Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Meditations on First Philosophy

Paris

Michel de Soly

1641

The "I" is not present in the body as a sailor is in a ship but is joined and intermingled with it

Nature also teaches me, by these sensations or pain, hunger, thirst and so on, that I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but that I am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit. If this were not so, I, who am nothing but a thinking thing, would not feel pain when the body was hurt, but would perceive the damage purely by the intellect, just as a sailor perceives by sight if anything in his ship is broken. Similarly, when the body needed food or drink, I should have an explicit understanding of the fact, instead of having confused sensations of hunger and thirst. For these sensations of hunger, thirst, pain and so on are nothing but confused modes of thinking which arise from the union and, as it were, intermingling of the mind with the body.
(Sixth Meditation, p. 56)

Population::Sailor

Past Masters; MacDonald's History of the Concept of Mind (289)

Descartes, René. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothof, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Mind and Body

10/09/2003