TY - JOUR
AU - Sullivan,, Marek
AB - Abstract Although explicitly challenging overly simplistic dichotomies between secular reason and religious affect, Charles Taylor’s monumental genealogy A Secular Age (2007) downplays the role of the body in Descartes’s theory of agency and mistakenly projects this understanding of the “Cartesian” self upon the public sphere of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through a careful reading of Descartes’s last work, Les Passions de l’Âme (1649), and drawing on existing work by Cottingham (2012), Kahn (2006), and Kirkebøen (2001), this article argues the Passions is better seen as an attempt to reinscribe politics in the body through Descartes’s theory of the habit. A focus on the latter yields a complex understanding of the emergence of the public sphere, not as a neutral space for the free exchange of rational speech acts, but as a power-driven environment shaped by the manipulation of habit-creating experiences. The article ends by considering some implications for the genealogy of our “secular age.” Talal Asad has criticized Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) for privileging belief as the pivot between pre-secularity and secularity. Against Taylor’s primary interest in the emergence of ubiquitously optional belief (what he calls “secularity 3”), Asad argues for “the importance of studying the senses in order to identify ways they can build sensibilities and attitudes that are distinct from beliefs” (Asad 2011, 37). This alternative approach sidesteps a Christo- or ratiocentric tendency to take faith, doctrine, propositional truth, or even “enchantment” as the essence of religion, and it clears the way for an analysis of the modern subject that crosses the secular/religious divide. If “belief” and its accompanying term “religion” are today better understood as performative elements in a language game that facilitates rule by liberal democratic government, “studying the senses” promises an avenue into both religious and “secular” subjectivity that is not already interpreted.1 Asad’s counter-Taylorian emphasis on the pre-interpreted, sensual, and disciplinary dimensions of secularism extends his earlier project, first outlined in Formations of the Secular, to develop an “anthropology of secularism” (Asad 2003, 1). This article agrees with Asad but goes further in questioning the “disenchantment” narrative at the heart of A Secular Age. Indeed, it suggests that Taylor’s focus on belief not only presents a methodological problem vis-à-vis the genealogy of secularity, but also leads to a distorted factual understanding of this genealogy by overemphasizing the importance of a historical break between belief and practice, reason and emotion, and mind and body in the intellectual history of Europe—a tendency that is particularly clear in Taylor’s treatment of the historical “Enlightenment.” Although explicitly challenging simplistic dichotomies between secular reason and religious affect, Taylor overstates the division of reason and emotion in the thought of certain “secularizing” thinkers, especially Descartes, and thus unjustifiably associates secularization or the Enlightenment with an epistemological and ethical disengagement from the body. To take this position is to grant the Enlightenment both too much and too little. It grants the Enlightenment too much when it allows it to step outside of politics and power and assume the voice of an idealized pure reason. It grants the Enlightenment too little insofar as it does not recognize the sophistication of its engagement with subjectivity and the importance of its legacy for modern psychology. Against such idealistic conceptions, this article shows that Enlightenment thought—beginning with Descartes—is indissociable from the body, politics, and power. Why Descartes? According to Taylor, Descartes marks a key moment in the simultaneous transition from theism to “exclusive humanism,” and from the “porous” to the “punctual” (Taylor 1989) or “buffered self” (Taylor 2007) of secular modernity. The sixteenth- to seventeenth-century shift from medieval practices of piety and devotion rooted in the body, to the mind-based, “rational-critical” world of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment situates Descartes in a pivotal position for the erasure of bodily experience and eventual hegemony of autonomous, “disengaged reason” (Taylor 1989; 2007; 2012). This in turn feeds into a disembodied conception of a “public sphere” founded on the dialogical unfolding of pure reason exempt from social conflict and the distortive influence of power (Taylor 2007, 185–96). Within this broad historical context, Taylor reads Descartes with a clear anti-corporeal or anti-emotional inflection: he opened the way for the “cold rationalism” of the Enlightenment and its distrust of religious sentiments or “enthusiasm” later epitomized by Gibbon and Hume; and he helped lay the ground for an effective “immanentization” of ethics by drawing previously external sources of moral authority (e.g., God or Nature’s order) under the judgement of autonomous reason, an internalizing movement partially revoked by the subsequent rise to dominance of communicative rationality in the public sphere. The assumption that Descartes sought to downgrade or dominate the passions by force of reason is so engrained that even researchers more sensitive to the presence of the body in the Enlightenment still associate Descartes with an antithetical stance towards the body and emotions. According to Jessica Riskin, Descartes “treated the passions as innate tendencies of the human constitution, the antithesis of the rational faculty, and inherently destructive” (Riskin 2002, 49). This is false, even by Taylor’s account. Descartes’s last major work Les Passions de l’Âme (1649) testifies to an acute awareness of the limits of internal, autonomous reason, emphasizing the entanglement of reason in the workings of the body; the importance of external, environmental factors for the shaping of human experience and response; and the centrality of “habit” or “habits” to the cultivation of virtue. Although Taylor himself accepts that Descartes adopted an instrumentalist approach to the passions that allowed for a positive reassessment of the latter, he still reads Descartes in terms of a rationalistic, “disengaged stance” towards the body that, among other things, elides his theory of the habit entirely. This article redresses the record. Given the depth and complexity of Taylor’s analysis, I begin with a detailed summary of the intellectual history leading up to Descartes, as outlined in A Secular Age (henceforth ASA), then summarize Taylor’s reading of Descartes, both in ASA and Sources of the Self (SotS). I briefly compare the chief arguments of the Passions—as read by Taylor—to the arguments of an earlier, lesser-known treatise, De l’Usage des Passions (1641) by the Augustinian philosopher Jean-François Senault, to draw out the distinctiveness of Descartes’s contribution. My own close reading of the Passions suggests that, if Descartes played a pivotal role in the genealogy of the secular, it is not because he rationalized the ideal thinking, feeling, acting subject (a feature of De l’Usage) but, on the contrary, because he provided a striking anticipation of post-rationalist skepticism, articulated through his theory of the associational habit. In the broader scheme of secular history, a careful reevaluation of Descartes problematizes Taylor’s narrative arc casting the eighteenth-century Enlightenment as the culmination of a gradual suppression of sentiment and rise to hegemony of affectless, disengaged reason. This culmination narrative is inaccurate because it relies on an illegitimate reification of pure or disengaged reason that in fact never existed, and it masks important ways in which the “radical Enlightenment” (Taylor 2007, 149) of the eighteenth century combined “rational-critical” (Habermas [1962] 1989) elaboration with nationalistic propaganda. This propaganda played heavily on sentiments and passions to manipulate an emergent public opinion and build up a secular-nationalist structure of affect with revolutionary and long-lasting consequences. THE NEO-STOIC BACKDROP ASA situates a key moment for the genealogy of the buffered self in the sixteenth-century neo-Stoic reformer Justus Lipsius. Like the Stoics, Lipsius broke from existing ethical frameworks based on divine command, empathy, or virtue by formulating an ethical theory rooted exclusively in the reasoning mind. Where Christian ethics might emphasize the power and necessity of agape (love for our neighbor) or miseratio and misericordia (the “compassion of feeling” embodied in the figure of Christ), Lipsius rejected all of these in favor of the Stoic goal of apatheia, “a condition beyond passion” (Taylor 2007, 115). His “Christianized Stoicism” had no place for the body or emotions, but rather sought moral perfection “on the basis of a full inner detachment” (Taylor 2007, 115). Along with the rationalization and internalization of morality came a newfound confidence in people’s ability to manipulate both themselves and their environment. Lipsius “set the tone” for the reformers of the following century, such as high civil servants, administrators, and generals who sought to “reconstruct various dimensions of society” (Taylor 2007, 118). A new optimism took over during this period, grounded in self-discipline and the training of the subordinate masses, so that eventually the belief emerged that “nothing in principle stood in the way of [. . .] social engineering” (Taylor 2007, 121). Whereas the Middle Ages were still “steeped in the view [. . .] that there are severe limits to the degree in which sin and disorder can be done away with in this world” (Taylor 2007, 119), the new “protestant work ethic” and “inner worldly asceticism” propagated by Calvinism and Pietism tended to remove limits on human improvement and bring other-worldly utopianism into the present. The thrust of this new optimism was an unprecedented faith in the powers of human reason. The eventual hegemony of reason, still understood as the ultimate expression of divine order, would allow humans to reach maximal control (and hence happiness) in this life, not just the next. In other words, the body was not just relegated to a subordinate position in the hierarchy of human flourishing; it was to be subordinated by force of will and reason. CARTESIAN REASON It is in this context that Taylor presents Descartes as a transitional figure for the closure of self at the onset of early modernity. Drawing especially on Les Passions de l’Âme (Descartes 1649), Taylor