Damasio: Descartes' Error

Damasio, Antonio: Descartes' Error; Penguin Books, London, 2005

I'm leading this discussion for the class and I'm also very interested in this book so this blog entry is going to be pretty long.  I've been looking forward to this book for several reasons.  One reason is the science aspect and including something in our exploration from a modern scientific perspective.  The second reason is based on where in our reading list this book is placed - towards the end where we are trying to synthesize what we have been reading and thinking about. It's a big jump from Freud in the early 20th century to Damasio at the end of the century and to Phillips in this millennium but it's great to read works by thinkers who are considering what has come before them and where we are now.

I hadn't heard of this book, nor Antonio Damasio before.  The book was written in the mid-1990s and Damasio is a neuroscientist.  Born in Lisbon in 1944 but living and working in the USA most of his career.  His wife, Hanna Damasio, is also a neuroscientist, and they have frequently collaborated together in their work.

Damasio's premise for this book is that the brain, and more particularly the mind, is not an organ or entity separate from the body but rather intimately connected to and dependent on the body for its integrity.  Where some previous thinkers, most notably Rene "cogito ergo sum" Descartes, have felt that the self belongs outside the body proper (either to the mind or to the spirit), Damasio argues that the self is very much a product of brain and body; that the integrity and persistence of the self rely on the integrity of both brain and body and the ongoing communications between the two; and that "mental activity, from its simplest aspect to its most sublime, requires both brain and body proper."[pg xxi)

In his introduction, Damasio states that both “high-level” and “low-level” brain regions, from the pre-frontal cortices to the hypothalamus and brain stem, cooperate in the making of reason.  But where we have long thought that reason is separate from passion and feelings (though affected by them, usually adversely), feelings are an important component and tool in rational decision-making.

Feelings, along with the emotions they come from, are not a luxury. [...] Feelings are neither intangible nor elusive.  Contrary to traditional scientific opinion, feelings are just as cognitive as other percepts.  They are the result of a most curious physiological arrangement that has turned the brain into the body's captive audience.

[...] Were it not for the possibility of sensing body states that are inherently ordained to be painful or pleasurable, there would be no suffering or bliss, no longing or mercy, no tragedy or glory in the human condition. (pg xvii)

 Damasio goes on to state that "Feelings are the base for what humans have described for millennia as the human soul or spirit." pg xx  He asks the series of questions that have engaged mankind (I use 'mankind' deliberately here) for millennia:

How is it that we are conscious of the world around us,
that we know what we know,
and that we know that we know?  pg xxi

[I couldn't help but think of Donald Rumsfeld's infamous quote on the topic of 'what we know we know', when he spoke at NATO; not that different from Damasio's but which seemed to confirm a reputation for cloudy political double-speak: "There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don't know."]

I liked Damasio's view on the limits of science:

I am sceptical of science's presumption of objectivity and definitiveness.  I have a difficult time seeing scientific results, especially in neurobiology, as anything but provisional approximations, to be enjoyed for a while and discarded as soon as better accounts become available.  pg xxii

I agree with this but what I really agree with is that his follow up statement that this doesn't mean that science is not useful, that where we are now in the state of our knowledge is not of value even though where we [ideally] end up will be somewhere else.  As Damasio put it, this scepticism doesn't mean he is not enthusiastic about attempts to improve these provisional approximations.

Damasio begins his text by recounting the story of Phineas Gage, a railway foreman in 1848 who suffers a severe linear brain injury (from a long narrow metal rod driven through his head from under his left cheekbone and up and out through the top of his skull, travelling dorso-medially and anteriorly).  He survived his injury and once he had recovered from the hemorrhage and infection he seemed miraculously intact: could walk, speak, function etc.  It was only after his physical recovery that severe and debilitating changes in his personality, his reasoning, his self became apparent and not only apparent but a severe problem for his functioning in society.  It appeared that an area of his brain had been damaged that was responsible for very specific functions to do with reasoning and "in particular to the personal and social dimensions of reasoning." (pg 10).  Damasio uses this case, and Hanna Damasio's computer reconstruction of which brain areas might have been damaged, as well as modern day cases of patients with similar symptoms to hypothesize what might be going on in several specific sectors of the brain and what this implies for concepts of reason, self, ethics etc

Gage's example indicated that something in the brain was concerned specifically with unique human properties.  pg 10

Among these unique human properties, Damasio lists: "the ability to anticipate the future and plan accordingly within a complex social environment; the sense of responsibility toward the self and others; and the ability to orchestrate one's survival deliberately, at the command of one's free will. " The case Damasio makes for the information we can derive from Gage's situation is compelling, though I gather not non-controversial.  I found an article online by Malcolm Macmillan in The Psychologist - UK [Article on Phineas Gage and Descartes' Error - The Psychologist ] which emphatically did not agree with Damasio's assumptions about Gage's injury.  If we disregard this aspect, Damasio does go on to discuss patients he has seen and other medical reports from more modern times regarding patients with similar areas of damage or similar symptoms and I do consider he makes a good case - or provisional assumption - about certain areas and functions of the brain.


