September the Third Post

The Head or the Heart?

“Well, go said I; so the Boy jump’d into the Water, and taking a little Gun in one Hand swam to Shoar with the other Hand, and coming close to the Creature, put the Muzzle of the Piece to his Ear, and shot him into the Head again which dispatch’d him quite.” – Robinson Crusoe, 22

“As for the movements of our passions . . . it is . . . very clear that they do not depend on thought, because they often occur in spite of us. Consequently they can also occur in animals, even more violently than they do in human beings . . . I do not deny life to animals and I do not even deny sensation, insofar as it depends on a bodily organ.” Descartes, “Brain and Mind,” page 17

The passage when Xury kills the creature ( which I believe is a lion ) on the shore became particularly interesting to me after reading “Brain and Mind in the ‘Long’ Eighteenth Century,” especially after coming across Descartes’s views on the separation of thought and action, in both humans and animals. I found it significant that people once thought that Descartes regarded animals as “unfeeling automata,” and was pleased that this was apparently not the case; however, I found it curious that Xury shot the animal in the head, and not in the general area of the heart. It is interesting that Defoe understood that life primarily originated from the brain, and thus the head, so that even the character of an uneducated slave boy knew that to kill a living entity, it must be wounded in the head. This is especially compelling since Defoe’s own time frame puts the story in the same era as when Descartes published L’Homme.