BOOK REVIEW

Dualisms of body and soul: historiographical challengesto a stereotype

Danijela Kambaskovic (ed.): Conjunctions of mind, soul and bodyfrom Plato to the enlightenment. Dordrecht: Springer, 2014;Studies in the history of philosophy of mind, vol. 15, xviii+421pp,$179 HB

Fernando Vidal1

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

In 2004, Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale

University, published a book entitled Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child

Development Explains What Makes Us Human. By ‘‘being human,’’ the author

basically meant ‘‘being a dualist.’’ Babies, he wrote, ‘‘are natural-born dualists,’’

and in his view that accounted for the fact that, at least when we consider the most

common attitudes and beliefs, ‘‘[w]e are Descartes’ babies’’ (Bloom 2005, xiii):

We can explain much of what makes us human by recognizing that we are

natural Cartesians—dualistic thinking comes naturally to us. We have two

distinct ways of seeing the world: as containing bodies and as containing

souls. These two modes of seeing the world interact in surprising ways in the

course of development of each child, and in the social context of a community

of humans they give rise to certain uniquely human traits, such as morality and

religion. (Bloom 2005, xii)

Bloom is not alone in his claim, and a range of scholars across disciplines have

argued that humans are intuitive, spontaneous and innate substance dualists.

Empirical data have often been used to support the case and to extend it beyond

Western and Christianized societies. The anthropological commonplace ‘‘that non-

Western peoples are free from the traps of dualistic thinking’’ (Astuti 2001, 429)

seems to have been vigorously challenged. In response, the universality of substance

dualism has been considered incompatible ‘‘with cultural representations such as

mythologies, funerary rites, iconography and doctrine as well as empirical evidence

concerning intuitive folk reasoning about the mind and body concerning the

& Fernando Vidal

fernando.vidal@icrea.cat

1 ICREA (Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies)/Center for the History of

Science, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

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DOI 10.1007/s11016-015-0050-9

afterlife’’ (Hodge 2008, 387). Indeed, across cultures, such representations always

involve embodied, enfleshed beings.

That is certainly the case of Christianity since the Medieval period. Insofar as the

fact that Christianity considers persons to be intrinsically corporeal has been

extremely well documented, the book under review cannot be seen as offering ‘‘a

fresh reconsideration of ideas on the body and soul’’ (6). It does, however, provide

numerous illustrations of that fact, and demonstrates the extent to which the terms of

the above-mentioned debate about ‘‘dualism’’ may have been oversimplified.

Instead of dichotomies, the beautiful and perfectly chosen word ‘‘conjunction’’

immediately evokes complex and dynamic relationships—and in the present case,

among the three, rather than the two, conjoined and concurrent entities at play,

namely mind, soul and body. The choice of a Shakespearean word (expounded in

pages 119–120) fits with the professional profile of several of the book’s authors, as

well as with the context in which it originated, the Australian Research Council

(ARC) Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. In addition to a common

preference for intellectual history, the volume covers a period closer to that

specified in the Centre’s mission (Europe, 1100–1800 CE) than to the Antiquity

suggested in its title: It does not go back to Plato, though it discusses various

Neoplatonic movements and thinkers (the earliest one treated in the book is the

fourth-century bishop Gregory of Nyssa).

Conjunctions of Mind, Soul and Body focuses on textual materials, with scant

attention to practices or visual and material culture. This is not a reproach, and some

of its chapters embody intellectual history at its best: They deal with ‘‘the

articulation of ideas in the past,’’ study closely written expressions of thought

produced in learned cultures, and try to recover the mental and contextual

conditions that shaped the meaning that those expressions had for their original

publics (Collini 2008).

The volume includes eighteen unnumbered chapters by eighteen authors (one

chapter is co-authored and two, unusually and excessively, are by the editor). It is

divided into four sections, whose titles aim to designate different fields or kinds of

mind–body–soul conjunction: Text and Self-Perception, Emotions, Sex, Material

Souls. As could be expected from an extremely heterogeneous volume, these labels

work only moderately well. More problematic, however, is the fact that they are

nowhere explained and elaborated. The editor declares, ‘‘I wanted to examine the

question from as many perspectives as possible’’ (1) and limits her introduction to

hurriedly sketching the book’s contents, without providing a rationale for the chosen

chronology, approach and specific topics, or trying to bring the abundant materials

conceptually and thematically together. A little bit of some of that integration can be

found in the Foreword by the medievalist Andrew Lynch, current director of the

ARC Centre for the History of Emotions; but it does not compensate for the lack of

analysis and synthesis. These shortcomings undermine the book’s overall value and

are reinforced by the absence of an index that might have helped readers navigate

the volume.