Damasio makes mention of phrenology, which topic has come up occasionally amongst our 19th century authors.  I didn't know much about it other than it involved bumps on the head but Damasio explains more in an aside on page 14.  He describes it as "a curious mix of early psychology, early neuroscience, and practical philosophy" and was especially influential on the humanities in the 19th c.  It's founder, Franz Joseph Gall, had an amazing conception that there were areas of specialization in the brain and he went against the established dualist thinking that separated mind and body.  What phrenology has become more known for is the erroneous assertion that there are specific single brain centres for each function and that the power of the function was related to the size of the centre (and which could be assessed via telltale bumps on the skull).  A phrenologist travelling through Massachussett in later years wrote about Phineas Gage's accident and concluded in 1882 that the iron rod had passed "in the neighbourhood of Benevolence and Veneration.  [...] His organ of Veneration seemed to have been injured..."  Much more evocative than ventromedial prefrontal area or cytoarchitectonic areas 3, 1, 2 and Area S2.

While individual areas are important for the various functions of the mind, these functions cannot usually be localized to one single specific site.  Most (if not all) brain functions are a result of the interaction of multiple specific areas and systems of the brain.  "The mind results from the operation of each of the separate components, and from the concerted operation of the multiple systems constituted by these separate components." pg 15

One characteristic of the patients that Damasio describes is that their brain injury has impaired their ability to make good decisions (which is evident in themselves but even more striking when compared to their personalities, decision-making and rationality before their brain damage).  Interestingly, Damasio comments about one patient that these changes seen were not "consequent to a former weakness of character, and they certainly were not controlled willfully by the patient." pg 37  He does not discuss much about other brain diseases or types of injury (other than direct trauma due to direct force or due to stroke) other than glancing references to injury from drugs/alcohol as well as genetic and social influences on the brain but thoughts of fetal alcohol syndrome and child abuse did come to mind. For Damasio's patients, after their brain injury "the machinery for [their] decision making was so flawed that [they] could no longer be an effective social being."  He describes patients that are now unable to learn from their mistakes.  "It is appropriate to say that his free will had been compromised." pg 38  Later on Damasio refers to the work of Francis Crick and his thoughts about a 'neural substrate for free will' in his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul.  [pg 73] Interestingly these patients, though completely unable to function in society, can have normal IQ tests and function normally on many cognitive tests.

Damasio speaks about diseases of the brain (epilepsy, brain tumour, stroke) vs diseases of the mind (manic-depression or schizophrenia) and the value judgements our culture places on them, where

diseases of the brain are seen as tragedies visited on people who cannot be blamed for their condition, while diseases of the mind, especially those that affect conduct and emotion, are seen as social inconveniences for which sufferers have much to answer. Individuals are to be blamed for their character flaws, defective emotional modulation, and so on; lack of willpower is supposed to be the primary problem.  pg 40

Emotion has long thought to affect reasoning, usually in a negative way, interfering in 'good' decision making.  "As a result, we usually conceive of emotion as a supernumerary mental faculty, an unsolicited, nature-ordained accompaniment to our rational thinking.  If emotion is pleasurable, we enjoy it as a luxury; if it is painful, we suffer it as an unwelcome intrusion."  [pg 52]  This is not to say that emotions can't cause biases that can lead to irrational decisions - where would advertising be if this were not the case?

Damasio discusses the complexity of the human organism (and of the mammalian class as a whole) and how this would have required a more complex brain than one based on simple sensory organs and simple reflexes.  What gives us a 'mind' is the ability 'to display images internally and to order those images in a process called thought."  [pg 89]  Images are not only visual but could be olfactory, auditory or tactile.

My view then is that having a mind means that an organism forms neural representations which can become images, be manipulated in a process called thought, and eventually influence behaviour by helping predict the future, plan accordingly, and choose the next action. pg pg 90

This is where Damasio starts to part company from Descartes.

The overall function of the brain is to be well informed about what goes on in the rest of the body, the body proper; about what goes on in itself; and about the  environment surrounding the organism, so that suitable, survivable accommodations can be achieved between organism and environment.  from an evolutionary perspective, it is not the other way around. If there had been no body, there would have been no brain.  pg 90

Damasio gives us just a hint of the complexity of the mammalian nervous system and asks "what does all that complexity buy us?" [pg 93]  It allows us to acquire strategies for reasoning and thus for decision making.  One concept that Damasio relies on is the concept of "dispositional representations".  These are the repositories of "facts and strategies" in each our brains of both innate and acquired knowledge about ourselves and our environment. [pg 94]

One odd little item that Damasio brought up again and again was a visual concept for the brain's functional regions of a homunculus or human figure distorted based on the relative "richness" of the area (ie: area connected to lip sensation would be bigger than mid-leg).  He ascribes this concept to Canadian Wilder Penfield [pg 72] and brings it up again and again - obviously an early 'provisional approximation' of how the brain works that really bugs Damasio.  However he seems to get this quite confused with a concept of a homunculus as a "little person inside our brain perceiving and thinking about the images the brain forms" [pg 99] a concept which has nothing to do with Wilder's surgical neuro-mapping.  Damasio quite rightly notes that for this intra-brain homunculus to be true, we would have to conceive of an endless nest of Russian Dolls with each brain containing a little human whose brain contains an even smaller human whose brain contains an even smaller ...

