Mind, Body, and Morality

New Perspectives on Descartes and Spinoza

Martina Reuter, Frans Svensson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351202817
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The turn of the millennium has been marked by new developments in the study of early modern philosophy. In particular, the philosophy of René Descartes has been reinterpreted in a number of important and exciting ways, specifically concerning his work on the mind-body union, the connection between objective and formal reality, and his status as a moral philosopher. These fresh interpretations have coincided with a renewed interest in overlooked parts of the Cartesian corpus and a sustained focus on the similarities between Descartes' thought and the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza.

Mind, Body, and Morality consists of fifteen chapters written by scholars who have contributed significantly to the new turn in Descartes and Spinoza scholarship. The volume is divided into three parts. The first group of chapters examines different metaphysical and epistemological problems raised by the Cartesian mind-body union. Part II investigates Descartes' and Spinoza's understanding of the relations between ideas, knowledge, and reality. Special emphasis is put on Spinoza's conception of the relation between activity and passivity. Finally, the last part explores different aspects of Descartes' moral philosophy, connecting his views to important predecessors, Augustine and Abelard, and comparing them to Spinoza.

1Introduction

Martina Reuter and Frans Svensson

DOI: 10.4324/9781351202831-1

In twentieth-century philosophy, René Descartes was generally considered a substance dualist, whose attempts to refute skepticism remained haunted by a metaphysics of the “ghost in the machine” and by an epistemology unable to reach past the “veil of ideas”. This picture was guided by the century’s own philosophical interests in questions of knowledge and certainty, and it dominated presentations of Descartes in introductions to the history of philosophy, as well as discussions of his views in advanced research in the philosophy of mind and in early modern philosophy.

Towards the turn of the millennium, however, this picture of Descartes’ philosophy was seriously challenged. One of the game changers was Lilli Alanen’s refutation of what she named the “Myth of the Cartesian Myth” (Alanen 1989, 1996, 2003). Alanen showed that Gilbert Ryle’s claim about Cartesian persons as “ghosts in machines” was based on a misinterpretation. Descartes does not identify the person with an immaterial soul trapped in a mechanical body, but rather with the mind-body union, which he names a “primitive notion”. Considered as a third primitive notion, the mind-body union gains independence to the extent that it cannot be reduced to either of the two primitive notions of thought and extended matter. Most scholars still agree, however, that it does not quite gain the independence of being a third substance and it remains far from clear what kind of metaphysical status that the third primitive notion should be granted and how it can be known.

Alanen approaches these questions from an epistemological point of view and argues that even though the mind-body union cannot be known with the same certainty as the mind or the body taken separately, it can be known as the locus of our daily experiences. In her criticism of Ryle’s Cartesian myth, Alanen uses Ryle’s own distinction between knowledge-that and knowledge-how and argues that the knowledge we can have of the mind-body union is characteristically of the latter, knowledge-how kind. The metaphysical questions involved here have been thoroughly discussed by Marleen Rozemond (1998), who examines the nature of Descartes’ dualism and his notion of the mind-body union in relation to positions defended in its seventeenth-century philosophical context. More recently, Deborah Brown has argued that the metaphysical nature of the mind-body union can best be understood by considering the dual nature of the passions, which consist in being both bodily processes and thoughts. She examines Descartes’ reference to the actions in the body and passions in the soul as being une mesme chose, one and the same thing, and shows how this notion of identity helps him avoid an occasionalist understanding of the mind-body union (Brown 2006).

In addition to a vitalized interest in the Cartesian mind-body union, this new turn in Descartes scholarship has also raised and led to the reconsideration of several other philosophical questions. The rejection of Descartes as a “ghost in the machine” metaphysical dualist has gone hand in hand with a rejection of the claim that his epistemology cannot get beyond the “veil of ideas”. Descartes distinguishes between ideas understood as thought-acts and ideas understood as the content of thoughts, and he claims that when understood in the latter sense an idea exists in the mind by its “objective reality”. This objective reality is connected to a “formal reality”, which is a causally prior and more perfect mode of existence and which causes objective existence in the mind.

Several scholars have investigated the connection between objective and formal reality and argued that Descartes is in fact not stuck with a conception of ideas as purely mental objects without any necessary relation to other modes of existence. This approach has involved taking into account Descartes’ scholastic predecessors in order to explicate the terminology of objective and formal reality, and to understand exactly how he thinks that cognition is determined by reality. For example, John Carriero has convincingly argued that there is, in Descartes’ view, a determination of structure, which connects ideas and reality. Carriero claims that “for Descartes, as for the Aristotelian tradition, ideas are best thought of as vehicles through which some reality or structure (i.e., some ‘nature, or essence, or form’) comes to exist in the mind and is made available to cognition” (Carriero 2009, 19; see also Normore 1986; Alanen 1994; Brown 2007).

