Descartes and Hobbes on the Passions

  • Richard Cobb-Stevens
Chapter
Part of the Analecta Husserliana book series (ANHU, volume 28)

Abstract

René Descartes (1596–1650) and Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) were contemporaries who met briefly but not amicably, who engaged in an acerbic published debate on issues raised by Descartes’ Meditations, and who were openly critical of one another’s fundamental premises. Descartes said of Hobbes’ moral philosophy in De Cive that it was very dangerous, because it supposed all human beings to be wicked, and thus gave them occasion to be so.1 Hobbes retorted that Descartes might well be the best geometer in the world, but that he had no knack for philosophy.2 Leo Strauss nevertheless calls attention to their common disdain for the unscientific and impractical character of the ancient treatises on morality, and even observes that “... Hobbes’ own system of morals corresponds better to Descartes’ deepest intention than does the morality of Les passions de l’âme.”3 In the same spirit, Richard Kennington claims that Descartes shared with Hobbes the modern conviction that reason serves the passions, and that what distinguishes humans from animals is the more malleable instrumentality of human reason, rather than some specifically different end.4 On this interpretation, we ought to construe Descartes’ treatise on the passions in the light of his fundamental project, i.e., to develop a universal method designed to promote the mastery of nature.

Keywords

Pineal Gland Inertial Motion Animal Spirit English Work Intellectual Humility 
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Notes

  1. 1.
    John Campbell, “The Author’s Life”, in The Moral and Political Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (London, 1750), xiv.Google Scholar
  2. 1a.
    See Arnold A Rogow, Thomas Hobbes: Radical in the Service of Reaction (New York: Norton, 1986), p. 148 n.Google Scholar
  3. 2.
    He [Hobbes] would say that “had he [Descartes] kept himself to geometry he had been the best geometer in the world but that his head did not lye for philosophy”. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, Chiefly of Contemporaries, Set Down by John Aubrey, between the Years 1669 and 1696. Ed. Andrew Clark. 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), p. 161. See Rogow, Thomas Hobbes, p. 148.Google Scholar
  4. 3.
    Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Genesis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), p. 56 and p. 88 n. 1.Google Scholar
  5. 4.
    Richard Kennington, “René Descartes”, in Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, eds., History of Political Philosophy. 2nd edition (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1972), p. 407.Google Scholar
  6. 5.
    René Descartes, Oeuvres et Lettres, ed. A. Bridoux (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1953), p. 168 and p. 722. The translations are mine. Unless otherwise indicated, translations will be taken from The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985). Subsequent reference to Les passions de l’âme will be confined to an indication within the text of this essay of the relevant chapters (which are brief, and, of course, common both to the French and English editions). See also Kennington, “René Descartes”, p. 402 and p. 410.Google Scholar
  7. 6.
    Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, Vol. III, ed. William Molesworth (Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1966), ch. vi. Subsequent references to Leviathan will be limited to references within the text of this essay to the relevant chapters.Google Scholar
  8. 7.
    Aristotle, Physics, 3, 1, 200b.Google Scholar
  9. 8.
    Ibid., 3, 1, 224b.Google Scholar
  10. 9.
    Thomas Spragens, The Politics of Motion: The World of Thomas Hobbes (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1973), pp. 53–76.Google Scholar
  11. 10.
    Hobbes, English Works, I, viii.Google Scholar
  12. 11.
    Jacques Taminiaux, “Hegel and Hobbes”, in Dialectic and Difference; Finitude in Modern Thought. eds. and trans. Robert Crease and James Decker (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1985), pp. 30–1.Google Scholar
  13. 12.
    Ibid., p. 31.Google Scholar
  14. 14.
    Hobbes, English Works, IV, pp. 52–3.Google Scholar
  15. 15.
    Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, p. 9.Google Scholar
  16. 16.
    Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. Erazim Kohak (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press), pp. 20–4. See Les Passions de l’âme, xvii.Google Scholar
  17. 17.
    Ibid., pp. 252–1.Google Scholar
  18. 18.
    Descartes also adds the following: “... c’est en usant seulement de la vie et des conversations ordinaires, et en s’abstenant de méditer et d’étudier aux choses qui exercent l’imagination, qu’on apprend à concevoir l’union de l’âme et le corps”. Oeuvres et Lettres, p. 1158.Google Scholar
  19. 19.
    Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, p. 217.Google Scholar
  20. 20.
    Plato, Phaedo, 82e.Google Scholar
  21. 21.
    Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, pp. 253–6.Google Scholar
  22. 22.
    Biaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Louis Lafuma (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1962), #199 (72), p. 116.Google Scholar
  23. 23.
    Ricoeur points out that this analysis is consistent with Sartre’s claim that imagination does more than intend an absent object; it also endows it with a quasi-presence. According to Sartre, the feelings and kinesthetic movements, which are used by the imagination as material supports in its work of producing the imagined object, contribute to the sense of presence or quasi-reality that we ascribe to that object. Descartes seems to be saying that love is the affective moment and the agitations of animal spirits are the kinesthetic moment of an imagining intention aimed at unification with the beloved object. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, p. 258. See Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of the Imagination (New York: Citadel Press, 1966), pp. 96–119.Google Scholar
  24. 24.
    See Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, p. 65 and p. 173. Stanley Rosen links Descartes’ confidence in the new mathematical physics with his stress on the primacy of will in The Passions of the Soul, and then suggests that both themes testify to Descartes’ deep commitment to the specifically modern project of a mastery of nature that coincides with a liberation from submission to the divine will. See Rosen, “A Central Ambiguity in Descartes”, in Cartesian Essays: a Collection of Critical Studies (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), pp. 30–1. However, it is difficult to see how this interpretation can be squared with Descartes’ efforts in his correspondence with Elizabeth to demonstrate the compatibility of human freedom and divine foresight. See Oeuvres et lettres, pp. 1214–6.Google Scholar
  25. 25.
    Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff), p. 19.Google Scholar
  26. 26.
    Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1985), p. 60.Google Scholar
  27. 27.
    For a comprehensive discussion of how the idea of the Infinite functions in Descartes “philosophy, see See Veda Cobb-Stevens,”Finitude, Infinitude and the Imago Dei in Catherine of Sienna and Descartes”, in this volume.Google Scholar
  28. 28.
    Michael Oakeshott, “The Moral Life in the Writings of Thomas Hobbes”, in Hobbes Studies, ed. K. C. Brown (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), p. 289.Google Scholar
  29. 29.
    Hobbes, English Works, II, p. 38.Google Scholar
  30. 30.
    Ibid., p. 291–2.Google Scholar
  31. 31.
    Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, p. 56.Google Scholar
  32. 32.
    Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1125a. For a history of the concept of magnanimity, see G. Krüger, “Die Herkunft des philosophischen Selbstbewusstseins”, Logos (xxii), pp. 261 ff.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Kluwer Academic Publishers 1990

Authors and Affiliations

  • Richard Cobb-Stevens
    • 1
  1. 1.Boston CollegeUSA

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