Sean Greenberg, Department of Philosophy
University of California, Irvine
1989 marked the publication of the first complete English translation (Descartes, 1989) of René Descartes’s final work, The Passions of Soul—originally published in 1649—since the Earl of Monmouth’s 1650 translation. (Despite the more recent publication of Descartes 2015—especially valuable for its translations of all the letters exchanged between Descartes and Princess Elisabeth that led up to and continued through the writing of The Passions of the Soul — Descartes, 1989 remains the gold standard English translation.) Descartes 1989 also signaled the beginning of a boom in English-language scholarship on the accounts of the phenomena today called ‘emotions’ advanced by early modern philosophers—i.e., philosophers working in the period from roughly 1517-1789—that continues to this day. In what follows, I make some general remarks on this boom and then, taking Descartes’s The Passions of the Soul as my example, consider various ways in which scholarship that has emerged from this emotional turn in the history of early modern philosophy might contribute to the present-day understanding of emotions.
I need first to register a caveat. Early modern philosophers used diverse terminology to characterize the phenomena today called ‘emotions’, including ‘affects’, ‘affections’, ‘emotions’, ‘passions’, and ‘sentiments’. This terminology signals theoretical and conceptual affinities with treatments of the phenomena by earlier philosophers and also embeds implicit assumptions about the nature of the phenomena; when reading early modern texts careful attention must therefore be paid to the terminology used to characterize the phenomena now called ‘emotions’. (The terminology and its significance has received scholarly attention: for different approaches, see Dixon, 2005, Rorty, 1982, and Schmitter, 2015; for an argument for resurrecting the concept of passion, see Charland, 2010.) For ease of reference, however, in what follows I ignore the terminological distinctions and refer generally to early modern approaches to the passions.
The boom in English-language scholarship on early modern accounts of the passions parallels the increasing embrace of a contextual or historical approach to the study of the history of early modern philosophy. (On the contextual or historical approach to the history of early modern philosophy, see Hatfield, 2005.) The chief aim of a contextual or approach is the understanding of texts on their own terms. Contextual scholarship has expanded the canon of early modern philosophers, stimulated interest in ‘minor’ predecessors, contemporaries, and successors of canonical philosophers, and opened up new topics for scholarly treatment. One topic opened up by contextual work on the history of early modern philosophy is early modern conceptions of the passions, whose study is now a thriving subfield of the study of the history of early modern philosophy, just as the study of emotion is a thriving subfield of the related fields of problem-oriented, i.e., non-historical, philosophy (Goldie 2010: 1-3), psychology (Lewis, Haviland-Jones, & Barrett 2008: xi), as well as history, among other disciplines. (It is, I think, a nice sociological question just why the study of the emotions has flourished in different disciplines at roughly the same time: I leave its investigation as a topic for future research.)
The study of early modern conceptions of the passions wasn’t always a thriving area of research, however, as is manifest in the opening sentences of two of the works published near the beginning of the emotional turn in scholarship on the history of early modern philosophy. Paul Hoffman begins his pioneering article “Three Dualist Theories of the Passions”—a discussion of the views of the passions advanced by René Descartes (1596-1650), Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715), and Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)—by trying to justify his topic by analogy.
Descartes, Spinoza, and Malebranche each devote a significant amount of attention to the passions of the soul…. Commentators, especially English-language commentators, on Descartes and Malebranche, often do not. I think their discussions of the passions deserve more attention. Commentaries on ancient Greek theories of the soul…would surely be considered deficient if they ignored the passions. (Hoffman, 1991: 153)
On the first page of the body of Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, Susan James apologizes for her topic:
Nowadays, the place and analysis of the passions in seventeenth-century philosophy needs, perhaps, to be steered in with some preamble, since its value…has darkened with time and grown opaque. We tend to forget that philosophers of this era worked within an intellectual milieu in which the passions were regarded as an overbearing and inescapable element of human nature, liable to disrupt any civilized order, philosophy included, unless they were tamed, outwitted, overruled, or seduced. (James, 1997: 1)
Such prefatory remarks are now no longer necessary.
