Happy Tears
BAROQUE POLITICS IN DESCARTES’S PASSIONS DE L’â ME
Victoria Kahn
Ut comoedi, moniti, ne in fronte appareat pudor, personam induunt; sic ego, hoc mundi theatrum conscensurus, inquo hactenus spectator exstiti, larvatus prodeo.
[As comic actors, receiving their cues, don their masks lest shame appear on their faces, so I, about to enter on the stage of this theater of the world, where up till now I have been a spectator, step forward masked.]
IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, Descartes most often appears as the founder of modern epistemology, a scientific discourse whose notion of evidence decisively shaped the subsequent understanding of philosophy.1 Scholars of Descartes only rarely discuss his late treatise on the passions, written in 1645–46 and published in the last year of Descartes’s life.2 Like his correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and Queen Christina of Sweden, the Passions de l’âme is read for its contribution to the fuller study of ethics Descartes did not live to complete. In this essay, I argue that the treatise on the passions should be read as Descartes’s prolegomena not only to ethics but also to political theory. If his Méditations is about the conditions of the possibility of knowledge, then the Passions de l’âme is about the conditions of the possibility of politics. But the two enterprises are not simply analogous. Rather, Descartes’s reflections on politics and the passions end up fundamentally recasting his earlier conception of the philosopher-spectator who looks on politics with stoic detachment. Theater in the Passions is not simply a metaphor for theory, for a modern, disengaged notion of rationality, or for what Heidegger called the modern world picture. Instead, theater becomes a way of reflecting on the irreducible embodiment of human beings and on the project of strategically manipulating the passions in order to secure social and political order. “In the end,” Adorno and Horkheimer write of Spinoza, “the transcendental subject of cognition is apparently abandoned as the last reminiscence of subjectivity and replaced by the much smoother work of automatic control mechanisms.”3 They could just as well be describing the effect, if not the intention, of Descartes.
Of course, the notion that the prince should theatrically manipulate his subject’s passions was a familiar one in the Renaissance. Aristotle had discussed the process in the Rhetoric and Politics. In De officiis, the most influential ethical treatise in the Renaissance, Cicero had argued that it is better for a ruler to be loved than feared. In The Prince, Machiavelli had scandalously inverted this advice, arguing that—if a prince has to choose—it is better to be feared than loved; and that an effective prince will know how to simulate and dissimulate, to feign virtue and to put on theatrical displays of his power, in order to control his subjects. By the seventeenth century, Machiavelli’s advice had been assimilated to (and, to a certain extent, camouflaged by) a Tacitean or baroque tradition of politic advice, which featured the prince as a skillful dramaturg and the dissident subject as a cunning actor. In this tradition, the passions were an object of pragmatic concern, but not of philosophical speculation.
With the seventeenth-century challenges to Aristotelianism by the new science and various materialist philosophies, the passions became a topic of renewed philosophical importance, and this philosophical approach in turn affected political theory. Many early-seventeenth-century writers saw the passions as a source of religious war on the continent, but they also believed that a new minimalist account of human nature—one predicated on self-interest and fear of violent death—could provide the building blocks for reconstructing society. In contrast to Machiavelli, who could also be said to have reduced human nature to its basic passions and drives, the new theories claimed the pedigree of scientific method. In the prolegomena to his great treatise on international law, De jure belli ac pacis (1625), the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius explains that he was driven to compose the work by the conflagration on the continent, but he went on to analogize his method to that of mathematics: “just as mathematicians treat their figures as abstracted from bodies, so in treating law I have withdrawn my mind from every particular fact.”4 Hobbes famously claimed to have done the same in The Elements of Law (1640). Praisingmathematics as “free from controversies and dispute, because it consisteth in comparing figures and motion only,” Hobbes declared he had discovered similar principles of justice and policy: scientific principles that “passion not mistrusting may not seek to displace.”5 And in a later work, he declared that political science was no older than his own De cive (1642).
