Abstract
The Passions of the Soul is Descartes’s main treatise on the passions (or what are currently more usually referred to as the emotions), in which the philosopher willingly investigates the passions from the perspective of a physiologist rather than a philosopher. Conceptually, Descartes’s approach is a strong departure from the humanist concept of emotions, employing as it does a mechanical strategy consisting in the separation of soul and body as different ontological entities in constant interaction. It is argued that Descartes’s reduction of fear to the product of a hydraulic mechanism was unfortunate, as it re-oriented understanding of this emotion away from philosophical insight. Moreover, the therapy of the passions suggested by Descartes is mostly based on ancient Stoic remedies, and his therapy does not follow from the mechanism of the passions that he attempted to describe with clockwork precision.
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- 1.
I have used the recent translation by Michael Moriarty for the Oxford World’s Classics edition (Descartes 2015). Numbering corresponds to the Adam and Tannery (AT) edition of Oeuvres.
- 2.
The seventeenth century was rich in treatises on theoretical aspects of emotions (Boros 2006, p. 125). The ideal of modernity was the mechanical science, which greatly influenced medicine and philosophy. The latter is evident in the works of Hobbes and Descartes (see Hatfield 2007, for a thoughtful discussion).
- 3.
In this chapter I use the term ‘passion’ rather than emotion given that Descartes uses ‘emotion’ in a technical way, different from passion.
- 4.
That is, soul and body are conceived of as different substances: the former as res cogitans and the latter as res extensa.
- 5.
- 6.
In one of the first letters, Elisabeth asked Descartes to tell her “how the soul of a human being…can determine the bodily spirits and so bring about voluntary actions” (6 May 1643; AT 3.660).
- 7.
Letter dated 18 May 1645 (AT 4:200).
- 8.
“The slightest period of inactivity causes [my mind] to fall back on the reasons it has to feel distressed, and I am afraid that, if I do not keep it active while taking the Spa water, it will become more melancholy” (Letter 22 June 1645; AT 4:233). Elisabeth is speaking about her soul in the third person, as an entity she is unable to govern.
- 9.
“I know well that it is virtually impossible to withstand the initial turmoil that new misfortunes bring about in us, and indeed that it is normally the finest minds that have the most violent passions.”
- 10.
“This is done by concentrating on all the benefits we may derive from the thing that the day before we were treating as a great misfortune, and by diverting our minds from the evils we had imagined in it”.
- 11.
“One of these means, and among the most useful, it seems to me, is to examine the writings of the ancients on this subject, and to attempt to go beyond them by adding to their precepts; for in this way we can make their precepts fully our own, and prepare ourselves to put them into practice” (Letter 4 August 1645; AT 4:263).
- 12.
Nye (1999, p. 53) has rendered Descartes’ maxims in an eloquent way: “Happiness is contentment, contentment comes from being virtuous, and virtue is nothing but a firm will to carry out whatever one understands is best as long as one has used one’s reason to try to discover what is best.”
- 13.
“It is true that a habit of valuing goods in proportion to their capacity to contribute to our contentment, of measuring this contentment by the perfections that give rise to pleasures, and of judging these perfections and pleasures dispassionately will protect them from many mistakes” (Letter 16 August 1645; AT 2:268).
- 14.
Elisabeth (perhaps ironically) refers to living the life of a human engaged in court and household matters, with all its contingent problems, unlike the protected and semi-secluded life of a philosopher.
- 15.
“For how can we foresee all the accidents that can occur in life, when they are impossible to count? And how can we help ardently desiring things that necessarily tend to our preservation as human beings (such as health and the means of life) which, nonetheless, do not depend on our will?” (25 April 1646; AT 4:403).
- 16.
The most comprehensive definition of “spirits” is provided in PS10: “For what I call ‘spirits’ here are only bodies, and their only properties are that they are very small and fast-moving…As a result they are never stationary, but while some are flowing into the cavities of the brain, others are simultaneously flowing out through the pores of the substance of that organ. Through the pores they are conveyed into the nerves, and thence into the muscles, by means of which process they move the body in all the various ways it can be moved”.
- 17.
Hassing (2015, p. 6) suggests that Descartes used the term “thought” in both a narrow and a broad sense. In a narrow sense a thought is a clear and distinct cognition or volition, whereas in the wide sense, thoughts are “obscure and confused” objects such as sense-perceptions, internal (bodily) sensations (e.g. pain), appetites (e.g. thirst), memories, imaginations, judgments and passions.
- 18.
In other words, judgment and imagination are sufficient to produce passions, but passions do not consist in judgments or imaginations.
- 19.
There are six basic passions listed in PS: wonder, hate, love, desire, joy and sadness. Interestingly, fear does not appear in this list.
- 20.
The reduction of psychological phenomena to physics is well rendered by Thomas Nagel (2012). Reductionism of emotions does not start with Descartes (Nagel 2012, p. 4), but his texts became extremely influential, and albeit with protestations (see Damasio, Chapter 7) still constitute the main framework for their analysis.
- 21.
Remarks are cited as originally numbered in PS.
- 22.
Descartes used the French crainte to design the initial affective apprehension of danger, whereas peur was used to denote a sudden urge to flee (Descartes 2015, p. 288).
- 23.
“Volition being the only or at least the principal action of the soul” (PS 13).
- 24.
Descartes used a rich metaphorical language, where the spirits are a “subtle air” coming from “rarefied” blood. The spirits are true matter, “very small and fast-moving” bodies (PS 10). Metaphors are frequently used in the PS to ‘explain’ physical phenomena linguistically in the absence of empirical information.
- 25.
