Abstract
This paper examines and reflects on Princess Elisabeth’s of Bohemia exchange with Descartes concerning the notorious difficulties of his doctrine of human nature as a union of two independent and mutually exclusive substances mind and body. The aim is to situate her questions in the context of the debate Descartes’s doctrine spurred among his contemporaries and to show the philosophical interest of her own contribution to the understanding of and clarification of the issues confronting Descartes.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
I am using Lisa Shapiro’s English translation and edition of Elisabeth’s letters in The Correspondence Between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes (2007, 62), referring to it by S, followed by page number (I am slightly departing from Shapiro’s translation). The AT reference is to the standard edition of Descartes’s works by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, and the English translation by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch, The Philosophical Writings of René Descartes (1985), when used, is referred as CSMK followed by volume and page. I have also used the French edition of Jean-Marie and Michelle Beyssade of the Correspondance avec Elisabeth (1989).
- 3.
For a different reading of the argument and discussion of the importance and role given by Elisabeth to touch in its first part and its background see Schmalz (2019) and the references there given.
- 4.
To defend Descartes, one might ask: is not a substance defined—at least within the Aristotelian tradition—precisely by its activity (function), and is not this in a sense what Descartes is doing? Human beings are defined as rational because they use reason, as animals because they move themselves, and as living beings because they can sense, nourish themselves and reproduce. Though Descartes gives a mechanistic explanation of life, movement and sensation, his way of proceeding in the Meditations, in so far as the soul is concerned, is still in line with this tradition in that it goes from activity—that of thinking—to determining the nature of the substance that thinks (Cf. Carriero, 2009). From here however to conclude that the thing that thinks is only a thinking thing would seem to be another affair: it is to go, as Hobbes points out in his objections to Descartes’s Meditations, against traditional logic and good philosophical sense (AT 7, 172–177).—Notice that Descartes’s notion of thought is broader than that of reason as traditionally understood, and covers sensation, emotions and passions considered as immediate objects of attention (AT 7, 28–29, 160; AT 8A, 7–8; AT 11, 349–350).
- 5.
Gassendi continues to speculate about the soul being a wind, fire or ether, or some other thin bodily matter, so that when, e.g., your body grows are not you, i.e., your soul, growing too? “And when the body is weak, are you not weak too?” (AT 7, 261; CSM 3, 182) Descartes has not proved “that this solid body of yours contributes nothing whatever to your thought (for you have never been without it, and have so far never had any thought separated from it). You will have to prove that you think independently of the body in such a way that you can never be hampered by it or disturbed by the foul and dense vapours of fumes which from time to time have such a bad effect on the brain” (AT 7, 262–263; CSM 2, 183). This is a question Elisabeth takes up later in the correspondence. Gassendi expressed a further worry that Arnauld had expressed before and that Elisabeth also voices: if the soul or mind is only thinking would it not follow it would have to be perpetually thinking even “during deep sleep or indeed in the womb”? (AT 7, 264; CSM 2, 184).
- 6.
Regius, whose physics Elisabeth had studied and who was one of her mentors before she came in contact with Descartes (AT 3, 660), had raised the same question to Descartes in correspondence. For reference, see Agostini (2014) who refers to Bos (2002). It is good to keep in mind also Hobbes’ famous argument (AT 7, 172; CSM 2, 122) mentioned in footnote 4 above. Elisabeth refers to Regius in her first letter (AT 3, 660). She refers to both Gassendi’s and Hobbes’ objections later, in wondering, remarkably, at their incomprehension of Descartes’ arguments. I take this to indicate that while she sees the problem they have with Descartes’s arguments she still sides with Descartes in opposing the kind of materialism they commit themselves too. Cf. Kolesnik-Antoine (2014) and the literature there referred to. Elisabeth is sometimes seen as siding with Regius on this matter. But if she repeats questions that Regius had presented, she clearly differs from Regius in that she never questions but seems to accept an important tenet of Cartesian dualism, namely that the soul is independent from or autonomous vis-à-vis the body. See e.g., Shapiro op cit. Elisabeth takes Descartes’s metaphysics and argument for the mind–body distinction seriously, which Regius did not. See, e.g., Regius letter of July 1645 to Descartes (AT IV, 255), quoted in Clarke (2010, 188–207, here: 199).