On the basis of this new scientific account of the minimal components of human nature, Grotius and Hobbes advanced a contractual theory of political obligation. Spurred by their passions and interests, including above all their desire for self-preservation, human beings would agree to subscribe to a political contract, involving an exchange of protection for obedience. The new political science thus joined a materialist analysis of human nature with a juridical language of rights. This juridical language encompassed older questions of sovereignty, morality, and agency but recast them in terms of artifice and individual consent. Morality was not missing from the new scientific politics, but conceived as a product of human agreement; while political agency was defined as the voluntary transfer of one’s rights. In Leviathan, Hobbes famously compared the individual’s alienation of his rights to the sovereign, to theatrical representation: the sovereign impersonates and acts for the subject, just as an actor impersonates a character on the stage.6 Whereas Machiavelli used the metaphor of theater to enhance the prince’s agency, Hobbes employed theater to convey the nonmimetic relation of sovereign to subject, and the corresponding diminishment of the subject’s power.7
In addition to the Machiavellian and Tacitean tradition of politic advice, Descartes was intimately familiar with the new
scientific discourse of politics. He was also acutely aware of the political conflicts all around him. As a young man, Descartes
had briefly traveled with a regiment of Prince Maurice of Nassau. Later, in his correspondence with Elisabeth, he discussed
such contemporary political issues as regicide, rebellion, and religious wars.8 His response to such issues, however, was not to extend scientific method to explicitly political matters, such as war and
peace, but rather to confine his speculations to questions of epistemology. This was because “the most perfect moral system”
could only be arrived at after the full study of metaphysics and physics.9 In contrast to both Grotius and Hobbes, who proposed new contractual theories of obligation, Descartes declared he would adopt
a skeptical “morale provisoire” and abide by the laws and customs of his country.10 Instead of the new minimalist language of natural right, Descartes continued to use the more traditional language of Stoic
virtue and Stoic detachment when discussing ethical questions in his correspondence11—until, that is, he encountered in Elisabeth an interlocutor with a passion for philosophy, who pressed him to apply his scientific
rigor to moral discourse and to the contemporary political situation. In the course of this exchange, which is, among other
things, a kind of trial run for the Passions de l’âme, Descartes began to see the relevance of baroque politics and theatrical manipulation for a scientific treatment of the passions.
By the time he composed Passions, Descartes had arrived at an understanding of politics that was potentially more radical—in the sense of innovative and transformative—than
the new, putatively scientific discourse of contract and natural rights. Whereas Grotius and Hobbes sought to apply scientific
method to the realm of politics, Descartes adapted baroque politics to his new mechanistic science of the body, and in doing
so, transformed them both. In this way, Passions de l’
âme anticipated a new paradigm of government as well as self-government.
Although Elisabeth was first won over by Descartes’s work in epistemology and mathematics, she quickly became dissatisfied with his reluctance to speak more directly to political affairs. It was all very well for Descartes to recommend scientific method and philosophical meditation from his retreat in the country, but how was someone who was engaged in the affairs of the world to follow his recommendations? More important, how relevant were his philosophical notions to the daily lives of those responsible for governing? Increasingly, Elisabeth pressed Descartes “to teach princes how they should govern.”12 She sought his advice, as well, about how to deal with the failure of government. As the exiled daughter of Frederick V, the deposed “Winter King” of Bohemia, Elisabeth was all too familiar with the loss of sovereignty—something she registered physiologically as well as emotionally in her aches and pains and depression.13 Her personal experience was inseparable from her experience of contemporary politics, and both motivated her request for Descartes’s therapeutic advice concerning the passions.
In his early letters to Elisabeth, Descartes parried Elisabeth’s requests for political advice by appealing to the philosopher’s spectatorial relation to current events. Adopting a pose much like that of Seneca in his moral letters, Descartes wrote to Elisabeth that he regarded the turmoil of political events “in the same way that we do comedies.”14 Some months later, in another letter to Elisabeth, he described this attitude of philosophical detachment as having its own pleasures, which he compared once again to a theatrical experience.
It is easy to show that the pleasure of the soul which constitutes happiness is not inseparable from cheerfulness and bodily comfort. This is proved by tragedies, which please us more the sadder they make us, and by bodily exercises like hunting and tennis which are pleasant in spite of being arduous—indeed we see that often the fatigue and exertion involved increase the pleasure. The soul derives contentment from such exercise because in the process it is made aware of its strength, or skill [la force, ou l’adresse], or some other perfection of the body to which it is joined; but the contentment which it finds in weeping at some pitiable and tragic episode in the theater arises chiefly from its impression that it is performing a virtuous action in having compassion for the afflicted. Indeed in general the soul is pleased to feel passions arise in itself no matter what they are, provided it remains in control of them.15
Just as the painful exercise of the body gives pleasure because it makes us conscious of our strength or skill, so tears at the theater give rise to contentment because they allow us to see ourselves as compassionate. Moreover, the soul takes pleasure in all excitations of the passions, as long as it remains in control. Here the argument is not so much that detachment will facilitate practical intervention, but rather that the theatrical experience of, or distance on, one’s own passions will facilitate self-regard or contentment. This advice had obvious relevance to Elisabeth’s own morose state of mind, but did not address her larger political concerns.
In response, Elisabeth objected that Descartes had conflated theater and life. It is true that we naturally enjoy having our passions excited. But the pleasure we derive from watching sad spectacles depends on the fact that they are not real. If these spectacles were real, and provoked real and potentially harmful actions on our part, she argued, we would not be able to take pleasure in them: “And this, in my judgment, is the reason tragedies please us more, the more sadness they cause, because we know that this sadness will not be so extreme [violent] as to lead us to foolish actions, nor so lasting as to affect our health” (110).
