Body and Soul

Preferring not to rush off to a doctor, I thought I might await the cessation of what seemed at best a negligible problem. Back in Chicago, so great did the throbbing become that I felt I wouldn’t be able to sleep under its insistent pressure, and so, it being early evening, I didn’t call our family physician, but took myself to the emergency room of a nearby hospital.

There the triage nurse noted the appearance of red lines running up my left forearm, which meant that infection had set in. When, roughly three hours later, I saw a young emergency-room physician, he lanced the thumb through the nail, out of which a pearl-size bead of pus oozed. Because I happened to be taking a very small dosage of the drug Prednisone, the infection put my immune system in jeopardy, and he felt that I must spend the night in the hospital lashed to an IV dripping antibiotics into my bloodstream.

Had I waited another day or so before coming into the hospital, this doctor said, I might have been in serious trouble. He then told me of a woman he had under care who had what she thought a pimple on her bottom that turned out to be a flesh-eating strep that, having been neglected, landed her in intensive care, where she was, at the moment, fighting to remain alive.

Swollen thumbs, harmless-seeming pimples, diseases arcane and common, many with no known cause or cure, not to speak of cancers just beginning to go on the boil and exotic new deadly diseases freshly revealed almost monthly, the wondrous machine that is the human body is also, when one thinks about it, frightfully fragile.

Best not to think too much about it, my own nonscientific view has long been. The older one gets, of course, the less one is able to achieve this fine state of deliberate indifference. Things fall apart, parts wear out, subtractions–in the realms of teeth, hair, strength, coordination–seem relentless. Just when the wisdom earned through experience ought to kick in, the body kicks not back but out. Not so fast, friend, it declares, you’re my prisoner, imprisoned in your own slowly but inexorably rotting flesh, and with no hope for parole in sight.

WHAT IS WORSE, the body often acts as if it is in business for itself. The state of one’s body affects one’s mind more often than the other way round. Not mind over matter, but matter over mind, generally seems the order of the day. “It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists,” Miguel de Unamuno writes, “But it is our optimism or our pessimism, a physiological or perhaps pathological origin, as much the one as the other, that makes our ideas.”

Our greatest efforts at physical control frequently come to naught: causing us to twitch, tremble, blush, weep, lose consciousness despite our strongest will to do otherwise. Organs, glands, and intestines go about their solemn work, requiring micturition, flatulation, defecation, ejaculation, belching, burping, yawning, and hiccuping–while in the engine room (as one would like to think of the mind) one is earnestly trying to determine, say, why there have been no major poets born after 1900. I recently read about Hermann Jellinek, a revolutionary about to be executed by hanging in Vienna during the revolution of 1848, who remarked: “My spirit is calm. I hope my body will not play tricks with me.” Alas, it probably did, since at the point of hanging, I have read, all sphincteral control is lost.

The issue at the center of the body-mind problem is which of the two, body or mind, is supreme, which is at the wheel, which is really in possession of the remote and selecting all the channels? The answer has never been clear. Contemplation of the world’s most powerful ideals or magnificent works of art cannot relieve the pain of a toothache. Neither is enduring pain likely to make one wiser. Considerations of the mind-body problem usually end in a cat’s game.

IN A LIFE of grand creation and epic dissipation, Roy Porter reports in Flesh in the Age of Reason, nothing seems to have given Lord Byron greater gratification than dropping forty-five pounds, going from 196 to 151 pounds, the result of strenuous exercise while wearing seven waistcoats and a greatcoat and eating only one meal a day and drinking no malt liquor whatsoever. Are not most of us trapped in our vanities, hostage to our bodies, terrified about their letting us down, turning us grotesque by our habits or through old age, weakening us beyond thought and even decency?

Porter’s Flesh in the Age of Reason is a lengthy, unsystematic, fascinating study of the changing nature of thoughts about the relation of mind and body, especially as they shifted in eighteenth-century Enlightenment England, a time when religious constraints, and with them theological ideas, were loosened and lost their grip, and were replaced by what passed for scientific reasoning. The book is an extraordinary intellectual performance, the final work by an English historian who died, in 2002, at the age of fifty-five. A specialist in the history of medicine and psychiatry, Porter wrote and edited more than sixty books on such varied subjects as the City of London, gout, friendship, the earth sciences, cosmology, and spiritualism.