Damasio makes a strong case for the importance of the sensory aspects of each organism in their mental functioning and this holds true in humans for their cognitive ability and consciousness.  He emphasizes that the innate drives and neural circuits in the brain "intervene not just in bodily regulation but also in the development and adult activity of the evolutionarily modern structures of the brain." pg 110  He is speaking of the experience-driven sections of the brain which are evolutionarily more modern than the "reptile brain" (limbic system and brainstem).  We are born with innate sectors of our nervous system responsible for basic life processes necessary for homeostatic regulation such as breathing, thermoregulation, immune system, endocrine system etc.  Though these areas are genetically provided to us that doesn't mean they are not influenced by outside factors: environment, nutrition, experiences etc.  More than that, these innate drives have important effects on the experiential parts of our brain.  This influence is carried out by modulator neurons in the brainstem and basal forebrain over cerebral cortex and subcortical areas.  For Damasio it looks a bit like this (pg 111):

1. the innate regulatory circuits are involved in the business of organism survival and because of that they are privy to what is happening in the more modern sectors of the brain;
2. the goodness and badness of situations is regularly signalled to them; and
3. they express their inherent reaction to goodness and badness by influencing how the rest of the brain is shaped, so that it can assist survival in the most efficacious way.

Damasio is firmly against the tabula rasa (blank slate) theory of the brain, that the brain begins with no innate preferences or abilities and that all develops based on environment and learning (nurture vs nature).  He supports the idea that we are born with a set of drives and instincts (the least controversial of these being appetite, procreation, care of kin, shelter seeking etc).  He also considers that emotions and feelings are central to rationality and are a powerful manifestation of drives and instincts. pg 115

Many of these basic drives are covert and we are not even aware of them but Damasio considers that instincts which "are slightly more complex regulatory mechanisms, involving overt behaviours, let you know about their existence indirectly, when they drive you to perform (or not) in a particular way.  pg 116  This could be via a body state (hunger or thirst) or emotion (fear or anger).  As our environments become more complex, our survival strategies also had to evolve (and have to evolve) to become more complex.  These 'suprainstinctual' survival strategies, the control of "animal inclination by thought, reason, and the will was what made us human, according to Descartes Passion of the Soul." pg 124  For Freud it was the superego (which would "accommodate instincts to social dictates").

For most ethical rules and social conventions, regardless of how elevated their goal, I believe one can envision a meaningful link to simpler goals and to drives and instincts. Why should this be so?  Because the consequences of achieving or not achieving a rarefied social goal contribute (or are perceived as contributing), albeit indirectly, to survival and to the quality of that survival.  pg 125

For those who feel that this debases altruism, love, compassion, free will, by trying to reduce them to neurobiological regulation, Damasio replies that "the partial explanation of complexity by something less complex does not signify debasement."[pg 126]  He is postulating

an organism that comes to life with automatic survival mechanisms, and to which education and acculturation add a set of socially permissible and desirable decision-making strategies that, in turn, enhance survival, remarkably improve the quality of survival, and save as the basis for constructing a person.  [...]  The neural mechanisms that support the supra instinctual repertoire may be similar in their overall formal design to those governing biological drives, and may be constrained by them.  Yet they require the intervention of society to become whatever they become, and thus are related as much to a given culture as to general neurobiology.  Moreover out of that dual constraint, supra instinctual survival strategies generate something probably unique to humans: a moral point of view that, on occasion, can transcend the interests of the immediate group and even the species.  pg 126

 Damasio also departs from some mainstream thinking in his differentiation between emotions and feelings.  For Damasio emotions are the body's responses, changes in "body state" connected to particular mental images that have activated a particular body system (viscera, skin, cardiovascular system, respiratory system, endocrine).  Feelings are the continuous monitoring of body changes and "the experience of such changes in juxtaposition to the mental images that initiated the cycle.  The substrate of a feeling is completed by the changes in cognitive processes that are simultaneously induced by neurochemical substances.  pg 146  It is the juxtaposition of "the ongoing representation of the body with the neural representations constituting the self." pg 146  Damasio writes about the three different types of feelings:

1. those based on basic universal emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust) and which cause our attention to be allocated to body signals 
2. those based on emotions that are subtle variations of the basic universal ones: euphoria and ecstasy (variations on happiness), melancholy and wistfulness (sadness), panic and shyness (fear), remorse, guilt, embarrassment, vindication etc.  These are tuned by experience
3. Background feelings - the body state prevailing between emotions, related somewhat to mood.

A composite, ongoing representation of current body states is distributed over a large number of brain structures (pg 151).  There are "on-line, dynamic body maps as well as more stable "off-line maps of general body structure that are dispositional.  The background body state monitoring is usually not a focus of attention or even perceived but it contributes to our sense of how we feel and it can move to the forefront of our attention when needed (i.e.: asthmatic attack, visceral pain etc).  The right hemisphere is more significant or involved in this monitoring than the left side though regions from both sides of the brain are involved.  Studies of patients with injuries involving the sectors of the brain concerned with this continuous monitoring show cognitive defects that suggest that "what does not come naturally and automatically through the primacy of feeling cannot be maintained in the mind."[pg 154]  This is another interesting comment of Damasio's, that feelings and sensory inputs are not only necessary for the body state information they provide which is used for rational decision-making but that this afferent information and processing is also important for maintaining this focus and knowledge.  Our sense of self is dependent on continuous feedback mechanisms about our pre-existing and current body states.  For Damasio, "feelings are just as cognitive as any other perceptual image, and just as dependent on cerebral cortex processing as any other image."  

