Generosity and the Utility of the Passions: Cartesian Ethics in Restoration England

Abstract

Les Passions de l'Ame was the second of Descartes's works to be translated into English, appearing in 1650 just a year after the original French editions had been printed. Yet despite its precipitate appearance, historians have generally ignored this book (and the story of Cartesian ethics to which it gives rise) in charting the narrative of England's reception of Descartes.1 Most such narratives begin, instead, by recording Descartes's acquaintance with Digby, Newcastle and Hobbes, or the circulation of the Meditations and Principes amongst scholars of Oxford and Cambridge and the Royal Society. Ever since Lamprecht established the agenda for histories of this sort in a seminal essay of 1935,2 studies of Descartes's English reception have then, typically, proceeded to emphasise not the Frenchman's ethics but the contentions occasioned by his adoption of a purely mechanistic natural philosophy, or by his differentiation between corporeal and spiritual substances on the grounds that the one is an extended, the other a thinking thing.3 Henry More's responses to Carte-sianism, especially, have attracted numerous commentators whose analyses all focus on these metaphysical concerns.4 Despite the fact that Descartes made a point of drawing More's attention to Les Passions in a letter of 15 April 1649,5 and notwithstanding, too, More's claim to have read it with Lord Conway whilst ambling in the Jardins du Luxembourg,6 only three commentators - Tulloch, de Pauley and Fiering - have broached the question of that book's relevance to More's Enchiridion Ethicum.7 Similarly, only Saveson has noted the part played by Passions in John Smith's ethics.8Where Saveson, Tulloch et al. cite two isolated examples, the aim of this essay is to trace the larger story of Restoration England's engagement with Descartes's theory of the emotions, a story which connects More and Smith to the physicians, Walter Charleton and William Ramesey, both of whom - though the fact has not hitherto been noticed - incorporated extensive material from Passions into their own treatises on the affections. Both More and Smith found in Descartes the rationale for a moral valorisation of the passions, and More exploited this to complement his sensuous and markedly affective conception of the boniform faculty. Ramesey and Charleton, too, took from the Frenchman a demonstration of the passions' ethical worth, but they also emphasised the latter's physiological usefulness. Furthermore, they extracted from Passions Descartes's influential celebration of 'generosite' - a passion-cum-virtue which (like More's boniform faculty) could be lined up in opposition to that Hobbesian egotism identified by all these writers as so lamentable a feature of their own milieu. Such, then, are my concerns, but before turning to them I sketch Descartes's theory of the passions.Les Passions de l'AmeFor all his interest in dualism Descartes followed Aristotle's De Anima 413a8-9 in conceding in his sixth meditation, 'ie ne suis pas seulement loge dans mon corps, ainsi qu'vn pilote en son nauire, mais ... ie luy suis conioint tres-etroittement & tellement confondu & mesle, que ie compose comme vn seul tout auec luy' (AT 9i.64). If the soul's only task were to move the bodily members, if it perceived corporeal pain with equanimity (as a matter in which it was not ultimately concerned), it might indeed be but a pilot. However, in reality man's experience is that the soul, joined as it is to every part of the body through the pineal gland, seat of the imagination (AT 11.176, 9i.69), feels involved in all its body's sensations. The fact of that interaction is precisely the concern which animates Les Passions, a work which persistently probes the mechanisms of mind-body union.As early as 1629 Descartes hypothesised in his L'Homme that the soul interacted with the body through the medium of the pineal gland (or conarium). He renewed this claim in article 34 of Passions,9 arguing, first, that nerve impulses (movements of animal spirits) from throughout the body all converge on that gland, from whence they are communicated to the soul; and second, reciprocally, that the soul induces diverse bodily activities (both muscular movements and changes to internal organs) precisely by altering the axial orientation of that same conarium - those alterations then initiating outflows of animal spirit from this gland into other body parts. …