- 7.
That Elisabeth knew of Gassendi’s objection is indicated by her referring to the same kind of examples as Gassendi mentions to back up his charge: that Descartes has not proved that the operation of the soul is inseparable from matter, e.g., fainting and thinking already in the mother’s womb. Cf. previous footnote.
- 8.
“But, as your highness sees so clearly that one cannot conceal anything from her, I will try here to explain the manner in which I conceive of the union of the soul with the body and how the soul has the power (force) to move it” (AT 3, 665; S 65).
- 9.
Cf. Descartes’s discussion of “teachings of nature” whereby the mind is said to know its intimate union with the body in the Sixth Meditation (AT 7, 80–81; CSM 2, 56). For the different sense of “nature” used by Descartes see Alanen (2008b, particularly 428–433).
- 10.
Cottingham (1985) introduced the term “trialism” in his discussion of the mind–body union but rejects the idea of a third substance which leaves it unclear what trialism really means. See also e.g., Gouhier (1962), Radner (1971), Hoffman (1986), Baker and Morris (1996), Rozemond (1998), Schmalz (1992), Shapiro (1999) and more recently de Buzon and Kambouchner (2015), Simmons (2017) and Brown (2019). See also Alanen (2008a). For a penetrating discussion of the problems of trialism see Brown and Normore (2019, Chapter 6, particularly 184–187).
- 11.
- 12.
Note that attribute dualism for Spinoza, who holds that the infinite one substance, God or Nature, has an infinite number of attributes, holds only for what “the intellect perceives of the substance” (Ethics I4d).
- 13.
- 14.
See the literature quoted above at footnote 10. For a balanced recent overview, see the article by Perler (2016).
- 15.
If we have something like innate cognition we also have a natural tendency to confuse our notions! Such a tendency is that of early childhood, when the soul is too much preoccupied with the body, a tendency enforced by bad habits and education but that training in critical thinking can cure.
- 16.
Goal-directed strivings are found only in minds or thinking things, not in material bodies whose movements are to be explained in terms of quantifiable notions by the laws of physics which are laws of motion according to Descartes’s theory of nature.
- 17.
Elisabeth is a good student of Cartesian physics, and sees extended matter and mechanical motion as paradigms of intelligibility in physics.
- 18.
For discussion of this and the analogy with heaviness see Garber (1983). While Garber’s argument is interesting the solution he proposes would seem to get Descartes into even bigger trouble: that of committing himself to a claim he always tried to resist, namely that finite human minds could have a way of understanding God’s way of acting, by relying on their own experience as agents, something that he could not accept given his conception of the incommensurability between the human and the divine intellect.
- 19.
Cf. Spinoza who lists as an axiom of Part 3 of the Ethics: “Man thinks” (3ax1) and “We feel a body” (3ax3).
- 20.
Phenomenology here is used in a wide sense including common shareable experience of the external natural and social world, not to be reduced to the kind of introspective phenomenology of embodiment suggested by Simmons (2017), and not in the technical sense of Husserlian phenomenology. I defend this reading in more detail in my “Mind–Body Holism and the Primacy of Experience” (forthcoming).
- 21.
- 22.
He advises: “The best is to content oneself in retaining in one’s memory and in one’s beliefs the conclusions one has at one time drawn from such [metaphysical] meditation, and then employ the rest of the time one has for study in those thoughts where the understanding acts with imagination or the senses” (AT 3, 695; S 71. My emphasis).
- 23.
But note that Aristotelian-Scholastic physics is not the only culprit here. This way of thinking is as Descartes argues “natural” or based on natural and habitual ways of thinking that we as children who do not have the full use of their reason but are immersed in their bodies grow up with.
- 24.
For a critical discussion see Wilson (1978, Chapter VI, in particular 214–218).
- 25.
There being some intellection involved in any act of sensing or imagining (AT 7, 78; CSM 2, 54).