Despite the considerable work that has been done in the past three decades on accounts of the passions developed by early modern philosopher, no overarching narrative has yet emerged to organize them. This may be due to the heterogeneity of early modern approaches to the passions, which include approaches to the passions influenced by the philosophical outlooks of Epicureanism, Stoicism and Augustinianism; medical, moral, and natural philosophical approaches to the passions; and combinations of these approaches. A preliminary starting point might be to organize early modern approaches to the passions in relation to Descartes’s The Passions of the Soul, which directly influenced the accounts of the passions advanced by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Spinoza, and Malebranche, and, via Malebranche, the accounts of the passions of Frances Hutcheson (1694-1746), David Hume (1711-76), and Adam Smith (1723-90). (I take the aforementioned philosophers’ treatments of the passions to be canonical for early modern philosophy, in light of their scope, significance, and influence.) This is, however, only an organizing principle that might serve as the basis of a narrative: the narrative of early modern philosophical treatments of the passions remains to be written. (For an overview of general issues concerning early modern approaches to the passions, and discussions of all the aforementioned philosophers with the exception of Smith, see Schmitter, 2016.)
Although English-language scholarship on early modern accounts of the passions has a relatively short history, early modern treatments of the passions have long been, and continue to be, used as benchmarks in problem-oriented philosophical and general work on the emotions. (See, inter alia, Damasio, 1994; Damasio, 2003; Deigh 1994: 824-828; Kenny, 1963: 1-19; and Plamper, 2017: 17-25.) While this use of the texts of the history of early modern philosophy is independent of the historical and contextual approach to the history of early modern philosophy that I have claimed has given rise to the boom in scholarship on early modern philosophical theories of the passions, the fact that early modern accounts of the passions are used in this way provides all the more reason for attending both to early modern accounts of the passions and to the scholarship on them that has resulted from the emotional turn in the history of early modern philosophy.
It’s not, I confess, altogether clear to me why early modern texts are used in this way, although it seems generally to be believed that present-day approaches to the nature of the emotions—like so many other topics—have been and continue to be shaped by the early modern period. Plamper, for example, maintains that “emotional thinking during the Middle Ages…has little influence on subsequent centuries; the Scholastics, and in particular Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), are usually treated as an appendix to Aristotle and Augustine. It is always said that René Descartes (1596-1650) is the real innovator” (Plamper, 2017: 17). While it seems to me to be somewhat historically short-sighted to reduce more than a thousand years of philosophy to “an appendix to Aristotle and Augustine,” this is certainly in keeping, for better or for worse and bearing in mind the thesis of Bloom (2007) regarding the anxiety of influence, with the way that early modern philosophers understood their relation to the past. Descartes, for example, begins The Passions of the Soul by maintaining that
the defectiveness of the sciences [i.e., bodies of knowledge—SG interpolation] we inherit from the ancients is nowhere more apparent than in what they wrote about the Passions. For even though this is a topic about which knowledge has always been vigorously sought, and though it does not seem to be one of the most difficult—because, as everyone feels them in himself, one need not borrow any observations from elsewhere to discover their nature—nevertheless what the Ancients taught about them is so little, and for the most part so little believable, that I cannot hope to approach the truth unless I forsake the paths they followed. For this reason I shall be obliged to write here as though I were treating a topic which no one before me had ever described. (Descartes, 1989: 18-19)
In light, especially, of Plamper’s remarks, in this instance of the dispute between the ancients and the moderns, the moderns certainly won the day. Whether the palm of victory is rightly given to the moderns with respect to the topic of the passions is, however, a matter for another article.
Given that Descartes is taken to be a “true innovator” with respect to the passions, and given that Descartes’s “little treatise” (Descartes, 2015: 74) on the passions, The Passions of the Soul, has given rise to by far the most scholarly literature on early modern accounts of the passions, from anthologies (Williston & Gombay, 2003), to monographs (Brown 2006; Hassing, 2015) to too many articles to list (as is generally the case, for better or for worse, with respect to English-language scholarship on the history of early modern philosophy)—in what follows I give two examples, derived from scholarship on Descartes, of different ways in which historical or contextual work on Descartes has been or can be brought to bear on present-day work on the emotions precisely insofar as it is historical. (For an overview of philosophical and scholarly issues in and literature on The Passions of the Soul, see Shapiro, 2006.)
A natural place to start is the well-known characterization of ‘Descartes’ Error’ in Damasio, 2007.