argues that Descartes “clearly [stood] in the neo-Stoic stream of thought” (Taylor 2007, 130), yet departed from traditional neo-Stoicism in important ways. He retained and intensified the neo-Stoic emphasis on disengagement from the body, and, like Lipsius and Grotius, elaborated an understanding of virtue as “dominance of the will over passion” (Taylor 2007, 130). Virtue increased to the extent that unruly passions were brought under the hegemonic reach of autonomous reason. Unlike the Stoics and neo-Stoics, however, Descartes (a) jettisoned any sense that rationally derived principles of virtue reflected something about the order of things existing “out there”—his moral framework was “all in the mind,” marking a further inward shift towards the self-sufficiency of the buffered self; and (b) did not seek to annihilate the passions, but rather, to channel them towards a rationally inferred or a priori deducible good. Whereas for the Stoics, the passions were “false opinions” that would disappear in the light of wisdom, for Descartes they were “responses we are endowed with by the Creator to help us respond with appropriate vigor in certain, appropriate circumstances” (Taylor 2007, 131). The goal was to bring the passions “under the instrumental control of reason” (Taylor 2007, 131), an approach that reduced the body to a mere crutch: “[The soul] has to support itself on [the body] to climb free of it” (Taylor 1989, 146). Taylor speaks of “the Cartesian picture of total self-possession” (Taylor 2007, 349), of “self-mastery,” which “consists in our lives being shaped by the orders that our reasoning capacity constructs according to the appropriate standards” (standards themselves derived from rational introspection; Taylor 1989, 147), of Cartesian “disengaged reason” and “dispassionate impersonality [. . .] taken as sufficient for universal benevolence” (Taylor 2007, 250). The Cartesian understanding is characterized by a “sharp division between mind and non-mental reality” that supports “a conception of thought and will as something self-contained, in principle quite clear and present to themselves, and capable of establishing their independence from the world of matter” (Taylor 2007, 348). For Descartes, power only travelled one way: the properly trained body submitted completely to the mind, for knowledge of both itself and the world and for directing its actions. Thus, “[Right action] is not defined as what comes from properly ordered desire, but rather as what disengaged reason demands of desire, to which desire has to be trained to be docile” (Taylor 2007, 614). The “clarity and distinctness” necessary for the control of desire required that we “distance ourselves from our embodied understanding of things” (Taylor 2007, 614), or do “violence to our ordinary, embodied way of experiencing” since embodiment inevitably embroiled us in an “irremediably confused and obscure way of grasping things” (Taylor 1989, 146). Against this, Descartes recommends “objectify[ing] the world, including our own bodies, […] in the same way that an uninvolved external observer would” (Taylor 2007, 145).2 DESCARTES’S LEGACY I: THE UNCONSCIOUS REVERSAL As noted above, Taylor takes Descartes’s understanding of “total self-possession” to represent a historical transition between “two great cosmic outlooks”—between an enchanted universe in which meaning resided in the structure of existence itself, and “a mechanistic universe, providentially ordered for the sake of souls whose destiny was elsewhere” (Taylor 2007, 349). The naive sense that “what I really am” was discoverable through “purely immanent self-clarity, clear and distinct self-consciousness,” and that human reflexes and behavior could be controlled through the sheer power of reason, (a) became definitive of the age of Enlightenment, and (b) would later be replaced by more skeptical theories of human consciousness and agency based on a new awareness of the power of the “cerebral unconscious.” This new awareness, outlined in Marcel Gauchet’s L’Inconscient Cérébral (1992), was more sensitive to the body’s imbrication in processes of deliberation, action, and will formation. Further, it marked an epochal shift in the entire experiential framework or social imaginary in which we live: Gauchet shows how in the nineteenth century [. . .] the sense [develops] that our thinking and willing emerges out of cerebral/nervous function, through the concept of the reflex arc and sensorimotor scheme. The second half of the century comes to be dominated by a psycho-physiological outlook, which tries to place consciousness, thinking and will within its bodily realization. [. . .] this is more than just a change of theory. It is a shift in the whole framework in which theories are propounded […] the reality of thought to its material substrate, from being an issue of external relations for Descartes, has now become the key question about its very nature. On the new understanding, conscious willing grows out of the reflex arc, and is of the same nature as it. This […] has helped to produce our sense of the deep subject, opaque to herself, the locus of unconscious and partly impersonal processes. (Taylor 2007, 349) In other words, Descartes’s transparent and rational subject laid the grounds for a monumental return of the repressed in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century thought, the most important exponent of which was of course Freud, but which later received expression in the behavioral conditioning theories of Pavlov and others. The very idea that consciousness might be shaped by or subservient to unconscious orders of experience and reflection secured in independence from the self-reflective, reasoning mind was anathema to Descartes’s faith in the transparency of the subject and the power of virtuous persons to force through actions on the basis of sheer will. This assumption had important political implications as it removed any limit on human reason and its potential for challenging external sources of authority. Because everything true began from the thinking mind, a process of rational inward reflection could not but corrode the causal relation between individual action and the externally imposed demands of social convention or hierarchical structures of authority headed by the sovereign will of prince and king. Such corrosion was in fact a double-edged sword: it eventually buttressed the emancipatory ideology of the Revolution, but it also generated a “weak” understanding of human nature and a naive faith in the autonomy of reason, so that Revolutionary utopias were quickly run aground and replaced with traditional Catholic structures and strictures during the nineteenth-century Restoration. For Taylor, this in turn provides a historical illustration of the weakness of rationality and conscious will versus the power of the unconscious. French revolutionaries could temporarily exterminate religious practices and institutions, but the background texture of affects, largely unconscious and generated by richly sedimented histories of liturgy, ritual, and social convention, eventually won out. DESCARTES’S LEGACY II: THE PUBLIC SPHERE Nevertheless, at least one aspect of Descartes’s thought survived and became definitive of early modernity: his “procedural rationality,” that is, a rationality based not on substantive ends but the method used to reach those ends. As is well known, Descartes’s starting point for accessing the true nature of things rested fundamentally on correct procedure. The search for truth began with a process of subtraction and partitioning (especially of mind from body) to facilitate the bottom-up reconstruction of knowledge by reason alone. The way in which Descartes’s epistemological building blocks were maneuvered into place following the initial act of deconstruction itself guaranteed the truth of his conclusions. For Taylor, this procedural rationalism mirrors a crucial development in the social consciousness of early modernity, one inherently bound up with the genealogy of ASA. Drawing on Habermas ([1981] 1984; [1962] 1989), Taylor explicitly links Descartes to the eighteenth-century emergence of the modern public sphere, seeing in his model of “clear and distinct thought” a paradigmatic precursor for the later emergence of communicative rationality, because both Descartes’s ethics and the legislative products of the public sphere rested on a rejection of substantive ends. Whereas substantive ethical frameworks assume that practical wisdom rests on “seeing an order which in some sense is in nature” (i.e., external or existing independently of the thinking self), Descartes’s method and the dialogically constituted public sphere require a radical “proceduralization” of the good (Taylor 1989, 86). For both Descartes and the public sphere, moral justification becomes a matter not of discovering external goods embedded in the fabric of nature, or obeying the dictates of a transcendental God, but of correct procedure within the confines of the thinking mind (in the case of Descartes) or the circumscribed domain of public reason (in the case of the public sphere). Though Descartes’s pure reason and the public sphere may not seem, at first sight, to share much in common (Descartes’s reason is internal; the public sphere is, well, public), in fact both see justification as procedural because “It can’t be defined by the particular outcome, but by the way in which the outcome is arrived at” (Taylor 1989, 86). In neither case can there be a priori ascertainable ends or “once-for-all” moral judgements dispensed by a sovereign deity to subordinated humans (Taylor 2007, 188). Even Descartes’s certainties (such as the cogito) only attain absoluteness in light of a retroactive ratification linking ends to means. His conclusions, like the public sphere’s, are not true because God has willed it but because they derive from the correct method of attaining them. This is why the public sphere is fundamentally “secular”: it closes off transcendence by legitimizing itself on the discursive unfolding of immanent rationality, carried forward by reciprocal speech acts in the “meta-topical” space—real and imagined—of free debate (a space constituted by a rich interconnecting network of communication media, including letters, pamphlets, books, face-to-face meetings, salon gatherings, etc.).3 This debate is purely immanent. It happens within time and space, and hence within secularity, defined against the eternal, unextended plane of the divine. Descartes’s reasoning parallels and anticipates the eighteenth-century public sphere at another level too. According to Taylor, the public sphere designates a universe of