Vincent Aucante. xxi + 472 pp. illus., figs., tables, app., bibl., index. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006. € 31.
(Originally published in Isis.)
It would be difficult to imagine a more thorough treatment of Descartes’s medical philosophy than the one Vincent Aucante has undertaken, and we may be certain this study will remain authoritative for some time to come. It is to be hoped that an English translation will be published soon, as this book is of tremendous interest not only to specialists in the history of medicine, but to anyone interested in understanding Descartes in terms of what he himself sought to understand. Medicine was important to Descartes: Aucante places at 20% the quantity of pages in the oeuvre dedicated to it, and Descartes himself writes in a 1645 letter that “the preservation of health has always been the principle aim of my studies” (AT IV 329). In view of Descartes’s own stated priorities, the received view of the 19th-century neorationalists who saw Descartes’s medical thought as a failure, and as best left out of editions, urgently needs to be revised. Aucante’s book makes this case powerfully.
This study surpasses Annie Bitbol-Hespériès’s Le principe de vie chez Descartes of 1990 in depth and breadth, though the subject here is not, to be precise, life. Life, for Descartes, is sustained by the ‘feu sans lumière’ (AT VI 46, 7-8) of the beating heart, and thus by a sort of ferment. To this extent animals, lacking the souls Aristotle had thought all living things have in common, are perfectly alive. Descartes’s ‘biology’ is thus entirely contained within his physics, while the ultimate horizon of his medicine is metaphysical, to the extent that medicine is concerned specifically with ensouled bodies, that is, human bodies, with their health and well-being, and with the psychophysical causes of disorders. In Jean-Luc Marion’s terms in his short preface (these in turn borrowed from Husserl), medicine is concerned not so much with the body [le corps, der Körper] as with the flesh [la chair, das Leib, or, in Descartes’s own telling phrase, mon corps].