French and German do not have words that correspond exactly with the English noun “mind,” which emphasizes reason (it’s derived from the Greek menos and Latin mentis). Before the 18th century, few people on the Continent read English, and when “mind” appeared in French translations, it usually became esprit, the spirit of angels and demons. In German, the available terms were Seele, or soul, and Geist, closer to spirit.
Even the early English empiricists like Isaac Newton considered “thinking matter” an oxymoron. Matter, they thought, operated like a machine, on rules. Thinking came from a divine, unpredictable soul. But humans clearly were thinking matter, and the slippery English concept of mind became a “radically destabilizing, heretical idea” with a bloody history, writes George Makari, a historian of psychiatry. In this fascinating work, he explains how Enlightenment thinkers wrestled with the conundrum as ideas about the mind helped shape the French Revolution and horrific madhouses.
The difficulty persists. Most people believe in an afterlife and experience consciousness as a resident of the home, rather than the bricks. We talk of mind/body approaches to medicine as if doctors deal with two entities rather than one. If we have grown accustomed to our confusion, it’s only because of the hard philosophical labor and individual suffering Makari documents. Soul Machine is, in part, an elegant, wry, and richly detailed narrative of lives.
For example, René Descartes, an ardent Christian, also dabbled in dissection of cow organs and considered himself a physician. He purposely exploited the ambiguity of French, translating the Latin mentis interchangeably as esprit or âme (soul). After he famously announced “Cogito, ergo sum” in 1637, his admirer Princess Elisabeth, daughter of the queen of Bohemia, began urgently questioning his logic as she struggled with what was then called “melancholia.” Was her sadness only an aspect of her thinking? Didn’t it also come from the body?
Descartes later dedicated a book to her in which he declared that an olive-sized part of the brain, the pineal gland, was a meeting-place between the soul and passions and other input from the body. Elisabeth could blame her gland, yet it was her duty to fight it. This idea of mind-over-body didn’t just apply to emotions: When the princess wrote complaining of a fever, he told her the cause was sadness and she must apply reason to banish it.
A half-century later, in 1693, John Locke published a popular book on education and parenting that gave parents—not God or the church—responsibility for seeding “reason, conscience, and good or bad character,” in their children. Newton would write Locke a furious letter, declaring him an atheist—though, as it turned out, Newton was probably in a delirium, possibly poisoned by his alchemical experiments.
When Locke’s book was translated into French, “mind” became esprit, and God slipped back in. Another half-century later, we meet Jean-Jacques Rousseau, plagued by “melancholy, headaches, and bodily pains,” making an arduous journey by carriage to get medical help. On the carriage ride he met a divorced woman, with whom he had “the most gratifying sex of his life and, miraculously, it rid him of his pains.” His doctor would declare him a hypochondriac.
An orphan and social climber, Rousseau goes far, justifying his carriage conversion. His self-portrait (The Confessions) would say little about the soul or church and, instead, inspire a generation who sought a “unified notion of mind and body,” stressing “not so much on consciousness and reason, John Locke’s rudders, but rather the primacy of the sensitive self,” in Makari’s polite summary. We still live with a Rousseauian idea of “Nature” that vaguely includes sex, pretty landscapes, and emotions and rejects reason, as we make choices based on the primacy of our sensitive selves.
Immanuel Kant seems to have offered the people of his time the greatest sense of resolution. Kant found a way to say that human beings enjoy freedom in a wholly deterministic universe, whether or not we have a Christian soul. Reason can’t prove an afterlife, but only because reason is limited in the face of a great mystery. Kant speaks of Seele and Geist to discuss the inner life, even when his “intended meanings wildly diverged from theological definitions. As a new German discourse emerged on subjectivity and inner life, it would be plagued by this kind of semantic slippage,” Makari writes. Arguing that mental illnesses were philosophical puzzles doctors couldn’t address, Kant tried his hand at psychiatry, using familiar German terms for madness. He also invented his own, such as Grillenkrankheit, or “cricket-disease,” a state in which your peace and sleep is disturbed as if by a constant chirping of crickets—a lovely metaphor for obsession.
In the 20th century, with church power in Britain and Europe replaced by the state, the new field of psychology gave up on the synthesis attempted by the Enlightenment. We now live in a “divided world,” taking sides on variations of the old problem. Does a fetus have a soul? Do we have free will? What should we recommend to Princess Elisabeth: medication (machine), cognitive behavioral therapy (Lockean reason), psychodynamic therapy (Rousseau)—or God?
Although we don’t know what we mean by the word “mind,” we accept it. Religious or secular, rationalist or Rousseauian, in Makari’s words,
Temma Ehrenfeld is a writer in New York.