strictly self-contained “rational-critical” debate outside social conflict and structures of power yet nevertheless able to influence those same structures. Indeed, its uniqueness stemmed from the fact it was “extra-political,” “emanating from reason [. . .] not from power or traditional authority,” yet still applied normative pressure on existing authorities; it was “a discourse of reason on and to power” that stood outside of power (Taylor 2007, 190, emphasis original).4 Drawing on Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989), Taylor suggests that the eighteenth century saw Prince and Church become answerable—for the first time in history—to a self-legitimizing system of norms, constructed by the people (or more accurately “the bourgeois reading public”; Habermas [1962] 1989) and their public use of private reason. As should be obvious, the free-floating yet hegemonic nature of rational-critical discourse directly parallels Descartes’s distancing of reason from the body. Both Descartes and the public sphere take autonomous reason and its hegemony over the passions (or their worldly equivalent, the people or politics) as their basis. For both, “power was to be tamed by reason” (Taylor 2007, 190). The Cartesian rationalistic procedure and its emphasis on freedom of will therefore parallels, and indeed motivates, the rise to hegemony of the public sphere—a kind of external, inter-subjective mind—and its self-generated system of justification on the basis of “the better argument” alone. The “modern idea of freedom” encapsulated in Cartesian and Kantian conceptions of the hegemony of reason and will is, according to Taylor, “the strongest motive for the massive shift from substantive to procedural justifications in the modern world” (Taylor 1989, 86). To summarize, Taylor reads Descartes as (1) standing in the neo-Stoic stream of thought, insofar as he advocates disengagement from the body and its unruly passions; (2) departing from the Stoics, in that he does not seek to suppress or annihilate the passions but to objectify and instrumentalize them for the greater good; (3) emphasizing the absolute hegemony of reason and will among the virtuous, as well as (4) the transparency of self to the scrutinizing gaze of rational introspection; and (5) recommending a third-person, self-objectifying perspective. Taken together, these points anticipate and motivate a shift from substantive to procedural justifications in the rational-critical discourse of the eighteenth-century public sphere, thus laying a foundation stone for the immanentization of sources of the good, a golden age of discursive rationalism, and the ultimate secularization of Latin Christendom. Almost every one of the above points can be challenged following a close reading of Les Passions de l’Âme. EXISTING CRITIQUES OF “CARTESIAN DUALISM” A number of existing works have challenged the Taylorian consensus of a rationalistic or dualistic Descartes. In “Descartes’ Embodied Psychology” (Kirkebøen 2001), Geir Kirkebøen argues against Antonio Damasio’s seminal work Descartes’ Error (Damasio 1994) that “Descartes never considered what we today call thinking or cognition without taking the body into account” (Kirkebøen 2001, 173). Whereas Damasio criticizes Descartes for imagining the thinking process as “an activity quite separate from the body” (Damasio 1994, 248, cited in Kirkebøen 2001, 173) and uses him as a historical foil for the elaboration of his own embodied psychology, Kirkebøen considers this critique flawed at the outset because “[Descartes’s] explanations of psychological phenomena are all embodied” (Kirkebøen 2001, 174). Similarly, veteran scholar of Descartes John Cottingham has written on the impossibility of separating reason from the passions in Descartes’s thought, arguing that, post-Méditations, Descartes became increasingly preoccupied with the need for a genuine “anthropology”—one which would do justice to the inescapable fact that we are not merely incorporeal ends inhabiting an alien mechanism, but creatures whose welfare is, in a special and intimate way, bound up with the operations of the body, and with the feelings, sensations, and passions that arise from our embodied state. (Cottingham 2008, 238) Conversely, Victoria Kahn reads the innovations of the Passions in terms of an attempt to grapple with politics, arguing that, although Descartes initially favored “the more traditional language of Stoic virtue and Stoic detachment,” he began to change his views following his correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (which Kahn views as a kind of trial run for the Passions). At this point, “Descartes began to see the relevance of baroque politics and theatrical manipulation for a scientific treatment of the passions” (Kahn 2006, 95). According to Kahn, the “old-fashioned aristocratic ideal of self-mastery” was replaced by Descartes with “the modern individual, whose body has become a foreign territory, one that requires new indirect techniques of government.” Thus, the Passions “deserves to be seen as one of the inaugurating texts of a new regime of politics, one inscribed in the body itself” (Kahn 2006, 110). Although these works provide necessary rejoinders to the standard reception of Descartes represented by Taylor, Riskin, and others, they do not touch on some of the most central aspects of the Passions, notably its technical and ethical similarity to previous works such as Jean-François Senault’s De l’Usage des Passions (1641), its presentation of the soul-body relation, and some of the deeper intricacies of the relation between the will, the passions, and the habits—the last of which may be the most important contribution of the Passions. There is also a tendency (e.g., in Cottingham’s work) to gloss over some of the basic contradictions in Descartes’s work, reading divergent viewpoints in terms of a “reconciliation” narrative that culminates in a strained harmonization of the Cartesian body-mind. DE L’USAGE DES PASSIONS (1641) Perhaps the first question that arises in response to ASA concerns the weight placed on Descartes as a major pivot on which a putative rationalization of the European subject turned: to what extent were the Cartesian developments outlined by Taylor really “Cartesian”? I suggest at least one author anticipated the majority of ideas taken by Taylor to define Descartes, and hence a crucial node in the genealogy of our secular age: Jean-François or “Father” Senault (1599–1672), an Augustinian philosopher and priest whose work De l’Usage des Passions (1641) is among the most extensive and systematic treatments of the passions pre-Descartes and sometimes listed as an important influence on the latter (Koch 2008, 303, fn. 67). To some extent, De l’Usage can be situated within the rationalistic theological lineage of Lipsius and Grotius. Like these, Senault saw no antagonism between reason and faith, for reason itself “flowed” from the Godhead and was therefore “the true good of man” (“le véritable bien de l’homme” (Senault 1641, 6).5 However, Senault did not think that approaching godliness and using one’s reason meant rejecting the body or passions. Like the Passions, De l’Usage is a manual for the correct use of the passions, not their destruction. He explicitly aligned himself with Aristotle on this point: “I had rather follow Aristotle’s opinion than Seneca’s, and rather govern passions than destroy them” (Senault 1641, 142). According to him, invectives against the passions merely exacerbated the problem, for he “who seeks to oppose this torrent by making a dam will only increase its fury” (Senault 1641, 118). Whereas the Stoics failed to consider that man is “endowed with a body” wherefrom “the soul is not disengaged” and “sought to stifle the passions” by “elevating him to the condition of angels” (Senault 1641, 2–3), the wise man, “knowing very well that he is composed of a soul and body, [. . .] endeavors to employ both parts in the exercise of virtue” (Senault 1641, 142). The passions were the “seeds” (semences) of all virtues and could, through careful cultivation, yield “pleasant fruits” (Senault 1641, 137). Indeed, no passion was not “useful to virtue, when [. . .] governed by reason” (Senault 1641, 9). Conversely, ignoring the passions would “leave unused one of the most beautiful parts of our soul,” for “virtue herself would become idle, had she no passions, either to subdue or regulate” (Senault 1641, 7). As even this cursory outline makes clear, the “Cartesian” ideal of a rational regulation of the passions is already prefigured in De l’Usage, undermining the pivotal role that Taylor assigns to Descartes as a rationalizing figure of secular intellectual history. In fact, I argue the Passions is important not for parsing the mind from the body and subjecting the latter to the former, as Senault had advocated eight years earlier, but for introducing a complex theory of the habits and their power to structure the passions. To unpack this claim, I now return to the Passions while continuing to highlight similarities and contrasts with De l’Usage where relevant.6 LES PASSIONS DE L’ÂME (1649) The Passions is not a systematic document. It combines speculation about the nature and “seat” of the soul, scientific theories about the bodily mechanisms linking thoughts and passions to actions; an extended enumeration of the passions, with explanations of their distinct qualities; and an early theory of behavioral conditioning. It is unintegrated and sometimes contradictory. It even contains jokes.7 Rather than summarize the entire work, I will focus on a number of points responding directly to Taylor’s “disengaged” reading. These are Descartes’s location of the soul not just in the “kernel” or pineal gland, but the whole body; his complex soul-body structure and the formative role of the habits within this structure; his understanding of rational/passional annexation by habit and experience; his nuanced understanding of the hegemony of reason or the will; his thoughts on the moral authority of “nature”; his nontransparent subject; his understanding of the human reflex arc; his understanding of the true function of the passions as resting in their memory-reinforcing properties; and finally, his faith in the inherent (not merely instrumental) goodness of certain passions. I will argue that although Taylor’s reading of Descartes is accurate from a certain perspective, it ultimately fails to engage with the full diversity of ideas contained in the Passions. The Location of the Soul Against conventional assumptions, Descartes’s soul-mind does not simply reside in the brain or even the glande, that uniquely undivided part of the brain