In September 1646, Elisabeth grew tired of letting Descartes hide behind the mask of the philosopher. Instead, she explicitly requested that he give his opinion about Machiavelli’s Prince, and Descartes complied. The letter is a virtuoso political performance, one that suggests that the philosopher- spectator and the theatrical Machiavelli are not as antithetical as one might expect.16 In the course of elaborating his views, Descartes touched on the major themes of baroque political thought: the legitimacy of reason of state, the management of the people’s passions, the relationship between force and ideology, as well as between virtù and virtue. Descartes complained that Machiavelli did not distinguish between the prince who acquires power by legitimate means and the prince who does so by illegitimate means. He rejected Machiavelli’s “very tyrannical precepts.” At the same time, he conceded that “God gives the right to those whom he gives power” [Dieu donne le droit à ceux auxquels il donne la force], and that the justice of an action is determined by the agent’s intention. Even the good prince will need to “join the fox with the lion, and join artifice to force” to preserve the state, as Machiavelli had recommended (146). Crucially important to the prince’s success is persuading his subjects of the justice or necessity of his actions. This will allow him to avoid their “scorn” or “hatred” (144). Descartes thus accepted Machiavelli’s view that the prince must know how to manage the people’s passions and turn them to his own political advantage.17 But he limited the excesses of Machiavellism by presupposing that the prince is not only legitimate but also généreux.18
In his reference to the prince’s générosité or nobleness of mind, Descartes recalls the neo-Stoic ethical ideals advocated by such near contemporaries as Lipsius, Charron, Le Caron, and Du Vair. Here theater is not primarily a figure for illusion and deception, but rather for Stoic self-control. Le Caron declared that “the world is the true theater in which the man who wishes to be called noble and virtuous must exercise himself.” 19 Du Vair proposed a model of Christian neo-Stoicism that advocated political engagement, generosity, and heroic self-sacrifice. By the 1640s the term ge´nérosité would also have suggested the more ambivalent preoccupation with heroism in the tragedies of Corneille.20 But in its dominant meaning, générosité conjured up greatness of soul and the autonomous disposition of the will, which Du Vair described as “a correct disposition of the will to make use of things that present themselves, according to reason” [une droicte disposition de sa volonté à user des choses qui se présentent selon la raison].21 In these neo-Stoic texts, self-government is the precondition of right political government.
By contrast, in his recommendation of politic feigning in the letters on Machiavelli, Descartes draws near to the baroque political advice of the same neo-Stoic authors. In the Politiques, which was translated into French in 1590, the Dutch neo-Stoic Justus Lipsius had advocated “a certain praiseworthy and noble [honnête] deception” in affairs of state, while in his De la sagesse (1600) Pierre Charron offered an extensive account of “political prudence,” which dictated a certain indirection for success in politics. As Charron wrote of the sovereign, who must procure “the common good”: “It is sometimes necessary to shift and dodge, to mix prudence with justice, and as they say, sew to the skin of the lion, if necessary, the skin of the fox” [Il luy faut quelques fois esquiver et gauchir, mesler la prudence avec la justice, et, comme l’on dict, coudre à la peau du lion, si elle ne suffit, la peau du renard].22 The ruler must know how to join force and artifice; he must act his part and manipulate his audience, not least of all by staging awe-inspiring theatrical displays of power. Similar recommendations were put forth by Guez de Balzac in Le prince (1631) and by Gabriel Naudé in Considérations politiques sur les coups d’Estat (1639).23 In these texts, the art of government is explicitly distinguished from the moral art of self-government. Government is not a matter of law, but of tactics and forces; and theater is not a figure for philosophical speculation but rather politic intrigue.
The letters on Machiavelli thus encompass a twofold attitude towards politics and theater. On the one hand, we find an insistence on the rational self-control of the Stoic sage. Here the letters gesture towards the sublime display of virtue and self-mastery associated with the ideal humanist ruler. On the other hand, we find the pragmatic consideration of political circumstances that authorizes a rationality specific to politics, a baroque “reason of state” divorced from the ethical injunctions of Stoicism. Whence the recommendation of politic feigning and the manipulation of the people’s passions. These two aspects of theater—deception and display, the manipulation of force and the celebration of self-mastery—encapsulate the two poles of contemporary neo-Stoic thought. They also, as we began to see in the remarks on theater in the correspondence with Elisabeth, capture the ambivalence of Descartes’s account of the mind-body relation.
Descartes’s account of human nature in the Traité de l’homme illustrates the relevance of baroque political thought, with its complex metaphor of the theater, to Cartesian dualism. In this work, Descartes compares the mechanism of the human body to those mechanical devices that formed part of the theatrical display of the sovereign’s power in the royal gardens. At the same time, the treatise shows how Descartes fundamentally alters the traditional early modern understanding of spectacles of state, familiar to us, for example, from Elizabethan processions and the great royal entries of Louis XIII. In Descartes’s new garden-theater, the relationship between sovereign and subject is subtly transformed: instead of dramatizing his power through spectacles of state, the sovereign acts from behind the scenes. Instead of consciously imitating the sovereign’s exemplary self-mastery, the king’s subject is manipulated at a distance through a series of mechanical devices. Here is Descartes comparing the mechanism of animal spirits to the royal gardens:
Now in the same proportion as the animal spirits enter the cavities of the brain, they pass from there into the pores of its substance, and from these pores into the nerves. And depending on the varying amounts which enter (or merely tend to enter) some nerves more than others, the spirits have the power to change the shapes of the muscles in which the nerves are embedded, and by this means to move all the limbs. Similarly you may have observed in the grottos and fountains in the royal gardens that the mere force with which the water is driven as it emerges from its source is sufficient to move various machines, and even to make them play certain instruments or utter certain words depending on the various arrangements of the pipes through which the water is conducted.
