Descartes: A Biography

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Once More into Battle 

preferable if Descartes were to devote more of his intellectual effort to

moral philosophy. Consistent with these limited interests, he now asked

Descartes to write something about love that would help respond to queries

from Queen Christina.Descartes analysed Chanut’s query into three

parts, in a lengthy letter ofFebruary:()Whatislove? () Does

the natural light of reason alone move us to love God? ()Isloveorhatred

more damaging if it gets out of control?

He distinguished initially between (i) a purely intellectual love and

(ii) a passion or emotion that is also called love. Descartes understood the

first of these as the spontaneous response of the will toward anything that

the mind perceives as good. ‘When our soul perceives some good, whether

absent or present, which it considers appropriate to itself, it joins with it

voluntarily, that is, it thinks of itself and of this good as a single whole

of which itself and the good in question are the two parts.’This purely

intellectual form of love would be possible even for minds that are not

embodied, such as those of angels. ‘However, when our soul is joined to

our body, this rational love is usually accompanied by another kind of love

which could be called sensual or sensuous’ (iv.). Sensual love, like all

other human emotions, is a reality with both mental and physical features.

The physical events associated with an emotion are a rush of animal spirits

through the body and, in the case of love, a warm feeling around the heart.

These bodily changes are always accompanied by a specific feeling that,

according to Descartes, is necessarily a mental phenomenon.

Descartes tries to explain the complexity of this feeling by comparison to

another example in which the characteristic features are easier to separate.

If we feel dryness in the throat, we are likely to desire a drink. There are

three distinct realities here: (a) the physical condition of the throat; (b) the

feeling of dryness, which is a mental state; and (c) the desire to drink,

which is a different mental state. It seems clear, in this case, that one

could experience the feeling of dryness without having a desire to drink.

Equally, someone could have a desire to drink – for example, because he

or she planned to do demanding exercise and anticipated the subsequent

dehydration that is familiar from previous occasions – without having any

experience yet of a dry throat. Similar distinctions apply in the case of

love. There is a characteristic bodily feeling that inclines the subject to

experience what Descartes had already described as intellectual love.

Descartes used this opportunity to repeat a thesis that he had outlined

in his draft treatise on the passions and that was to emerge later as a central

feature of his account of the unity of mind and body in human nature. The