I see feelings as having a truly privileged status.[...] Because of their inextricable ties to the body, they come first in development and retain a primacy that subtly pervades our mental life. pg 159

He also touches on superstition.  It's a necessary thing for us to make causal links between people and events and certain feelings but sometimes we make the wrong links.  "Superstition is based on this sort of spurious causal association" pg 162  This is a really significant weakness in human rationality, our propensity to assign cause to things - to NEED to assign a cause to things - without critical thought.  I see this all the time with testimonial-based claims (vs evidence based medicine), with people wanting to blame illness on the water, on something that happened years ago, on rare diseases that do not commonly occur locally.

REASONING

Que chacun examine ses pensées, il les trouvera toutes occupées au passé et à l'avenir. Nous ne pensons point au présent ; et, nous y pensons, ce n'est que pour en prendre la lumière pour disposer de l'avenir.

  Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670 (fragment 172)

The purpose of reasoning is deciding and the essence of deciding is selecting a response option. Phillip Johnson Laird put it [pg 165] :
"In order to decide what to do, judge; in order to judge, reason; in order to reason, decide."
Some decisions are instinctual such as jumping out of harm's way, ducking your head from an incoming baseball.  Others are exceeding complex involving challenging assessment, moral evaluations and competing interests, judgements of short term and longterm gains as well as probabilities.  Descartes separated them into 2 camps: "one outside the body, as a hallmark of the human spirit, while the other remained inside, the hallmark of animal spirits, so separate that one stands for clarity of thought, deductive competence, algorithmicity, while the other connotes murkiness and the less disciplined life of the passions."  pg 168  Damasio came up with a somatic marker theory to explain how humans reason out these complex decisions.  He suggests that the brain can create stored connections that connect an instinctual response (good and bad) to scenarios or situations.  The neural system involved in these markers is "the pre-frontal cortices, which is also coextensive with the system critical for secondary emotions." [pg 180] These somatic markers help us winnow down on possible response options when faced with complex decisions but quickly eliminating several "bad" options from the possible responses, actions or decisions. pg 173.  It would also apply to:

the choice of actions whose immediate consequences are negative, but which generate positive future outcomes. [...]  Willpower draws on the evaluation of a prospect, and that evaluation may not take place if attention is not properly driven to both the immediate trouble and the future payoff, to both the suffering now and the future gratification. [...] Willpower is just another name for the idea of choosing according to long-term outcomes rather than short-term ones." pg 175

This discussion extended into a discussion of altruism which could be explained by benefits such as self-esteem, social validation, exaltation and avoidance of guilt and shame. pg 176

Some sublime human achievements come from rejecting what biology or culture propels individuals to do.  Such achievements are the affirmation of a new level of being in which one can invent new artifacts and forge more just ways of existing.  Under certain circumstances, however, freedom from biological and cultural constraints can also be a hallmark of madness and can nourish the ideas and acts of the insane.  pg 177 

He also discusses intuition, which is merely a covert preselection winnowing down possible options through a biological mechanism, for decisions primarily in the personal and social domains. pg 187-189
Another area Damasio touched on but did not explore to any great extent was the effect of "sick cultures" on normal adult systems of reasoning.  He uses the examples of Nazi Germany, Russia (one assumes during the purges) and the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia but then makes a vague mention of "sizable sectors of Western society are gradually becoming other tragic counterexamples." pg 179

Damasio discusses some of the neuroanatomy underpinning his hypotheses.

The prefrontal sectors are indeed in a privileged position among other brain systems.  Their cortices receive signals about existing and incoming factual knowledge related to the external world; about innate biological regulatory preferences; and about previous and current body state as continuously modified by that knowledge and those preferences. pg 181

Categorization is important to humans in their efforts to organize and prioritize information (experiential). The dispositional representations we create are stored in convergence zones in the prefrontal cortices.  These contingencies are what make up our individual experience.  Bioregulatory and social knowledge tends to be stored in the ventromedial sector while knowledge of the external world (objects, people, space-time, language, mathematics) tends to be located in the dorsolateral regions. pg 182-183  This somatic marker system develops as we age and experience and comes to include symbols of somatic states and what Damasio calls "as-if" loops, circuits that occur solely in the brain (through image generation, representations) rather than a body-brain loop. pg 184

Damasio also evaluated decision-making from an evolutionary perspective pg 191.

1. oldest decision-making device pertains to basic biological regulation
2. the next oldest decision-making device pertains to the personal and social realm;
3. the most recent decision-making process pertains to a collection of abstract-symbolic operations under which we can find artistic and scientific reasoning, utilitatian-engineering reasoning, and the developments of language and mathematics.

It's a great system but it doesn't work perfectly.  We don't always make rational decisions, in fact we probably often make irrational decisions.  We are easily manipulated by our emotions and our desire to assign a cause to events.

But even if our reasoning strategies were perfectly tuned, it appears, they would  not cope well with the uncertainty and complexity of personal and social problems. pg 191

Damasio blames some of this irrationality on the influence of biological drives such as obedience, conformity, the desire to preserve self-esteem.  Decision-making also requires working memory and attention.  He posits that the somatic markers also act as "a booster for continued working memory and attention," [pg 198] saying that the proceedings are energized by signs the process is actually being evaluated, or is progressing.  I certainly find this.  If I am working on something and I feel like progress is either being made or at least possible, then I'm motivated to keep working.  However f I am working at something and feel there is no hope of succeeding, then I lose interest, focus and energy. "Somatic markers which arise out of activating a particular contingency boost attention and working memory throughout the cognitive system. " pg 198
Cognitive reasoning processes working at both the subconscious and the conscious level are both necessary for reasoning.