joining each lobe now understood to be the pineal gland.8 Although Descartes on occasion insists, “Apart from this gland, there cannot be any other place in the whole body where the soul directly exercises its functions” (Descartes [1649] 1985, 340), he also, perhaps contradictorily, understands soul as an emergent epiphenomenon dependent on the entire body, at least for its worldly existence. As he explains in Article 30, “The Soul is United to All the Parts of the Body Conjointly”: We need to recognize that the soul is really joined to the whole body, and that we cannot properly say that it exists in any one part of the body to the exclusion of the others. For the body is a unity which is in a sense indivisible because of the arrangement of its organs, these being so related to one another that the removal of any one of them renders the whole body defective. (Descartes [1649] 1985, 339) That the soul can coexist with the body, indeed, be fundamentally dependent on it yet remain indivisible and eternal, is because the soul (a) has no extension, and (b) relates to the body as an assemblage of interrelated parts. As he puts it: “The soul [does not] become any smaller if we cut off some part of the body, but it becomes completely separate from the body when we break up the assemblage of the body’s organs” (Descartes [1649] 1985, 340).9 The relation between the body and the pineal gland is not entirely clear but may be understood in terms of a quantitative distinction. If the gland still plays a special role in housing the soul, it is arguably one of degree not kind: “There is a certain part of the body where [the soul] exercises its functions more particularly than in all the others” (Descartes [1649] 1985, 340). The gland is merely the “principal seat” (Descartes [1649] 1985, 341) of the soul, not its unique dwelling. This more embodied conception of the soul subtly nuances Taylor’s interpretation of Descartes as arguing for a “disengaged perspective” wherein our usual embodied perspective, which conceives of surrounding objects as “really qualified by color or sweetness or heat, [or] tend to think of the pain or tickle as in [our] tooth or foot” (Taylor 1989, 145), is replaced by the singularly rational perspective of the thinking mind. If the soul-mind is in fact co-extensive with the body (insofar as it makes sense to speak of an extended, nonextended entity), then it becomes difficult to speak of sensation—whether experienced by the body or soul-mind—as not being in the tooth or foot. For Descartes, the pain resides in both (e.g., tooth and soul) because the soul is (at least partly) in the tooth in any case.10 As we shall see, this understanding corresponds well with the broader framework of the Passions. Although Descartes on occasion seems to emphasize the “ontological cleft” between body and soul, for example, by insisting on the nonextendedness of the soul or by claiming that “it is to the body alone that we should attribute everything that can be observed in us to oppose our reason” (Descartes [1649] 1985, 346), a careful breakdown of his soul-body structure yields interesting bridges between the two. The Soul-Body Structure After distinguishing body from the soul by explaining their different functions, Descartes equates the soul with “our thoughts” and divides these thoughts into two kinds: “actions of the soul” and “passions of the soul.” The actions of the soul are equivalent to “our volitions” and the passions of the soul to “the various perceptions or modes of knowledge present in us” (Descartes [1649] 1985, 335). Volitions are further broken down into two sorts: actions of the soul that terminate in the soul itself and actions that “terminate in our body, as when our merely willing to walk has the consequence that our legs move and we walk” (Descartes [1649] 1985, 335). Our perceptions are also of two sorts: those caused by the soul and those caused by the body (Descartes [1649] 1985, 335). This may be diagrammed as follows: As this schema shows, the initial clear-cut distinction between body and soul is mitigated considerably by stage 5. It is not just that the soul generates actions or wills that end in bodily action (e.g., walking)—the one-way process that Taylor takes as indicative of reason’s hegemony in the properly disciplined subject—but that the passions of the soul (and hence one half of “our thoughts” or “soul”) are at least partially caused by and hence dependent on the body (stage 5c). Descartes elaborates on this point considerably. From Articles 21 and 22, on “Imaginings which are Caused Solely by the Body” and “How These Other Perceptions Differ from One Another”: Among the perceptions caused by the body, most of them depend on the nerves. […] we refer some to external objects which strike our senses, others to our body or to certain of its parts, and still others to our soul. (Descartes [1649] 1985, 336–37) The perceptions that stem from “things outside us” are caused by objects that “produce certain movements in the organs of the external senses and, by means of the nerves, produce other movements in the brain” (Descartes [1649] 1985, 337). Although perceptions attributed only to the soul (including “the feelings of joy, anger and the like” Descartes [1649] 1985, 337) are distinguished by the fact that their effects are felt “in the Soul itself” (Descartes [1649] 1985, 337), as well as, presumably, originating there, they may also (somewhat mysteriously) originate in the body, too, since “[they] are aroused in us sometimes by the objects which stimulate our nerves” (Descartes [1649] 1985, 337). In other words, although Descartes opens the Passions by proposing to focus only on the third element of his triadic structure of apprehensive causes (those passions attributable to the soul itself, hence the title of the book) this third element is in fact very similar to the first. Perceptions of “things outside us” and perceptions “from the soul” are both triggered by “objects which stimulate our nerves.” Perceptions that in principle derive only from the soul are in the end as traceable to the body as those deriving from without. Mind-Body Dualism, Habits To understand how our thoughts or “perceptions” link up with the body and can be shaped by it, it is necessary to engage with a crucial concept at the heart of the Passions and completely absent from Taylor’s analysis in both SotS and ASA—the concept of “habit.”11 According to Descartes, “Our soul and body are so linked that once we have joined some bodily action with a certain thought, the one does not occur afterwards without the other occurring too” (Descartes [1649] 1985, 365). Indeed, he feels strongly enough about this to later repeat the same point: For the rest, so as to put in a few words all the points which might be added regarding the different effects or different causes of the passions, I shall content myself with repeating the principle which underlies everything I have written about them—namely, that our soul and body are so linked that once we have joined some bodily action with a certain thought, the one does not occur thereafter without the other occurring too; but we do not always join the same actions to the same thoughts. (Descartes [1649] 1985, 375) These passages confirm Descartes’s emphasis on the mutual engagement of soul and body. But they also show (a) that this engagement stems from a prerational linkage of specific thoughts to specific actions, because these thoughts and actions are not “willed” but “present themselves” to us involuntarily; and (b) that although corporal actions and thoughts arise outside of our immediate control, it is still us who “join” or “annex” specific actions to specific thoughts in the first place. Taken together, points (a) and (b) present a fascinatingly complex picture of agency that suggests neither the sovereignty of reason or will over the body and passions, nor the absolute submission of reason to bodily experience or “providence,” but the dependence of agency on a process of behavioral self-conditioning through the manipulation of habits, themselves shaped and modified by external conditioning factors. This point needs unpacking. The Annexation of Passions through Habit, the Hegemony of Reason/Will To grasp what Descartes is getting at, we first need to understand how “volitions” become joined to thoughts and passions, and (what amounts to the same) thoughts to actions and experiences. I will quote extensively from the Passions to demonstrate the centrality of the concept for Descartes’s ethics. According to Descartes, “Each volition is naturally joined to some movement of the gland, but through effort or habit we may join it to others” (Descartes [1649] 1985, 344). This applies to every possible movement, even those that seem most naturally joined to their respective wills: although “nature seems to have joined every movement of the gland to certain of our thoughts from the beginning of our life, yet we may join them to others through habit” (Descartes [1649] 1985, 348). Descartes illustrates this by reference to the work of language: words “represent to the soul only the sounds of their syllables when they are spoken or the shape of their letters when they are written, yet, because we have acquired the habit of thinking of this meaning when we hear them spoken or see them written, do they tend to make us conceive their signification rather than the shape of their letters or the sound of their syllables” (Descartes [1649] 1985, 348).12 In other words, the repeated juxtaposition of specific wills and motions gradually generates a firm bond between them—a bond so strong that it bypasses the conscious level of sense perception. We do not primarily perceive the shape or sound of letters and syllables but their signification. Despite the general necessity of reiteration, however, the process of annexation can also be immediate if the experience is disturbing enough: A habit can be acquired by a single action, and does not require long practice. Thus, when we unexpectedly come upon something very foul in a dish we are eating with relish, our surprise may so change the disposition of our brain that we cannot afterwards look upon any such food without repulsion, whereas previously we ate it with pleasure. (Descartes [1649] 1985, 348) Or again, Those who have taken some medicine with great aversion when they are ill […] afterwards cannot eat or drink anything approaching it in taste without immediately feeling the same aversion; and similarly they cannot think of the aversion they have for medicines without the same taste returning in their thought. (Descartes [1649] 1985, 365) For Descartes, then, the arising of thoughts