Reading Descartes as a Stoic

Abstract

Reading Descartes as a Stoic: Appropriate Action, Virtue, and the Passions Donald Rutherford (University of California, San Diego) Although Descartes does not use the terms officium or devoir with any frequency, his ethics gives a central place to the notion of appropriate action in a sense reminiscent of the Stoics’s kathekon. Within this category are included a human being’s duties to God and to other human beings, and actions whose aptness stems from their promotion of the survival and health of the body. While noting these parallels, I also show how Descartes’s accounts of virtue and the passions diverge from Stoic views, ascribing these differences in part to his acceptance of the threefold division of goods (moral, bodily, external) rejected by the Stoics. Introduction Stoicism has served as a reference point for many interpretations of Descartes’s moral philosophy. Descartes himself provides support for such an association in letters to Princess Elisabeth and in works from the Discours de la methode to Les Passions de l’âme. Yet caution must be exercised in extrapolating from this evidence. In contrast to Neostoic writers such as Justus Lipsius and Guillaume Du Vair, Descartes claims no allegiance to Stoicism or to any other sect of the ancients, whose methods he finds inadequate. Moreover, there are substantial doctrinal differences between Descartes and the Stoics. Given this, the attempt to label him a “Stoic” in any strict sense of the word must be rejected. 1 Despite this conclusion, I believe, there remains a case for reading Descartes as a Stoic, or for adopting Stoicism as a framework within which to interpret his moral philosophy. Taking up this perspective requires assuming that Stoicism is relevant to the comprehension of Descartes’s ethics, but it does not commit one to the thesis that Descartes is a Stoic, or that Stoicism is unique in the light it casts on his views. As I intend my title, it signifies the strategy of elucidating Descartes’s ethical theory by probing the parallels between it and Stoic ethics. Irrespective of Descartes’s intentions or his knowledge of Stoicism, his ethical thought follows channels dug by the Stoics. By making these traces explicit, we can deepen our understanding of his moral philosophy and of the extent to which ancient patterns of ethical thought persist in the early modern period. 2 In what follows, I pursue this strategy with special attention to the Stoic concept of kathekon, or officium, expressed variously in French as ‘convenable’ and ‘devoir’, and in English as ‘proper function’, ‘appropriate action’, and ‘duty’ (to mention only a few of the possibilities). The range of Cf. Olivo 1999, who surveys the earlier literature on the topic. Among other recent studies that explore Stoic elements in Descartes’s ethics, see Marshall 1998; Mehl 1999; Shapiro 2011. 2 In speaking of Descartes’s “moral philosophy” or “ethics”, I refer to the views expressed in his late letters and in the Passions, as against the “morale par provision” of the Discours or “la plus haute et la plus parfaite Morale” projected in the preface to the French translation of the Principia. On the relation among these different versions of his moral philosophy, see Rodis-Lewis 1957; Kambouchner 2008.