← History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
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Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in munich online@historyoffphilosophy.net Today's episode as Rational as you Elizabeth of Bohemia in an influential essay published in 1997 under the title Disappearing Ink, Eileen O' Neill pointed to what she called the pressing, mind boggling, possibly scandalous fact that women were at that time almost entirely absent from standard histories of early modern philosophy. This despite the profusion of early modern women who did do philosophy, many of whom were prominent in their own day. In the essay, o' Neill offers a variety of explanations for this exclusion, ranging from sexist assumptions on the part of intellectual historians to changing fashions that led away from certain topics and styles in philosophy. But she also points to a more straightforward the ink may not have appeared in the first place, at least not under the names of the authors. Women often chose to publish anonymously. Men did that too, of course, but it was an especially tempting option for a woman author wary of provoking opposition, outrage, or contemptuous dismissal. And then some women were unwilling to see their ideas in print at all. After Descartes death in 1650, his friend Chanute asked Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia for permission to publish the letters she had written to him. She refused to allow it, with the result that for more than 200 years the only Descartes side of the correspondence was available. It was not until her letters were rediscovered and published in the 1870s that scholars gained access to them. And thank goodness, because they document the ideas of one of Descartes most perceptive and sympathetic critics. They also tell us a good deal about Elizabeth's own philosophy, more than we could ever learn from his responses to her. Her letters complement the collected objections written against the Meditations by Mersenne, Cassandi, Hobbes and others, but they respond to a wider range of his thought and solicit a wider range of reflections from Descartes, including his last major work, a treatise on the passions, written at her behest. In their exchanges, he's less defensive than in his replies in response to the objections to the Meditations, and he's more inclined to expand on and modify his previous ideas. Though Elizabeth fairly bombards him with objections of her own, the general tone is not adversarial. Instead, we have two philosophers thinking together through core problems in Cartesian thought and trying to apply its lessons to their own lives. It is also a meeting of Equals as royalty. Elisabeth is Descartes socioeconomic superior. Yet this is balanced out by the fact that she treats him as a philosophical authority and source of advice. They are also of one mind when it comes to preventing the dissemination of their correspondence. At one point, they even consider writing in code to keep the conversation from prying eyes. Both had good reason to maintain discretion. Descartes was a controversial figure, forced to endure such public attacks as those launched at Utrecht by Gispertus Woetius. And Elizabeth was a figure of political significance. Born in 1618 as one of 13 children produced by the Palatine Elector and King of Bohemia, Frederick iv. Through her mother, she was the granddaughter of James VI of Scotland and first of England. And Charles I was her uncle. That's the king who was executed in the English Civil War. That event was one of only many calamities that befell Elizabeth and her family before, during and after her correspondence with Descartes. After her father was deposed, the family was forced to seek shelter in the Netherlands, which is why her letters to Descartes were written from the Hague. It was also in the Netherlands that the two were able to meet in person from time to time between 1643 and 1646. Finally, in 1648, the family regained partial control of their territory in the German Rhineland, the Palatinate. In 1651, the year after Descartes death, Elisabeth traveled there and helped her brother Charles to revive the war torn area. They refounded the University of Heidelberg, where Elizabeth encouraged the uptake of Cartesian ideas, as she had previously done in Berlin and Wolsenbuttel. At Heidelberg, she was even referred to as a source of instruction in Cartesian philosophy for some students, which is extraordinary given the almost total exclusion of women from university life in this period. Of course, princesses tend to play by their own rules. But it was not only Elisabeth's highborn status that made her of interest to a number of interlocutors, including Descartes. She was renowned for her intelligence, called la Grecque by her own family in recognition of her mastery of ancient languages. Her sister Sophie, admittedly not an entirely unbiased source, remarked that Elizabeth was very learned. She mastered all languages and all sciences. She belonged to the epistolary circle that had at its center another woman thinker, Anna Maria von Schurmann, Ironically, von Schurmann was tutored by Descartes Nemesis voitius. In another break from gender norms, she was allowed to attend lectures in Utrecht, albeit while sitting behind a curtain to avoid distracting the other students. Let's bring back this Measure, but use it for smartphones. Elizabeth also corresponded with such