Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.4 (2001) 308-321

Early Modern Emotion and the Economy of Scarcity

With this preliminary remark Descartes renders human nature in its quintessential modern form: it is something housed in a body subject to the self-evidence of a descriptive science.

According to Descartes what we know is best established through introspection, and so is what we feel. Everyone has experience of the passions "within himself," and therefore it is unnecessary to borrow one's observations from elsewhere in order to discover passion's nature. But ultimately for Descartes, introspection is not about attaching meaning to our emotions in the narrative form of autobiography. It is not like Hobbes's dictum "Nosce teipsum, Read thy self," a prelude to the radical mutation of man's nature required for commonwealth (Leviathan 10), nor is it a primitive form of psychoanalytic introspection. Rather it is a literal "look inside" the body. Thus, to better understand and control those passions that have unfortunately trained to vice, we must understand body mechanics.

To do so, according to Descartes, it is helpful first to identify human activity independent of those passions that are the soul's motivating force. Certain sorts of body movements, such as the blinking of an eye threatened by a poking finger, cannot be affected even by our knowledge that the finger belongs to a benign friend. In this case the machine of our mind is useless, because "the machine of our body is so formed that the movement of this hand towards our eyes excites another movement in our brain, which conducts the animal spirits into the muscles which cause the eyelids to close" (338). Articles 2 through 16 of Descartes's The Passions of the Soul further explain body mechanics independent of the soul: its heat and movement; its vitality and death; the role of blood circulation, muscles, nerves, the heart, and animal spirits; and the "little tubes" or vincula that transport animal spirits between body and brain.

If body mechanics work on reflex, passions are for Descartes forms of retardation. Unlike actions originating from within, such as thirst and hunger, passions of the soul provide space for learning, memory, and judgment. If for instance we see some animal approach us, and

if this figure is very strange and frightful -- that is, if it has a close relationship with the things which have been formerly hurtful to the body, that excites the passion of apprehension in the soul and then that of courage, or else that of fear and consternation according to the particular temperament of the body or the strength of the soul. . . . For in certain persons that disposes the brain in such a way that the spirits reflected from the image thus formed on the gland, proceed thence to take their places partly in the nerves which serve to turn the back and dispose the legs for flight, and partly in those which so increase or diminish the orifices of the heart. (348)

Passions are thus defined as the "perceptions, feelings, or emotions of the soul which we relate specially to it, and which are caused, maintained, and fortified by some movement of the spirits" (344). And since passions are produced by the movement of blood and spirits, they are also accompanied by legible signs, the most salient of which are actions of the eyes and face, changes of color, tremors, languor, swooning, laughter, tears, groans, and sighs (381).

We might ask, with Spinoza, is there not a domain of freedom inserted into the causal chains of human activity (366)? How does Descartes explain why people respond to the same situation differently, some with consternation and some with courage, in the face of a similar physical threat? Ostensibly, Descartes does make room in the mind for both divine ideas and debased habits...