It seems to take both types of processing for the well-tempered decision-making brain to operate. pg 214  

The mind derives from the entire organism as an ensemble. pg 225  It depends on mind-body interactions.  The body contributes information that is part of the workings of the normal mind. pg 226  Some of this information is what Damasio terms "primordial representations" (bioregulatory information, visceral, skin and musculoskeletal information including proprioception and place in space,.  This is the information about the body proper. pg 229  Though these are important (especially evolutionarily), what now dominates are the non-body images.  Some of the patients that Damasio discusses suffer from anosognomia, where they are paralyzed but due to the areas of the brain affected, they do not have awareness or cognition of what is going on with their bodies.  He postulates that this is because they are relying on old information about their bodies (since the source of new, continuous ongoing information about their body states have been cut off.) pg 237  For Damasio, the self is rooted in a relatively stable, endlessly repeated biological state. pg 238  Our sense of self comes from autobiographical information, ongoing information about our body states, categorized facts about ourselves, our preferences, dispositional memories of recent events, plans ("a memory of a possible future").  The self consists of 2 sets of representations: Dispositional

The endless reactivation of updated images about our identity (a combination of memories of the past and of the planned future) constitutes a sizeable part of the state of self... pg 239

as well as the primordial representations  (what the body has been like lately - the background body state and the emotional state).

At each moment the state of self is constructed, from the ground up.  It is an evanescent reference state.  pg 240

I got bogged down in his descriptions of the metaself pg 241-243 but when he says that " the neural basis of consciousness, namely the acknowledgement of a biological self imbued with value" pg 244 makes sense to me.
Damasio  brings passion and reason together in Chapter 11 towards the end of his book.  Feelings depend on a multi-component system dependent on biological regulation.  Reason depends on specific brain systems some of which process feelings as well.  This seems to connect reason, feelings and the body.

It is as if we are possessed for a passion for reason, a drive that originates in the brain core, permeates other levels of the nervous system, and emerges as either feelings or nonconscious biases to guide decision making.  pg 245

He then refers to the Faustian contract that has brought progress to humanity.  pg 246  One of Damasio's concerns in figuring out the neurobiological basis for feelings is our current "culture of complaint" which pervades the social discourse and also leads to attempts to correct personal and social problems with medical and non-medical drugs.  Again he briefly touches on issues of education and children's overexposure and desensitization to violence and its consequences and how it downgrades the value of emotions, but he doesn't go any further on these topics. pg 246

Descartes error was in thinking that the brain was the repository of self, exclusive of the body, in separating the body from the brain.  I think therefore I am.  Cogito ergo sum.  Damasio rephrases this as

We are, and then we think, and we think only inasmuch as we are.  pg 248

He brings this back to western medicine in its study and treatment of disease; with its divisions or lack of awareness and acknowledgement of the min-body connection.  He posits that this is likely a main driver behind the push toward alternative medicines.  pg 251

Damasio adds a postscriptum with some comments on Ethics and survival.  The evolution of ethics would have required several things [pg 261]:

1. A large capacity to memorize categories of objects and events.
2. A large capacity to manipulate the components of those memorized representations and fashioning new creations by novel combinations.
3. A large capacity to memorize those new creations (anticipated outcomes, plans, the "memories of the future")

Pain and pleasure are the basic drives, the innate drives but they can be modified by education (experience, learning).  Pain + annoyance = suffering.  The evolutionary advantage of suffering is a a heightened attention and focus on action to avoid negative consequences. 

Barolome de Las Casas's A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

De Las Casas, Bartolome; A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies; Transl. Nigel Griffin; Penguin Classics, London, 2004

This is the text that I have to present to the class for discussion.  I was interested in this text partly because I'm very interested in Latin America and its history.  I also remember reading a biography of Mary I of England which also dealt with Prince Phillip (Felipe II) of Spain.  That period of time (in Spain and in England) has always stuck in my mind and De Las Casas' book was published, and the events he relates occurred, during that period.

Bartolome de las Casas was born in the late 15th c. and sailed as a young man in Columbus' 4th voyage to the Americas, to Hispaniola in 1502.  It was amazing to read a text written by someone who was present 10 years after Columbus first reached the Americas.  De Las Casas initially was there for commercial reasons, to make his fortune, accumulating land and slaves as a colonist.  In 1511 he heard a Dominican priest preach a sermon on the text "a voice crying in the wilderness", denouncing the Spanish treatment of the aboriginal peoples in the Americas.  De Las Casas was also present during Velasquez' brutal invasion of Cuba in 1513 - and he was horrified by what he saw.  His attitudes began to change and he started to protest the brutality used by the Spaniards as they invaded and took over the governance of the Americas, subjugating and tyrannizing the local inhabitants.  Initially De Las Casas objected to the brutality, greed and dishonesty but still thought that governing the local peoples was just if it were done more cooperatively and less brutally.  De Las Casas became ordained and travelled back and forth from Spain to the Americas speaking about what was going on in the Americas and preaching reform.  He received approval from Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor) to set up farming communities in what is now Venezuela where Spanish settlers would try to live in peace with the local people.  His vision was betrayed by the greed and non-cooperation of the settlers.  Their continued slave trade angered the indigenous peoples leading to violence and counter-violence and De Las Casas' project failed.