- 26.
It has been argued that Descartes is here alluding to a distinction made by the Scholastics between two ways of being in a place: “circumscriptively”—when each part of a thing occupies a part of that place, or “definitively”, when it can exercise its powers in that place, and that the latter sense of being in a place is the only sense he can accept (Brown & Normore, 2019, 180). In the Letter to More 15 April 1649 Descartes distinguishes between the extension of a substance, that he denies to the mind, angels and God, and an extension of power, which does not threaten the impenetrability of matter (AT 5, 342; CSM 372). For discussion of this see Rozemond (2003). Descartes also allows in the Passions of the Soul that the soul is joined to the whole body—not because it has extension, and so parts, but because the extended body has a functional unity and that therefore “The soul is united to all the parts of the body conjointly” (AT 11, 351; CSM 1, 339–340).
- 27.
See Alanen (2004) and the literature there quoted.
- 28.
As Shapiro argues (1999) Elisabeth develops in this correspondence a position of her own on the mind–body relation, one that acknowledges on the one hand the autonomy of mind or reason, and on the other its dependence of the well-being and good state of the body. This is, as Shapiro shows, a position providing a new alternative in between strict dualism and materialism, for while it recognizes the dependence of the mind for its good working on the state of the body, it is not reductive, reducing the mind to a property of the body or brain like for instance that of Hobbes. See Shapiro (1999, 187–196). I think this is right and want to add that the position Elisabeth seems to anticipate here is that of Spinoza’s parallelism of attributes with monism of substance.
- 29.
For Descartes’s account of love as a willed union, see Alanen (2019).
- 30.
Cf. Deborah Brown (2006, Chapter 6).
- 31.
See Objections and Replies: Author’s Reply to the Sixth Set of Objections, §9. AT 7, 436–439; CSM 2, 294–296.
Bibliography
Agostini, I. (2014). Le mythe du cartésianisme d’Élisabeth. In D. Kolesnik-Antoine & M. F. Pellegrin (Eds.), Élisabeth de Bohême Face à Descartes: Deux Philosophes? (pp. 101–118). Paris: Vrin.
Alanen, L. (1989). Descartes’s dualism and the philosophy of mind. Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (3), 391–413.
Alanen, L. (2004). Descartes and Elisabeth. A philosophical dialogue? In L. Alanen & C. Witt (Eds.). Feminist reflections on the history of philosophy (pp. 193–218). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Alanen, L. (2008a). Descartes’s mind-body composites, psychology and naturalism. In M. Kisner (Ed.), Special Issue on “Naturalism in modern philosophy”. Inquiry, 51(5), 464–484.
Alanen, L. (2008b). Cartesian scientia and the nature of the soul. In D. Perler (Ed.), Transformations of the soul. Aristotelean psychology 1250–1650. Vivarium, 46(3), 418–442.
Alanen, L. (2019). Self and will in Descartes’s account of love. In M. Reuter & F. Svensson (Eds.), Mind, body and morality: New perspectives on Descartes and Spinoza (pp. 239–258). London: Routledge.
Alanen, L. (forthcoming). Descartes’s mind-body holism and the primacy of experience. In D. Charles (Ed.), History of hylomorphism. Oxford University Press.
Baker, G., & Morris, K. (1996). Descartes’s dualism. London: Routledge.
Bos, E. J. (Ed.). (2002). The correspondence between Descartes and Henricus Regius. Utrecht: Zeno.
Brown, D. J. (2006). Descartes and the passionate mind. Cambridge University Press.
Brown, D. J. (2019). The metaphysics of Cartesian persons. In M. Reuter & S. Svensson (Eds.), Mind, body and morality: New perspectives on Descartes and Spinoza (pp. 17–36). London: Routledge.
Brown, D. J., & Normore C. G. (2019). The ontology of everyday life. Oxford.
Buzon, F. de, & Kambouchner, D. (2015). L’âme avec le corps: le sense, le movement volontaire, les passions. In F. de Buzon, É. Cassan, & D. Kambouchner (Eds.), Lectures de Descartes (pp. 279–328). Paris: Ellipses.