A little later in the same text, Descartes compares the effects of external objects on the senses to strangers entering into the royal gardens and causing—“without thinking” [sans y penser]—the mechanical movements of the figures in the grottos and fountains:
External objects, which by their mere presence stimulate its [the body’s] sense organs and thereby cause them to move in many different ways depending on how the parts of its brain are disposed, are like visitors who enter the grottos of these fountains and unwittingly cause the movements which take place before their eyes. For they cannot enter without stepping on certain tiles which are so arranged that if, for example, they approach a Diana who is bathing they will cause her to hide in the reeds, and if they move forward to pursue her they will cause a Neptune to advance and threaten them with his trident; or if they go in another direction, they will cause a sea-monster to emerge and spew water onto their faces; or other such things according to the whim of the engineers who made the fountains.24
Descartes then goes on to explain that the soul (which has its royal “seat” in the pineal gland) is to the body-machine as the fountain-maker is to his mechanical fountain.25 In this elaborate comparison of the soul-body relation to the royal gardens, the mechanical play of forces—of the automata—is designed to display the authority of the sovereign/artificer. At the same time, however, other aspects of the scene curiously undermine this authority. With the appearance of the king’s subject as visitor to the gardens, the analogy between soul and body, and sovereign and subject, begins to break down: the sovereign’s soul may be in control of the spectacle, but the subject’s soul is both isolated from and dependent on material sensations that may deceive the soul or subject it to a mechanical play of forces.26 This play of forces is responsible for theatrical illusion and deception—a deception that cannot fail to suggest its evil twin, the malin génie. Ironically, the only figure of authority who actually appears in the scene—Neptune—is himself a mere mechanical effect of pressure on the garden tiles, while the only human agent who appears is entirely deprived of thought: “sans y penser.” In this display of control by the sovereign soul, Descartes insinuates what Alain Vizier has called “the existence of an automatism proper to thought,” an automatism that Descartes elsewhere calls a “passion.”27 This automatism is both the problem Descartes sets out to analyze in Les passions de l’âme, and his proposed solution. But it is a solution that fundamentally recasts our understanding of the political subject. In Passions de l’âme, politics is less a matter for the sovereign than for the self-disciplining subject, and discipline is less a matter of neo-Stoic virtue than of indirection and force.
Les Passions de l’âme is not a treatise on politics, but in obvious ways it grows out of the correspondence with Elisabeth. As in the correspondence, Descartes responds to Elisabeth’s concerns about “those in charge of governing,” who do not have the leisure to examine the most expedient course of action and who are not able to “judge without passion.” In both the treatise and the letters, action in the realm of politics poses an obstacle to Cartesian ethics in the form of passions such as “regrets and repentance” that are not easily mastered.28 In both, the passions are the material of politics, which sovereign and subject need to control. In both, Descartes singles out the passion of religious zeal, which has inspired “the greatest crimes that men can commit, such as betraying cities, killing princes, and exterminating entire peoples just because they do not accept their opinions” (art. 190). As in the Lettre-Préface to his Principes, the religious wars resulting from the passion of zeal are one motive for composing Passions de l’âme.
So far, this description makes Descartes’s text sound like any of the numerous treatises on the passions published during the 1640s in France. These treatises often commented, directly or indirectly, on the contemporary political debate surrounding Richelieu’s policies of raison d’état and the court ethos of aristocratic “gloire.”29 One of the most explicit was Jean-Franc¸ois Senault’s L’usage des passions (1641). Although Senault recommended the use rather than the Stoic suppression of the passions, he also drew on the well-worn trope of the body politic to compare Richelieu’s management of the people to the way sovereign reason rules over the passions.30 In contrast, Descartes avoids this sort of clichéd analogy. Rather than elaborating a comparison between the state and the individual, Descartes celebrates the political benefits of scientific method. Writing with the religious violence of the Thirty Years’ War clearly in mind, Descartes voices his hope that a scientific treatment of the passions, a treatment “en physician” rather than as a moral philosopher, will provide a scientific basis for the management of the passions and thus a scientific basis for generosity or nobility of soul, and the promotion of peace.31
Descartes begins with a dualist account, according to which the soul is an immaterial substance, while the body is extended. The question is then how to establish a relation between the soul and the body, and the passions are one answer. According to Descartes, the passions of the soul broadly construed are the ways in which the soul is affected or acted on by the body. In this broad sense, the passions include various kinds of perceptions, which Descartes classifies in the following way: perceptions of external objects; bodily sensations, such as hunger or pain; involuntary memory and imaginings; and perceptions that seem to have no location other than the soul itself.32 These last are passions in the narrow sense of the term.33 As in the Traité de l’homme, Descartes then goes on to give a mechanistic account of how passions arise in the soul by means of “animal spirits” that move the pineal gland. He also provides a functionalist account of the passions as modes of perception of an object’s utility or harm. In both cases, we can see the passions as revealing the internal political relations between body and soul. In the mechanistic account, the passions are spirits or forces within the soul that act on the soul’s faculties of judgment and will, which must in turn learn to master them (art. 212). In the functionalist account, the passions communicate the body’s interests to the soul, moving it to consent and to contribute to actions that preserve the body. The passions also provide the soul with evidence of its relations to others (art. 137, art. 206). From this analysis of internal relations, Descartes moves outward again in part III of the treatise to the social and political relations in which all individuals are implicated. Here the passions are not simply ways in which the body affects the soul; they are social modes of interaction: we relate to our friends and enemies, our fellow citizens and our superiors, with pity, fear, contempt, veneration, cowardice, or emulation.