As a limited attempt at suggesting how Conjunctions might tell a story endowed

with a certain unity or provide a comprehensive historical ‘‘lesson’’ out of the rich

diversity of its narratives, let us take the two ends of its protracted timespan: the

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eleventh-century Byzantine historian and philosopher Michael Psellos, and early-

modern and Enlightenments strategies for naturalizing the soul (the earliest author

on whom a chapter focuses is Gregory of Nyssa; but the ‘‘next’’ one in time is

Psellos, and the rest of the chapters are closer to his century than to Gregory’s). Of

course, these are in all respects two extremely different universes. According to

Graeme Miles (2015), a characteristic trait of Psellos’ philosophy was its capacity,

which emerges in his treatment of the relationship of body, soul and intellect, ‘‘for

accepting and balancing apparently contradictory demands’’ (11). Psellos’ emphasis

on the totality of the human as a composite being (which he sometimes discussed

via the allegory of the sphinx) has led commentators to see him as rehabilitating the

body in the Platonic tradition which he revived and transmitted. This tradition was

ambivalent as regards the ‘‘right valuation’’ of body and soul; Psellos, in Miles’

depiction, embraced such ambivalence and was willing ‘‘to accept the inconsistency

and multiplicity of human existence, including its bodily component’’ (14), while

arguing for a reconciliation of substances to maintain the composite ‘‘in good order’’

(21). Thus, beyond conventional Platonizing positions concerning the distinction

between the sensible and the intelligible or the disparity of the human components,

Psellos’ originality (in this area) lies in ‘‘his appreciation of the bodily and material

parts of the human composite and his celebration of the fact of composition in

itself’’ (23).

At the other end of the chronology, Charles T. Wolfe and Michaela van Esveld

(2015) examine a ‘‘unique intellectual situation in which materialism is asserted

while the existence of the soul is not denied’’—the ‘‘hybrid option’’ of early modern

Epicureanism, which refused the immortal, purely intellective soul while affirming a

material soul (371). In the long-lasting Galenic and Aristotelian frameworks,

psychological explanations were given in terms of modifications of the animal

spirits, the material body acted on the immaterial soul by means of the humors

(blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm), and the two substances maintained

relationships of mutual dependence and mutual causation. That is why early modern

‘‘psychology’’ belonged primarily in ‘‘physics’’ or the science of nature, why the

‘‘sciences of the soul’’ made room for anatomy and were not chiefly a study of

intellectual functions, why physiology and medicine routinely accommodated the

notion of soul and its commercium or interaction with the body and why the most

piously Christian eighteenth-century psychologists elaborated psychophysiologies

instead of philosophies of mind (Vidal 2011). Wolfe and van Esveld exaggerate the

extent to which other historians have claimed that in the early modern period the

soul was the exclusive province of metaphysics, or have emphasized the divide

between philosophy and disciplines such as medicine and physiology. Their study

nonetheless makes its abundant materials, some of which are seldom treated

together, sustain a skillfully documented story about the naturalization of mind and

about ‘‘the presence of materialist ‘components’ or articulated wholes within

philosophical systems that are not themselves materialistic’’ (415). In short, soul

may be (and has been) naturalized ‘‘without being entirely eliminated,’’ and making

it ‘‘material’’ does not require folding it ‘‘into a mechanistic ontology’’ (416).

Taken as a whole beyond the strengths and weaknesses of individual chapters and

particular readers’ interests, the volume under review demonstrates that the long

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historical trajectory of the ‘‘conjunctions of mind, soul and body’’ is predominantly

characterized by attempts at reconciling their ostensibly incompatible features and

at balancing the apparently contradictory intellectual and moral demands they

involved. These attempts were not always explicit, nor did they necessarily result in

clear-cut positions. But in most circumstances and contexts, the prevalent view saw

the human as a composite, and intellectual efforts were directed at conciliating the

inconsistency and multiplicity that seemed to follow from humanity’s mixed nature

with a satisfactory level of explanatory power and theoretical and practical

coherence. Yet dualistic idioms still permeate not only daily language, but also

contemporary ‘‘neuro’’ discourses at many levels, from the assertion that

‘‘meditation actually changes our brain’’ (Walton 2015—one example in hundreds)

to the less triumphalistic observation that dualism persists because the best theories

about the brain and about some aspect of mind ‘‘do not seem to share any

properties’’ (Phillips et al. 2015, 367). Here, then, in Conjunctions of Mind, Soul and

Body, is a chance for history to illuminate the present and challenge enduring

intellectual stereotypes.

References

Astuti, Rita. 2001. Are we natural dualists? A cognitive developmental approach. Journal of the Royal

Anthropological Institute 7: 429–447.

Bloom, Paul. 2005 [2004]. Descartes’ baby: How the science of child development explains what makes

us human. London: Arrow Books.

Collini, Stefan. 2008. Intellectual History. http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/

intellectual_history.html. Accessed 28 November 2015.

Hodge, K.Mitch. 2008. Descartes’ mistake: How afterlife beliefs challenge the assumption that humans

are intuitive cartesian substance dualists. Journal of Cognition and Culture 8: 387–415.

Miles, Graeme. 2015. Living as a sphinx: Composite being and monstruous interpreter in the ‘Middle

Life’ of Michael Psellos. In Conjunctions of mind, soul and body, ed. Danijela Kambaskovic, 11–24.

Netherlands: Springer.

Phillips, Kristopher G., Alan Beretta, and Harry A. Whitaker. 2015. Mind and brain: Toward an

understanding of dualism. In Brain, mind and consciousness in the history of neuroscience, ed.

C.U.M. Smith, and Harry Whitaker, 355–369. Dordrecht: Springer.

Vidal, Fernando. 2011. The sciences of the soul: The early modern origins of psychology, trans. S. Brown.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Walton, Alice. 2015. 7 ways meditation can actually change the brain. http://www.forbes.com/sites/

alicegwalton/2015/02/09/7-ways-meditation-can-actually-change-the-brain/. Accessed 5 Dec 2015.

Wolfe, Charles T., and Michaela van Esveld. 2015. The material soul: Strategies for naturalising the soul

in an early modern Epicurean context. In Conjunctions of mind, soul and body, ed. Danijela

Kambaskovic, 317–421. Netherlands: Springer.

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