The Body, the morality, and the passions in Descartes’ philosophy

Abstract

This article attempts a discussion of the philosophy of Rene Descartes, about the relationship between the human body and its passions, in the process of learning the morality of virtues. Descartes has repeatedly mentioned the decisive role that the true knowledge of the good must play and trouble by regulating our passions, but without ever providing us with the answer satisfying the following question: where does and what exactly does this awareness? Even if do not find a complete answer to our question in the last great work of Descartes, we still see several elements emerging from it important in some articles of the Passions of the Soul. Thus we learn in article 143 that desire "is always good when it follows a true knowledge”, but this true knowledge only seems to be reduced to a distinction fundamental that takes place inside the soul of things "which depend entirely on us, of those which do not depend on it”. But if true knowledge, that is true, does not seem to have any other criterion apart from what it depends entirely on us, here we are in full philosophical modernity. To what Descartes immediately adds that if one succeeds in one's life in distinguishing fatality from posture, "one easily gets used to regulating his desires in such a way that, especially as their fulfillment depends on us, they can always give us complete satisfaction ” (article 146). Theoretical aspect, practical aspect, thus reconciled and harmonized with each other, it remains for us to ask one more question: why the true joy, which makes the greatest happiness of human life (felt, for example, by the husband mourning his wife in section 147) can only be a "joy secret ”? René Descartes frequently mentioned the importance of the real knowledge of good and evil, supposed to rule our lives. However he never clearly explained what this knowledge really meant to him. If there's no full answer to that to be found in his work, at least it seems that the real knowledge, meaning the truth, is totally dependent on us. Quite a modern vision of Philosophy was suggested by Descartes but also, in this article, an unusual point of view of the philosopher's work.