a confession: today I have bought two more translations of Descartes

[kaberett]

Item the first: the 1972 Harvard University Press Treatise of Man, translated by Thomas Steele Hall. This translation is quoted by two of the other books I'm working with, Pain: the science of suffering by Patrick Wall (1999), and The Painful Truth by Monty Lyman (2021). It is also an edition that, as I understand it, contains a facsimile of the first French edition (1664, itself a translation of the Latin published in 1662). My French is not up to reading actual seventeenth-century philosophy, but being able to spot-check a couple of paragraphs will be Useful For My Argument.

Item the second: Descartes: Key Philosophical Writings, translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross (1997). This doesn't contain Treatise on Man, but it's the translation of Meditations on First Philosophy that's quoted in The Story of Pain by Joanna Bourke (2014).

Meanwhile the Descartes essay, thus far composed primarily but not solely of quotations from other works, has somehow made it north of 4500 words. I think it might even be starting to make an argument.

Part I is illustrating that a very specific mis/interpretation of Descartes on pain appears consistently across a range of texts on Understanding Pain from the last 50 years or so.

Part II is what Descartes actually says, emphasising the incompatibilities with the narratives presented in Part I.

Part III is about how the various texts quoted in Part I commit the sin they're accusing Descartes of that he doesn't, actually, i.e., treating Mind and Body as totally separate and distinct things, where in the modern incarnation for "mind" read "central nervous system" and for "body" read "peripheral nervous system". Part III is the least fleshed out and the most likely to make philosophers cross and will require the most careful work, and is also the section that's shortest. This is the bit where all the quotations about "after three months all of the tissues have healed and it's now all central sensitisation/nociplastic pain/whatever you wanna call it" go.

I am resisting the urge to try to turn this into a Proper Survey Of Popular Books On Pain, because that sounds like a lot of work that will probably involve reading a bunch of philosophers I find profoundly irritating, and also THIS IS A TOTAL DISTRACTION from the ACTUAL WORK I AM TRYING TO DO. But it's a distraction that is getting me writing, so I'll take it.

Comments

[simont]

Ah, but will this essay confirm or refute the claim [Idle et al, 1970] that René Descartes was a drunken fart "I drink therefore I am"?