Descartes decided on the pineal gland as the brain structure ‘communicating’ stimuli to the soul given that this is the only brain midline structure. The mechanism by which the pineal gland interacts with the soul remains unexplained, and this is one of the major objections that Elisabeth posed to Descartes’s system of passions.
- 26.
Descartes considers sense-perception to be the most frequent stimulus producing passions. Other stimuli are thoughts produced by “bodily temperament” or by brain impressions (PS 51).
- 27.
Passions are only produced by specific representations (e.g. seeing a piece of paper only produces a visual representation simpliciter), whereas reading what is written in that piece of paper (e.g. a love letter) produces both a perception and a passion.
- 28.
A more complex schematic representation of Descartes’s machinery of the passions is presented by Hatfield (2007, pp. 23–25).
- 29.
This is a remnant in the Cartesian system of the passions of the Galenic humoral theory. Based on this theory, the individual’s humours influence the type of passion that results from the movement of the pineal gland.
- 30.
In this case, it is the mood of the individual that influences the production of a passion. For instance, an individual with a fearful brain ‘imprint’ will tend to produce the passion of fear.
- 31.
This is a tautological statement, where a frightening image will produce the passion of fear in the soul. But the key question is: what makes the image ‘frightening’? This relevant conceptual problem is discussed below.
- 32.
PS 166 provides other examples: “when hope is…strong…it becomes complacency or confidence,” and “when fear is so extreme that it leaves no room at all for hope…it is transformed in despair.”
- 33.
As we shall see in subsequent chapters, the same reductionist concept of fear affects its treatment in current philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience.
- 34.
A similar problem lies with Descartes’s statement that a specific movement of the pineal gland “represents the same object to the soul, so that it realizes that this is the thing it wanted to remember” (PS 42).
- 35.
This title illustrates important conceptual contradictions in PS, where passions are considered as always being good for the individual and yet some of them are in need of treatment due to becoming excessive (such as fear changing into terror) or inappropriate to the situation (such as a flight response triggered by fear when courage and a fight response would be more appropriate).
- 36.
“…the movements aroused in the blood by the objects of our passions follow so swiftly from mere impressions in the brain and the disposition of our organs, without any contribution from the soul, that there is no human wisdom capable of withstanding them if one is not sufficiently prepared” (PS 211).
- 37.
“Indeed, I shall go so far as to say that I seek to be read by none, except those who will be able and willing to meditate seriously alongside me, and to withdraw their minds from the senses, and at the same time from all their preconceptions. Of these I well know already that there are very few” (Descartes 1991; Introduction, p. 15).
- 38.
As already mentioned, Genevieve Lloyd (2008) elaborated extensively on the therapeutic relationship between Descartes and Elisabeth. Since the Princess suffered from sadness, distress and anxiety, Lloyd’s comments on Descartes’s therapy should be at least briefly mentioned. Like Nye (1999), she stresses the “asymmetry” (p. 172) between the philosopher and his ‘patient’ and suggests that the notion of ‘providence’ underlies Descartes’s selection of Stoic remedies. By “asymmetry,” Lloyd means the gender hierarchy, as expressed in Descartes’s and Elisabeth’s different life-styles, social relations and daily problems, as well as their different approaches to self-knowledge. For instance, Elisabeth is unable to practice the meditation towards self-knowledge that Descartes recommends, but this is not due to any intrinsic limitations, but to gender differences in their opportunities and social roles. Descartes is unable to understand the reason why Elisabeth is not improved by his remedies, which are based on right reason and ultimately depend on God’s providence. The Princess writes to Descartes that she is enslaved by the physical weakness of her sex, although the implications of this statement, perhaps ironic, go beyond bodily differences and refer to a different embodiment in daily life practices (while the philosopher was able to practice the vita contemplativa , the Princess had to deal with actual misfortunes). In the end (Letter 18 May 1645; AT 4:200) Descartes recommends the Princess to seek advice from true doctors.
- 39.
“…the difference there is between the greatest souls and those that are base and vulgar consists mainly in this, that vulgar souls give way to their passions, and are happy or unhappy only in so far as the things that happen to them are pleasant or unpleasant; whereas those of the other kind can reason so powerfully and convincingly that, although they too have passions, which are often indeed more vehement than those of common souls, their reason nonetheless remains in command, and ensures that even afflictions are of use to them, and contribute to the perfect happiness they enjoy even in this life” (Letter 18 May 1645; AT 4:200).
- 40.
“…if a person with any number of real reasons to be distressed applied himself so thoroughly to turning his imagination aside from them that he never thought of them, except when compelled by practical necessity, and devoted the rest of his time to thinking only about what could bring him contentment and joy, not only would this greatly help him to judge more wisely about matters of concern to him, because he would consider these without passion, I am certain that this alone would be capable of restoring him to health” (Letter May or June 1645; AT 4:218).
- 41.
Descartes himself could not help worrying about the risk of being condemned by the Calvinists in Leyden, and this fear was one of the main reasons he left the Low Countries for Sweden.
- 42.
Gaukroger (2002, p. 394) and other authors suggest caution when labelling the Cartesian system of the passion as ‘reductionist’. Part Three of PS, as already noted, is mostly about how to manage the passions using psychological tools, and Descartes’s approach to the passions is more holistic in this section of his work. But the aim here is not to blame Descartes for the problems of reductionism; I merely want to note the tremendous influence of dualism and reductionism that is present in current medicine, neurobiology, and even some trends in philosophy. This is discussed in the next chapters.
- 43.
Discussing the transition of studying and treating passions from the philosophical to the scientific-medical domain will be the focus of the next chapters.
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Starkstein, S. (2018). Descartes and the Mechanization of Fear. In: A Conceptual and Therapeutic Analysis of Fear. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78349-9_6
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