Cartesian Psychophysics and the Whole Nature of Man

On Descartess Passions of the Soul

By (author) Richard F. Hassing

Publication date:

31 August 2017

Length of book:

278 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9781498522373

In The Passions of the Soul Descartes proclaims his intention to explain the passions “only as a Physicist,” and titles Part I “About the passions in general, and incidentally about the whole nature of man”—not an incidental item. Two questions orient the present inquiry: What does Descartes mean by “the whole nature of man,” and how does a general theory of the human emotions based on his physics account for it? Not surprisingly, Descartes does not fulfill the letter of his intention; rather, he explains the passions “only [partly] as a Physicist.” The other part of his study—irreducible to any physics—consists in his own analysis of the life of the human being as union of soul and body. The resulting account is an unusual combination of scientific (hypothetico-deductive) psychophysics and prescientific insight into human experience. In it, a quasi-mechanical theory of the impact of imagination on passion and volition is combined with a distinctive emphasis on the human propensity to esteem what we imagine to be great. Human history and therewith “the whole [problematic] nature of man” is constituted in significant measure by the particular and variable objects of esteem. The correction and improvement of our nature is the aim of Descartes’s culminating doctrine of the one thing that is truly estimable: the firm and constant resolution to use well (autonomously) one’s own (individual) powers of cognition and volition. With the return of religious war The Passions of the Soul is newly relevant.

1 Background: What was Rejected?
2 Early Cartesian Psychophysics: The Treatise of Man
3 Baseline Teleology: Sensation and the Teaching of Nature in Meditation 6
4 Human Difference: Speech and the “True Man” in Discourse 5
5 The Passions of the Soul, Part I, aa. 1–44: General Theory of the Passions (the Use of Physics)
6 The Passions of the Soul, Part I, aa. 45–50: The Soul’s Power in Relation to its Passions
(Leaving Physics Behind)
Interim Conclusions: “the Whole Nature of Man” or Descartes’s Final Dualism
7 The Passions of the Soul, Part II, aa. 51–67: The Causes, Use, and Derivation of the Principal
Passions (to the Standpoint of the Self-Conscious I)
8 Art. 68: On Descartes’s Rejection of the Distinction between Concupiscible and Irascible
Appetites (art. 47, continued)
9 Arts. 144–146: Fortune, Providence, and the Regulation of Desire (a Theological
Accompaniment to the Self-Conscious I)
10 On Generosity and the Meaning of Cartesian Individualism (Wholes, Parts, and the
Redirection of Thumos)
11 Gravitas: Autobiography of a Childhood but Persistent Prejudice (the Psychogenesis of
Anthropomorphism)
Conclusion
Appendix Descartes: Concepts Engineer

Richard Hassing’s monograph is to my knowledge the first full-length study of Descartes’s Passions of the Soul…. Hassing’s excellent study should be of interest not just to Descartes scholars, although that group clearly is its primary intended audience, but to anyone interested in the Cartesian origins of modern self.