The Beviad–musings, mutterings and myths

EXCERPT

Chapter One - The Blood of an Android

To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death.
-Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

He was sure it was to be his last trip. The philosopher René Descartes had been summoned by Queen Christina of Sweden, who wanted to know his views on love, hatred, and the passions of the soul; but although he was happy to correspond with the Queen, Descartes was loath to become part of her court. He felt, he said, that “thoughts as well as waters” would freeze over in Sweden and, since that winter was particularly harsh, he believed he would not survive the season. He even feared, he wrote to a friend, “a shipwreck which will cost me my life.” But Christina’s whim was his command. Filled with foreboding, he packed his bags, taking all of his manuscripts with him.

He was travelling, he told his companions, with his young daughter Francine; but the sailors had never seen her, and, thinking this strange, they decided to seek her out one day, in the midst of a terrible storm. Everything was out of place; they could find neither the philosopher nor the girl. Overcome with curiosity, they crept into Descartes’s quarters. There was no one there, but on leaving the room, they stopped in front of a mysterious box. As soon as they had opened it, they jumped back in horror: inside the box was a doll-a living doll, they thought, which moved and behaved exactly like a human being. Descartes, it transpired, had constructed the android himself, out of pieces of metal and clockwork. It was indeed his progeny, but not the kind the sailors had imagined: Francine was a machine. When the ship’s captain was shown the moving marvel, he was convinced, in his shock, that it was some instrument of dark magic, responsible for the weather that had hampered their journey. On the captain’s orders, Descartes’s “daughter” was thrown overboard.

It’s hard to know if this story is true. Descartes did go to Sweden, and did, as he had feared, die there, six months later. He had, in fact, attempted to build some automata earlier in his life (one of his correspondents reported that Descartes had plans for “a dancing man, a flying pigeon, and a spaniel that chased a pheasant”), and he continued to be interested in mechanical toys. But the events on the ship read like a too-perfect fable-about science falling prey to the God-fearing crowd, about the threatening, uncanny power of machines, about the rational philosopher who has an almost superstitious relation to the product of his own mind: he names it, he calls it his daughter-and whether or not the story is made up of literal facts, it must, in a sense, be true to some metaphorical purpose: what is the use of telling it? (It has been told many times since Descartes’s death).

Descartes did have a daughter, and her name was Francine, but by the time this story is said to have taken place, Francine had been dead for many years. She was born in 1635, to a servant named Hélène Jans, whom Descartes never married. She lived with her father, at least some of the time, in the Netherlands, and he was planning to take her with him to France, when she died of scarlet fever, at the age of five. He told a friend that her death was the greatest sorrow of his life.

Seen from this angle, the Descartes of the story comes across, not as the reasoning philosopher, but as a fallible human being, distraught, nine years later, by the death of his child. Unable to mourn her, he constructs a simulacrum of the girl, gives it the power of motion, names it after her. If death was, as the following century liked to call it, “suspended animation,” then Descartes, in animating this doll, had defied mortality and resurrected his daughter. Perhaps he had even done something, symbolically, for his own lifespan. Some years earlier, when he had been focusing his work on medicine, Descartes had written that he thought he could live to be a hundred. Francine died shortly after that. The making of the doll might be seen as an attempt to counter the terrible dashing of his hopes of extended life; and it seems fitting then that the ageless clockwork figure should have been destroyed on the trip where he was eventually to meet his end. This would suggest that the sailors might have been right to fear the object, not in itself, but because of Descartes’s strange attachment to it.

Perhaps, however (since we cannot be sure of Descartes’s intentions), the story can only be understood as one put about by later generations, in which case what is interesting is the confusion of the culture behind it. The fable is a new configuration, built up out of anxiety. It describes, in the mind of the storyteller, and in that of the audience, an uncertainty about categories. What is the difference between a person and a machine? Where is the line between a child and a doll, between the animate and inanimate-in other words, between life and death? Will reason win out over randomness? Will God get the travellers to Sweden? What can we know for sure?

It seems barely surprising that these concerns should have been traced back to, or posthumously inserted into, the life of Descartes, who is often referred to as the father of modern philosophy. They are philosophical problems (philosophy, until the nineteenth century, included all branches of science: mechanics, astronomy, botany, chemistry, anatomy, and so on), but they were relevant to everyone. 

Descartes had laid the foundations for one of the central ideas of that period: the notion, taken up by anatomists and philosophers alike, that man is a machine, and can only be understood as such. You could say that androids were a crucial part of Descartes’s thought-his Treatise on Man,which was published after his death, is founded on a comparison between a human being and a hypothetical “statue or machine,” which operates like a clock or a hydraulic fountain. He had already put forward a “beast-machine” hypothesis, in which he argued that animals were machines, made up of mere matter, and that all of their faculties could be explained by mechanical means. The difference between beasts and men, he said, was that humans possessed a “rational soul,” whereas animals were incapable of reasoned thought (the cogito, “I think therefore I am,” sets out what separates us from matter). However, the idea that the soul was the source of human life was to become very contentious, and the atheist philosophers of the eighteenth century stretched Descartes’s beast-machine premise to include human beings as well. It was even suggested that Descartes had meant to say this all along, but had been too afraid: his hypothetical moving statue was not an analogy, a later thinker said, but plainly a description of ourselves. His masking rhetoric was just a clever “ruse,” “to get the theologians to swallow a poison.”

So the man most famous for the dictum “I think therefore I am” was as interested in the way bodies worked as he was in the function of the mind (whilst Descartes was conducting his own anatomical investigations, the local butcher would deliver animal corpses for him to dissect at home). Neither the idea that men are machines, nor, conversely, the machines that were constructed to look like men, can be properly understood without him.

Jaquet-Droz’s writing automaton in Neuchâtel is known to have scrawled, on some occasions, the words “I think therefore I am.” At other times, it has written a more ironic tribute: “I do not think . . . do I therefore not exist?” It’s a perfect riddle, of the kind many automata conjure up. The writer, a mere machine, is able to declare that it cannot think. Clearly, however, it does exist: and if it is able to communicate the fact that it cannot think, is it possible that it can think after all? Might the machine be lying? What is the difference between the automaton that writes “I do not think” and a person who, having lost the power of speech, is obliged to write that sentiment or its opposite on paper?

In this context, what the fable about the ship finally represents is the throwing overboard of one of Descartes’s great contributions to philosophy, anatomy, and mechanics. Science was cast out to sea.