Parallel with a focus on new philosophical topics recent scholarship has also started to pay serious attention to parts of the Cartesian corpus that used to be overlooked. When interpreting e.g. Descartes’ Meditations, many philosophers have turned their attention away from the epistemological discussions in the First and Second Meditations to the discussion of free will in the Fourth Meditation and of the mind-body union in the Sixth. Reinterpretations of the Meditations have furthermore gone hand in hand with detailed studies of Descartes’ last published work, The Passions of the Soul, and of his correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. These studies have focused on Descartes’ psychology of the passions and also created a new interest in him as a moral philosopher.¹

In their correspondence, Descartes and Elisabeth develop a moral philosophy where the Stoic overcoming of the passions is replaced with an attempt to refine the passions in order to constitute the basis of a virtuous and happy life. In addition to the passions, Cartesian moral philosophy stresses the freedom of the will and defines virtue as the correct use of free will. Passion and will are brought together in Descartes’ notion of generosity. Generosity is simultaneously a pleasurable passion, felt when one realizes that one has used one’s free will correctly, and a virtue, which by calming vicious passions acts as “the key to all the other virtues” (CSM 1, 388; AT 11, 454). Just as in the case of reinterpreting Descartes’ concept of idea, the new interest in his understanding of free will has also generated important comparative studies of Descartes’ position and the positions of Scholastic philosophers, particularly in the Augustinian and Scotist traditions.

By focusing on Descartes’ correspondence with Elisabeth, recent Descartes scholarship has also contributed to the rediscovery of women philosophers of the early modern period, and to the attempt to integrate their works into the philosophical canon.² Taking for granted the view of Cartesian persons as “ghosts in machines”, some feminist philosophers and theorists in the twentieth century criticized Descartes for radicalizing mind-body dualism and thus strengthening a hierarchy between male characteristics associated with the mind and female characteristics associated with the body (e.g. Bordo 1987). The recent focus on the role of embodiment in Descartes’ philosophy has challenged this feminist interpretation and drawn attention to the beneficial consequences that Cartesian philosophy has had on early-modern as well as more recent conceptions of gender (e.g. Clarke 1999; Heinämaa 2004; Reuter 2004; Shapiro 2008b).

In addition to raising new philosophical questions, introducing new interpretations of familiar parts of Descartes’ corpus, and generating close studies of not so familiar parts of that corpus, the recent turn in Descartes scholarship has also had a broader effect on interpretations of early modern philosophy. First and foremost, the fresh interest in the metaphysical and epistemological puzzles implied by Descartes’ mind-body union has given rise to new perspectives on Baruch Spinoza’s attempt to solve the problems that, in his view, result from Cartesian dualism. Whereas twentieth-century scholarship in early modern philosophy tended to focus on the differences between Descartes and Spinoza, contrasting the substance dualism of the former with the monism of the latter, recent scholarship has shown greater interest in the similarities, particularly in the similarities between the philosophical questions the two thinkers tried to answer.

Given that Spinoza is a rationalist who adopts the ontological framework of substances, attributes, and modes, it is no wonder that Descartes has come to be regarded as Spinoza’s most important predecessor. Moreover, a growing interest in Descartes’ theory of the passions—and particularly in the therapeutic aspects of this theory—connects the two thinkers on a new level: after all, Spinoza is the early modern rationalist who develops an extremely systematic and thorough theory of human emotions to show us how to control our passions (James 1997; LeBuffe 2010; Kisner 2011; Kisner and Youpa [eds.] 2014). However, Spinoza’s theory of the passions and of what he takes to be the ultimate end of his philosophy, namely human salvation, builds on a specific ontology of human existence; an ontology that involves a number of tenets concerning essences, powers, individuality, and activity. Much of the arguably most progressive current scholarship focuses precisely on these issues,³ shedding new light on how finite human existence is to be understood in a system that so decidedly takes infinite divinity as its point of departure not only in the Ethics but also in earlier, previously less researched works.⁴

The present volume consists of fourteen chapters written by scholars who have contributed significantly to the new turn in Descartes and Spinoza scholarship outlined above. Here they present their most recent arguments. The volume is divided into three parts: the first focusing on different features of Cartesian persons; the second discussing different aspects of ideas, knowledge, and reality in Descartes and Spinoza; and the final part examining how the two philosophers conceptualize will, virtue, generosity, and love.

1. Cartesian Persons

The first part consists of three chapters, which examine different metaphysical and epistemological questions raised by the Cartesian notions of mind, body, and mind-body union. In the first chapter, Deborah Brown engages in a close dialogue with Lilli Alanen’s interpretation of Descartes on mind-body unity. Brown asks whether Descartes’ notion of mind-body unity belongs among his metaphysical notions or is to be viewed within the bounds of a purely phenomenological inquiry. Scholars tend in their treat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Cartesian Persons
• Part II Ideas, Knowledge, and Reality
• Part III Will, Virtue, and Love
• Index