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History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
HoP 474 States of the Union: Descartes on the Passions
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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 States of the Union Descartes on the passions watching Buster Keaton's film Sherlock Jr. At a special cinema event, you marvel at the scene in which he is barely missed by an onrushing locomotive somehow filmed with technology from the 1920s. You look to your left, where your daughter is sitting, wrapped with attention, and are suffused with a feeling of deep affection for her. Then you're distracted by the popcorn on her lap. You'd love to take some, but promised she could have it all. Your attention is wrenched away again by the boorish people two rows back talking during the movie, unforgivable behavior even, or perhaps especially at a silent film. Then another rush of positive emotion as you exult in the way that the whole audience is laughing along to this film that is now more than a century old. Finally, despondency sets in when the film comes to an end and the experience concludes. You've just managed to experience all six of the emotional reactions or passions recognized by Descartes, namely wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy and sadness. Of course we have plenty of other emotional experiences, but Descartes thinks that these all derive from the six fundamental ones just listed. For instance, we feel hope when we have some prospect of getting what we desire. So says Descartes in his last philosophical work, published in 1649, the year before his death. Called Passions of the Soul, it was written because Elizabeth of Bohemia prompted him to explore the subject. As Deborah Brown has written in her indispensable study of Descartes theory of passions, his final treatise attempts to plug the hole in his previously rather incomplete account of the relationship between soul and body. I agree, but might instead have said, fill the gap. In typically brash style, Descartes opens the work by saying that the topic is in a way easy, since we all experience passions constantly, yet the ancients failed to explain them adequately. By now we know Descartes well enough to suspect that with this bluster he wants to conceal how how close his views are to those of the very same ancients. And so it will prove the very project of itemizing a list of primary passions was far from new. We find such lists in the kind of scholastic literature that Descartes studied in his youth. There are clear resonances between his ideas and Stoicism when it comes to his ethical approach to the passions and on the passions seems to shift away from the stark mind, body distinction of Cartesian dualism towards something more like an Aristotelian view, according to which the soul and the body are genuinely unified with one another. Indeed, Descartes defines the passions as involving both soul and body. Sometimes the soul does things on its own, as when we are thinking. The Meditations, for instance, could be seen as the report of Descartes engaging in that sort of purely mental activity. At other times the body operates on its own. Here one might think of digestion or of reflex motions. Descartes gives the example of flinching from a friend's playful feint, despite knowing full well the friend is not going to hit him. In contrast to these phenomena, which occur entirely on one side of the soul body divide, the passions seem to span that divide. Descartes definition reads as Passions are those perceptions, sensations or emotions of the soul which we refer particularly to it, that is to the soul and which are caused, maintained and strengthened by some movement of the spirits. This definition is slightly different from the one he offered in a letter to Elizabeth. There he one can generally call passions all the thoughts that are excited in the soul in this way without the concurrence of its will, and by consequence without any action coming from it, but only from the impressions in the brain. In this earlier definition, the emphasis is on the way that events in the brain are giving rise to experiences in the soul. The definition in on the Passions is more even handed, saying that passions are referred to the soul despite being caused by the bodily spirits. But this seems to mean simply that it is the soul that is moved when we experience passions. After all, in Descartes, only the soul can actually have experiences on the side of the body. There are only modifications of extension. So the two definitions seem to be compatible with one another. Passions are then states of the union between soul and body. This is something any Aristotelian would readily agree to. Scholastics like Aquinas carried on an understanding of emotions that goes all the way back to Plato, according to which the passions belong to the lower non rational soul. For more on this you can go Back to episode 290, which is an interview with Martin Picquere about medieval theories of the emotions. Returning to that interview myself just now, I discovered that it mentions Descartes as having a somewhat different account from what we find in someone like Aquinas. Indeed, his account really has to be different because Descartes does not recognize a non rational soul. So for him, an emotional response is typically going to involve a purely physical process in the body, which is registered or noticed by the soul, as suggested by those definitions. A passion is an experience that combines a physical process and mental awareness. Descartes is fairly detailed and, as usual when it comes to this sort of thing, fairly creative in venturing hypotheses about the physical side of the story. The passion of wonder is an exceptional case since it aims only at knowledge, as when one wonders at Buster Heaton's films and wants to know how he filmed them with such rudimentary technology. And wonder thus involves no physical correlate. But the other five passions are all caused by the motion of the blood and vital spirits around the body, and especially into different organs. For instance, when we find something humorous, a rush of blood causes the lungs to expand, which forces air upward through the windpipe, causing the face to contort and noise to