is conditional on past histories of association that wire the soul and body in certain ways through unintentional or intentional reiteration. This wiring is evidence of the inseparability of body and soul, and it is “pre-rational” insofar as it involves soul-body annexations not immediately governed by reason or the will. It may also be altered through a change of habits or by undergoing a traumatic experience that shocks the soul-body nexus into a new configuration. These points place considerable limits on the power or “hegemony” of reason, which Taylor takes as a defining feature of Descartes’s virtuous subject. If anything, Descartes is here demonstrating the opposite: the secondariness of reason to predetermined bodily-psychic pathways, established by contingent histories of habit and experience. We do not “choose” our reactions in given situations, except insofar as we are able to condition ourselves before the event to respond in certain ways. This conditioning may be aimed at a rationally derived telos beyond the immediate content of the passions (though not necessarily; see below), but the declension from thought to action is not itself a rational process dictated by the sovereign will or reason. There is no question here of the soul or will coercing the passions or body to respond in rationally sanctioned ways. Though it is true Descartes frequently emphasizes the virtue of a soul that has achieved “absolute mastery” (“un empire très-absolu”; Descartes [1649] 1985, 348; 1649, 78) over the passions, this is simply impossible from the perspective of his total psychology. As he himself puts it, “The soul cannot suddenly [promptement] change or stop [arrester] its passions” (Descartes [1649] 1985, 345).13 It cannot because the habits connecting motions of the body to motions of the gland override everything else, as he explains with the example of tickling: [T]he objects of the passions produce movements in the blood which follow so rapidly from the mere impressions formed in the brain and the disposition of the organs, without any help at all from the soul, that no amount of human wisdom is capable of counteracting these movements when we are not adequately prepared to do so. Thus many people cannot keep from laughing when they are tickled, even though they get no pleasure from it. For the impression of joy and surprise, which previously made them laugh for the same reason, is awakened in their imagination and causes their lungs to be swollen suddenly and involuntarily by blood sent to them from the heart. (Descartes [1649] 1985, 403) Even more fundamentally, thoughts—the basis of reason’s power—are themselves, to some extent, conditioned by habits. As he explains in Article 161, on “How Generosity May Be Acquired”: “It should be noted that what we commonly call ‘virtues’ are habits in the soul which dispose it to have certain thoughts: though different from the thoughts, these habits can produce them and in turn can be produced by them” (Descartes [1649] 1985, 387). The idea that virtues are based on habits that can both produce and be produced by thoughts seriously compromises any putative Cartesian point d’origine founded on the sovereignty of will or reason. All that exists is a cycle from habits to thoughts, and back to habits, continually inflected by our external environment. One cannot alter one’s behavior and achieve a “struggled-for-domination” (Taylor 2007, 133) over the passions through an antagonistic imposition of the will. According to Kirkebøen, Descartes’s radical insight did not concern the hegemony of the soul over the body and passions, but the opposite: “the limitations [of] the human soul and its functions” (Kirkebøen 2001, 173–74, emphasis original). Kahn even goes so far as to suggest that, for Descartes, “the body might be a better sovereign than the soul” (Kahn 2006, 109). Article 52 and the Moral Authority of Nature Taylor hinges much of his argument on Article 52 of the Passions, in which Descartes seems to explain the sole utility of the passions as residing in their power to “dispose the soul to desire those things which nature tells us are of use, and to persist in this desire” (Taylor 1989, 150). Following this reading, the passions function as a causal link between the soul and the body as a kind of extended arm or ontological bridge allowing the soul to manipulate the body in the immediate present.14 Yet I must emphasize two points here. First, the book contains several statements about the true function of the passions, some of which expand on Article 52 considerably. As Descartes writes elsewhere, under Article 74 “How the Passions Are Useful, and How They Are Harmful”: The utility of all the passions consists [only] in the fact that they strengthen and prolong thoughts in the soul which it is good for the soul to preserve and which otherwise might easily be erased from it.15 Likewise the harm they may cause consists entirely in their strengthening and preserving these thoughts beyond what is required, or in their strengthening and preserving others on which it is not good to dwell. (Descartes [1649] 1985, 354)16 Or again, on the particular passion of “wonder” (admiration): Of wonder [. . .] we may say that it is useful in that it makes us learn and retain in our memory things of which we were previously ignorant. [. . .] when something previously unknown to us comes before our intellect or our senses for the first time, this does not make us retain it in our memory unless our idea of it is strengthened in our brain by some passion, or perhaps also by some application of our intellect as fixed by our will in a special state of attention and reflection. (Descartes [1649] 1985, 355) These alternative passages suggest that, insofar as the passions can extend or even alter the soul’s disposition, it is not because they further the soul’s power directly, but because they precondition the soul to interact in certain ways with the body by inscribing memories at a deep level—an idea that ties in seamlessly with Descartes’s theory of habituation. Second, even if we accept that Article 52 contains Descartes’s definitive statement on the function of the passions, Taylor’s translation of this passage is clearly inflected by his effort to reinforce Descartes’s putative hegemony of will and shoehorn him into the neo-Stoic mold. The problem stems from his translation of two key words: vouloir and volonté. Taylor translates these as “desire” (verb and noun), thus bringing home the power of the passions to extend the power of the will, which may manipulate desire to its own end. The “sovereign will” remains untouched. But as is well known, volonté typically refers to the Cartesian will itself, not desire. Thus, Robert Stoothoff renders the passage in straightforwardly volitional terms: “The function of all the passions consists solely in this, that they dispose our soul to want the things which nature deems useful for us, and to persist in this volition” (Stoothoff 1985, 349). The earliest (anonymous) translation of 1650 follows a similar model: “The use of all the Passions consists only in this, that they dispose the Soul to will the things which Nature dictates are profitable to us, and to persist in this will” (Descartes [1649] 1671, 46). Both translations arguably reflect the semantic universe of the Passions more naturally than Taylor’s. For example, if desire is the passion in question, it is likely Descartes would have written désirer and désir instead of vouloir and volonté, to match his specific treatment of the passion of desire in Article 57, “Le Désir.” “Will” or “want” are not only more accurate than “desire;” they make more sense. Desires are by definition unwilled (desire happens; the will makes things happen) and thus not subject to the Stoic or neo-Stoic virtue of persistence: for example, it makes no sense to “persist in desiring pistachio ice cream.”17 But the problem with Taylor’s translation emerges particularly acutely when we try to understand how the passions could ever “dispose” the soul to desire something, because, according to Descartes, desire is itself a passion. This would suggest desire can dictate desire—an idea that could make sense in terms of Descartes’s wider theory of habituation but undermines any conception of the absolute hegemony of will, given that desire could unfold and intensify through its own closed system.18 What Descartes seeks to demonstrate, I would argue, is not simply the idea that desires can be manipulated to affect other desires under the coercive direction of the sovereign will, but that they—like habits—can snap back to influence the will itself. The passions “dispose our soul to want the things which nature deems useful for us” (Descartes [1649] 1985, 349). This idea is problematic for Taylor on two accounts. First, because it unseats the will as the sovereign dictator of the passions but ties in very well with the broader context of the Passions. And second because it relocates the sources of moral authority away from the sovereignty of the thinking self and towards “nature,” thus challenging Taylor’s assertion that for Descartes true virtue is an entirely internal matter. This may be seen through a breakdown of Article 52’s key points: (a) the passions are instrumentalized by the will; this is a condition of their being “useful.” (b) They in turn reflect back on the will, because they “dispose the soul” to will certain things. (c) Nature dictates that these things are “profitable to us” (i.e., the passions, and hence nature itself, work in our interests). This breakdown evinces a direct link between the will’s surrender of authority and Descartes’s faith in the inherent goodness of nature, which replaces introspective certainty as the ground of morality. This ground has existed for time out of mind, and it is external (i.e., not dependent on human powers of reasoning). For Descartes, we can no more control our physiology than “other events in the physical universe.” Indeed, “The natural (or divinely ordained) correlations between physiological events and psychological states are not within our power to set up from scratch; they were laid down, as part of our human nature, long before we came on the scene” (Cottingham 2008, 244). As Cottingham points out, these psychophysical correlations are “crucial for our survival,” a point that would today be accounted for in evolutionary terms. Descartes, however, like Senault, invoked the standard source of morality at the time—the benevolence of God—as the ultimate origin and dispenser of “information about what is harmful for the [human] mind-body composite” (Cottingham 2008, 250). Point three above reinstates an external (i.e., transcendental or non-rationally derived) source of morality grounding what is effectively a feedback loop between the passions and the will. The perpetual mutual influence of one on the other undoes any sense that true morality issues from a single internal source (e.g., reason or the will); there is instead an ongoing process of mutual reinforcement, guided towards the good by the dictates of external reality, God, or nature.19 Descartes’s Reflex Arc According to Taylor, Descartes envisioned spontaneous bodily reflexes as one side of a double response involving both reflex and rational deliberation. Whereas animals always respond impulsively and mechanistically, humans have a unique capacity to subjugate the initial “animalistic” response to the dictates of autonomous reason, which may then use passion to bolster the appropriate physical response: The sight of a dangerous animal […] will typically have three kinds of consequences. It may trigger off a reflex of flight. This is the only consequence which occurs in animals, which must be understood as complex machines. With man it will also bring about the rational recognition that he ought to make himself scarce. The man is rationally motivated to do what his animal reactions have perhaps already started. But then passion will strengthen the response, because the animal spirits connected with the perception of the animal and the flight reflex also incite fear in the soul. (Taylor 1989, 150) For Taylor, Descartes’s rationalistic reflex arc underscores the utility of the passions as extenders of the will over the body. The passions have no value in themselves but are useful insofar as they strengthen the causal relation between will and action, or “beef up the already existing rational movement towards flight” (Taylor 1989, 150, emphasis mine). This reading of Descartes is puzzling because the Passions makes quite clear that reflex actions are distinctive precisely because they do not involve a rational process. Summarizing the work ahead of its publication in 1649, Descartes wrote that “even in us [humans] all the motions of our limbs which accompany our passions are caused not by the soul but simply by the machinery of the body” (Descartes [1619–1650] 1991, 374). In the Passions itself, Descartes discusses uncontrollable, knee-jerk reactions to external stimuli (e.g., a hand that threatens to strike) to illustrate the absence of reason in the reflex arc. If someone suddenly thrusts his hand in front of our eyes as if to strike us, then even if we know that he is our friend, that he is doing this only jest, and that he will take care not to harm us, we still find it difficult to prevent ourselves from closing our eyes. This shows that it is not through the mediation of our soul that they close, since this action is contrary to our volition. (Descartes [1649] 1985, 333)20 At least for the Descartes of the Passions, it is not the case that the passions strengthen an “already existing rational movement towards flight.” Insofar as the passions are involved in the reflex arc at all, they bypass the rational process. The soul does not intervene in reflexive action, let alone precede it. Disengaged, Disembodied Reason, and the Inherent Goodness of Passions As explained above, a cornerstone of Taylor’s interpretation of Cartesian ethics rests on a distinction between internally and externally derived goods. For Taylor, Descartes marks a profound shift in ethical consciousness, whereby goods previously located “outside” in a Platonic order of things, or partially constructed through a neo-Stoic Natural Law, are fully internalized, dissected, and reconstructed from the bottom up by the power of autonomous reason. The properly trained, neo-Stoic subject only reengages with the passions and body to the extent that they can further the soul’s aims: for example, by coercing the body into desiring virtue. This is why Descartes does not seek to eradicate the passions but to co-opt them in pursuit of the good; the soul uses the body to “climb free of it” (Descartes [1649] 1985, 146). A key question here concerns Descartes’s ends. Are these really so detached from the body as Taylor makes out? Here again, a careful reading of the Passions nuances the picture. On the centrality of the body for our conception and experience of the good, Descartes is clear: “If we had no body, I venture to say we could not go too far in abandoning ourselves to love and joy, or in avoiding hatred and sadness” (Descartes [1649] 1985, 378). Note that the passions of love and joy are here valued as goods in themselves; their value does not derive from their utility in bringing the soul closer to full flourishing; they are full flourishing. (Contrast with Taylor’s claim in SotS that it is only during the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that “Experiencing certain feelings [including ‘married love’] comes to be an important part of the good life;” Taylor 1989, 294.) Again, from the final article of the Passions, on the notion that “It Is on the Passions Alone that All the Good and Evil of this Life Depends”: “For the rest, the soul can have pleasures of its own. But the pleasures common to it and the body depend entirely on the passions, so that persons whom the passions can move most deeply are capable of enjoying the sweetest pleasures of this life” (Descartes [1649] 1985, 404). Cottingham has challenged classical, “dualistic” misconceptions of Cartesian ethics that drive a wedge between passions and the good. According to him, the Passions is aimed at redressing precisely this misconception: “The major task of Descartes’s closing years [was] the task of coming to terms with—and trying to mitigate the harsher effects of—that alienation of man from nature which his own dualistic metaphysics and mechanistic science had threatened to generate” (Cottingham 2008, 238). Although the Greeks tended to take on a “ratiocentric bias” and the Cartesian model “at first seems to be even more ratiocentric,” the Passions presents a somewhat different picture. Here, Although the deliverances of reason reveal a rigidly dualistic world of extended matter plus incorporeal consciousness, our own daily experience as human beings provides a very different kind of awareness—one colored by intimate and urgent feeling and emotion, one that projects us into the very center of a “substantial union” of mind and body, where, so far from operating as cognitive pilots of an alien bodily machine, each of us finds the operations of the body that is in a special and intimate sense his own giving rise to a rich and vivid sensory and emotional life. (Cottingham 2008, 239, emphasis original) If there is any restriction on the ethical worth of the passions, it is based not on a categorical distinction between means and ends but the degree of intensity of these same means, because “the bodily movements accompanying these passions may all be injurious to health when they are very violent; on the other hand, they may be beneficial to it when they are only moderate” (Descartes [1649] 1985, 378). Of course, even here Descartes ultimately equivocates because he also removes any restriction on the intensity of passion (e.g., desire) provided this passion is geared towards the right end.21 What is clear, however, is that Descartes at no point reduces his concept of the good to a disembodied set of virtues attained through a coercive imposition of the will on instrumentalized passions. The soul does not simply use the body to “climb free of it,” as Taylor claims. Descartes was clear on this point, writing in his Sixth Meditation: “I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but [. . .] am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit” (Descartes [1641] 1984, 56). He further speculated in his Letter to Regius of January 1642, that “If an angel were in a human body, it would not have sensations as we do, but would simply perceive the motions which are caused by external objects, and in this way would differ from a real human being” (Descartes [1642] 1991, 206). This seems almost a direct response to Senault, who one year earlier had attacked “profane philosophy” for representing “the soul in the body as an intelligence in the heavens [. . .] as a pilot who guides his vessel, sometimes as a sovereign who governs his state” (Senault 1641, 11). According to Senault, by seeking to cut the soul loose from the body, the Stoics had “elevated man to the condition of angels” (Senault 1641, 3). Unresolved Tension Despite Descartes’s insistence on “our daily experience as creatures of flesh and blood” (Cottingham 2008, 240), it is difficult to ignore other, more ratiocentric aspects of the Cartesian self. At points Descartes clearly advocates for the independence, distance, and dominance of reason from and over the passions. For example, he writes in his Letter to Princess Elisabeth of August 1645, that: The right use of reason [. . .] makes virtue easy to practice; and by making us recognize the condition of our nature, it sets bounds to our desires. So we must conclude that the greatest felicity of man depends on the right use of reason; and consequently the study which leads to its acquisition is the most useful occupation one can take up. Certainly it is the most agreeable and delightful. (Descartes [1619–1650] 1991, 258) In another letter to Elisabeth, cited by Taylor, Descartes describes “the greatest souls” as those “whose reasoning powers are so strong and powerful that although they also have passions, and often even more violent than is common, nonetheless their reason remains sovereign” (May 1645, in Taylor 2007, 131). Many more quotations could be provided along these lines (see e.g., Cottingham 2012, 116, fn. 30). It should be clear from the foregoing, however, that the idea of an absolute sovereignty of the will or reason is both impossible from the perspective of Descartes’s total psychology, and explicitly denied by Descartes himself, because we cannot stop or alter the course of the passions “at will.” Descartes’s work is contradictory, and often seems to involve two quite different conceptions of agency. Although Cottingham reads Descartes’s alternative, embodied mode of thought as suggestive of “reconciliation and integration” (Cottingham 2008, 252), I suggest Descartes failed to think away a basic tension between the sovereignty of will or reason, the undeniable power of the passions, and their inscription through external conditioning factors. Beneath the contradictions and careful qualifications lies a double tension underpinning all Descartes’s explorations into human subjectivity between the power of reason and the power of the