Clocks: Machine and Organism in Descartes

DENNIS DES CHENE, Spirits and Clocks: Machine and Organism in Descartes. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp. xiii + 181. ISBN 0-8014-3764-4. L25.95 (hardback).

DOI: 10.1017/S0007087403225048

This rangy and precise book deserves to be read even by those historians who think they are bored with Descartes. While offering surprising and detailed readings of bewildering texts like the Description of the Human Body, Des Chene constructs a powerful, sad narrative of the Cartesian disenchantment of the body. Along the way he also delivers provocative views on topics as various as teleology, the role of illustrations in the history of mechanism, theories of the sexual differentiation of the foetus, and problems of simulation in scientific method.

Des Chene's writing is both witty and melancholic. Discussing Descartes's view of the fire in the heart as a 'fire without light', he comments that 'only in love poems does the heart glow: the real heart is a heart of darkness' (p. 27). He communicates vividly a sense that there is 'something frightening' about Descartes's brash confidence in certain of his explanations in natural philosophy (p. 34). Des Chene illustrates the schematic rhetorical role of the machine with Descartes's explanation of why one cannot attend to several things at once: the man-machine whose gaze, in a famous figure from the Treatise on Man, is fixed on an arrow in front of it, is prevented 'from smelling the flower beneath its nose' (p. 73). These influential images, drawn by la Forge and van Gutschoven for the first French edition of the book, are analysed carefully and without pretension. But he also offers his own neat drawings to try to make sense of some of the more bewildering bits of Descartes's mechanistic physiology. Des Chene is far from the first to argue that in this field 'Descartes was too ambitious by half' (p. 153), but these sympathetic attempts to reconstruct obscure parts of Cartesian embryology and theories of bodily self-regulation give his subsequent criticisms extra...