Cartesian Corporeality and (Aesth)Ethics

Abstract

Founded on the dualism elaborated in Descartes's early metaphysical writings, such as the Discours de la méthode and the Méditations, most studies of corporeality in Descartes delimit the alienated body according to its mechanical functions. His later writings on ethics and the passions reappropriate the body for the subject and emphasize the sensible or “aesthetic” functions of corporeality. By analyzing Descartes's correspondence with Elisabeth of Bohemia during the last five years of his life and his late treatise Les passions de l'âme, this study examines the construction of the Cartesian aesthetic body and explores the ways in which that body, rather than the mechanical body, produces the ethical individual in society, a subject–body. Displacing the Aristotelian concept of sensus communis ‘common sense,’ Descartes turns the body into the source and target of affective ethical habit. I argue that Descartes's ethical doctrine is based on the cultivation, development, and deployment of that aesthetic body. (ERK)