He was devastated by this failure and retreated to a Dominican monastery for many years.  He began to write and to read many philosophers.  It was this time period that led him to change his thinking about the rights of the indigenous peoples.  When he left the monastery in 1530, he became a very outspoken and dedicated proponent, not only of an end to the brutality and venality practiced by the Spaniards but of the rights of the indigenous people to their land and property.  He did not go so far as to think that Spain had no right to be there (Pope Constantine had granted sovereignty to Spain over all the "newly discovered" lands across the Atlantic Ocean, via the 'Donation of Constantine') but De Las Casas did feel that Spanish sovereignty provided citizenship rights to the indigenous people as well as their pre-existing rights to their property.  He also felt that natural laws, laws of humanity, required just treatment of the native people.

De Las Casas - important dates:

1484	Born in Seville to Pedro de Las Casas, a merchant who travelled to the Indies with Columbus
1502	Leaves Spain for Hispaniola
1511	Listens to a sermon by Dominican priest, Father Antonio de Montesinos, denouncing Spain's treatment of the AmerIndians.
1513	Present during the violent, bloody conquest of Cuba led by Diego Velazquez.
1515	Returns to Spain to plead the AmerIndian cause before King Ferdinand.
1516	Returns to America as a member of a commission sent to investigate the treatment of the Indians.
1519	Returns to Spain once more.
1520	Presents a defense of the AmerIndian to King Charles I (Emperor Charles V) The king supports his plan to build a colony in present-day Venezuela inhabited by both Spanish and free Indians.
1522	In January, after more than a year of continuous opposition of local encomenderos who incite AmerIndian attacks on the farmers, the experiment fails.
1523	Disappointed, Las Casas joins the Dominicans in Santo Domingo and focuses his energy on writing, begins both Apologetica historia de las Indias and Historia de Las Indies.
1530	Returned to Spain and obtained a royal decree prohibiting the enforcement of slavery in Peru which he delivered personally.
1537	Receives some support from the Pope in the form of Paul III's bull Sublimis Deus which declared the American AmerIndians as rational beings with souls and that their lives and property should be protected.
1542	Returns to Spain where he convinced Charles I to signs the "New Laws" which prohibited AmerIndian slavery and attempted to put an end to the encomienda system by limiting ownership of serfs to a single generation. Writes "A brief report on the Destruction of the Indians," which horrifies the court.
1544	To ensure enforcement of the laws he is named bishop of Chiapas in Guatemala - meets immediate opposition. He declares that any Spaniard who refuse to release his AmerIndians is to be denied absolution. A year later the inheritance limitation is rescinded by Charles V.
1547	Returns to Spain and gives up his episcopal dignity. Becomes an influential figure at court and at the Council of the Indies.
1550	Meets Sepulveda in the famous debate at the Council of Valladolid.
1552	Publishes The Destruction of the Indies. Spends the next fourteen years writing and appearing at court and councils in defense of the Indians.
1566	Dies in Madrid and buried in the convent chapel of Our Lady of Atocha.
1875	Historia de las Indias first published.

De Las Casas spent most of his adult life travelling through the Americas and back and forth to Spain, arguing for, preaching and educating about reform of Spanish rule in the Americas.  He initially advocated only for gentler treatment (the doctrine of peaceful conversion), he then progressed to supporting the legal rights of the indigenous peoples and was instrumental in several laws being passed by the Spanish monarchy to protect the indigenous people though these rights were not upheld by the Spanish conquistadors, settlers and some greedy clergy in the Americas.  Eventually De Las Casas became more radicalized and began to use his clerical office to try and compel change, by threatening excommunication or withholding absolution to those not adhering to the revised laws.

By the end of his lifetime he had seen 3 monarchies govern over the Americas (Ferdinand & Isabella, Charles I/V and Felipe II) with little improvement in the conditions for the local people.  He had argued his cause in many forums, had circulated his writings which not only shocked those in Spain but reached a wider audience in Europe.  Though he didn't see much improvement in his lifetime, conditions slowly began to change as the power of the initial conquistadors was curtailed and the encomiendero system was abolished.  

De Las Casas' text is difficult to read only because of its subject matter.  He goes through each country, roughly in the order in which they were "conquered" and the littany of brutal oppression, treachery, greed is very hard to read about.  He reports about one native leader who was about to be executed.  Asked to convert to Christianity/Catholicism so that he would have a chance at Heaven after he died, the local leader asked if the Spaniards around him were examples of Christians and would they be going to Heaven.  When he was told 'yes' he said that in this case he did not wish any chance of going to Heaven.
It's difficult to consider that human beings can do this to any living creature much less to other human beings.  I can't help but think of what it would have been like for the local people to have the Spaniards arrive and to then suffer such change, brutality and oppression.

When you try to explain it by saying those were brutal times you then run up against De Las Casas and the other clerics who spoke out against the brutality and were able to see and recognize the injustice.  Was it a matter of education?  Was it a matter of the type of person who would have been on those voyages of exploration (education, class, situation, greed, fitness for society?).

What was happening in Europe at the time?

