Descartes's Theory of Action, and: Descartes and the Passionate Mind (review)

Descartes, practical philosopher? Not the first description that comes to mind. Yet throughout his career Descartes aimed not only to increase our knowledge but also to guide our conduct. In his early fragments, science and the studium bonae mentis go hand in hand. The Rules offer as a theory of knowledge a method for attaining it. In the Discourse and in the preface to the French Principles, the physical and metaphysical researches of the late 1620s and early 1630s are put in service to the practical sciences — medicine, mechanics, and ethics — that form the branches of the tree of knowledge, from which alone the fruits of knowledge are gathered. The sixth Meditation and the Passions instruct us on the proper use of sensation and feeling.

Descartes does argue that the mind, by virtue merely of being a thing that thinks, is already substance, and thus capable of existing apart from all bodies; he advises us that to think clearly about mind and God we must abstract ourselves from sense and imagination. But he also insists that in this world the mind is intimately joined with the body. Even if in the sciences it attempts to understand the world, so far as it can, just as God does — apart, that is, from anything specifically human — nevertheless in acting the mind naturally adopts, and ought to adopt, the standpoint of a thing doing and suffering with and for its body in the here and now.

The two books under review take as their subject not the self-contemplating subject of the cogito, nor the pure reasoner of geometry, but the self as agent — embodied and striving toward virtue in Brown's work, free but cooperating with God's will in Davenport's. That orientation serves them well in seeing Descartes whole. The dualisms erroneously foisted upon him — reason against the passions, mind against body — are seen mostly to be artifacts of interpretation. Descartes does not isolate reasoning from feeling, nor does he remove the mind from a world to which it would henceforth stand as a mere spectator. The "passionate mind" (Brown, 10) sees itself not as a mind operating a machine, but as a genuime union of thought and extension. The Cartesian self, moreover, in attaining virtue, takes others' ends as its own, and God's first of all: it strives to act in accord with what it perceives to be the divine will (Davenport, 298).

Davenport takes acting, not perceiving or knowing, to be the foundation of Descartes's theory of mind. The experience of acting exhibits to me my freedom, and the act of which I am aware is automatically my act: Lichtenberg's observation that the cogito ought to be construed to show only that there is thought, and not that "I think," is no longer troublesome. Davenport places Descartes's theory into the context of the French school of spirituality. François de Sales and others made the accomplishment of a genuinely free will, in service to God, the basis of their spiritual project. A number of points in Descartes's doctrine — his emphasis on resoluteness, his treatment of suspension of judgment, his view that we are most free when most strongly inclined by reason — are illuminated by reference to his contemporaries in the Catholic Reformation. Davenport fits together a number of the usual themes — radical doubt, suspension of judgment, freedom, and the substantiality of the soul — into an interpretation that not only offers solutions to some standard puzzles but also shows that the religious background of Descartes's philosophy cannot be dispensed with.

Brown's first chapter is entitled "Volo ergo sum," and from this one might suppose that her topic would overlap greatly with Davenport's. In fact what follows...