Abstract
Descartes maintains that we can love God and that it is pleasant and morally beneficial to do so. In this essay, I examine the necessary conditions for such an intellectual love of God. I argue that the intellectual love of God is incited by a judgment that we are joined to God in reality, which is constitutive of an intellectual joy. I go on to show that the intellectual love of God is, itself, constituted by a stripping of our private interests in favor of God’s divine will.
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Notes
Abbreviations to editions of Descartes’s works are:
AT: Oeuvres de Descartes, Vols. I-XII and Supplement. Edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. Paris: Leopold Cerf, 1897-1913.
CSM: The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vols. I and II. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
CSMK: The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. III. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, Anthony Kenny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Though little has been written in recent literature on Descartes’s account of the love of God (with two notable exceptions being Alanen, “Descartes and Spinoza on the Love of God,” 2016 and Brown and Normore, “Larger Than Life,” 2019), a significant amount of recent literature has been dedicated to his broader account of love. See: Alanen, “Self and Will in Descartes’s Account of Love,” 2019; Beavers, “Desire and Love in Descartes’s Late Philosophy,” 1989; Boros, “Love as a Guiding Principle,” 2003; Brown, Descartes and the Passionate Mind, 2016; Frierson, “Learning to Love,” 2002; Frigo, “A very obscure definition,” 2015; Kambouchner, “Spinoza and the Cartesian Definition of Love,” 2019; Tate, “Imagining Oneself as Forming a Whole with Others,” 2021; Tate, “Love in Descartes’s Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy,” 2020; Wee, “Self, Other, and Community in Cartesian Ethics,” 2002.
Frierson, “Learning to Love,” 335-336; Tate, “Imagining Oneself as Forming a Whole with Others,” 73; Alanen, “Descartes and Spinoza on the Love of God,” 76-77; Secada, “God and meditation,” 222-223.
Svennson, “Descartes on the Highest Good,” 714-716.
Tate, “Imagining Oneself as Forming a Whole with Others,” 74; Frierson, “Learning to Love,” 325; Wee, “Self, Other, and Community in Cartesian Ethics,” 262-263.
Frierson, “Learning to Love,” 325-326.
One way of accounting for the identity claim, here, is found in Alan Nelson’s (1997), “Descartes’ Ontology of Thought.” There, Nelson argues that perceptions and volitions are only rationally distinct – i.e., that there is only one mental state, which can be considered active in one sense (volitionally) and passive in another (perceptually).
For more on the bodily mechanics of the passions, see Schmitter, “‘I’ve Got a Little List’: Classification, Explanation, and the Focal Passions in Descartes and Hobbes,” (2017). See also: Hatfield, “Did Descartes Have a Jamesian Theory of the Emotions,” (2008) and Hatfield, “The Passions of the soul and Descartes’s machine psychology,” (2007).
The impression of the bear that is formed on each eye is directed to the brain. The two brain impressions converge on the pineal gland, and the gland sends animal spirits to the relevant body parts so as to make the body start running. Where then does the passion (of, for example, fear) figure into Descartes’s account? When the brain impression converges on the pineal gland only to mechanically send the animal spirits to their proper body parts, the soul is affected by the pineal gland so as to produce a passion (of, in this case, fear). See: Hatfield, “Did Descartes Have a Jamesian Theory of the Emotions,” (2008) and Hatfield, “The Passions of the soul and Descartes’s machine psychology,” (2007).
I’m not alone in suggesting that intellectual emotions are a kind of judgment. See, for instance: Alanen, “Descartes and Spinoza on the Love of God,” 78; Alanen, “Self and Will in Descartes’s Account of Love,” 242. Compare: Brown, Descartes and the Passionate Mind, 161. I also take my reading to be broadly consistent with Susan James’s. See, for instance: James, Passion and Action, 197-200.
Intellectual emotions deepen Descartes’s phenomenological landscape of thought. If the intellectual emotions are identical with judgments, then at least some judgments involve an affective phenomenology – i.e., emotive feelings, like love, joy, sadness, or desire. These emotions are identical to the movement of the will. So, the will is, to some extent, affective.
In Melanie Tate’s paper, “Imagining Oneself as Forming a Whole with Others: Descartes’s View of Love” (2021), she argues that joining in volition is not essential to Cartesian love. It should be noted that she is discussing the bodily passion of love, not intellectual love. Perhaps, in the case of the former, joining in volition is not essential to love, since it involves passive processes (Tate, 6-7). But this is not the case with intellectual love – the will is involved, by definition. This is noted by Tate, herself, in footnote 14 (6).
This distinction has been noticed elsewhere. In his paper, “Three Dualist Theories of the Passions” (1991), Paul Hoffman writes, “another sort of volition he mentions is that of ‘joining ourself in volition’ to something, which he contrasts with being joined in reality to the thing” (164).
For some (albeit, limited) discussion on Descartes’s account of how to love God sensuously, see: Alanen, “Descartes and Spinoza on the Love of God,” 84-85. I address this problem in greater detail in another drafted paper under the working title, “Descartes on the Sensuous Love of God.”.
Here is the passage: “In my view, the way to reach the love of God is to consider that he is a mind, or a thing that thinks; and that our soul’s nature resembles his sufficiently for us to believe that it is an emanation of his supreme intelligence, a ‘breath of divine spirit’. Our knowledge seems to be able to grow by degrees to infinity, and since God’s knowledge is infinite, it is at the point towards which ours strives…. But we must also take account of the infinity of his power, by which he has created so many things of which we are only a tiny part; and of the extent of his providence, which makes him see with a single thought all that has been, all that is, all that will be and all that could be; and of the infallibility of his decrees, which are altogether immutable even though they respect our free will. Finally, we must weigh our smallness against the greatness of the created universe, observing how all created things depend on God, and regarding them in a manner proper to his omnipotence instead of enclosing them in a ball as do the people who insist that the world is finite. If a man meditates on these things and understands them properly, he is filled with extreme joy… [H]e thinks the knowledge with which God has honoured him is enough by itself to make his life worth while. Joining himself willingly entirely to God, he loves him so perfectly that he desires nothing at all except that his will should be done” (CSMK 309-10; AT IV 608).
Much could be said about Descartes’s method of deduction, and his general relationship with intuition and syllogism. He argues, for instance, that first principles are not arrived at by means of syllogism (AT VII 140-1). But to discuss a more full account is beyond the scope of this paper. See Nolan, “The Ontological Argument as an Exercise in Cartesian Therapy,” 2005 and Sowaal, “Descartes’s Reply to Gassendi,”2011 for a detailed discussion of these topics with respect to discovering God’s existence.
See two other examples, among many: “[As] for corporeal substance and mind (or created thinking substance), these can be understood to fall under this common concept: things that need only the concurrence of God in order to exist” (CSM I 210; AT VIIIA 25), and “The first and chief of these [truths] is that there is a God on whom all things depend […]” (CSMK 265; AT IV 292).
It should be noted explicitly that my conclusion is in direct conflict with Frierson, “Learning to Love,” 325-326, where he maintains that Descartes does not have the conceptual resources for a metaphysically motivated love for God (or others). My account is metaphysically motivated, insofar as it appeals to our substantial dependence upon God.
References
Primary Literature
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Descartes, R. (1897–1913). Oeuvres de Descartes, Vols. I-XII and Supplement. Edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. Paris: Leopold Cerf.
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Agoff, Z. Descartes on intellectual joy and the intellectual love of god. Int J Philos Relig 95, 1–19 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-023-09885-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-023-09885-y