Conflating consciousness with reason lets Descartes deny animal sensation

Evidence

The word ‘thought’, writes Descartes, covers ‘all the operations of the soul’ (1973:II, 36). ‘Willing, understanding, imagining and feeling are simply different ways of thinking, which all belong to the soul.’ Thought includes not only ‘meditations and acts of the will, but even the functions of sight and hearing, and the resolving on one movement rather than another’ (1973:II, 36). But since some of these features (e.g. calculative functions, pondering) were taken to be peculiarly human, this amalgamation facilitated the conclusion that the whole set of operations which could be called thinking was similarly confined to the human. Certainly the term ‘thought’ or consciousness could be redefined to include in a democratic fashion the whole gamut of broadly psychological activity—imagination, sensation, emotion, as well as intellectual functions. But this is not what Descartes actually does, for the intellectual functions and reason retain in a de facto fashion their privileged place in the definition of selfhood (sum res cogitans) and in the account of mind, and are now deployed to deprive the non-human sphere of any claim to any of the other aspects of mind. Thus Descartes does not argue that animals have sensation, and therefore must think, but instead that they cannot think (reason), and therefore must lack true sensation. — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 427

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Mind-as-consciousness is an on-off concept excluding intermediate degrees — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 426; Pure reason without emotion becomes mere tautology and unconsciousness — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 150; Escaping monologic reason requires replacing philosophy of consciousness with communicative rationality — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 383 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Pure reason without emotion becomes mere tautology and unconsciousness #expands (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 150
• Descartes’ indubitable ‘I’ redirected philosophy inward toward certainty of the self. #responds-to (0.80)
• Descartes grounded certainty in thought, establishing mind as primary over matter. #responds-to (0.80) — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 2069
• Escaping monologic reason requires replacing philosophy of consciousness with communicative rationality #complicates (0.75) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 383
• Descartes’ certainty program reduced nature to quantifiable primary qualities #responds-to (0.75) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 795
• Occultism’s spiritualism severs body and soul more cleanly than Descartes did #complicates (0.70) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 264