come from the mouth, otherwise known as laughter. In general, Descartes says, these causal connections between body and soul tend to endure once they have happened before. Our soul and body are so linked that once we have joined some bodily action with a certain thought, the one does not occur thereafter without the other occurring too. A paradigm case of this is memory and its involvement in the passions. Descartes gives the nice example of finding something disgusting in a food you like and thereafter feeling revulsion whenever offered that same food. My desire for almond croissants is a matter of record. But suppose I bit into one and the almond filling was replaced with vanilla ice cream? No, wait, that sounds nice. Actually, I know toothpaste. If that happened, I'd probably move on to pain au chocolat. Now, it might seem that memory is a purely mental phenomenon, but Descartes thinks otherwise. As we saw in the episode on Dualism, he believes that our sense experiences create impressions or channels in the brain in a process he compares to folding paper so that it retains the creases or making perforations in a cloth. If the brain doesn't retain physical traces of the experiences, you can't remember. This is why we cannot recall things from when we were babies or fetuses in the womb. Our brains weren't yet capable of retaining impressions after all. If you fold a soft sheet of rubber, you won't leave any creases in it. But to have memory, you also need to have the mental awareness of what has happened in the brain. As Descartes puts it, it is by turning to traces in the brain that the mind remembers. So, upon reflection, Descartes decides that it is really the mind that is responsible for recalling previous experiences as memories. Understanding this whole process can be helpful in coming to grasp our own emotional reactions. In a letter to Chanute, Descartes described how he had a lifelong attraction to women with squints, which he traced back to a childhood infatuation for a girl with squinting eyes. That sort of analysis can be helpful in dispelling unwanted or counterproductive emotions. Once you know where the passion comes from, it is easier to resist. I mentioned last time that in the correspondence with Elizabeth, Descartes admits that bodily effects can have an overwhelming effect on the soul, and he makes the same point in on the Passions. Even a well trained philosopher who bites into an almond croissant and gets a mouthful of unexpected toothpaste will not just lay it calmly aside. Still, you can exert force of will to prevent yourself from overreacting. You don't have to throw the croissant across the room and physically assault the pastry chef. Also, once the initial event has passed, it is always possible to master one's emotional state, though this may not be easy. Such self mastery is an achievement of the highest importance according to Descartes. He concludes his treatise by saying that it is on the passions alone that all the good and evil of this life depends, and that the chief use of wisdom lies in its teaching us to be masters of our passions and to control them with such skill that the evils which they cause are quite bearable and even become a source of joy. Descartes often talks about the passions with remarkable tone of detachment. To an extent they can be unintentionally amusing. His paragraph about romantic love may well be the least romantic thing ever written on the topic, and dryly finishes off by observing this inclination or desire provides writers of romances and poets with their principal subject matter. In such passages, Descartes sounds a bit like a space alien describing humans, or more to the point, like a stoic sage describing normal people who are, unlike him, at the mercy of their passions. This brings us back to his disagreement with Elizabeth regarding the question whether such self control is even possible. Elizabeth describes in some detail how even when she works to eliminate intrusive and counterproductive thoughts, she nonetheless continues to experience emotional reactions to the misfortunes that have befallen her, which then have further effects on her bodily health. Where Descartes makes it sound like an emotional response can be tamped back down after the first surge of blood to the head, which here would be meant quite literally, Elizabeth says that several months can be needed for her to overcome a serious setback. Like any good Stoic, Descartes does have advice for overcoming such challenges. He proposes that one should fight fire with fire, or perhaps blood with blood, by deliberately provoking useful passions that will combat harmful ones. Some of Descartes advice to Elizabeth falls into this. Meditate on how fortunate you have been in some respects. Go to a spa, enjoy the beauty of nature. It can also be a great help to prepare oneself in advance, steeling oneself against misfortune before it comes, and remembering that in the end, it is only your own will that matters. As we saw in the episode on Descartes Ethics, the person who manages this is described as having the virtue he calls generosit, which is why Descartes says that the generous person has complete command over their passions. For all that, Descartes does not want us to eliminate the passions entirely, a position sometimes associated with the ancient Stoics, though actually they did think that the perfect sage would experience some emotions like joy. Descartes tells Elizabeth, I am not one of those cruel philosophers who want their sage to be insensible, and that it suffices that we render the passions subject to reason. Descartes doesn't make this concession because he is convinced by Elizabeth's arguments concerning the inevitability of sorrow. Rather is because he thinks that the passions are in fact very useful. Indeed, he pretty much has to think this. After all, he can hardly admit that his providential God has given us a complex and intense emotional life simply to torment us and lead us away from rationality. Even apparently, pernicious passions can sometimes be helpful. Now, sounding a bit like a Jesuit engaging in casuistry, Descartes observes that jealousy can be reasonable if one is thereby prompted to defend a great and genuine good. The passions do not give us information about the world. But life isn't