luminaries as William Penn, the Quaker leader who founded Pennsylvania, and the scientist Constantine Huygens. Appropriately for a luminary, Huygens told Elizabeth in one letter that a part of the moon had been named for her. She took less of a shine to other thinkers of the period, declaring herself unimpressed by the objections brought against the meditations by Hobbes and Gossandi, and also finding little of value in the ideas of Kenelm Digby. For her, Descartes eclipsed all other thinkers. His biographer Ballet says of her that she conceived so strong a passion for his doctrine that she wanted to count for nothing anything she had learned before. Yet she was far from an uncritical audience for Descartes ideas to the contrary. Though she would surely have been too modest to say so, she must have considered herself to be supplying the sort of penetrating objections that she found absent in Hobbes, Gossandi and Digby. Descartes seems to have agreed. It was not only her royal status that appealed to him, though that surely helped, but her concise and precise way of exposing potential weak points in his philosophy. He also appreciated her impatience for scholastic philosophy. He alludes to this in his work Passions of the Soul, whose preface says that he wrote it for a princess whose mental powers are so extraordinary that she can easily understand matters which seem very difficult to our learned doctors. He had not changed his mind about her since his first acquaintance with Elizabeth in 1642, when he wrote to a friend, I think more of her judgment than that of those doctors who who, for laws of truth, prefer the opinions of Aristotle to the evidence of reason. When they took up correspondence, they discussed mathematical topics, and she amazed him with a solution to a problem he set her. And by the way, she did allow their letters on mathematics to be published in full during her lifetime. Unlike the letters on philosophy, they also discussed problems in natural philosophy such as magnetism. As this suggests, Elisabeth and Descartes shared broad interests. She was engaged in the construction of microscopes and telescopes and read the reports of the Royal Society. The correspondence between Elizabeth and Descartes is, however, dominated by more abstract philosophical concerns, in particular, mind, body, dualism and ethics. As we'll see, these two issues are closely connected, which makes them unlike the mind and the body, at least to all appearances. According to Descartes, soul and body are not intimately connected but radically distinct, one a thinking unextended being, the other nothing but extension. Elisabeth is often credited with being the first or one of the first to put her finger on a central problem for Cartesian, how can two things that are so different interact with one another? As she puts it, how can the soul of a human being, it being only a thinking substance, determine the bodily spirits? After all, it seems that bodies can only be affected by other bodies, like when one thing collides with another and pushes it. She also approaches the issue from a second direction, wondering whether the soul's control over the body shows that the soul is extended after all. Elizabeth admits that she has never been able to understand an incorporeal or unextended substance as anything but a negation of matter, and adds that it would be easier for me to concede matter and extension to the soul than to concede the capacity to move a body and to be moved by it to an immaterial thing. Here she is not so much asking Descartes to explain interaction between soul and body as taking that interaction for granted and suggesting that it may disprove his theory of the soul. Notice that with this move she is in effect pushing his rejection of Scholasticism one step further than he had. As we saw, Descartes denied that the body has a substantial form that gives it its vital powers. Rather, it is simply extension from the Aristotelian theory of soul. Descartes retained only the disembodied mind. Now Elizabeth is proposing that even the mind is an extended thing, since if it were not, it would not be able to move or control the body. Where Descartes moved from Aristotelian vitalism to his own dualism, Elisabeth now threatens to shift from Cartesian dualism to full blown materialism. Not that she actually endorses this third theory. She simply throws down a challenge to Descartes. Show me how mind can affect body without itself being extended. Descartes offers several responses, some of which are unexpected. One is a comparison between the soul and heaviness. The heaviness of a stone can make the stone fall without needing to be in contact with the stone or push it downward. After all, heaviness is not the sort of thing that could be in contact with anything or give anything a push. The reason this analogy is surprising is that, as Descartes hastens to add, he doesn't even believe in heaviness. It is a property postulated in the bogus physics of the Scholastics, whereas in Cartesian physics, heaviness is nothing really distinct from body. He thinks the comparison could be useful nonetheless, and also uses it in correspondence with his colleague Arnaud. His idea is evidently that One should pretend to understand heaviness, as the scholastics do, ignoring the fact that their theory is false, and then understand the true situation of soul. To run along the same lines. That's a bit weird, but also risky. Why shouldn't