Intellectual Love in Descartes’ Passions of the Soul, and Incidentally the Whole Nature of Mind-Body Union

Actions and passions play a significant role in Descartes’ conception of the union between mind and body. Having explained to Princess Elizabeth that to conceive of the mind-body union is nothing but to conceive the mind as material and to Mersenne that the fact that the mind cannot be imagined does not render the union any less conceivable, Descartes moves onto illustrate the account of emotion and how the passions of the soul are the result of this very union. In the letter to Chanut, he gives a more detailed description of how the soul is inclined to unite with the body by appealing to the four passions the soul possesses prior to its attachment to the body. According to this account, the soul feels desire for the body, and when the body is well nourished and in a good condition, the soul attaches itself to the body through the reciprocation of love, and remains attached to it. In this paper, I aim to explore the role of the passions in the mind-body union and try to make sense, given his philosophical system, what it is that keeps the soul united to the body, thus making an individual rather than accepting the view some of his contemporaries held that the mind can migrate one body to another at its will. In doing so, I will primarily focus on the intellectual passions Descartes discusses, and draw attention to the duality of the passions and its explanatory role in understanding what a human individual may be.

Descartes begins with an assertion that what is a passion in the soul is an action in the body. He gives a definition, following the common usage of the term, that we call “a ‘passion’ with regard to the subject to which it happens and an ‘action’ with regard to that which makes it happen.” So when external objects stimulate our senses, they act upon our body and these stimuli become that act upon the soul, which receives them as . Passions, then, are nothing but the soul’s reactions against external influences. In this way, the soul does not initiate movement in the body or impart heat to the body but reacts only as a recipient, just as a sponge bounces back up when you push it with a finger in it. This well accords with his view that it is a mistake to think that the body dies when the soul leaves it, but rather “the soul takes its leave when we die only because this heat ceases and the organs which bring about bodily movement decay.” This is an important to point to note, since it suggests that it is not the soul that makes something alive, but rather it is the arrangement of the organs and the cessation of their functions that make the soul leave the body. This is why Descartes is able to say without contradiction that animals do not possess souls, for a living animal can be without a soul as an infant in the womb is. For he says “it is not credible that the soul was put into the body at a time when the body was not in a good condition,” it follows that there was a time in which the human body was not united with the soul. Further, because the body is not in a good condition when “there [are] nearby some matter suitable for food” and “[t]he soul, uniting itself willingly to that new matter,” would have felt sadness had there been no food, it is unlikely that the soul would attach itself to the body simultaneously, as it were, as soon as the body comes into being. It is Descartes’ own contention that the soul would not unite with a body unless it first perceives “some present or absent good, which it judges to be fitting for itself… and the good in question as forming two parts of a single whole,” thereby causing the sensation of love in the soul. We are told that love was caused before birth only by suitable nourishment. But if this judgment that the soul makes of the perceived object as good is love, and if it is this love that urges the will of the soul to either desire to be united with it or feel sadness for the recognition that it is not feasible to attain it, these ‘four passions’ as Descartes calls them must have been present prior to the union. Indeed, not being united with the body, he explains, the soul possesses only so many intellectual sensations, one of which is love that unites the soul and the body in a reciprocal manner. So it is not the specific body that individuates the human beings from one another, but rather it is the soul’s choosing specific body as desirable to be united with itself. This conclusion that the soul can have the will guided by these ‘passions’ can be deduced from a number of passages in his letter to Chanut, for he says that the will of the soul, whose movement is constituted by love, joy, sadness or desire, could exist in the soul even if it had no body, “in so far as they are and .” Here, he is making a distinction between feelings such as love caused by the passions and sensations that are perceived intellectually. But a problem arises: did he not say that there are passions in the pure soul prior to the union, namely, love, joy, sadness and desire? How is it possible for the body-less soul to have , which we have seen are none other than reactions to the external influence? Or are passions different from passions? For he clearly thinks love, desire, joy and sadness are passions that the soul could possess and that “the only ones we had before our birth.” There are two kinds of will, Descartes tells us. One consists of the actions that terminate in the body, and the other consists of the actions of the soul that terminate in the soul itself. The first kind is the type of will that is constituted by the passions such as love and joy, while the second kind is the intellectual will that we have “as when we will to love God or, generally speaking, to apply our mind to some objects which is .” So clearly, when he talks about the will of the soul that is constituted by love prior to birth, wanting to be united with body, he is not talking about the intellectual will, as such a will desires a material body. On this account, Deborah Brown seems to accept Descartes’ claim and argue with him that “[i]nsofar as it is not dependent upon any movement of the spirits, however, rational love is not a passion and could exist in a disembodied mind.” But how the soul can have intellectual love for a material body without depending upon any movement of the animal spirits is left unanswered, and she moves on to say that the rational love can accompany sensuous love as long as it is united with the body. While she thinks it “perfectly understandable” that an object is necessary to account for a passion and affirms that “[t]he will is blind without an object,” she does not seem to be concerned with Descartes’ claim that the soul feels the for the body and desires to be united with it, which is rather sensuous than rational according to the Descartes’ definition. Descartes, however, endeavors to take care of such worry in offering an account of perception that is an action passion. Perceptions, he explains, can be called either actions of the soul or passions with respect to the soul. When the soul loves something rationally, and consequently will to be joined with it “as forming two parts of a single whole,” while the act of willing is the action proper with respect to the soul, “the of such willing may be said to be a passion in the soul.” This perception, he tells us, is as will, and because “names are always determined by whatever is most noble, we do not normally call it a ‘passion’, but solely an ‘action.’” So we do call perceptions then. Nevertheless, he quickly reminds us, our perceptions are, strictly speaking, with respect to our soul, and hence we use the term ‘passion’ to signify only . However, he then concludes that perceptions are passions insofar as they are caused by animal spirits, “maintained and strengthened by some movement of the spirits,” and in that respect differ from volitions or will which are caused by the soul itself. But animals spirits must of necessity material. So the soul without a body cannot have such spirits. So the difference between passions from volitions consists solely on this: their originating causes are different – .