only about information, it's also about motivation. As Descartes puts it, the passions move and dispose the soul to want the things for which they prepare the body. It's very useful that if a tiger leapt at Descartes from out of the undergrowth, he would not just think, ah, a tiger. Strange that it should be here in 17th century France. Rather, he would be terrified, which would get him running as fast as his early modern stockings and shoes could carry him. Nor do emotions systematically mislead us about the world. Tigers really are dangerous and it is right to fear them. Toothpaste free almond croissants really are delicious and it makes sense to desire them, at least within moderation. It's that last part about moderation that gives me trouble, and I'm not alone. Descartes tells Elisabeth that the passions do their motivating job so well that they often make us overestimate things like bodily pleasures. Almond croissants are nice, but given a choice between them and reasoned use of the will, there should be no contest. Let's wrap up this look at the passions in Descartes and at his philosophy as a whole. By returning to the question of the relation between mind and body. In the Spirit of Elizabeth, one might suspect that the passions are incompatible with Cartesian dualism. An episode of fear, for instance, would be a single event involving both body and soul, thus straddling the metaphysical divide between them. But it seems impossible to say this given the constraints of Descartes metaphysics. In Cartesian parlance, no one mode can belong to both the body and the mind, since they are two distinct substances. Instead, we seem to be dealing only with a kind of coordination between physical and mental events. A sudden tiger attack causes both a rush of blood in the body and an awareness of this in the mind. And these two events together make up the experience of fear. Actually, we don't even need to appeal to the technicalities of Descartes metaphysics to draw this conclusion. We can just look back at his definition of the passions, which clearly say that the vital spirits and brain cause experiences in the mind. If the physical event causes the mental event, they cannot be one and the same thing. And yet there is something to the suspicion, I mentioned at the outset, that in on the Passions, Descartes is taking a step or two back in the direction of Aristotelianism. Even if a passion involves two modes, and not just one, the whole made up of those two parts is still a single phenomenon, just as surely as an almond croissant is one pastry made up of both flaky crust and succulent almond filling. The passion as a whole is ascribed to the composite of body and soul, which is exactly what Aristotle would say. As he puts it, it is not the soul that gets angry. Rather, it is the whole human who gets angry through the soul. Descartes thus says that the passions, like the senses, give us a direct experience of the union between soul and body. Descartes proposes a thought experiment to illustrate the point. If an angel were somehow joined to a human body, the angel would not have any sense experiences or undergo any passions. It might register what is happening in its assigned body, but it would not feel what is going on in that body. Human Souls, by contrast, are so intertwined with the body that they have experiences caused by bodily events. This means that when we work on improving our emotional reactions, we need to train both our bodies and our minds, the two working in tandem to yield more beneficial experiences. The goal being pursued here is a good life for the whole human, not just satisfaction for the mind or a state of health and pleasure in the body. None of this is in flat contradiction to the Meditations, which contains the most famous exposition of Descartes dualism. But in the later Descartes we find at the very least a difference in emphasis. To use an appropriate expression on the passions fleshes out what Descartes means by the union of soul to body, and even makes the management of that union the key goal of his ethical teaching. As we saw, the work concludes by saying that this is the chief use of wisdom. The aforementioned Deborah Brown welcomes this shift in Descartes thought, concluding her own book with a comment that if the mind of the Meditations is alienated from its body, nature, and others, the mind of the passions is one thoroughly embedded and better off because of it. That would make a fitting end to our own discussion, but I think I'll give the last word to Elizabeth. In the letters we find not only her request that Descartes write about the passions, but her verdict on the treatise he produced. She deems it the best thing ever written on the topic, albeit that it is difficult for the uninitiated to see how movements of the blood could give rise to such a wide variety of emotional responses. As for applying Descartes teaching in her own life, she admits, I find it much less difficult to understand all that you say on the passions than to practice the remedies you prescribe for their excesses. Elizabeth, I'm with you, and I'm off to celebrate your insight with a cup of coffee and an almond croissant. But not before celebrating the fact that we have just about finished our tour of Descartes philosophy. It took me almost 15 years of podcasting to get to him, and after that long wait, we dealt with him in just nine episodes. But if we're done with Descartes, we are not yet done with Cartesianism. He belongs to that select group of philosophers who shaped generations of thought to come, like Avicenna in the Islamic World, or W.E.B. du Bois for African American philosophy. As we'll see, such figures as Malevanche, Spinoza and Leibniz would be unimaginable and incomprehensible without having learned about Descartes and they won't be so easily comprehensible even having done so. Then there are the less celebrated Cartesians, who were the immediate bearers of his legacy, like Cordemois, La Forge and Desgab. We'll be turning to them next, just as soon as we've enjoyed an interview that will round off this miniseries on Cartesian ethics and the reaction to it we find in Elizabeth of Bohemia. We'll be joined for that by Ariane Schneck, a guest who is passionate about the whole topic here on the history of philosophy without any gaps.