I just read Descartes’ Baby by Paul Bloom and found it fascinating and annoying simultaneously.

Bloom is a psychologist who argues for “intuitive dualism.” The fascinating parts are the many experiments he cites that show babies are more sophisticated than we usually give them credit for. At a very early age, babies are aware of the constancy of objects, that appearances may be deceptive, and that other people may hold false beliefs.

The annoying part is what Bloom makes of this. Bloom thinks those experiments obviously show babies are dualists because they distinguish objects from belief-holding humans. But Cartesian dualism isn’t simply the belief that there’s a difference between people and objects. We were making that distinction before Descartes. Cartesian dualism consists of conceiving of the mental and the physical as so distinct and different that it doesn’t seem the two could ever even interact. And that’s not a distinction babies make.

From the fact that babies seem universally (although I suspect most of the experiments were done on babies born into Western culture) to be aware that there’s a difference between faces and balls, that they are aware that the faces may have false beliefs, and that the faces care about what happens to them, Bloom jumps to conclusions.

First, he thinks Cartesian dualism is a natural outgrowth of baby dualism. But baby dualism isn’t even necessary dual. I can believe that you are different from a log because you are aware of and care about your world without thinking that you are made of two types of substance. For example, I can believe fish are different from birds without attributing to fish two substances, animality and swiminess. Getting to Descartes requires abstracting and fragmenting our experience in ways that babies don’t, many non-Western cultures don’t, and our culture didn’t before Descartes. I don’t think Bloom has shown much more than that babies are aware that logs don’t think and feel, but people do. That isn’t Descartes. It’s not even dualism in any interesting sense.

Bloom seems precise when dealing with baby psychology. He’s not so good when he heads into art, religion and philosophy, which constitutes the bulk of the book. His explanation of why we can be moved by “anxious objects” — edgy art such as Warhol’s Brillo boxes, pure white paintings, a real dead horse — is prosaic and oddly disconnected from the dualism that his book is about. He goes through the predictable reasons we like art — it pleases the eye, we look smart by valuing difficult art, etc. — and then comes back to the special case of anxious art. And what he says is distinctly wrong about anxious art:

We still have not fully explained why some of us like anxious objects.

In appreciation of these artworks all of the ingredients of pleasure discussed earlier come into play, but there is at least one more that we have not yet discussed: we enjoy displays of skill, of virtuosity, both physical and intellectual.

Ok, but anxious art can share that feature with the least anxious of art — “Look at how realistic those dogs playing poker seem!” — and much anxious art does not seem very accomplished technically. In some cases, that’s exactly what makes it anxious. But, Bloom drops this line of thought. He instead concludes that some art we like because we like what it shows — the pleasant view from a hilltop or Mary nursing Jesus. Other art, the more anxious type, we can only like because we’re able to see it as more than what it represents. We’re able to see the human intention in it. But, again, that’s true of all art, not just anxious art. His investigation does not come close to answering the question he raises.

More important, art refutes dualism. As Bloom acknowledges throughout the chapter — belaboring the obvious — we react to objects differently if we know they were created as art. So, here’s a physical object that embodies something mental and intentional. The artwork has no inner life, but it can’t be understood apart from the intentionality it embodies. Art and all objects we create are inseparably infused with matter and spirit. Monism is far more important to our experience than dualism.

The book is muddled over all, except for the fascinating research on babies scattered throughout. For example, his section on our “natural” belief in intelligent design confirms what I think we all already suspected: Children are “consistently more creationist than their parents.” (p. 62). Bloom is careful to say that creationism is not necessarily only for the immature. It is “a natural by-product of a mind evolved to think in terms of goals and intentions.” (p.63) Ok. So is animism. So what? How does this help? And what does it have to do with dualism, unless you define it as weakly as Bloom does?

The book suffers from overstatement. He defends essentialism, but so waters it down that it becomes merely the belief that humans think in categories and are capable of assigning an object to a category based on non-visible characteristics. Wow, that is so not what essentialism is. He knows this, too, contrasting it with Plato’s and Aristotle’s view of essences as eternal, immutable types. He argues against that strong view because it leads to evils such as racism (51). But racism can follow from the “essentialism lite” that Bloom propounds. Both types of essentialism say that there is a real way a thing should be categorized. Plato and Aristotle happened to think that that real way is eternal and immutable. Bloom thinks that the real category “is clear once we consider again what concepts are for. Tomato is a good category, because once you know something is a tomato, you know things about it, including that it is good to eat.” (41) So suppose a lite essentialist believed that dark-skinned humans have the mental and spiritual capacity of cattle. The problem with racism isn’t that it is based on eternal and immutable categories. The problem with racism is that it’s based on false facts and the false categorization that follows from them.

Besides, what Bloom calls essentialism lite just isn’t essentialism. Essentialism implies that there are clean lines between things and clear criteria for deciding what they are. Neither is true in the world of tiny, purple, winter, hybrid, genetically-engineered, insect resistant, square-cornered-for-easy-packing tomato-cantaloupes.

Nevertheless, the book is full of interesting ideas, historical references, and an open-minded back and forth on the issues. It’s fun to read and exceptionally engagingly written. It just doesn’t hold together. At least for me. [Tags: descartes descartes_baby paul_bloom books taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous psychology]

AKMA replies. I can addres part of his concern: I didn’t mean to imply that art is distinctive in its fusion of matter and intentionality. The same is true for all our artifacts. Not did I mean to say that to understand an artwork is to understand the artist’s intentions; rather, to take it as an artwork one must see that it was created intentionally. Bad writing on my part. But AKMA’s point is broader and more important than that.

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