Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

as would the majority of people in Europe who were also Catholic.How-

ever, his usual attitude was to encourage his royal correspondent ‘to adopt

a more carefree attitude’ to things, and to engage in a kind of mental

training to alleviate the scruples from which she suffered. This was con-

sistent with the advice about making decisions about matters that remain

uncertain. Descartes tried to persuade her that probable knowledge was

sufficient to make practical judgments and that, once such decisions had

been made, she should accept that these were the best ones she could have

made in the circumstances. For this reason Elizabeth needed to acquire

practice in making decisions, together with the kind of resolution required

not to second-guess those decisions subsequently.

Apart from such typical counselling, Descartes was drawn by Eliza-

beth’s letters into discussing an issue that was subsequently to emerge as

an important part of his philosophy, namely, an explanation of human emo-

tions. He embarked on this project explicitly in Octoberbytelling

his royal correspondent that she was the ideal person with whom to have

that discussion.The reason was that she had already had a preview of

adraft treatise on animals that he had written, and she was therefore

familiar with his earlier speculations about how both external and internal

stimuli trigger impressions in the brain when, for example, animals see an

object or feel hungry. Descartes claimed that exactly similar physiological

changes occur in human beings, with similar results. If the term ‘passion’

is used to refer to states that we experience passively and over which we

have no control, then all these experiences should be classified as passions.

Forexample, when we perceive external objects, when we feel thirsty or

tired, when we dream while asleep or daydream while awake: in all these

cases, the person who has such experiences is passively subject to events

that do not result from any choice on his or her part. Likewise, in all such

cases, the mental state that is experienced – the feeling of thirst, or the

awareness of our dreams – results from some corresponding state of the

body.

However, Descartes was starting out with a wide sweep in this context

before focusing on passions in a much narrower sense that corresponds

to what are now called emotions. He wanted to classify and to explain

experiences such as feeling sad or joyful, and he needed to distinguish,

forexample, between feeling a pain and feeling sad while one is in pain,

or between feeling thirsty and having a desire to drink. In both examples,

only the second feeling is an emotion properly so called (although both are