Here we are given a different account of the passions, for earlier he says that all perceptions are passions of the soul, and now he says that perceptions can be actions if they are caused by the soul itself. To understand better what may be going on here, we need to have a clearer view on Descartes’ view on will and perception. It would be a mistake to think of the will as having a cause solely in the soul. In fact, he never says that will in the soul, but only that will in the soul or in the body. Is it, then, possible that will can originate in the body? It is unlikely, since will is the activity of the soul. Here the nature of perception will better aid us, for perceptions have a rather opposite aspect from will in that perceptions originate either in the soul or in the body, but in either. So what happens here is that we first have the perceptions of some object either from the soul or from the body, and once the soul judges this perceived object as good, then the soul either to desire or not to desire for the perceived object. So while the perception may come from the soul, as in when judging something to be beautiful, depending on whether the object of such beauty is material or not, the will can result in the actions that terminate in the body. For example, if we perceive an apple (a physical object) as beauty, then the soul may to pursue it in order to obtain it, but not for the sake of eating it (for it if were for the sake of eating it, it would result in the material pursuit) but for the sake of obtaining it. It is in this sense that Descartes speaks of the will as intellectual, as when “our merely willing to walk has the consequence that our legs move an we walk.” This is made no more obvious in the passage where Descartes illuminates us with the examples on how “our well-being depends principally on internal emotions which are produced in the soul only by the soul itself,” providing us with the ways in which these intellectual emotions are different from the passions of the soul. To illustrate the point clearly, he gives us two situations where the difference between the intellectual emotions and sensuous emotions is acute. “[w]hen a husband mourns his dead wife,” Descartes recounts, “it sometimes happens that he would be sorry to see her brought back to life again,” because, however he may feel torn by the sadness aroused in him by the display of the funeral and by the loss of the person whose company he was so accustomed that it that some remnants of love or of pity for her occur in his imagination, drawing genuine tears from his eyes, he cannot help but feel “at the same time a secret joy in his innermost soul, and the emotion of this joy has such power that the concomitant sadness and tears can do nothing to diminish its force.” In what way this ‘secret joy in his innermost soul’ differs from sensuous joy caused by the actions of the body is described by Susan James that if the joy is the result of “an involuntary memory of his wife’s complaining, together with his realization that he will never have to humour her again,” it is a passion proper caused by the pineal gland, and would be distinguished from the intellectual joy originating in the soul alone. Rather, for this ‘secret joy’ to be an intellectual one, it needs to be the result of “a judgment based on a reflective assessment of his marriage” and hence needs to stand at one step removed from the bodily events. I venture to disagree with her reading, for even such an assessment of his marriage must involve experiential referent, i.e. his actual marriage from experience. Further, if we look at the second example Descartes gives immediately after the funeral display example, even though at first glance, he seems to be talking about a completely different, and more relatable, example about the nature of intellectual joy. For he tells us of any feelings that are aroused by reading an adventure book or seeing a play acted out on a stage as a cause for an intellectual joy, since even when we feel overwhelmed by sadness in reading a protagonist die in a book, or feel terror in seeing a play, we nonetheless “have pleasure in feeling them aroused in us,” and such pleasure “may readily originate in sadness as in any of the other passions.” This second example is about a joy that you feel in feeling various emotions, that is to say, you feel joy by virtue of having these passions, however sad you may be feeling. The funeral example, however, can be seen as a joy that you have only upon reflection on the experience. It is then a joy that can be felt only in retrospect. I do not believe that is what Descartes has in mind, and in fact, I believe the two examples he lists are meant to be read in tandem. Just as the second example about the joy you feel in feeling the passions, I believe the first example illustrates the same point in the more forcible way. In the funeral example, he brings out some of the most traumatic experience one could ever have, i.e. the death of a loved one. In such situations, the passions he feels of sadness are so extreme that there is no way one could feel a sensuous joy. But even in such extraneous circumstances, one cannot help but feel a ‘secret joy’ in the very act of feeling these acute passions that “the concomitant sadness and tears can do nothing to diminish its force.” In this way, Descartes clearly illustrates the bifurcation of joy as an action in one sense – of the passions – and as a passion in another – sadness from the death of the loved one and excitement from reading of a book.