15th century Spain:

• Uniting of five kingdoms in the Iberian Peninsula: Castile, Aragón (which included Catalonia, Valencia, the kingdom of Naples, Sardinia and Sicily), Granada, Navarre and Portugal. By early in the 16th century they had been reduced to two: Castile/Aragón and Portugal.
• Castile and Aragón were united in the late 15th century through the marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragón (tiny Navarre was swallowed by Aragón in 1513). 
•  The marriage between Isabel and Ferdinand in 1469  (she was 18 and he was 17) 
•  By January 1492, Granada was in Spanish hands.  Granada was the last Muslim kingdom of the once powerful al-Andalus and Isabella and Ferdinand saw its conquest as a necessary step for consolidating their political power and for religious uniformity in the peninsula. 
• The terms of surrender were generous and included freedom of religion. Religious conformity, however, was still the overall objective of the Christians. Already on March 31, 1492, Ferdinand and Isabel signed an edict giving Jews four months to accept baptism or go into exile; by 1501 the Muslims faced the same choice.
•  Christianity was now the common bond that held Spaniards together.  There was widespread suspicion that their conversion was not genuine.  This was not a new phenomenon; the 15th century had seen an explosion of Jews accepting baptism.  Many were sincere in their new faith, many others continued to practice their Judaic faith in secret. It was to investigate the suspicion of heresy amongst Conversos that the infamous Inquisition was introduced into Castile in 1478.
• Under the Mongol Empire's hegemony over Asia, Europeans had long enjoyed a safe land passage, the 'Silk Road', to China and India. After the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire (Turks) in 1453, the land route to Asia difficult and dangerous. A sea route to the Indies was needed.
• Portugal had made advances in navigation, allowing for more ambitious voyages & explorations.
•  Late 15^th c., the Catholic monarchs had just completed an expensive campaign in the Iberian Peninsula (la Reconquista), reconquering Granada, and were desperate for money. Columbus’ proposed search for a new route to the Indies promised access to these riches.  He 1^st sailed to Americas in August 1492

16^th Century  -  Golden Age for Spain

At the beginning of the 16th century, there was a general feeling of pride and self confidence in Spain. 

Further impetus to the general air of confidence was given by two far-reaching events:

• the “discovery” of America (Las Indias) by Christopher Columbus in 1492
• the accession in 1516 to the Spanish throne of the powerful Hapsburg family of central Europe.

With the discovery of Las Indias and the acquisition of vast new lands, Spain embarked on transatlantic imperial conquests.  With the accession of the Hapsburg Carlos I to the Spanish throne, Spain suddenly acquired large areas of central and northern Europe.

From the marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand in 1469 there grew within about 55 years an imperial power whose possessions included large areas in Europe and America, and whose reach even stretched across the Pacific (the first voyage around the world was completed in 1522, led by the Portuguese explorer Magellan but under Spanish auspices).

The arranged marriage of Ferdinand and Isabel`s youngest daughter, Juana, to the son of the Hapsburg emperor, Maximilian I lead to the establishment of the Hapsburg dynasty in Spain by their son, Charles.

Charles I/V (1500-1558; ruled Spain 1516-56, Holy Roman Emperor 1519-58)

Charles I/V had large imperial ambitions, costly ambitions.  He requested money in pursuit of the office of Holy Roman Emperor (HRE) and did become HRE (as Charles V) in 1519.  His priorities extended beyond Spain, with high costs to the Spanish treasury. Of the 40 years that Charles ruled, he spent only 16 in Spain; in the last 13 years of his reign he didn’t set foot in Spain. His son, and successor, Felipe II, in contrast, was devoted to and spent most of his time in Spain.

Charles won Spaniards over by identifying them increasingly with the mission of defending Catholicism. His struggle with the threat of heretical Protestants in Northern Europe and with Ottoman (Turkish) activities in the Mediterranean recalled the crusading spirit of the Reconquista, which was still relatively fresh in the collective Spanish memory. 

The costs of defending imperial (HRE) and Catholic interests were enormous. The only recourse was to borrow money against the future gold and silver coming from the Americas. However, Spain had lost a large part of its own banking resources with the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, so the borrowed money came mainly from established bankers in Germany (Fuggers) and Genoa (Italy).  At one point parts of South America were granted by Spain to German banking interests.  I’ve always wondered a bit at the amount of German interests in South America as I didn’t think of Germany as having colonizing interests so far away.  It makes sense now.

SPAIN in the AMERICAS

Two rationalizations put forth for the Spanish Invasion of the Americas and their actions towards the indigenous peoples:

• 1.     There was the moral framework of the ‘just war’.
• 2.     Justification under Aristotelian concept of “natural slaves”

Thomas Aquinas had asked whether war was "always" sinful.  There was a general presumption against the shedding of blood.  The pacifists understood this prohibition to be absolute, while the ‘just war’ theorists maintained the prohibition could be overridden provided certain conditions were fulfilled.

The Thomistic tradition of just war identified three conditions for a war to be just:

1. ·      that it be commanded by a sovereign authority,
2. ·       that a just cause be present owing to some "fault" in the enemy, and
3. ·       that there exist a right intention to advance good or avoid evil.

• The supporters of Spanish conquest believed that rightful authority resided in the papal pronouncement of Alexander VI in 1493 that Spain had just title to the Indies for the purposes of conversion to Christianity. 
• The "fault" of the AmerIndians was usually noted to be refusal to accept the Christian faith.
• I haven’t seen as much discussion about the 'right intention' but it likely went along the lines of bringing Spanish knowledge, religion, advances (iron) to the AmerIndians.

