INNER LIFE AND TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY IN HUSSERL

Stephen Gaukroger opens his masterful Descartes: An Intellectual Biography with a "curious story" about Rene Descartes that apparently began to circulate sometime during the 1 8th century, and which reflected the anxiety and suspicion that Descartes' philosophy had managed to arouse. The story was that Descartes, towards the end of his life, had constructed a female automaton for use as a travel companion. On his journeys, he would store her in a box next to him as he slept. During one such journey, a long sea voyage, the suspicious crew discovered the artificial person tucked away in her box, and, in a fit of disgust and rage, threw the poor machine overboard.2 Like all such popular legends, this story expresses a number of things. One is the prejudice that a mechanistic physics such as Descartes'