Although Descartes avoids the body-politic metaphors of Senault and others in Passions, baroque politics are everywhere in the treatise. In particular, the baroque political problem of the relationship between force and representation appears in Descartes’s discussion of the relations between body and soul. This problem is initially discussed solely in mechanistic and materialist terms: just as the contemporary political question is how to move from force to representation—both how to legitimate the exercise of force and how to make the play of political forces intelligible—so Descartes wants to explain how the mechanics of the body communicates with the incorporeal locus of reason, and specifically what the relationship is between the mechanics of the passions—the play of forces—and the intelligible order of the soul.34 Ultimately, however, Descartes intends his analysis of the relation of force to representation to raise the question of the relationship between mechanical force and virtue. For humans as embodied creatures, the political question is the following: how are creatures who are moved or determined by their passions also capable of reflection on and control of their passions? What is the relationship between the determinism of the passions and the capacity for voluntary action, which is to say the capacity for virtue, political or otherwise?
The Cartesian ideal of genérosité or nobility of soul, which involves a kind of theatrical distance on the self, is one answer to this question. In Book III, Descartes tells us that self-esteem, a subspecies of the passion of wonder (art. 150), is a good opinion of oneself. He then explains that one can only rightly esteem oneself if one is generous. Generosity comes from understanding “that there is nothing which truly belongs to him but this free control of his volitions, and no reason why he ought to be praised or blamed except that he uses it well or badly” (art. 153). It also comes from feeling “within himself a firm and constant resolution to use it well, that is . . . to follow virtue perfectly” (art. 153).35 As both a passion and a virtue, understanding and feeling, generosity is the moral and affective equivalent of the pineal gland—the meeting place of soul and body, philosophy and ethics, knowledge and resolution, virtue and virtù . Generosity also establishes a link between ethics and politics, as when Descartes explicitly equates generosity with the political virtue of justice: “For the more noble and generous one’s soul is, the greater one’s inclination is to render everyone his own,” unlike the servile individual who disdains authority, and passes from impiety to superstition and back again (art. 164). Descartes also tell us that the generous are “naturally inclined to do great things, and yet to undertake nothing they do not feel themselves capable of” (art. 156). The potential conflict between an aristocratic ethos of great deeds and the Stoic “undertak[ing] nothing they do not feel themselves capable of” is then displaced by being recast in terms of traditional Christian ethics: the generous “esteem nothing more highly than doing good to other men and for this reason scorning their own interest” (art. 156). Heroic theater is internalized in the satisfying spectacle of one’s transcendence of individual interest.
Descartes develops this conceit in articles 186 and 187 on the passion of pity. Descartes claims that those are most subject to pity who imagine the sufferings of others as happening to them: “Those who feel very weak and very much subject to fortune’s adversities seem to be more inclined to this passion than others are, because they represent the misfortunes of others to themselves as possibly happening to them; thus they are moved to pity by the love they bear to themselves rather than by that which they have for others” (art. 186). In contrast, the generous man has a different theatrical experience, one in which pity is not based on identification with the sufferer, construed as the love one bears to oneself. For the generous man,
the sadness in this pity is not bitter; like that caused by the fateful actions we see represented on the stage, it is more on the outside and in the senses than in the inside of the soul—which all the while has the satisfaction of thinking it is doing its duty in being compassionate to the afflicted. Now there is a difference present here: whereas the common person has compassion for those who lament because he thinks the misfortunes they suffer are extremely grievous, the main object of the pity of the greatest men is the weakness of those they see lamenting.
As in Descartes’s correspondence with Elisabeth, theater is here employed as a metaphor for a Stoic distance on the passions, a distance that itself yields the satisfaction of seeing oneself as virtuous. The generousman does not pity real-life suffering, just as he does not pity the sufferings he sees represented on the stage; instead, he pities those who experience pity in the wrong way. These sentimental individuals are incapable of the higher pleasure or ethical satisfaction of knowing one is doing one’s duty.36
Elsewhere in Passions de l’
âme, however, Descartes complicates this Stoic use of theater as a metaphor for the philosopher’s mastery of the passions—his
own and others. I have in mind the strange example of article 147. In this article, Descartes distinguishes the passions from
what he calls émotions intérieures, which are the excitations the soul feels when it reflects on its own perceptions or operations.37 Although he has just argued that the passions tell us what is beneficial or harmful, he now asserts that “our good and our
ill depend principally on inner excitations, which are excited in the soul only by the soul itself.”