Having seen now how intellectual love and joy are to be conceived of in relation to the roles will and perception play, the problem raised at the beginning as to how the soul is said to possess intellectual love without it being united with the body which gives rise to agitations of the animal spirits, i.e. passions, in the soul becomes easier to grasp. For even though the soul perceives the body that is material as good and wills to be united with it, it is not the kind of love that terminates in the body – the soul does not desire the body for its materiality but it is the very union with such a body that the soul loves, and it is this very recognition of the union that makes the soul feel joy. In other words, the soul loves the very thought of being united with the body it perceives as good and agreeable to itself. This explains also why the soul is united to a particular body as opposed to another body elsewhere, for the very constitution of various bodies gives the soul an option to choose from as to which body is so constituted that it agrees with the soul in particular. Perhaps this still does not explain whether soul is individuated prior to the union, but from what Descartes tells Princess Elizabeth about how to properly conceive of the mind and body as well as their union, it seems blatantly obvious that we cannot think of the soul in terms of divisibility that is a principal attribute of body substance and not of mind substance. He also writes to Mersenne in July of 1644 that there is no wonder in our inability to imagine what the soul is like, for “our imagination is capable of representing only objects of sense-perception,” the soul cannot be represented by a corporeal image. As for the reciprocity of intellectual love between the soul and the body, it is perhaps explained in the similar vein as I did above about how it is possible for the body-less soul to have intellectual love for the body. Simply, it is not the body that the soul desires but rather the union with that specific body that agrees with the soul that it loves. Being united with the body, the body reciprocates love by simply being agreeable to the soul. Hence, so long as the body remains to be in the functioning condition, the soul remains united with it, explaining why the soul is united with the body for as long as it does.

See Louis de la Forge, (1664) for instance.

Descartes, , in .

Ibid, art. 1.

Ibid., 5.

Descartes, to Chanut, 1 February 1647.

Ibid.

These are love, joy, sadness and desire.

It is certainly unclear what it means for the body to reciprocate the love of the soul, but it will be made clearer once I have elucidated my main thesis.

Descartes, , 1 February 1647. ( mine)

Ibid.

, 18.

Ibid. mine.

Deborah J. Brown, “Wonder ad Love” in , 147.

Ibid.

Ibid., 149.

Ibid., 19.

Ibid.

Ibid., 29.

The Passions of the Soul, 18.

Ibid., 19.

Ibid.

, 147.

Ibid.

Susan James, , 198.

, 147.

Ibid.

Descartes to Mersenne, July 1644.