The Function of Passions Is to Align Mental and Bodily Activities

Consider the definition of emotion of love which Descartes gives. Love is “an emotion of the soul caused by a movement of the spirits, which impels the soul to join itself willingly to objects that appear to be agreeable to it.”31

Suppose (non-counterfactually) that I love my mother. This passion is brought about when a brain image of my mother either directly or by some link in the memory causes a certain perception in the mind. The love is felt32 _{to be in the self because we do}

not perceive any cause for it outside the self.33 _{In contrast, a pain is felt in the body} because we perceive its cause to be in the body.

Now, my perception of my mother presents her as agreeable, that is, good for me. The part about “joining itself willingly” signifies my consent of being together. The emotion of love coaxes the will to affirm any imagination where my mother and I form a unit. Descartes has in mind here something like the family unit. These imaginations could be of situations where my mother supports me, I bring her a gift, or something

31 _{Article 79, Passions of the Soul, AT XI:387.}

32 _{Descartes uses the term “referred to”, but I think in this context “felt” does the same job with more}

transparency.

33 _{This is where the phenomenology breaks down since in fact the perception does have its cause in the}

mundane but valuable like that. Descartes does not give us a concrete idea of what an imagined unit is, because it is not supposed to consist only of physical proximity. If I love my mother, I won’t necessarily want to be physically present in her life.

Even though there is a question of what an imagined unit is, that is only indirectly our concern with this definition. Rather, it is not clear what “agreeable” is. It is clear from the definition that the object of love, my mother, is supposed to be agreeable to me. The self properly speaking is the mental agent, or the thinking being. The emotion of love likewise is a modification of the mental agent. The passion is not a modification of the body since it is a perception. On similar and familiar grounds, the self is not the same as the bodily agent.34

Descartes makes it clear that the function of passions, their raison d’etre, is that they move the self to affirm whatever is the good of the human being.35 _{Because the} human being is compounded of two agents, there are two kinds of goods according to Descartes. The bodily good consists in health and strengthening the body’s ability to perform its functions.36

The mental goods can be discerned from his definitions of joy and sadness. Joy and

34 _{This fact is clearly emphasized by Descartes in articles 2 and 3 of Passions, AT XI:328–329. He says that in}

order to understand the function of passions properly we must distinguish them from bodily functions.

35 _{He writes: “The function of all the passions consists solely in this, that they dispose our soul to want the}

things which nature deems useful for us, and to persist in this volition; and the same agitation of the spirits which normally causes the passions also disposes the body to make movements which help us to attain these things.” Article 52, Passions, AT XI:372.

sadness are recognitions that we possess some good or some harm respectively. Joy is simply “the enjoyment of a good belonging to the soul” and sadness mind is “the

discomfort which the soul receives from evil”.37 _{Ultimately, the benefit that the mind gets} out of things is the enjoyment of some perfection. The perfection here is tricky: We might think that the perfection for the mind is the perfection of its cognition. But to perfect one’s cognition is to be able to perceive something truly. But the best good for the mind is not indifferent to what is veridically cognized. In other words, it is not true that a

recognition of a good or of a bad bring equal perfection to the self. The best kind of good for the mind is when the mind cognizes veridically that something good belongs to it. Because the perfection of the mind involves the perfection of the object which the mind

enjoys, it leaves open what the range of mental goods are. At least, we can say that all of

them involve veridical cognition.

When I love something, the passion of love presents something as good for me and that I should unite myself to it because it is good. For example, my love of my mother consists in the presentation of my mother as a good for me. Since I am strictly speaking a mental agent, this would mean that I love my mother because I recognize that she is a good for me.

This brings in the question: How does this involve the body?

It was concluded that the origin of passions is in the body and its functions. Bodies are capable of attachment behavior because the body gets a biological benefit from forming

units with others, which would be parental guidance in the case of my mother. In the case of a partner, the benefits of attachment would be procreation and child rearing, since arguably procreation is the preservation of the body in another.

The body gets involved in the good for the self because the bodily goods are presented as good for the self. But the very fact that the body’s health is presented as a good for the mind does not originate from the nature of the mind (which is only a thinking thing).

As I said earlier, it was left open what exactly is a mental good. The point of leaving that open was for Descartes to leave room that the self can be as if permeated by the bodily agent when the bodily good is included within the scope of the mental good. If we regard the self as a purely mental agent, the only good of the self would be the perfection of its cognition. At least, it is hard to see what else there would be.

If the mind would be solely a thinking being without any involvement with this

body, there would be no willful or interested co-operation with the body because the self

would not regard the bodily good as its own good.

Where does this addition of good come from such that it compounds the interests of the self to those of the body? That can be none other than the third factor of the mind– body union itself. Descartes indicates in the 6th Meditation that the sensations arise from mind–body union, and in Passions that the function of those sensations is to present the object of the passion as good for the mind. That is why the union itself should38 _{exist. It is}

38 _{The union makes possible that there is beneficial co-operation, the extension of the goods of the self, and}

the ground which makes possible that the mind will form a whole with the body in terms of agency by taking in the bodily goods as good for the self.

The above leads to the view that sensations and passions are signals for the mind. They are signals because they instruct the mind to regard some bodily good as a good for itself. They also coax the mind to consent to actions which promote the good.