Autor: Issabayeva Madina
Translated by: Uspanova Ainura
The theories and philosophical insanities of Rene Descartes (1596-1650) occupy an important place in the history of the production of the "medical gaze". Although this general medical concept of the philosopher until recently did not arouse the interest of historians, at the beginning of the new millennium the relevance of turning to a historical analysis of Descartes's medical concept has doubled.
Rene Descartes's idea, today, is similar to many people who inspire themselves with the fact that with careless treatment of their health, they can easily heal themselves, without any help from medical personnel. Reading into a brief biography and the disposition of Descartes's ideas, it is important to distinguish between two orders of signs that converge together in the clinical picture of the death of a philosopher: on the one hand, there is a more or less clearly recorded history of illness and death of a philosopher, who has been opposing a healthy lifestyle to ill health throughout his life; on the other hand, there are three stages in the evolution of his medical concept, which includes first a mechanistic perception of the human body as a natural machine, then a psychosomatic vision of the interpenetration of soul and body, and finally, the consciousness of the need for a philosopher to be a doctor to himself. The conclusions of the work are reduced to the following statement: death.
So, let's start with the fact that for Descartes, philosophy was unthinkable without medicine: not only in the sense that medicine was part of philosophy, as it could be in the ancient, medieval or scholastic tradition, but also in the fact that he saw medicine as one of the main functions of philosophy, which, paradoxically, was reduced to maintaining health or even extending life. Caring for the preservation of health is one of the primary functions of the new philosophy, the practical nature of which Descartes sharply opposes to the scholastic doctrines.
First, Descartes analyzes medicine as a purely mechanical one, within which the human body is perceived as a physiological machine that functions along with other natural mechanisms. From this point of view, the concepts of "illness" and "health" appear rather problematic, almost inappropriate, since we are not talking here about observing symptoms, but about establishing the causes, which ultimately boil down to circulatory disorders. In the fifth part of "Discourse on Method" Descartes devotes several pages to the key role of blood in the functioning of the human mechanism, not missing the opportunity to sarcastically remark that doctors, feeling the pulse, do not understand anything about a person. At the same time, the philosopher realizes that mechanistic medicine, centered on the human machine, does not give access to a person or a thinking subject. In one of his letters to Father Mersenne, Descartes reported that he had been engaged in animal anatomy and vivisection for eleven years, but he had not made any progress in understanding the reasons why a person gets feverish during illness.
The second type of medicine is associated with the knowledge of a person in particular, which, unlike an animal, is determined by its ability to think. Descartes was of the opinion that our thoughts, our passions, our emotions directly affect the physical state of our bodily machine. In this regard, Descartes takes such a decisive step that modern historians of ideas believe that he anticipates what much later will be called psychosomatic medicine.
In addition to the first two types of medicine, which generally correspond to the project of universal science, the idea of self-healing is being formed in Descartes's thoughts. This idea does not deny the first two types of medicine, but rather indicates the incompleteness of Descartes's medical research. At the same time, it reflects, if not optimism, then a certain kind of conviction of the philosopher that nature cannot harm itself, that the physical machine that supports the thinking substance is aimed at preserving the human body, including in such a test as illness... In truth, Descartes was truly obsessed with the desire to discover and substantiate the secret of many years in order to live as long a century as possible, at least up to a hundred years. One way or another, but this obsession with health or just madness is most clearly reflected in the picture of the death of the philosopher: according to the generally accepted version, Descartes died of transient pneumonia.
Summing up the preliminary results, the story of Descartes's death testifies that the regime of the vigilant vigilance of reason, to which the philosopher tried to subjugate himself in living life, became more than not subject to.
