Descartes's Peepshow

I Minding Descartes

Is Descartes the most misunderstood philosopher in the history of philosophy? To many of us in the business of Descartes scholarship, it certainly seems so. Time and time again, we find ourselves faced with pronouncements about one or another of Descartes's 'errors' — whether the shortcomings of the theater model of consciousness, or the pernicious after-effects of a foundationalism devoted to the transparency of the mental, or the shocking vilification of the body and emotions. Typically these pronouncements are paired with exhortations to overcome the Cartesian X, where 'X' stands for whatever item crucial to enlightenment is currently most misunderstood. That X is some term rarely used and drastically under-thematized in Descartes's corpus seems to matter little outside our narrow circle. We are left feeling like dusty pedants for insisting that Descartes never used the figure of a theater to illustrate consciousness, that the metaphor of foundations underdetermines any epistemological position, and that many other of the 'errors' with which he is charged seem belied by explicit textual statements. And if we turn to the history of reception of Descartes — the centuries-long collection of myriad and often disparaging appraisals² — for evidence that it is less than obvious to the naked eye that Descartes adopted all the positions now attributed to him, we worry that we will encounter that most damning of all philosophical rebuttals: the incredulous stare.

So what is a Descartes scholar to do? Well, she can turn to Deborah Brown's revisionist study of Descartes, which looks at the way his late accounts of the full human person emphasize our embodiment and how that embodiment is manifested through the perceptions qualifying as 'passions' in the strict sense. Brown's book is a welcome shot across the bow of numerous (mis)readings of Descartes, particularly those that assume that the 'Cartesian' theory of mind supposedly advanced by the second installment of the Meditations on First Philosophy represents a fully realized conception of the human person and human lived experience. I applaud this entry into a field that is not crowded enough; Brown's work is apropos, historically informed and philosophically ingenious. It's also full of delightful asides that I wish I had written myself, such as the description of the pedagogy driving many detractors to continue 'to feed Descartes to our children' as akin to 'that of the conscientious parent whose idea of moral instruction is a family outing at a public flogging' (1). That does not mean that I agree with all of the book's particular claims and suggestions; for one, I find the Meditations read 'selon l'ordre des raisons' to offer rather less aid and comfort to the standard line than Brown may suggest. But disagreements of this sort do nothing to lessen my appreciation of the aspirations and achievements of Brown's work; I hope they will simply add spice both to this essay and to our future discussions.³

In many respects, Descartes and the Passionate Mind reads as a manifesto for taking the late Passions of the Soul as seriously as the more widely read Meditations on First Philosophy. By Brown's reckoning, the Meditations describes the roots of Descartes's tree of knowledge (the metaphor introduced in the Principles of Philosophy), whereas the Passions cultivates its fruit-bearing branches. Although she admits that 'there is no getting around the dualism' established in the root system (3), she argues vigorously for the view advanced in the Passions and associated texts of phenomenological monism — an experienced unity of mind and body. This experienced unity is no mere phantasm born of confusion, for it serves a robustly embodied form of rationality that Brown traces in both the theoretical and practical realms. Such embodied rationality makes little use of the suspect traits commonly attributed to the soul alone, e.g., the 'unmediated awareness of the mind and its contents,' 'the transparency of the mental,' and 'the autonomy of the mind' (1). The alternative view...