THE SUBJECT that ties almost all of Roy Porter’s work together is his quest to understand human nature. Flesh in the Age of Reason, completed just before his death, is perhaps his most comprehensive attempt at this ambitious project, and while it does not provide anything like a persuasive answer to the large question of why we are as we are, in our grandeur and in our squalor, it does offer a splendid survey of the answers tendered by some of the most brilliant and idiosyncratic minds in that most intellectually glittering of times, eighteenth-century Enlightenment England.

Flesh in the Age of Reason examines how the self was understood and transformed by “educated elites–opinion makers–[as they] grappled with anxieties as to their nature, individuality, and destiny as thinking and feeling humans.” Without claiming to be representative, let alone definitive, the book also attempts to chronicle how, as Porter puts it, “the demise of the soul came about,” by which he means the centrality of the soul in the minds of those thinking about these matters. This will of course come as striking news to many people who continue to believe they possess an undiminished soul, but then another part of Porter’s story has to do with philosophers’ and scientists’ attempt to wrest the domain of the soul from Christian theology and transfer its functions to the mind.

The eighteenth century ended, of course, before two big pieces of startling news arrived: The first was Darwin’s discovery that human beings derive from lower forms of life; and the second was Freud’s invocation to look inside ourselves, where we are likely to find things much less pleasing than we had imagined. An earlier piece of news–the messenger in this instance being a Pole named Nicolas Copernicus–had it that the earth was not the center of the universe and, like as not, neither were human beings.

All this put the idea of a God-driven, soul-centered universe in doubt. But even before, something in human beings would not allow them to live too comfortably with the abstractions required by religion. As Porter recounts, people early began asking such questions about the dimensions, the actual square footage, of heaven and hell if it could accommodate so many souls; and, if youth is returned to everyone in heaven, how will one recognize one’s grandmother? Not content to believe in the insubstantiality of the soul, as rugged a realist as Thomas Hobbes believed it was located in the pineal gland.

AN ENLIGHTENMENT MAN with a propensity to mock religion, Roy Porter begins his book discussing the way the Greeks regarded the soul and the relations between it and the body. Aristotle, notably, thought of body and soul as wedded, “potentiality to actualization.” Plato, much more poetically, saw the two in struggle, and condemned bodily appetites as inimical to freedom and even dignity. For Christianity the soul, then as now, was absolutely central; the soul was immortal, the body earthbound. What is the body, wrote the Puritan William Prynne in the 1630s, but “a loathsome Masse of dust and ashes, brittle as a glasse.” The two, body and soul, could be counted upon always to war against each other.

The argument was framed very differently on the continent with the advent of René Descartes, who decided that not soul but mind was what distinguished human beings. His famous 1637 cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am,” may be the shortest sentence with the most farreaching implications in the history of thought. “The importance of Descartes,” as Porter writes, “lay in his boldly designating the soul as a philosophical rather than a religious principle, an immaterial thinking subject.” His significance lies in converting the soul to the mind, and in asserting the predominance of free will in human behavior. Descartes thought, and we all are.

The other great philosophical player in Roy Porter’s story is John Locke, who in his 1689 Essay Concerning Human Understanding held that we all come into this world as a tabula rasa–a blank slate–and that we are what we learn and experience and what we remember of our learning and experience. Perhaps this explains the terror of witnessing a person with advanced Alzheimer’s Disease; stripped of both his learning and experience, he no longer seems the same person–or, often, like a person at all.

“Consciousness,” Locke wrote, “is Self.” Consciousness is at the heart of Locke’s doctrine, and consciousness comprised the “Totality of Impressions, Thoughts and Feelings, which make up a person’s conscious Being.” This marks the advance of Locke’s thought over Descartes’s. It’s one thing to know that one exists because one can think–and another to be self-aware so that one is able to perceive oneself in the act of thinking.

