Descartes and the Passionate Mind
Deborah J. Brown, Descartes and the Passionate Mind (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
This is not the thinking of a hyper-rationalist but of someone sensitive to the fact that our embodiment is important to our identities as individuals and socially related persons. (p. 164)
Classical philosophy frequently associated thought with the divine. Stoic freedom, for instance, meant operating in accordance with the rational soul, as opposed to lower, animalistic factors; some stoics even found falsity and depravity in erotic love on account of its arbitrariness and inconstancy. In medieval Christianity, because everything, following a divine plan, was for the best, individual well-being did not depend upon external circumstances, but upon the ordering of one’s soul. Goodness, like physical health, was a matter of organization around the proper ends.
But Renaissance individualism coincided with a rise in the stock of the heroic virtues: ambition, charisma, courage, forbearance, liberality, love. Mastery of fortune had egalitarian implications, placing earthly happiness within the reach of anyone, at least in theory. René Descartes (1596-1650), understanding the body and the mind as both forming an integrated system of coordinated functions, proceeded to narrow our mastery of fortune to self-mastery. The body was no longer an impediment to virtue, but, properly directed, a necessary condition for it. In a well-ordered Cartesian soul, the passions are reliable guides, not to be repressed through the authority of the intellect, nor to be ignored completely through peaceful apathy. The temporal realities of help and harm therefore gained ethical importance.
The early moderns conceived epistemological issues in a metaphysical fashion. Descartes, no exception, enrolled the passions in an epistemological capacity — his explanation of knowledge included why we seek knowledge. Wonder in particular had the function of keeping us attentive and reflective, thus allowing us to learn new things. And, like the schoolmen, Descartes sided with wonder over curiosity. Knowing for the sake of knowing alone was considered a vice. But wonder was explained as a kind of reverential awe, presenting an object as worthy of attention. Curiosity, seeking to goggle at rarities, was believed to pervert wonder by impeding investigation of phenomena, thereby producing stupor. When we face the extraordinary, the exceptional, the marvelous, the incongruous, the unexpected, Descartes believed a healthy soul uses such novelties, not as ends in themselves, but to illuminate underlying principles.
Cartesian passions served another role as the glue in the mind-body unity. Like the mind, and, like the body, the mind-body union was explanatorily basic in Descartes’ philosophy. Professor Brown believes the union stands for a phenomenological monism, our experience of moving and being affected by our bodies, something known only obscurely through the intellect, but clearly through the senses. The passions have the function of contributing to the preservation of the body. They are not experienced as originating in the soul, though in the strictest sense they are, like volitions, thoughts, which are modes of the soul. Yet, passions cannot be conceived independently of their causes in the body. Consider how phenomenal consciousness triggers immediate behavioral responses, such as someone being startled by a sudden, loud noise. Cognitively, passions incite the soul to consent or dissent when evidence is uncertain, select relevant information out of a pool of irrelevant information, and help keep objects of perception in working memory.
Descartes identified six principal passions: wonder, love, desire, hatred, joy, sadness. Passions were not imaginations, nor habits, nor judgments about good and evil. Rather, passions had a representational role as modes of self-awareness, responses to the various ways objects may be of interest to a mind-body unity. Passions not only have the potential to exaggerate the value of their objects; they can bypass reason and become a direct stimulus for action. But instead of obliterating our passions, Descartes recommended achieving self-mastery by establishing the right connections with our passions. Like scholastic passions, Cartesian passions always took a formal object. Because of this inherent variability, passions were not caused by specific classes of external events, and therefore remained open to mediation by associated thoughts. Like psychoanalysis, we can prepare ourselves for future accidents so they can be handled skillfully; we can also get old associations unstuck by being aware of their causes. The aim here was to be resolved to do what we think is best, minimizing regret with the consolation that we have reasoned well.
Generosity was the fountain of virtue in the Cartesian system. A passion itself, it glued together virtue and happiness through love, wonder, and joy. To judge well, one must see oneself as a part of a greater whole; generosity prevents us from taking actions based upon false esteem, when we wrongly judge ourselves inferior or superior to others. This doesn’t mean that brotherly love always has its way. While love does introduce constancy into our interests, motivating us when wonder has diminished, love is bad when combined with rash desires and badly founded hopes. Again, we do not overcome desire in Descartes, only vain desires, limiting desires to what is attainable within our power. Rational self-determination meant rational control over desire, and desire was what transformed the natural into the normative, making it a reason for acting. A generous person therefore was a reasonable person, just as a reasonable person was a generous person; our rationality depended upon our experience as a mind-body unity.
Descartes did not deny that sensations could resemble their causes; he did deny that the intellect essentially relies upon such resemblances to perform its functions properly. We find no examples of reasoning without sensation, just admonitions not to reason from sensation. Professor Brown wants to persuade us that the Cartesian soul was not a ghost floating in the void that suddenly discovers it is a robot. Rather, the Cartesian sense of self comes from its very embodiment, through our experiences of pride and shame, gratefulness and indignation, and other lived, human phenomena.
If Brown is correct, then why is Descartes treated in a scientistic fashion? Probably for the same reason Descartes is crowned as the father of modern philosophy. Philosophers, in awe of science, want to make their area of study sound progressive, lest it be dismissed as a useless endeavor. Descartes thus receives the role of the guy who ended the superstitious reign of scholasticism and started the supremacy of practical epistemology over spooky metaphysics, though in many senses, Descartes himself was a metaphysical scholastic, just like his successors.
Since any periodization of philosophy will have an arbitrary element, we always have the choice of selecting the Renaissance as the beginning of modern philosophy. After all, its humanistic methods established the individualism, secularism, naturalism, professionalism, and analysis necessary for any scientific environment to blossom. But if we acknowledged this, and didn’t treat the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries like philosophical ciphers, then we wouldn’t be able to cast science in the role of the protagonist, and religion in the role of the villain, which is what a scientistic story of progressive enlightenment requires. Why should we believe scholasticism abruptly stops, and science abruptly begins? Since we push the humanistic context out of view, it isn’t surprising that we miss the humanism — think Montaigne, not Comte — in thinkers such as Descartes.
Musical selection: Henri Dumont, Je n’ai jamais parlé de mon amour extrême
