Descartes: A Biography

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Thoughts of Retirement 

the heart, to cause them to send more of it there....That is why this same movement
of spirits has always accompanied the passion of love since then. (xi.–)

This describes an elementary feedback mechanism by which a young infant
is motivated by a naturally endowed primitive feeling to seek things that
support its survival. The same natural disposition works in the opposite
direction for avoiding harms, and the relevant passion in that case is called
hatred.
The final essential thread in this account of emotions is the Cartesian
theory of conditioning. If someone’s emotional life remained as undevel-
oped as it was at birth, with warm positive feelings toward mother’s milk
and an aversion to strong tastes, it would be impossible to develop the
Cartesian ‘physical’ theory into a theory of human emotions. However,
Descartes assumes that imagination and memory provide a link between
innate responses, which are present from birth, and other emotional
responses that are learned as one develops. Those that are innate are rein-
forced by practice, so that as a child grows into adulthood he or she con-
tinues to experience emotional responses that duplicate those of infancy.

Our soul and our body are so linked that, if we have once joined some bodily action
with a certain thought, one of them does not occur subsequently without the other
also occurring. We see this, for example, in those who have taken some medicine with
great revulsion when they were ill, and cannot afterwards eat or drink anything that
has a similar taste without immediately feeling the same revulsion. Likewise, they
cannot think of their revulsion from medicines without the same taste returning in
their thought. (xi.)

This innate connection between specific thoughts or feelings and bod-
ily states tends to continue indefinitely unless changed by new connec-
tions that displace them. However, the primitive connections can also
be expanded to include novel relations between mental states and bodily
states, even in the case of stimuli that have no natural connection with
the feelings they trigger. Descartes had noticed that animals can be con-
ditioned to respond to novel stimuli, long before Pavlov studied the same
phenomenon in the twentieth century and gave his name to it. ‘This is so
certain that if you whipped a dog five or six times to the sound of a violin, I
believe that it would begin to howl and run away when it hears that music
again’ (i.). Evidently, the same kind of conditioning works in the case
of human beings. ‘If people have at some time in the past enjoyed dancing
while a certain tune was being played, then the desire to dance will return
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