In brief portraits, Roy Porter runs through the history of thought on the mind-body problem of the famous–and sometimes not so famous–figures of the eighteenth century. Flesh in the Age of Reason is especially useful in summarizing the thought of several lesser-known but often crucial figures: names that have passed the philosophical and scientific amateur on the express train of a desultory reading life, among them Robert Boyle, David Hartley, Joseph Priestley, Thomas Willis, Bernard de Mandeville, Dugald Stewart, Thomas Beddoes, Erasmus Darwin, and many others.

ON THE MORE SECURELY FAMOUS SIDE, Porter provides succinct profiles of David Hume, the Earl of Shaftsbury, Jonathan Swift, Adam Smith, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, all of whom weighed in significantly on the mind-body problem. Samuel Johnson, a key English Enlightenment figure who never strayed from his profoundly held Christian belief and greatly feared his own extinction, felt that God gave people free will so that their souls could triumph over their flesh. His friend James Boswell, meanwhile, wondered if there would be claret in heaven and hoped, relentless skirt-chaser that he was, that women would also be there. Edward Gibbon, an unbeliever trapped in a small, pudgy, gout-ridden body, was unconcerned about the condition of his soul, in disbelief about an afterlife, and felt little sadness in leaving no children. But, then, he left three volumes of the greatest historical work written in English, which would grant him greater immortality than any line of offspring could hope to provide. Laurence Sterne, in Tristram Shandy, was pleased to remind his readers how very body-bound we all are, and to point out the absurdity of our thinking we can surmount the insistently rude and comical demands of our bodies.

A criticism of Roy Porter is that on subjects on which one already knows something, he seems thin. And this is largely so: He hasn’t much fresh to say about Johnson, Gibbon, Sterne, Mary Wollstonecraft, or Hazlitt. Yet Porter’s reading across the two cultures–scientific and literary–was impressively wide, and he knew a vast deal about many subjects about which one is unlikely ever to have heard.

Consider, as an example, Thomas Day, a member of the Birmingham-based Lunar Society (of which Eramus Darwin was a key member) and a follower of the doctrines of Rousseau, who attempted a Pygmalion project by picking out two young girls from foundling homes to teach them a proper contempt for luxury, social status, and frivolity, and a love of domestic tranquility and matronly obedience. The experiment failed dismally, of course, although he blamed it on the girls’ lack of intelligence. Always a man to put theory before practice, Day attempted to train a horse without the least cruelty–an experiment that ended with the horse’s throwing him to his death.

Along with his wide-ranging portraiture of eighteenth-century figures, Porter provides a fund of tangential information on the changing ways in which the body was regarded. Slowly, the condition of the body, like that of the soul–after Locke, better thought of as the mind–began to seem less predetermined. Thinness or corporeality became subject to (alternating) fashion. Suicide came to seem more sad than sinful. Insanity, no longer thought purely a God-given infestation of the spirit, became treatable. Death itself became “medicalized.” Porter quotes the eighteenth-century physician John Ferriar: “When all hopes of revival are lost, it is still the last duty of the physician to sooth the last moments of existence.” More and more priests were replaced by physicians at bedside before death. It all begins to smell suspiciously like progress.

BUT, not to worry, a true picture of human nature came no closer in the eighteenth century than the arrival of utopia, and it seems unlikely to arrive much in advance of human perfectibility. Porter’s summary of the paradox at the center of Tristram Shandy is also the conclusion most readers of Flesh in the Age of Reason may be expected to reach today: “Organism and consciousness, soma and psyche, heart and head, the outer and the inner–all merged and all needed to be minutely observed, if the human enigma were ever to be appreciated.” But has it been?

As for Roy Porter’s story of “the demise of the soul,” to anyone sufficiently impressed with the mysteries of life, this demise seems greatly exaggerated. Science since the eighteenth century has accomplished so very much–medically, technologically, purely heuristically–failing only to answer the really serious questions. It still cannot explain the origin of the universe, how consciousness arises, how the brain turns into the mind. It cannot tell us why there is so much suffering in the world, or whence genius derives. Nor can it account for acts of unmotivated goodness and heroism. The mind-body problem is still that, a problem in search of a solution. Until science and philosophy can answer such questions and solve such problems, the time for ditching the soul is not yet at hand.

Should one add, Amen?

Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.