It would not have been possible to present my side of this conversation without invoking Descartes as an emblem for a collection of ideas on body, brain, and mind that in one way or another remain influential in Western sciences and humanities. My concern…is for both the dualist notion with which Descartes split the mind from brain and body…and for the modern variants of this notion: the idea, for instance, that mind and brain are related, but only in the sense that the mind is the software program run in a piece of computer hardware called the brain; or that brain and body are related, but only in the sense that the former cannot survive without the latter…This is Descartes’ error: the abyssal separation between body and mind…the suggestion that reasoning, and moral judgment, and the suffering that comes from physical pain or emotional upheaval might exist separately from the body. Specifically: the separation of the most refined operations of the mind from the structure and operation of a biological body. (Damasio 1994: 247-250)
Refutation of Damasio’s characterization of Descartes’s error has become almost commonplace (see, e.g., Plamper, 2017: 18; Sorell, 2005: 113-139). The response is straightforward: while Descartes did believe that the ‘pure intellect’ operated independently of the body, he thought that most thoughts—and especially in this context, passions—depended on the body. It’s not, however, especially interesting to learn that someone misinterpreted Descartes. Hatfield remarks:
Ironically, it is on Damasio’s home turf—the passions or ‘feelings and emotions’—that Descartes developed his most extensive account of the body’s essential role in producing some mental states….The Passions treats human emotional life in detail, including the physiological processes that underlie the passions. Descartes’s theory of the passions and his broader physiological theories, especially as found in the Treatise on man, provide a very different picture of Descartes’s conception of the role of the body in human behavior than that offered by Damasio. (Hatfield, 2007: 4)
Attention to The Passions of the Soul, especially its first part, would have revealed to Damasio a Descartes who theorizes the interaction of mind and body in behavior in general, especially in passionate action, a Descartes who could have served as an ally, not as an opponent.
A very different kind of benefit from the emotional turn in the history of early modern philosophy derives from the details of Descartes’s approach to the passions. Although the question ‘what is an emotion’, has received attention from philosophers both before and after James’s eponymous article (James, 1879), and remains a standard question in present-day philosophical work on the emotions, I have long been surprised that in this post-Darwinian age, it is not generally asked by philosophers what the function of emotions is.
The function of the passions comes to the fore in The Passions of the Soul. In a section of The Passions of the Soul entitled “Wherein all the passions are serviceable, and wherein they are harmful,” Descartes gives a general account of the function of the passions:
Now it is easy to understand from what has been said above that the utility of all the passions consists only in their strengthening thoughts that it is good that the soul preserve and that could otherwise be easily effaced from it, and causing them to endure in the soul. So too all the evil that they can cause consists either in their strengthening and preserving those thoughts more than necessary or in their strengthening and preserving others that it is not good to dwell on. (Descartes 1989: 59)
In this passage, Descartes simultaneously characterizes the proper function of the passions and the respect in which they can malfunction. (This is important, because a function can only be attributed to something if it is also possible for it to malfunction.) The function of the passions is “to strengthen and preserve thoughts”; passions malfunction when they excessively strengthen or preserve thoughts, or when they strengthen and preserve thoughts that should not be strengthened or preserved. The basic idea is this: the function of the passions is to focus attention. (Greenberg, 2007: 713-734 is a sustained argument for this admittedly controversial interpretive claim.)
In this context, to my mind what’s important is not whether Descartes’s account of the function of the passions is correct—although parallel accounts of the function of emotions have been advanced by Derryberry and Tucker 1994 and Fazio, Roskos-Eweldsen, and Powell 1994 — but the general idea of considering the function of emotions. It seems to me that just as consideration of this issue enabled Descartes to illuminate the nature of the passions, it is worth investigating whether consideration of this issue can shed light on the nature of emotions.
The preceding examples are meant only to illustrate benefits that might be derived for present-day work on emotions from the history of early modern philosophical approaches to the passions. Others could be multiplied, history deserves attention in this context, because it “can offer…a laboratory of worked-out positions that are distant enough from present positions to facilitate a certain amount of detachment. Such detachment enables the study of past positions to teach us about possibilities in the problem space that we may not otherwise be familiar with, and it helps us see the contingency of the range of theoretical options that constitute the framework for contemporary thought” (Hatfield, 2003: x).
References
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Brown, D. (2006). Descartes and the Passionate Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Charland, L. C. (2010). Reinstating the Passions: Arguments from the History of Psychopathology. In Peter Goldie (Ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 237-259.
Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Damasio, A. (2003). Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Orlando: Harcourt.
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Derryberry, D., & Tucker, D. M. (1994). Motivating the Focus of Attention. In P. M. Niedenthal & S. Kitayama (Eds.) The Heart’s Eye: Emotional Influences in Perception and Attention. San Diego: Academic Press: 167-196.
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