passions, and the autonomy of mind and the dependence of mind on the body. It is never fully resolved. Descartes swings between affirming a necessary independence and hegemony of reason, and the impossibility of ever reaching that goal. This tension arguably echoed through the French Enlightenment.22 CARTESIAN SECULARITY? What is the relevance of the above for “secularism,” “secularity,” or “the secular”? Recall that Taylor sees Descartes as standing in a pivotal position for the closure of self at the onset of modernity. The disengagement of reason from the body and its blustery passions is taken as a signal shift for the eventual rise to predominance of a buffered self whose self-understanding drew heavily on an idealized conception of pure, autonomous reason later epitomized by the cold rationalism of the Enlightenment. According to Taylor, reason is inextricably bound up with “the meanings things have for us” and hence with the bodies and emotional reactions that generate such meanings in the first place. Because the reasoning process itself can only take place through “our reactions” as embodied beings, and because we grasp truth not by disengaging from experience, but “[inhabiting] the meanings things have for us” (Taylor 2012, 19), it is wrong to imagine that truth can be secured on the basis of a “post-Enlightenment notion of ‘reason alone’” (Taylor 2012, 17). Taylor pins the blame for this development on Descartes, who opened the way for Enlightenment philosophers like David Hume to drive a wedge between reason and affect, reason and experience, or reason and aesthetics (Taylor 2012, 18). By implication, Descartes, although not himself atheist or even deist, laid a critical foundation stone for the later disassociation of religion from reason, as religion became increasingly tied to emotionality or “enthusiasm,” whereas its opposite—what we would now call “secularity”—became tied to an essentialized understanding of pure, disengaged reason. This development had crucial implications for the evolution of “religion” as a conceptualizable category of the secular and for the practice of religion itself. Because eighteenth-century religion was still bound up with bodily practices and emotions, and because reason had nothing to do with the body, everything not rooted in reason could be thrown into the catch-all categories of “religion” or “false” religion—“true” religion in the latter case being a matter of ground-up reconstruction on the basis of reason alone (Kant to Swinburne) and usually involving some form of religious internalization. As noted above, Taylor argues for a direct link between the procedural rationality of the Méditations and the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters because both relied on faith in the process of argument itself and a rejection of substantive ends. With this rejection, claims Taylor, came a sharp step away from transcendental or “auratic” forms of the good, which morphed into the worldly goods and values of the immanent frame (e.g., “the order of mutual beneficence”) that, by definition, were visible for public inspection and accessible to human powers. This transformation can be understood in terms of a regulatory strategy for the control and pacification of “dangerous” religion during the eighteenth-century creation of liberal nation-states. At this time, religion became false and dangerous because it was affective, external, and invisible to the logic of public reason; secularity or “true” religion were good and true because they were rational, internal, and constitutive of public reason. Anything that escaped the logic of public reason or the force of “the better argument” was potentially subversive of national stability and thus to be eradicated or suppressed. As Cavanaugh (2009; 2012) and others (e.g., Fitzgerald 2000) have shown, the very concept of “religion” was crafted out of these concerns, because it enabled secular powers to circumscribe non-public forces and brand them with the label of subversion. The religious/secular distinction is a modern invention that directly parallels the invention of the modern state. [. . .] As religion was invented in the early modern struggle between ecclesiastical and civil powers in Europe, it was envisioned as occupying an essentially non-rational and non-public sphere to which the concerns of the church should be confined. As the liberal state developed, “religion” became a category into which to dump ideologies and practices that are judged antithetical to the liberal state’s goal of excluding substantive ends from the public sphere. (Cavanaugh 2012, 29) There is a strong sense in which eighteenth-century approaches to religion mirror Descartes’s approach to the passions. In both cases, the pure rationality of the mind/public sphere seeks to dominate the threatening force of the body, theorized as non-private (yet non-discursive, and therefore non-regulatable) activity in the case of the public sphere, and unwilled physical action in the case of the Cartesian mind. Descartes’s “warning” against the passions thus serves as an early adumbration of polemic attacks on emotional or “fanatic” religion during the mid- to late eighteenth century. Taylor clearly writes out of a concern to undo the dichotomies religious/secular, affect/reason, external/internal, public/private that underpin the genealogy of our secular age, with all the implications this has for the deconstruction of secularism qua political ideology of national melioration. But his analysis itself rests on a deeply problematic assumption: that Descartes played a distinct role in underscoring the absolute incompatibility of affect and reason, and generating faith in a politics by reason alone. In fact, the protoplasmic form of secularity developed by Descartes was less a matter of procedural rationality than of consent manufactured by controlling people’s experiential environment, or, as it came to be expressed in the eighteenth century, “what passed before people’s eyes.” It was less a matter of competing reasons than the affective structure in and through which such reasons were presented. Against common assumptions, Descartes expressed a keen awareness of the limitations placed on introspective reason and insisted on the impossibility of ever knowing exactly why people speak or act as they do. In one sense, this was determined by factors in place from time immemorial (i.e., nature or God). In another, it was determined by human systems of power that preceded and encompassed the formation of the individual self. This skeptical standpoint effectively theorized the relation between the elite, who controlled the people’s sensual environment (through mass media: print, education, stage shows, etc.), and the masses, who were controlled by them. Descartes thus testifies to a sophisticated and critical understanding of the political subject that later became the bread-and-butter of eighteenth-century theories of secularization. Indeed, contra Cavanaugh, many of the philosophes did not just reject affects from the public sphere by throwing them into the bucket of “religion,” but saw in them a deep facet of human nature, as inextricable as life itself. Enlightenment writers from Montesquieu to Diderot sought to preserve intact what makes us “real human beings” by re-annexing, not destroying, emotions traditionally associated with religion, and they usually did so with the interests of the nation in mind. Although Baron d’Holbach—sometimes described as the first true atheist—criticized religion for “authorizing” and “unchaining” the passions, he also insisted that one should abandon “the vain project of destroying passions” and instead “direct them towards objects that may be useful to himself and to his associates.” The passions should be given “free course” whenever they led to “real and durable advantages to society,” and were dangerous “only because everything conspire[d] to give them an evil direction” (Baron d’Holbach [1770] 1889, 72, 104). Earlier, Montesquieu had prescribed conducting the nation by its passion rather than its reason because “[reason] never produces any great effect in the mind of man” (Baron d’Holbach [1748] 1777, 411), whereas the founding ideologist Destutt de Tracy later collapsed the distinction between sentiment and reason altogether, arguing that “thinking [. . .] is feeling, and nothing but feeling” (de Tracy [1804] 1817, 24). Politically, this translated into a renewed emphasis on the value of rhetoric and the control of people’s emotions through affective tropes and expressions of sincerity (or what Reddy has called “emotives”; Reddy 2001, 143). According to the Encyclopédistes, the “latin eloquence” underlying modern democratic governance not only “admitted” the passions but “required” them. The passions were “the soul of discourse” and “the means by which the orator exert[ed] upon his listeners an absolute empire.” Even the “gentle passions” had to be stimulated without study or affectation, using external appearances, gesture, tone, and style to “breathe something soft and tender that comes from heart and goes straight to the heart” (Diderot and d’Alembert [1751–1782] 2016, XII. 147). As these extracts make clear, the public sphere was never a neutral, apolitical entity guided solely by the workings of discursive rationality but grew out of a desire to shape public opinion through the language of the senses. It was “secular” insofar as it produced discourse around the specific problem posed by religion (newly conceptualized) and existed in relative independence from monarchic or religious powers. But it was far from antithetical to emotion or the body, both in terms of its self-understanding and evolution. If, as Charles Hirschkind has argued in his own analysis of the “secular body” (Hirschkind 2011), Kant’s “two-world metaphysic” ensured “the autonomy of the moral will” by “circumscribing the role of the passions and habits to the sphere of sensible life” (Hirschkind 2011, 637), the mid- to late-eighteenth-century philosophes saw “sensible life” as the very basis of communicative reason. For them, there could be no such autonomy, for the will was subject to the power of orators to inspire “whatever feelings they pleased” (Diderot and d’Alembert [1751–1782] 2016, XII. 147). CONCLUSION The last half-decade has brought something of a vindication for pioneers of secular studies like William Connolly (1999), Talal Asad (2003), and Saba Mahmood (2009), who have, in distinctive ways, argued for the ongoing relevance of the body through modern formations of the secular. Not only has there been a gradual dismantling of Ralwsian and Habermasian assumptions about the existence