Flesh in the Age of Reason by Roy Porter Page A

something in one’s ‘bowels’, or of appealing to the ‘bowels of Christ’, were waning. No longer were the viscera or ‘vitals’ where the essential self lay. The new centre of symbolic gravity lay up in the head, the brain and the nerves.
    Descartes’s philosophy certainly met the need for a philosophical vindication of the autonomy and dignity of the soul, reason or self, independent of interdenominational wranglings. But it did so at the cost of reducing to mere ‘extension’ the whole of the rest of Creation – and that included the human physique. It was a tendentious claim which brought in its wake endless enigmas and created more problems than it solved. English readers found such solutions as Willis’s more palatable, with their reassuring sense of man’s continued location on a well-defined and traditional Chain of Being, midway between humanoid brutes and the divine – apes and angels.
    The mechanical metaphors spun by Willis were both powerfuland attractive, and they carried with them significant implications, not least for free will. Was man just a machine? What did this imply for accountability? It was such problems as these which exploded over the coming century.

4

THE RATIONAL SELF
     
Self
is that conscious thinking thing… which is sensible or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends.
     
    JOHN lOCKE
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The Proper study of mankind is Man.
     
    ALEXANDER POPE
    What is Man?
Gnothi seauton
, ‘know thyself’, spake the Delphic oracle,
nosce teipsum
, as it came to be Latinized; but that could seem less a plan of action than an invitation to paradox, as with Pope’s
Essay on Man
.
    As just seen, any definition of that ‘self’ evidently had to include the mortal coil and what made it tick. But,
pace
Coleridge’s dismissal of the tribe as ‘
shallow
animals, who having always employed their minds about Body and Gut… imagine that in the whole system of things there is nothing but Gut and Body’, * doctors like Thomas Willis certainly did not maintain that man was made of flesh alone – far from it. For its part, Christian divinity taught that the apex of Creation, made in God’s image, was
homo duplex
– if he was the fallen son of Adam, a pilgrim in this vale of tears, yet he was also a seraphic soul scripted into an apocalyptic epic. Whether biologically ortheologically, man was obviously hard to plumb and puzzling – was, as Pope put it, ‘the glory, jest and riddle of the world’.
    Gaining prominence from the seventeenth century was a further model of man, one which did not so much negate as complement the alternatives already discussed. Philosophers, too, were developing their own visions of the self, principally figured not in terms of the fabric of the flesh or the salvation of the soul but in respect of consciousness. Not just the stuff man was made of (‘substantial form’, as Aristotelian scholasticism put it) nor his role in the divine comedy, but how he thought and felt – perception, sentience and thinking – also defined who he was, indeed might be truly definitive of it. Such a view was hardly new, of course – its antecedents lay as far back as Socrates and Plato – but what was significant was that, from the rise of Renaissance humanism, such philosophizings increasingly stood on their own two feet, independent of the prop of theology, in what became in time the burgeoning domains of epistemology, cognitive science, ethics and psychology; in short, the core human sciences.
    Society too, for official purposes, needed formulations of its own as to what constituted a public person, a legal entity, a bearer of privileges and obligations. Matters of subjecthood and status, judicial and contractual accountability, property ownership, transfer and inheritance, marriage and family law, guardianship and trusteeship, guilt and punishment,