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  • Descartes’s Ballet: His Doctrine of the Will and His Political Philosophy
  • Julie Walsh
Richard A. Watson. Descartes’s Ballet: His Doctrine of the Will and His Political Philosophy. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2007. Pp. xiii + 133. Cloth, $27.00.

Richard Watson’s Descartes’s Ballet engages three main questions uncommon to traditional Cartesian scholarship: Did Descartes script La Naissance de la Paix, the ballet performed in honor of Queen Christina’s twenty-third birthday in December 1649? Did Descartes have [End Page 139] a political philosophy? Did Descartes read the French dramatist Pierre Corneille? Watson answers no, yes, and yes.

By emphasizing the complete lack of evidence that Descartes wrote La Naissance de la Paix, Watson disarms the suggestion made by Adrien Baillet, Descartes’s seventeenth-century biographer, that Descartes authored the ballet. Watson further suggests that only someone who was immersed in the subtleties of political culture in the Swedish court and was in Christina’s confidence could have written it. And Descartes, he argues, could not have met this description. Had it been written by Descartes, the ballet could have provided a foundation on which to build an interpretation of Cartesian political philosophy. Without it, explicit textual support for the construction of Descartes’s political philosophy is nonexistent. Undaunted by the lack of texts, Watson nevertheless constructs one based largely on the Discourse on Method and Descartes’s life. He suggests that Descartes supported monarchy—benevolent despotism, in fact—while nevertheless holding that the individual is the most important unit in society (99). Aside from the prima facie tension between monarchy and individualism, however, it is difficult to accept this as Descartes’s political philosophy because the position is not discernable in his texts.

If Descartes had written the ballet, it could also motivate an investigation into his poetic and literary influences and a comparison of the philosophical themes expressed in the ballet with those developed in his philosophical texts. Without Descartes’s authorship it is difficult to understand the motivation for Watson’s discussion of Corneille. Watson suggests that, being in the same intellectual milieu, Descartes and Corneille could not have been unacquainted, though he still acknowledges that there is no direct evidence that they were known to one another. Even so, Watson concludes that they influenced each other (85). Perhaps the best reason for investigating whether Descartes and Corneille knew of one another’s works is the conceptual similarity between the austere self-control of Corneillean heroes and Descartes’s writings on the human will, particularly in The Passions of the Soul, where the discussion of the will is focused on its relation to the passions. Watson’s treatment of Descartes’s theory of the will contains the book’s most philosophically interesting remarks.

Watson focuses primarily on Descartes’s prescriptions for controlling the bodily passions and suggests that the sole function of the will is to moderate these passions in human beings. It is only in virtue of having a body, Watson says, that we have a will at all, for a disembodied soul would have no use for this faculty (71). This is a strange statement given Descartes’s frequent references to God’s will, and Watson’s own mentions of God’s will in this section of the book. Furthermore, Descartes’s claim that the human will is like God’s will has motivated much scholarly discussion, particularly concerning whether the human will is capable of both pure freedom of indifference and freedom of spontaneity. An aspect of this problem is determining what counts as an object of volition. Watson says that Cartesian willing is an intentional act (69), but he does not spell out what this means. Given the suggestion that the will is the moderator of the bodily passions, Watson intimates that the objects of volition are grounded in sensory perception—the objects of volition must be the passions. But Watson also acknowledges Descartes’s claim that there are pleasures of the soul that belong to it alone (68), which undermines his interpretation. Part of analyzing Descartes’s notoriously thorny account of free will must include a substantial discussion of the intentional objects of volitional...

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