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Roger Brooke’s interest in Jungian ideas and phenomenology and my interest in Fordham’s model and early development have overlapped and become a shared interest in the mind-body issue and, with that, the 17th century philosopher Rene Descartes. Brooke has taken the time to critique my paper and I am here addressing what I consider to be salient points that I think need clarification.
Following introductory comments summarising his understanding of my paper, Brooke writes that there is a fundamental problem with my appraisal of Descartes. His view is that the ‘radical shift’ ascribed to Descartes tears mind and body apart and ‘jettisons’ the body, isolating the mind in an interior world. But this is only half the picture because Descartes held with equal conviction that these two separate ‘substances’ (as medieval thinkers conceived them) were unified: that although he stressed the differences between matter and thought, he was certain that they are ‘mysteriously and inextricably combined’ in human beings, although he could not explain how (Gottlieb 2006, p. 88).
It needs to be born in mind that the implications of cogito ergo sum were not Descartes’s major preoccupation, which was the search for the unity of the sciences. The separation of soul and body had been around for a long time and, as I understand it, what made a difference to the course of Western thought is that Descartes gave individual human subjectivity a place. (This is why Copleston refers to Descartes as ‘a forefather of phenomenology’, (1963, p. 158) although Brooke indicates there was not a direct influence.) It seems that Descartes may have left things with his discovery of how he could attain certainty if not for the insistence of Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, who prodded him to explain how mind and body related to one another. Descartes admitted to a fellow philosopher that his dual position did seem to be a contradiction, and turned his attention to the interaction between them. He subsequently