Carriero, J. (2009). Between two worlds: A reading of Descartes’s Meditations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Clarke, D. M. (2010). The physics and metaphysics of the mind: Descartes and Regius. In J. Cottingham & P. Hacker (Eds.), Mind, method and morality: Essays in honour of Anthony Kenny (pp. 188–207). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cottingham, J. (1985). Cartesian trialism. Mind, 94, 218–230.
Davidson, D. (1999). Spinoza’s causal theory of the affects. In Y. Yovel (Ed.), Desire and affect: Spinoza as a psychologist (pp. 95–111). New York, NY: Little Room Press.
Della Rocca, M. (2008). Spinoza. New York, NY: Routledge.
Descartes, R. (1964–1976). Oeuvres de Descartes (12 vols., Ch. Adam & P. Tannery, Eds.). Paris: Vrin.
Descartes, R. (1985). The philosophical writings of René Descartes (Vols. 1–2, J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, & D. Murdoch, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Descartes, R. (1989). Correspondance avec Elisabeth et autres lettres (J.-M. Beyssade & M. Beyssade, Eds.). Paris: GF Flammarion.
Elisabeth of Bohemia & Descartes, R. (2007). The correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes (L. Shapiro, Ed.). Chicago: The Chicago University Press.
Garber, D. (1983). Understanding interaction: What Descartes should have told Elisabeth. Southern Journal of Philosophy, 21, 15–32.
Gouhier, H. (1962). La Pensée Metaphysique de Descartes. Paris: Vrin.
Hoffman, P. (1986). The unity of Descartes’s man. The Philosophical Review, 95(3), 339–370.
Kambouchner, D. (2014). Le cas Élisabeth: générosité et mélancolie. In D. Kolesnik-Antoine & M.-F. Pellegrin (Eds.), Élisabeth de Bohême face à Descartes: deux philosophes? (pp. 139–153). Paris: Vrin.
Kolesnik-Antoine, D. (2014). Elisabeth philosophe: un cartésianisme empirique. In D. Kolesnik-Antoine & M.-F. Pellegrin (Eds.), Élisabeth de Bohême face à Descartes: deux philosophes? (pp. 118–213). Paris: Vrin.
Perler, D. (2016). Human being. In L. Nolan (Ed.), The Cambridge Descartes Lexicon (pp. 369–379). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Radner, D. (1971). Descartes’ notion of the union of mind and body. The Journal of the History of Philosophy, 9, 159–170.
Rozemond, M. (1998). Descartes’ dualism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rozemond, M. (2003). Descartes, mind-body union and holenmerism. Philosophical Topics, 31, 343–367.
Schmalz, T. M. (1992). Descartes and Malebranche on the mind-body union. The Philosophical Review, 101, 281–325.
Schmalz, T. M. (2019). Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia on the Cartesian mind: Interaction, happiness, freedom. In E. O’Neill & M. Lascano (Eds.), Feminist history of philosophy: The recovery and evaluation of women’s philosophical thought (pp. 155–173). Dordrecht: Springer.
Shapiro, L. (1999). Princess Elisabeth and Descartes: The union of soul and body and the practice of philosophy. British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 7(3), 503–520. Reprinted in Lloyd, G. (Ed.). (2002). Feminism and the history of philosophy (pp. 182–203). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Simmons, A. (2014). Sensory perception of bodies: Meditation 6.5. In D. Cunning (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Descartes’ meditations (pp. 258–276). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Simmons, A. (2017). Mind-body union and the limits of Cartesian metaphysics. Philosophers Imprint, 17(14), 1–26.
Wilson, M. D. (1978). Descartes. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Acknowledgements
I am most grateful to Deborah Brown who read a version of this paper and to the editors of this volume for helpful comments and corrections.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Alanen, L. (2021). The Soul’s Extension: Elisabeth’s Solution to Descartes’s Mind–Body Problem. In: Ebbersmeyer, S., Hutton, S. (eds) Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680): A Philosopher in her Historical Context. Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71527-4_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71527-4_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-71526-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-71527-4
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)