In Descartes
and the Passionate Mind, Deborah Brown attempts to defend Descartes’ theory
of self from the classical challenge of inconsistency.  Descartes’
theory of the human mind and its relation to our body, Brown points out, has
long been used in the introductory courses in philosophy as an example of a
failed answer to the mind-body problem.  Quite often, the Meditations on
First Philosophy are read and discussed as an introduction to the theories of
mind that are actually plausible.  While "we can’t accept the Cartesian
mind," Brown says, "we despair of finding a better way of introducing
the mind-body problem to our kids" (1).

In
general, the problem that Descartes’ Meditations (allegedly) fail to
solve is the problem of unintelligibility of interaction between the
immaterial mind and the material body:  if the substances of which the human
mind and the human body are made are fundamentally different (one is immaterial
and the other is material), and if they share no attributes in common, then no
explanation of interaction between the two substances seems to be possible.  As
Brown points out, the challenge to Descartes’ Meditations was famously
articulated by Princess Elizabeth in 1643, who argued that the Cartesian
account of the human mind faces at least two problems.  First, it is unclear
how the body can be ‘moved’ by the soul in acting intentionally:  if a body is
to move intentionally, then it must move "in accordance with a cognitio
of [an] end" (16), which Descartes’ theory does not allow for since
the body cannot have cognitions which constitute the ‘thinking’ attribute
Descartes denies to the material substance.  Second, Elizabeth points out in
her correspondence with Descartes, the Cartesian theory does not leave room for
the mind’s autonomy:  the body seems to have "debilitating affects"
on the mind since it is "afflicted by strong passions" and therefore
leads to an "imbalance" in human reason (16).  These two problems,
Elizabeth concludes, show that on a more consistent theory of human mind, the
mind itself is material, i.e., the interaction of the mind and the body
makes it implausible that the mind is a fundamentally different substance than
the body.

In Descartes
and the Passionate Mind, Brown undertakes the project of spelling out
Descartes’ overall account of the self (and most importantly — of the mind)
in order to show that his theory is more viable and interesting than Elizabeth’s critique implies and than most introductory courses in philosophy allow for. 
The key to understanding Descartes’ theory of the mind, Brown argues, is in
reading his Passions of the Soul in addition to the Meditation on
First Philosophy.  The Passions not only provide the missing view
that supplements Descartes’ mind-body theory, but also constitute the
appropriate context for the Meditations, the context without which
Descartes’ project is easily misconstrued and sounds rather implausible.  The
thing to do, Brown argues, is to "start with Descartes’ conception of the whole
human [as it is presented in the Passions] and to work back to the
concept of the mind we find in the early Meditations" (209,
emphasis added). 

What,
then, is Descartes’ theory of the whole human, i.e., of the mind (or
soul) as "thoroughly embedded" in the human body?  According to
Brown, the starting point of this theory is decidedly empirical. 
Whereas the traditional account of Cartesian self starts with the (allegedly) a
priori argument from the Mediations — Descartes’ cogito —
the appropriate starting point, Brown argues, is Descartes’ later account of
the self, according to which we have an immediate awareness of the unity of
our soul and our body. On Brown’s account, "to understand causality … we
must look not to the metaphysical notions of mind and body [as the Meditations
suggest] but to [Descartes’] third ‘primitive’ notion, the union of mind
and body" (139, emphasis added).  Our understanding of this union is "primitive"
since it is not analyzable in a further set of concepts; it is both "basic"
and "definitively a posteriori" (ibid.)  If this is Descartes’
account of the mind-body union, then we ought not to attribute to him the view
of the "abyssal separation of the mind and body" (77).  Instead, the
starting point of Cartesian theory of the mind is his view that the mind is ’embodied’
and that the modes of the mind are "grounded in bodily processes"
rather than are capable of existing apart from them (77).  This basic unity of
the mind and the body as well as the possibility of their interaction, the Passions
suggest, is something that we are immediately and empirically aware of.

Now,
with this starting point in mind, Descartes proceeds to give an account of this
union, an account in which passions play an important role.  The six key
passions (wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness (50)) are, according
to Descartes’ early definition of them, "thoughts that are ‘excited in the
soul without the concurrence of her will’" (21).  In particular, passions
are "primarily or directly modes of self-awareness" and are "explicitly
of or about the ways in which the soul is moved or affected by
things outside itself" (105, emphasis added).  Against various readings of
Descartes on passions, Brown argues that passions "refer" to
the soul in that the soul "perceives itself as modified in a particular
way" (101) and in that it perceives itself as moved "in a certain way
by some external thing" (103).  Passions, on this account, are intentional,
i.e., are of or about something (the soul).  (Notice that
intentionality is an attribute of the thinking substance only.)