Descartes gives as his example of émotions intérieures the husband who experiences joy at mourning his dead wife:
although these excitations of the soul [émotions de l’âme] are often joined with the passions that are like them, they may also frequently be found with others, and may even originate from those that are in opposition to them. For example, when a husband mourns his dead wife, whom (as sometimes happens) he would be upset to see resuscitated, it may be that his heart is constricted by the sadness which funeral trappings and the absence of a person to whose company he was accustomed excite in him; and it may be that some remnants of love or pity, presented to his imagination, draw genuine tears from his eyes—in spite of the fact that at the same time he feels a secret joy in the innermost depths of his soul, whose excitation has so much power that the sadness and tears accompanying it can diminish none of its strength. And when we read of unusual adventures in a book or see them represented on a stage, this sometimes excites sadness in us, sometimes joy or love or hatred, and in general all the passions, according to the diversity of the objects offered to our imagination; but along with this we have the pleasure of feeling them excited in us, and this pleasure is an intellectual joy, which can originate from sadness as well as from any of the other passions.
The husband feels both sadness, prompted by the funeral trappings and the loss of his customary companion; and remnants of love or pity, prompted by the image that memory presents to the imagination. Descartes goes out of his way to emphasize that these give rise to real tears—“de véritables larmes”—a phrase that recalls his earlier insistence that we cannot be deceived by the passions as we can be by our perceptions (art. 26). Our perceptions of external objects may be falsely referred to those objects, but our passions are always correctly referred to the soul. Or, to put this more colloquially, our perceptions may be inaccurate, but if we feel certain passions, we must actually feel them. Descartes then tells us that this complex of emotions coexists with “a secret” or “intellectual joy”—a kind of metapassion that comes from feeling the primary passions excited in us. This metapassion is one of those émotions intérieures, which are excited in the soul when it reflects on its own operations.
What is striking about the description of the mourning husband is that Descartes does not moralize the example.38 He does not offer a judgment about the husband’s passions, as he does in his discussion of pity in article 186. Nor does he represent the husband’s sadness as following from a judgment that his marriage was, after all, a good one. Instead, he describes how the husband’s tears are prompted by the funeral trappings and the representation of some remnants of love in his imagination. And he describes the secret joy in terms of its power or strength, which overcomes the primary passion of sadness. On the one hand, we have theater; on the other hand, we have force. The juxtaposition of the mourning husband to the experience of reading a book or going to the theater makes it clear that the husband’s experience of his wife’s funeral, and of his own response, is an essentially theatrical one. The question is, how should this theatrical experience be interpreted?
As though to acknowledge Princess Elisabeth’s remark (in the letter quoted earlier) that theatrical experiences are pleasurable because they are not real, Descartes stresses that the husband experiences joy in mourning his dead wife even though (or precisely because) he would be upset to see her resuscitated. That is, his mourning does not necessarily reflect his real feelings about his wife. Descartes’s language suggests that his tears are a mere reflex, a physiological response to the funeral trappings and his own imagination: his heart is constricted by sadness; his tears are prompted by remnants of love or pity. This is of course what makes them “real tears,” but also what makes them morally problematic. In responding to the funeral and his marriage as though to the theater, the husband is being hypocritical—in the root sense of hypokrites: an actor who can take pleasure in his own experience of certain artificially or mechanically induced emotions. The clause, then, in which Descartes intimates that the husband is hypocritical is Descartes’s concession to Elisabeth that the feelings prompted by the theater are different from those that would be prompted by the same experiences in real life and are morally problematic for that reason. The irony, of course, is that the husband really is at his wife’s funeral, he just experiences it as though it were a play.
Descartes then offers us two responses to the hypocritical husband, two responses to Elisabeth’s objections about the morally problematic conflation of theater and life. In the first response, he describes the relationship between the passions and the émotions intérieures as a calculus of forces. First, he tells us that the husband “feels a secret joy in the innermost depths of his soul, whose excitation has so much power that the sadness and tears accompanying it can diminish none of its strength.” Similarly, he tells us that, when we go to the theater, we not only feel discrete passions but “along with this we have the pleasure of feeling them excited in us, and this pleasure is an intellectual joy, which can originate from sadness as well as from any of the other passions.” Intellectual joy is a metapassion, a pleasure we take in feeling our own passions or, as the sentence about the husband suggests, a pleasure whose force is greater than any individual passion.
In article 148, Descartes tries to moralize or legitimize this experience of power by linking it to an understanding of “perfection”:
Now, inasmuch as these inner excitations affect us more intimately and consequently have much more power over us than the passions from which they differ but are found with them, it is certain that, provided our soul always has what it takes to be content in its interior, none of the disturbances that come from elsewhere have any power to harm it. On the contrary, they serve to increase its joy, for in seeing that it cannot be injured by them it comes to understand its perfection. And in order that our soul may thus have what it takes to be content, it needs only to follow virtue diligently.