and rationality of the public sphere (accompanied by an acceptance of religion’s staying power), but a growing realization that reason may function less effectively than emotion in shaping the political demos. This realization is not restricted to the “affective turn,” now well-established in academic circles, but extends to mainstream, if not popular, discourse on the science of political mobilization. Discussing the issue of a democratic Brexit, children’s author Philip Pullman has warned that the only way to change people’s minds is through emotion because “reason doesn’t work” (Pullman 2017, unpaginated). According to the former managing director of Cambridge Analytica, Mark Turnbull, filmed by undercover reporters in 2018: The two fundamental human drivers when it comes to taking information on board effectively are hopes and fears, and many of those are unspoken and even unconscious. You didn’t know that was a fear until you saw something that evoked that reaction from you. And our job is [. . .] to drop the bucket further down the well than anybody else, to understand what are those really deep-seated underlying fears, concerns. It’s no good fighting an election campaign on the facts, because actually it’s all about emotion. (Channel 4 News 2018, 7:00–7:48) Such developments have been accompanied by a predictable backlash from centrist supporters of the secular order. Steven Pinker, in particular, has called for a reinvigorated Enlightenment against the parochial forces of a regressive “Counter-Enlightenment” (Pinker 2018), echoing earlier secularists like Sam Harris (2005), Christopher Hitchens (2007), and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Brewis 2004), who have all, at one time or another, thrown themselves behind the idea of a “new Enlightenment.” It is no small irony that affect’s shift to the mainstream in some ways marks the fulfilment of Enlightenment thought on the mechanics of public discourse and a return to the Cartesian secular. Modern advocates of reason who seek succour in European intellectual history may find themselves short-changed on this front, as the Enlightenment was already an emotive, nationalistic, and often xenophobic phenomenon, rooted in a post-rationalistic (and to that extent “post-secular”) understanding of the body. As I shall argue elsewhere (Sullivan 2020), this understanding led the Enlightenment to rely increasingly on racist and Orientalist tropes in its mission to simultaneously undermine the Catholic Church and build up a national imaginary, foreshadowing the modern association of barbaric religion with Islam. Perversely for modern-day secularists, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment did not simply mark the emergence of the public sphere qua disengaged sphere of rational-critical speech acts; it also marked the genesis of modern propaganda.23 Footnotes 1 “[D]efining is a historical act and when the definition is deployed, it does different things at different times and in different circumstances, and responds to different questions, needs, and pressures. The concept ‘religion’ is not merely a word: it belongs to vocabularies that bring persons and things, desires and practices together in particular traditions in distinctive ways. [. . .] [L]iberal democracy [. . .] requires that belief be taken as the essence of religiosity” (Asad 2011, 39–40). Although Asad recognizes that “the idea of belief in Taylor’s story does not always have the sense of a proposition,” he nevertheless worries that “the notion of ‘construal’ by the buffered self in [Taylor’s] story seems to presuppose something that is capable of being articulated—if not propositionally, then in the form of a narrative” (Asad 2003, 48). 2 See also Taylor 1989, 162; 2012, 18. 3 Cf. Habermas [1962] 1989, 30–31. 4 See also Taylor 2007, 190. 5 The only available translation of De l’Usage is Henry Carey’s The Use of Passions (1650). Because this translation is reliable but stylistically older than Stoothoff’s translation of the Passions (below), I have updated Carey’s text for consistency, with occasional reference to the French for clarification of key terms. 6 Citations are from the standard modern translation by Robert Stoothoff in Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. I (1985, 325–404), with occasional reference to the French, and to the first, anonymous translation of 1650 where relevant. Although Stoothoff’s translation is the standard reference for Descartes Studies, cross-referencing with the French and the older 1650 translation reveals occasional divergences in meaning, along with a subtly rationalistic bias in the modern rendition. I have therefore modified Stoothoff’s translation where appropriate and signaled changes by including the original term in square brackets within the quotation, accompanied by Stoothoff’s translation in a footnote. For example, “the soul cannot suddenly [promptement] change or stop [arrester] its passions” (Descartes [1649] 1985, 345) substitutes “suddenly” and “stop” for Stoothoff’s “readily” and “suspend.” 7 See, for example, Descartes [1649] 1985, 381. 8 For an overview of these common assumptions, see Cottingham 2008, 243. 9 Cf. Taylor’s claim in SotS: “For Descartes, there could have been minds without bodies” (Taylor 1989, 188). 10 Cf. Senault: “For though [God’s] infinite spirit does not depend upon the world he has created, [. . .] yet is he dispersed into all its parts; there is no space he does not fill up. [. . .] So is the soul dispersed in the body, and penetrates all its parts. It is as noble in the hand as in the heart, and though it accommodates itself to the disposition of the organs, speaks by the mouth, sees by the eyes, and hears by the ears, yet is it but one spirit in its essence. And in its differing functions, its unity is not divided, nor its power weakened. [. . .] the soul, whose power is limited, cannot operate independently of the organs” (Senault 1641, 12–13, emphasis mine). 11 Not only is this concept missing from Taylor’s reading of Descartes, but SotS explicitly describes “habit” as a twentieth-century term traceable to Locke and the “uneasiness of desire.” According to Taylor, Locke represents the roots of “the remote origins of modern reductive psychology and the theory of reinforcement”: “Where twentieth-century psychologists speak of ‘habits’, Locke speaks of the association that each of us makes between our inner unease and certain goods as our ‘relish’” (Taylor 1989, 170). 12 I have adjusted Stoothoff’s translation of this passage, since he unjustifiably cuts out the last half of Descartes’s sentence (“do they tend [. . .] syllables”), erasing the essential dualism Descartes sets up between the sense experience of hearing or seeing language, and the extra-sensual act of interpretation—an erasure that makes the passage redundant and almost meaningless. Stoothoff renders the passage: “Words produce in the gland movements which are ordained by nature to represent to the soul only the sounds of their syllables when they are spoken or the shape of their letters when they are written, because we have acquired the habit of thinking of this meaning when we hear them spoken or see them written” (348). The original passage is: “[les] paroles, qui excitent des mouvements en la glande, lesquels selon l’institution de la nature ne representent à l’ame que leur son, lors qu’elles sont proferées de la voix, ou la figure de leurs lettres lors qu’elles sont escrites, & qui neantmoins par l’habitude qu’on a acquise en pensant à ce qu’elles signifient, lors qu’on a ouy leur son, ou bien qu’on a vû leurs lettres, ont coustume de faire concevoir cette signification, plustot que la figure de leurs lettres, ou bien le son de leurs syllables” (Descartes 1649, 76). The 1671 translation by Henry Carey is more faithful on this point. According to the latter, words “excite the motions of the kernel” by “represent[ing] only to the soul their sound [. . .] or by the figure of their letters when they are written,” yet “by a habit acquired by thinking what they signifie, as soon as ever their sound is heard, or their letters seen, use to make us conceive the signification rather than the form of our letters or the sound of their sillables” (Descartes [1649] 1671, 43). 13 Subst. “readily” and “suspend”; 1649, 65. 14 In SotS Taylor defines the passions as “functional devices that the Creator has designed for us to help preserve the body-soul substantial union” (Taylor 1989, 150). 15 Subst. “simply”; Fr.: “l’utilité de toutes les passions ne consiste qu’en ce qu’elles fortifient et font durer en l’âme des pensées” (Descartes 1649, 100). 16 See also Descartes [1649] 1985, 386–88. 17 On our passivity vis-à-vis the passions in general, see Cottingham: “The etymology of the term ‘passion’ (derived from the Latin verb for ‘to suffer’) suggests something contrasted with an action—something that happens to a person, as opposed to that which he initiates” (Cottingham 2008, 242). 18 On the possibility that, for Descartes, “virtue is defined as, at least in part, a matter of virtù, a surplus of power or a strategic manipulation of the passions by means of the passions themselves,” see Kahn 2006, 108. 19 Cf. Taylor’s claim in SotS that “the spiritual attitude,” which focuses upon the mysteriousness and strangeness of our conscious emergence from an unconscious universe, “is in flat contradiction to the Cartesian.” According to Taylor, for Descartes, “the dominant idea is of the purity of the thinking being, of its utter heterogeneity from blind physical nature, and of its transcendently higher status” (Taylor 1989, 347, emphasis mine). 20 See also Article 38: “The body may be moved to take flight by the mere disposition of the organs, without any contribution from the soul” (Descartes [1649] 1985, 343). 21 “[W]e cannot have too ardent a desire for virtue. [. . .] the mistake we usually make in this regard is never that we desire too much; it is rather that we desire too little” (Descartes [1649] 1985, 378). See also Descartes’s Letter to Elisabeth of June 1645: “I know indeed that it is almost impossible not to give in to the disturbances which new misfortunes initially arouse in us. 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TI - Cartesian Secularity: “Disengaged Reason,” the Passions, and the Public Sphere Beyond Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007)
JO - Journal of the American Academy of Religion
DO - 10.1093/jaarel/lfz037
DA - 2019-12-12
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/cartesian-secularity-disengaged-reason-the-passions-and-the-public-fMlPeyMCQ9
SP - 1050
VL - 87
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -