  A third conception is little more than the use (or abuse) of Descartes as a straw-man representative of a kind of  over-arching “Western rationality” that over-rationalized the human being and denied the body and emotions. The claim that Descartes denied the body and the emotions is easily put aside. It is an over-generalization, and a misunderstanding, of Descartes' procedure  of “withdrawing the mind from the senses” in the Meditations for the purposes of doing metaphysics. A more historically nuanced reading of Descartes' text would connect it with the practice of spiritual meditation extant in the seventeenth century, a practice that Descartes co-opted for his metaphysical meditations (see the first three chapters  in Rorty 1986). Also, the notion that Descartes ignored the body and emotions does not respond at all to his work on  the Passions, in which the body has a starring role. More generally, this sort of charge does not engage the long portion of the Sixth Meditation that concerns mind–body union and interaction and the embodied mind.