Passions,
however, also cannot be "conceived of independently of their causes in the
body" (141).  In fact, Descartes claims that "the action and the
passion do not cease to be always one and the same thing, which has two
names [i.e., ‘action’ and ‘passion’] on account of the two different subjects
to which one can refer it" (117, emphasis added).  Take a traditional
(Aristotelian) example of passion and action:  the action (e.g., cutting)
and the passion (e.g., being cut) are "one and the same thing"
which has two distinct names only in virtue of two subjects to which it can be referred
— e.g., a knife (that does the cutting) and a body (that is being cut).  To go
back to Descartes’ understanding of the passions, we can say that on his view
the passions (such as wonder or love) and the causes of these passions
(which Descartes holds to be material occurrences in our body) are "one
and the same thing" as well.  Brown argues that this claim ought to be
interpreted in the following way:  "the sense in which actions and
passions constitute a unity is akin to the way in which the human being is a
unity [of the mind and the body]" (127).  While there is no "token-identity"
of a passion and an action (much like there is no token-identity of the mind
and the body), a passion and an action constitute a real unity: 
although conceptually distinct they are not "really distinct" from
one another (ibid.)

In
passions, therefore, we have a key to answering the question of how the mind is
capable of moving the body and how the body is capable of moving the mind:  a
passion is an "idea which is constituted by two parts:  a mode of mind [i.e.,
the self-awareness of the soul] and certain motions of the animal spirits [i.e.,
the bodily cause of the passion]" (135).  A genuinely causal interaction
between the mind and the body, therefore, is possible through passions,
which, as it were, ‘have a foot in both worlds’ — the mental and the material.

How
successful is Descartes’ project on Brown’s interpretation?  It may be argued
that the causal interaction between the mind and the body is still largely
unintelligible since instead of being solved it has been merely re-phrased into
yet another question:  How can a passion and its cause form a unity without
token-identity?  An appeal to the (supposedly) similar unity between the
mind and the body does not answer the question since this unity itself is what’s
being challenged.  Brown, however, acknowledges as much:  "there is no
getting around [Descartes’] dualism", she writes; still, "our failure
to set the Cartesian mind in the wider context of Descartes’ thought …
exacerbates the problems associated with the notion [of Cartesian dualism]"
(3).  It is this "exacerbation" that seems to lead to the fact that
many introductory courses in philosophy treat Descartes merely as a
spring-board to the discussions of the mind-body accounts that do make
sense.  But considered in the context of the Passions of the Soul,
(Brown seems to suggest) the Meditations prove to be a more challenging
reading.

Brown’s
Descartes and the Passionate Mind is bound to interest both a beginning
and a serious scholar of Descartes.  Since it contains a thorough analysis of
the up-to-date secondary literature on Descartes and since it argues for
original readings of Descartes on several outstanding issues (e.g., on ideas’
representation and reference, and on the relation between ‘passions’ and ‘actions’),
Brown’s account of Descartes’ theory of the mind will interest and challenge
those who are well-versed in the history of Early Modern Philosophy.  On the
other hand, a less experienced student of Descartes will find it helpful to
look beyond the cogito argument in order to do justice to Descartes’
more complex theory of the unity of the mind and the body and of their causal
interaction.  Furthermore, in Descartes and the Passionate Mind, a
beginning student of the history of ideas will find insightful and useful
discussions of a number of related topics (e.g., occasionalism, the relation
between Cartesian and Aristotelian philosophy, Scholasticism and Stoicism, and
Early Modern conceptions of normative ethics and politics).

But
what of the question concerning the pedagogical significance of the Meditations
in particular and of Descartes in general?  Having read Descartes and
the Passionate Mind, are we indeed "long way from the bogeymen of
analytic philosophy of mind and critical theory, the ‘Cartesian mind’ and the ‘Cartesian
self’" as Brown argues (208)?  Here, I believe, the answer is negative.  At
best, we need to acknowledge that the Meditations (as indeed any significant
work in philosophy) is a part of a larger corpus, a corpus that inevitably
sheds some light on the arguments in any of its parts.  But before altering the
syllabi to introductory courses in philosophy, we need to ask whether the
metaphysical argument in the Meditations becomes sound if augmented by
Descartes’ empirical view concerning the unity of the self.  The question is
the following:  Does Descartes’ claim that the mind is immaterial gain
plausibility (or at least become immune to its traditional criticism) because
in the Passions Descartes tells us an interesting empirical story about
the unity of the self?  Here, Elizabeth’s initial challenge seems to be still
standing and the Meditations still read very much as a failed Early
Modern attempt to reconcile (i) the commitment to the causal interaction
between the mind and the body, and (ii) the commitment to the view that the
mind is immaterial.

© 2007 Tatiana
Patrone

Tatiana Patrone, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Montclair State University, NJ

Categories: Philosophical