The 2nd rationalization for the Spanish invasion of the Americas derived from classical philosophy rather than religious tradition: the Aristotelian notion that some persons are slaves by nature, born to serve masters. This was the argument used by de Sepulveda in 1550 at Valladolid. Fourteen distinguished judges were summoned by the emperor to assess whether war could be justly waged against the AmerIndians.  De Sepulveda cited the natural slavery argument and De Las Casas made the arguments contained in this text (A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies) and in his massive “History of the Indies” and “Apologetic History of the Indies”.

Part of the just war rationalization relied on the dehumanization of the indigenous peoples and biblical arguments based on Battle of Jericho (Encisco in 1513).

In 1513, Martin Fernandez de Encisco argued before the crown's counselors that "the king might very justly send men to require these idolatrous AmerIndians to hand over their land to him, for it was given him by the pope. If the AmerIndians would not do this, he might justly wage war against them, kill them and enslave those captured in war, precisely as Joshua treated the inhabitants of Jericho."  The biblical record of the legendary battle of Jericho observes that the Israelites "utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass with the edge of the sword." (Joshua 6; 1 Sam. 15).

Encisco's biblical paradigm of conquest provided the theological grounds for the infamous Requirement (Requerimiento), issued under the authorization of King Ferdinand, in 1514.  This was a text carried by all conquistadors, to be read out to the indigenous people, warning them that if they did not convert and did not submit to Spain, they would be [rightfully] slaughtered.

De Las Casas discussed this requirement in this text, reporting that the Conquistador’s would obey the letter rather than the spirit of the law, reading the proclamation out loud, at night and at a distance from the sleeping villages where no one could hear the words (not that they would have understood them given that they were read out in Spanish and the meaning would not be obvious without extensive explanation and education).

De Las Casas' ideologies evolved to center on the right of the AmerIndians to their land, on the principle of self-determination, on the subordination of all Spanish interests, including those of the Crown, to AmerIndian interests, material and spiritual. Towards the end of his life, Las Casas ultimately advanced a program calling for

•  the suppression of the encomienda,
• liberation of the AmerIndians from all forms of servitude except a small voluntary tribute to the Crown, and
• the restoration of the ancient AmerIndian states and rulers, the rightful owners of those lands. Over these states the Spanish monarch would preside as "Emperor over many Kings" in order to fulfill his sacred mission of bringing the AmerIndians to the Catholic Faith and the Christian way of life. This was the only Spanish title to the Indies that Las Casas regarded as legitimate. The King's agents in the performance of this mission would be a small number of model religious who would cooperate with the native rulers, with the AmerIndians separated from the corrupting and oppressive presence of lay Spaniards.

He promoted practical political measures like the New Laws of 1542, and began to systematically use the powers of the Church: excommunication, interdict, and denial of absolution to secure compliance with these protective legislations.  Though he was successful in seeing several laws either revised or brought into being that were intended to offer some protection or justice to the inhabitants of the Americas, in practice De Las Casas' efforts were usually subverted by local Spanish resistance or by later being rescinded or weakened by the monarchs.

His writings in other texts show how his views and thinking were drastically advanced from the self-interest at play in Spain's "conquered lands" as well as the greed and appetite for power and for catholic dominance at play back in Spain.  As early as 1519, in a rebuttal to Juan de Quevedo, Bishop of Tierra Firme, who questioned the morals and capacities of the indigenous peoples, De Las Casas stated:

Our Christian religion adapts equally to all the nations of the world and receives all nations, and strips none of its liberty or dominion, nor does it reduce any people to servitude on the pretext that they are slaves "by nature."

For all the peoples of the world are men, and the definition of all men, collectively and severally, is one: that they are rational beings. All possess understanding and volition, being formed in the image and likeness of God; all have the five exterior senses and the four interior senses, and are moved by the objects of these; all have natural capacity or faculties to understand and master the knowledge that they do not have; and this is true not only of those that are inclined toward good but those that by reason of their depraved customs are bad; all take pleasure in goodness and in happy and pleasant things and all abhor evil and reject what offends or grieves them.... 

Thus all mankind is one, and all men are alike in what concerns their creation and all natural things, and no one is born enlightened. From this it follows that all of us must be guided and aided at first by those who were born before us.

In his last will and testament Las Casas wrote:

To act here at home on behalf of all those people 
out in what we call the Indies, 
the true possessors of those kingdoms, those territories.
  To act against the unimaginable, unspeakable violence
 and evil and harm they have suffered from our people,
 contrary to all reason, all justice,
so as to restore them to the original liberty
 they were lawlessly deprived of,
 and get them free of death by violence, death they still suffer.

He also commented on the probability of divine retribution, a factor that had always been uppermost in his mind throughout his time in the Americas:

I think that God shall have to pour out his fury and anger
 on Spain for these damnable, rotten, infamous deeds 
done so unjustly, so tyrannically, so barbarously 
to those people, against those people.
  For the whole of Spain has shared in the blood-soaked riches,
 some a little, some a lot, but all shared in goods 
that were ill-gotten, wickedly taken with violence and genocide-
and all must pay unless Spain does a mighty penance.

I'm looking forward to the discussion.