This passage is exemplary of the treatise’s indecision concerning the relationship of force to ethics. In arguing that the power of the soul derives from representing to itself the idea of perfection, Descartes seems to be echoing the famous passage from Lucretius, De rerum natura, book 2, where the spectator looks on a storm-tossed ship from the vantage of a safe promontory. This passage was regularly cited in the seventeenth-century discussions of tragic pleasure, particularly by those who wanted to advance an amoral account of tragic pleasure as analogous to the pleasure of self-preservation.39 But in linking this pleasure to an idea of perfection, Descartes also anticipates the Kantian notion of the sublime, in which reason comes to understand its higher destiny by the very fact that the individual can imagine and therefore transcend his own physical destruction. If we read article 148 as a gloss on the mourning husband, we could say that what the husband understands—what gives him intellectual joy—is the recognition that he can’t be harmed by his feelings of sadness. Although Descartes qualifies his potentially amoral calculus of forces in the last sentence in the quotation above, by attributing the satisfaction and contentment of the individual not simply to greater power but to the firm and constant resolution to act virtuously, he mentioned no such resolution in discussing the mourning husband. The ethical explanation is belated, and not entirely convincing.40
In this light, the distinction between passions and émotions intérieures is another manifestation of Descartes’s ambivalence about the mind-body relation. In the aftermath of his emphasis on the mediating power of the passions, the idea of émotions intérieures appears designed to preserve the soul’s inviolability and to guarantee the autonomy of the moral subject, whose virtue is not affected by external events or contaminated by the passions but is instead constituted precisely by the act of self-reflection, that is, reflection on the “free control of [one’s] volitions.” This notion of self-reflection, uncontaminated by the passions, is what we might call the idealist moment in Descartes. But no sooner has Descartes introduced this distinction than he complicates it by his illustration of the mourning husband. For Descartes’s example of the autonomous, self-reflexive master of the passions is not presented in the first instance in moral terms but in terms of greater power. The Cartesian act of self-reflection is less a matter of neo-Stoic autonomy than of a baroque politics of force.
In Book III, Descartes distinguishes between generosity, based on correct judgment, and pride, which is based on false judgment, in a way that has implications for the unruly example of the mournful husband. Articles 157 and 158 suggest that the husband would be wrong to esteem himself for experiencing a passion that has nothing to do with generosity: “whatever may be the cause for which we esteem ourselves, if it is anything other than the volition we feel within ourselves always to make good use of our free will, from which I have said generosity arises, it always produces a most blameworthy pride.” Whether the husband feels joy in his freedom from the force of sorrowful passions, or joy in feeling the sorrowful passion, in neither case is this joy clearly linked to a disposition to virtue.
Article 147 thus provides a different account of what it means to have a theatrical experience of the passions from that of the generous man. Rather than serving to moralize admiration or self-regard—as the virtue of generosity does—the example of the mourning husband shows instead the moral ambiguity of such self-regard. For in ascribing the husband’s tears to a physiological reflex, the example suggests that the husband cannot equate theatrical distance with Stoic mastery. Instead, the theatrical experience produces—through a relation of forces—a sense of virtù or power that cannot be simply assimilated to moral virtue.41
We can now see that the example of the mourning husband is part of a historical shift in the understanding of the ethical and political utility of the theater. In the early modern period, the pleasures of tragedy were primarily interpreted in ethical terms: tragedy instructed about virtue and vice both in its explicit plot and in its cathartic effect, by which it purged or moderated those passions that hindered ethical action. Such a moralizing interpretation of tragedy conveyed obvious lessons to both subjects and sovereigns. By the middle of the seventeenth century, this moralizing explanation was being challenged by Descartes’s and Hobbes’s materialist accounts of the passions. Later in the century, followers of Descartes such as Rapin and Dennis explained the effects of tragedy in terms of the natural delight we take in the “sheer physical stimulation of the animal spirits.” But in Passions de l’âme, we see that such an interpretation of the theater was not simply an extrapolation from Descartes; it was Descartes’s own chosen analogy for the workings of the passions.42
Even more important, the example of the mourning husband also suggests a shift in the understanding of the relationship of government and self-government. If we think back to the description of the royal gardens in the Traité de l’homme, we can compare the complicated emotional state of the husband to the relationship between the sovereign and subject. In his experience of intellectual joy, the husband is like the sovereign who takes intellectual pleasure in observing the unwitting visitor. Yet, in responding reflexively to the funeral trappings, the husband is also like the visitor to the royal gardens who triggers the mechanical display of waterworks without thinking. In fact, we might think of the husband’s tears as a miniature version of the royal fountains. In neither case can the theatrical scene be assimilated to an older model of Stoic self-government. Instead, Cartesian theater anticipates a new model of social and political order in which government is not exercised from on high by a sovereign but rather exercised through indirect mechanisms and diffused throughout the body politic.
