René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul (1649)
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989)
The following is the first item on my list on the body in the (very-long-)Eighteenth Century Novels and Philosophy.
In this text, published shortly before his death, Descartes develops what could be called an elaborate physiology of emotions, based on his knowledge of anatomy and his fundamental assumption of the duality between mind and body. Necessarily, in working out the idea of the passions, body and mind are brought extremely close together; anyone who has read this work would not blame Descartes personally for ignoring the human flesh and embodied experience. Without attempting to summarize the thickly detailed (and truly bizarre) physiological descriptions, I’ll focus on the main conceptual tangles.
[passion=action] For starters, “passions of the soul” are strictly equivalent to “actions of the body”; they are the opposite of will, which is an action of the soul upon the “passive” body: “...we notice no subject that acts more immediately upon our soul than the body it is joined to, and that consequently we ought to think that what is a Passion in the former is commonly an Action in the latter” (19). Passions are experiences in which the soul is passive, i.e. acted upon by the body.
[anatomy] The body, treated as an object of “physics,” (7) is possessed of a complicated anatomy which works according to several physical principles at once, mainly heat and pressure/hydraulics, using multiple materials: humors (hot and cold), blood (hot and cold, more or less refined), and animal spirits (as in, highly refined blood which imparts motion to the body through the nerves, not little furry animals as Tristram Shandy seems to think. “For what I name spirits here are nothing but bodies; their only property is that they are bodies which are very small and which move very rapidly—just like the parts of the flame which emanate from the torch” (24)).
[pineal gland] The essentially Cartesian weirdness of this account of the passions comes from having to read emotions, conceived as mental states including judgment in regard to an object, back into a body constructed out of disparate (discursive and physical) materials and forces, and connected to the soul in one essential location: the pineal gland, the apparent center of the network of nerves and of the flows of animal spirits (the distinction between the two provides the distinction betw. Perception (nerves) and imagination (animal spirits).
[pleasure principle?] Passions are commonly excited by perceived objects, insofar as they are either harmful or beneficial to the human subject: “the use of all the passions consists in this alone: they dispose the soul to will the things nature tells us are useful and to persist in this volition ...” (51-2); the passions are (ideally) subjugated to something like Freud's pleasure principle. Later in the text, D. identifies this future-oriented principle with desire (53).
[Base Affect] Since passions are thus oriented, the initial affect in encountering any object is wonder (52) -- it registers that an encounter has taken place without assigning a positive or a negative significance, and thus affective charge, to the object. All objects regarded without wonder are simply undetected.
[Principle of Association] the six primary affects: Wonder, Love, Hatred, Desire, Sadness, Joy, originate in the infantile body's interaction with its environment through food and muscle activity; physiological experiences which caused these basic emotional states become associated with them. This principle holds for later life, as well.
[moral philosophy] near the end of the treatise, D. dispenses moral advice on how to deal with one’s passions, and namely with one’s desire which is the passions’ only actualizer. Articles 144 and 145, which posit that the fundamental moral/ethical question is the distinction between desires that do and that do not depend on our actions, could conceivably be brought into conversation with Freud’s discussion of the nature of drives in "Drives and their Fates"; Descartes’ distinction between desires for attainable/actionable objects and desires for the unattainable (which is best left to providence or forgotten through generosity) parallels in a strange way the difference between external stimuli which can be discharged by action in the world and internal stimuli, i.e. drives, which no amount of external/physical action can avoid. For D., knowing what can and what cannot be controlled and acting accordingly is Generosity (104).
Significantly for ,addressing later periods, D. criticizes those who are easily moved to pity as selfish weak, and moved by self-love. Essentially, he seems to cultivate an aristocratic model of detached and reasonable action, which is condescending to, though not entirely dismissive of, emotional weakness.
[Curio: savages & modernity]
Now it is easy to prove that the excessive respect maintained for antiquity is an error which is extremely prejudicial to the advancement of the sciences. For we see that the savage peoples of America--and many others as well who inhabit places not so far away---have a lot fewer of the comforts of life than we do, and yet have an origin as ancient as ours, so that they have as much cause as we to say that they are content with the wisdom of their forefathers, and believe no one can teach them anything better than what's been known and practiced among them from the most ancient times. (Preface, Letter 1. p.6)
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