Descartes’ Baby by Paul Bloom, Basic Books/William Heinemann, July in the UK, £20/$26, ISBN 0434007994
EXPLORING how the average person feels about their own existence is no trivial enterprise. In Descartes’ Baby, Paul Bloom rises to the challenge, using insights from psychology and philosophy to argue that we are all natural born dualists, perceiving the world to contain material bodies and immaterial souls.
Drawing on his expertise in child development, he shows that this Cartesian dichotomy can explain a good deal of the human condition: why someone slipping on a banana skin is funny, why a forgery is worth less than the original, and why a man might kiss a woman passionately, but refuse to use her toothbrush.
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An examination of the nature of disgust highlights the distinction between the ways we experience body and soul. To brand a person or anything about them “disgusting” means viewing them as strictly corporeal rather than as a soul with moral worth – a tendency that has, historically, made disgust a powerful psychological element in committing atrocities. But this “debasing effect of the body on the soul”, the tension between the material and immaterial can also make us laugh: slapstick humour is funny precisely because it shows a person with feelings and goals trapped in a treacherous physical shell.
Bloom argues that any rejection of dualism occurs at an “airy intellectual level” – at gut level, we all believe in souls. But our intuitions run counter to reality. The common-sense view is that we are more than meat, but that hasn’t stood up to scientific enquiry. For Bloom, this is no grounds for pessimism. As the work of philosophers, psychologists and evolutionary theorists converges, it is, he claims, possible to be a “morally optimistic materialist”.
