The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) / quote 140 of 254
Descartes: not a sailor in a ship
a philosopher of Descartes’ undoubted genius is not going to completely miss the fact that this ego is very much embodied. In a passage often quoted by those seeking to defend Descartes against the charge of ignoring the body, he writes: ‘Nature also teaches me, by these sensations of pain, hunger, thirst and so on, that I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but that I am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit.’18 But what Descartes admits in this sentence he simultaneously takes back, for the psychosomatic unit he describes is nonetheless a combination of ‘I’ and ‘body’. He may be intermingled with a body, but the body is not him. As he puts it in the very next sentence, ‘I, who am nothing but a thinking thing’.