The example of the mourning husband in turn bears on our understanding of generosity. As we have seen, générosité is a passion insofar as it involves self-love or self-esteem. It is a virtue insofar as this self-esteem is legitimate—that is, based on a correct judgment of the good, and a firm and constant resolution to use one’s will to act in accordance with the good (art. 48).43 Self-esteem for any other reason is not generosity but rather pride (art. 157). The generous man knows how to control his passions and channel them into the service of reason. The problem, of course, as we see in article 147 and elsewhere, is that the passions cannot be directly controlled by an act of the will (art. 45). And this problem leads in turn to the characteristic dilemma of Descartes’s Christianized neo-Stoicism. Either virtue is simply defined as the intention or resolution to do well, without regard for success or the practical results of one’s actions (art. 146, art. 156), or 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 (art. 45).
In this context, Descartes reveals his discovery of the principle of association or habituation: habituation is the psychological equivalent of the combination of force and artifice that Descartes discussed in the letter on Machiavelli (arts. 44, 50, 107, 211). Just as one cannot will to dilate one’s pupils but can trick oneself into doing so by focusing on a distant object, so “our passions cannot . . . be directly excited or displaced by the action of our will, but they can be indirectly by the representation of things which are usually joined with the passions we will to have. . . . Thus, in order to excite boldness and displace fear in oneself, it is not sufficient to have the volition to do so—one must apply oneself to attend to reasons, objects, or precedents that convince [one] that the peril is not great, that there is always more security in defense than in flight, that one will have glory and joy from having conquered” (arts. 44 and 45). In short, “there is such a connection between our soul and our body that when we have once joined some bodily action with some thought, one of the two is never present to us afterwards without the other also being present” (art. 50). Precisely for this reason, the mechanism of association can be used to retrain the mind to have different thoughts in connection with the same bodily stimuli.44 The soul is once again in the position of a theatrical spectator watching various “representations”; but the spectator here is located somewhere between the Stoic sage and the mourning husband, who only appears to be virtuous as a result of his automatic emotional response. The mechanism of association may ultimately convert virtù into virtue, the play of forces into representation, but the cost of doing so is the dethroning of the sovereign soul or Stoic sage who directly masters the passions by force of will.45
As we have seen, in exploring the problem of how to control the passions, Descartes alternates between an ideal of generosity or wonder at our capacity to act according to free will, and a mechanistic manipulation of the passions. This alternation is reflected in Descartes’s shifting use of the metaphor of the theater. In contrast to the correspondence with Elisabeth, in Passions Descartes uses his metaphor of the theater to complicate his own project of mastery and generosity. At times, in Passions de l’âme, theater is a metaphor for the Stoic’s spectator relationship to the external world; at other times, theater is the locus of a conceptual disturbance—one might even say, a dramatic conflict—between the ideas or representations of the soul and the force of the body-machine. Far from simply asserting a Stoic notion of reason as the remedy for political passions, Descartes gives us an instrumental conception of reason as the manipulator of the passions. In elaborating his principle of association, he even appears to suggest that the body might be a better sovereign than the soul. The Descartes who recommends the principle of association or habituation as the chief discovery of the Passions recalls the politic advice of Machiavelli, Lipsius, or Charron. But with a difference. Whereas baroque politics involves a rationality intrinsic to politics, a reason of state, dealing with the passions requires amechanistic principle of association that undercuts any self-aggrandizing claims to virtue or, for that matter, virtù .
The Passions de l’âme deserves to be seen as a contribution to and transformation of this early modern politic literature. Although writers such as Lipsius and Charron very often treated the passions moralistically, as something to be stoically mastered or channeled, they were also quite capable of treating the realm of politics in a proto-scientific fashion, as requiring a non-moralizing, dispassionate method of observation and control. As we have seen, in his own scientific treatment of the passions, Descartes applies the insights of neo-Stoic politics to the realm of the passions and, in doing so, transforms them both. Where Descartes differs from his contemporaries is in his internalization of baroque politics.46 The subject of Passions de l’âme is not the prince who rules over his people and territory, but rather the vexed relation of the soul to the body. Although, in some ways, the generous man involves a familiar, even old-fashioned aristocratic ideal of self-mastery, in other ways the text takes as its subject the modern individual, whose body has become a foreign territory, one that requires new indirect techniques of government. These indirect techniques are very far from Descartes’s original ambition to establish ethics on a secure scientific basis. But the distance Descartes has traveled should not necessarily be construed as a sign of failure. In internalizing baroque politics, Descartes not only moves beyond the baroque prince’s use of indirect techniques to control his unruly subjects. He also moves beyond Hobbes’s and Grotius “modern” juridical language of rights, obligations, and consent, to a conception of government and self-government based on units of energy, mechanical operations, relations of forces. Because he transfers the prudential techniques of Machiavelli, Lipsius, Charron, and Senault to the internal politics of body and soul, Descartes’s Passions de l’âme deserves to be seen as one of the inaugurating texts of a new regime of politics, one inscribed in the body itself.