Elizabeth interpret the soul in a materialist way, as he himself has done with heaviness? That takes us to a second surprising move on Descartes part. He says that if Elizabeth wishes, she can simply treat the soul as if it were indeed extended, since it is united with the body. Descartes seems to be admitting that the mind somehow pervades the body, even though he elsewhere suggests that the soul is present to the body at just a single point which is found in the brain. Either admission may seem to fly in the face of his vaunted dualism. But in fact, the Meditations too had spoken of the union between body and soul, a union that will be central in Descartes last work on the passions. One might fairly say then that across his writings Descartes tries to hold on to a metaphysical distinction between soul and body, while also seeing the two as intimately connected, if the effort to distinguish them is more prominent in his thought. That is because the union of soul and body is obvious to everyone, while their distinctness tends to escape notice. We experience the unification of soul and body all the time, for instance, whenever we use sensation. Thus Descartes tells Elizabeth that people who never do philosophy only grasp a soul and body as interacting with one another and are thus led to assume that they are one and the same. Perhaps because this conversation was interrupted by events such as the Voitius affair in Utrecht, or perhaps because the two reached a stalemate, the debate between Descartes and Elisabeth over the mind body problem breaks off without a resolution. And if Elisabeth was left unsatisfied, she wasn't the last to feel that way. Subsequent philosophers have often seen Descartes attempts to explain soul, body, unity as inadequate. One of his leading modern interpreters, Dan Garber, went so far as to write a piece called what Descartes should have Told Elizabeth. Garver points out that the soul isn't the only immaterial unextended cause in Descartes system. There is also God. And as we saw a few episodes back when looking at Cartesian physics, there's a case to be made that for Descartes, all bodily motion is caused by God. When one rock hits another, it is not truly the physical impact that causes the second rock to fly off at an angle, but God who is making that happen. So Descartes should have said to Elizabeth that she was wrong to suppose that bodies move each other around. Actually, they only move when something immaterial causes it to happen. This is usually God, but it can also be the soul. Indeed, on the basis of our intimate familiarity with the way our souls affect our own bodies, we can come to understand how God makes other bodies move, as Garver puts it. For Descartes, mind, body interaction is the paradigm for all causal explanation. It is that in terms of which all other causal interaction must be understood. It should be said, though, that not all interpreters agree, that Descartes denied causation in bodies. And back in the 17th century, some early Cartesians adopted the kind of occasionalist theory proposed by Garber, while others did not. It's an interesting question whether we should count Elizabeth as one of those early Cartesians. Given the praise she lavishes upon him in their letters and her role in disseminating his teachings, it would certainly seem so. But in her letters she seems less than totally convinced by some of his central teachings. We've already seen this with the relationship between mind and body, and it's also true when it comes to his ethics and his conception of the good life. This is a less celebrated, but actually more extensively treated theme. In their correspondence, Descartes frequently offers her therapeutic advice in the style of ancient doctors like Galen, who claimed to minister to both the body and the soul. Descartes observes that Elisabeth's fevers may be caused by sadness over the tribulations of her family. As a restorative measure, he recommends a trip to the spa, hardly the counsel you'd expect from someone who thinks the mind is radically distinct from the body. On the other hand, now sounding more like an ancient Stoic, he also emphasizes that Elizabeth's happiness is under her own control. While a change in diet or surroundings may do some good, the more powerful remedy is for the soul to exert its power over the body and focus on happier thoughts. As in his other writings on ethics, Descartes tells Elisabeth that happiness lies in good use of the will, and that we should never feel sorrow or regret so long as we have made the best choices we could. Elisabeth finds all this far too optimistic. Given that we do not have infinite knowledge, we are bound to make errors, and it is entirely reasonable to regret those errors, even if one has made good use of the will. Indeed, she presents herself as someone who has tried to do her best, but suffered anyway. If my life were entirely known to you, she tells him, I think the fact that A sensitive mind such as my own has conserved itself for so long amid so many difficulties, in a body so weak, with no counsel but that of her own reason, and with no consolation but that of her own conscience, would seem more strange to you than the causes of this present malady. That reference to her weak body may allude not just to her general infirmity, but to her gender. On the previous page, she is just admitted to being vulnerable to the weaknesses of my sex, so that it is affected very easily by the afflictions of the soul. She may be teasing Descartes here, as she almost certainly is when she elsewhere writes to him, if I were as rational as you, I would cure myself as you have done. But teasing or not, she is making a crucial philosophical point. It is far from obvious that the soul can simply exert its will over the body in the way Descartes seems to be imagining. Just consider, says Elizabeth, that there are diseases that weaken or wholly destroy the power of reason. These can put even the most moderate man at the mercy of his passions. Her conclusion, then, is that the good life is not only a life of the mind. Under the pressure of these arguments, Descartes offers a number of qualifications. His ethics is demanding, he admits. To follow it, one must be very philosophical, he says, and it's relevant only to those who have free use of their reason. He also admits that the effects of the body on the soul may be unavoidable in some cases, though once their initial force has subsided, he is convinced that one can regain one's tranquillity of mind. Yet in another way, his ethics is less demanding than it may seem. Ultimately, we're only trying to judge well and then adhere to the judgments we have made. And it is fine to do this by adhering to the generally accepted morality of our society. In accordance with the first maxim of the provisional morality I mentioned last time. Elizabeth seems to be somewhat less conservative in this respect. She chafes at social expectations rather than seeing them as a guide to a good enough moral code. One letter complains to Descartes of the burden of unreasonable customs. She is constrained to abide by the impertinent, established laws of civility by graciously playing hostess to an unending stream of tiresome visitors seeking her favors. They deprive me of real goods so that I might give them imaginary ones, she says, presumably meaning that she would rather be free to spend her time on science and philosophy, like Descartes. This difference of perspective between the two is also shown by their contrasting reactions to Machiavelli's the Prince. It was Elizabeth who proposed that they read and discuss this notorious work, using it as a source for reflection on politics. Similarly, the two had read Seneca together to explore Stoic ethics. That was Descartes idea. But once he had a closer look, the ancient Stoics struck him as insufficiently exact, a mild criticism. Compared to his scathing review of Machiavelli's immoral counsels, Elizabeth is more favorable. She points out that the cynical measures proposed by Machiavelli concern the establishment of a new state when every ruler is vulnerable and, realistically enough, assume that surrounding states are ruled by unscrupulous rivals. Under such circumstances, a prince might indeed have to cut a few ethical corners. A small evil now might be justified because it wards off a greater evil in the future, as when a ruler crushes dissent to prevent civil war. Elizabeth might be teasing Descartes again when she points out that whereas she bears only the title of prince, he is a private person who aims to teach princes how to govern. The subtext here, I think, is that she knows better about such things, or is at least closer to Machiavelli's intended audience. Unlike Descartes, Elisabeth did indeed face difficult political decisions in her life. Whether to accept a favorable marriage, which would have demanded her religious conversion and she refused, and whether to offer the religious group called the Lavadists to Hereford Abbey when she became its head. Late in life and controversially here, she decided to do so. These practical examples confirm the impression given by the correspondence with Descartes. Elisabeth was someone who knew her own mind, and one thing she knew about that mind was that it is not detached from the body in the way Cartesian metaphysics seem to suggest. The intimate connection between body and soul is the unifying theme in her side of the correspondence. An excellent paper by one of my former interview guests, Dominic Perle, explores this point. When Elisabeth demands to know how mind and body affect one another. She is, among other things, trying to understand why the mind and its will go wrong when the body is dysfunctional. Perle calls Descartes position internalist because he thinks that the sources of our happiness are entirely internal to the mind. All we need to do is use the will rightly and the will can operate independently of the body. For Elizabeth, by contrast, the mind is subject to the influence of the body and of worldly events, as she experienced in her own life. In the face of failing health and political misfortune, it's not so easy to say, well, never mind, because these topics were so important to Elisabeth. She persuaded Descartes to write about the passions, the emotional reactions that provide one of the most striking illustrations of the complex interaction between mind and body. The resulting work was Descartes last great contribution, though it is an open question whether it is fully compatible with ideas he had put forward in earlier texts like the Meditations, and whether Elisabeth was right to feel that his account of the passions was less than fully convincing. We'll tackle these questions next time as we finish looking at this fascinating and momentous thinker and also at Descartes here on the History of Philosophy without any gaps, Sam.