the seventeenth-century moralists and Pascal
2. Descartes on the passion of love and its relation to the imagination
In his letters to Pierre Chanut,11 René Descartes offers a multi-faceted and complex philosophical view of the essence of love. Regrettably, the complex character of Des-cartes’ account of love is easily missed. He defines love as a movement of the will in the
8 This is why Descartes’ approach to the passions starts from a physical point of view: every passion has a corporeal origin, namely as a certain movement of the life spirits which moves the pineal gland and transforms itself into a concrete passion in the soul. Cf. AT XI, 353: “Et on peut aisément concevoir que ces images ou autres impressions se réunissent en cette glande par l’entremise des esprits qui remplissent les cavités du cerveau.” Voss 1989, 37: “And we can easily understand these images or other impressions to unite in this gland by the mediation of the spirits filling the brain’s cavities.”
9 AT XI, 357: “(…) ils (les esprits animaux) excitent un mouvement particulier en cette glande, lequel est institué de la nature pour faire sentir à l’âme cette passion.” Voss 1989, 39: “Simply in virtue of enter-ing these pores, these spirits excite a particular movement in this gland which is instituted by nature to make the soul feel this passion.”
10 AT XI, 431: “elles nous représentent tant les biens que les maux beaucoup plus grands et plus im-portants qu’ils ne sont, en sorte qu’elles nous incitent à rechercher les uns et fuir les autres avec plus d’ardeur et plus de soin qu’il n’est convenable.”
11 Pierre Chanut was an appointed diplomat at the Swedish court and a good friend of Descartes. Unlike many other intellectual correspondents of Descartes, Chanut was not really concerned with scientific issues but expressed a deep interest in morality. For further information, see Clarke (2006).
direction of an object that appears convenient or agreeable to the soul. As a passion, love accomplishes a bodily function, in that love inclines the will towards an object that appears useful. As a result, some might find – especially those who are somewhat romantically-minded – that Descartes’ account of love is somewhat disappointing since he views this passion as a physician: love is rooted in a biological process. In order to ex-plain the biological origin of love, Descartes refers to the very beginning of human life:
the most primitive form of love consists in the desire of the unborn fetus to unite with the nutrients in the mother’s milk. With the French philosopher Alain (born as Émile-Auguste Chartier), we could call the Cartesian passion of love “a hymn to mother’s milk” (Alain 1925, 175).Very generally, Descartes’ account of the passion of love tends to be interpreted as nothing more than a mere scientific study of a certain biological phenomenon.
According to Descartes, love entails an incomprehensible connection between an indifferent physical process and a passion in the soul. The passion of love is originally rooted in an indifferent, bodily movement or, more specifically, in a certain stream of life spirits in the body. Therefore, passionate love always appears as a confused thought in the mind: the passion has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of the beloved object.
A biographical example from Descartes’ early childhood might be illuminating here:
‘the cross-eyed girls’. As a child, Descartes felt strangely attracted to cross-eyed girls.
Without being able to give a reason why, he felt impressed by the singular property of being ‘cross-eyed’. As an adult, Descartes offers a dry, physical explanation for this strange, youthful attraction: the first time he met a cross-eyed girl, he was so impressed that the sight of this girl, it left an impression in his brain. Every time he saw a cross-eyed girl this trace was reactivated, as a result of which poor René unwillingly lapsed into love.
Of course, Descartes’ predilection for cross-eyed girls is quite innocent and certainly does not arouse moral condemnation. Descartes could not control the physical move-ments triggered by the pleat in his brain. However, the passion of love, rooted in a physi-cal movement, which may appear as a thought in the soul can become excessive and even immoral. By this, it is meant that the soul is inclined to consent blindly to the images this passion evokes. Some passionate lovers spend all their energy and efforts embellishing and idealizing the image of their beloved. Ascribing a disproportionate value to the object of their love, they become obsessed with an image and invent all kinds of qualities and reasons that justify their love. Sometimes the illusion even expels the real person, and one thus falls in love with an image. At this point, love becomes an imaginary passion and therefore causes a serious form of alienation: the fascination for the image of the beloved becomes an obsession ousting every other idea of the soul. This alienation does not neces-sarily imply a love directed towards a person since objects, whatever their form may be, can give rise to the passion of love as well. Curiously, Descartes juxtaposes moral objects (a father loving his ‘son’/ someone loving his ‘friend’) and immoral objects (sex, alcohol, money):
For, e.g., although the passions an ambitious person has for glory, an avaricious person for money, a drunkard for wine, a brutish man for a woman he wants to violate, a man of honor for his friend or his mistress, they are nevertheless similar in that they participate in Love. But the first four have Love only for the posses-sion of the objects their pasposses-sion has reference to, and have none whatever for the objects themselves, for which they have only desire mixed with other particular passions (Voss 1989, 63).12
However divergent and arbitrary the nature of these objects may be, they all participate in the passion of love. But despite the fact that Descartes contends that all these (moral and immoral) kinds of love have the same essence, he still insists upon a difference with regard to the relation these objects have to the loving soul. A miser desiring money or a rapist longing for a female body do not love the objects (women, money) in themselves: they only desire the possession of these objects. In other words, all these lovers believe (wrongly) that they need to usurp or conquer the objects of their love in order to satisfy their desires.
Descartes calls this phenomenon a love for possession.
As soon as the passion of love derails and becomes an obsession, it can give rise to even more dangerous consequences. These consequences can even be more dire than those of the passion of hatred. Descartes surprisingly claims that an excessive love can cause the most pernicious evil of humanity. This is not necessarily so because love, unlike hate, conjoins with much strength and audacity (do not all deeds of heroism spring from love?), but because this passion entails a blind and wrong judgment of its object. In other words, if the passion of love corresponds to a union of the soul with an object that is faulty and excessively valorized by the imagination, this love is uncompromising: every other object that can be an obstacle for the unification with the object is destroyed in the most merciless way. The love for one’s object brings along hate for an infinite series of other objects. “The greatest and most tragic disasters” according to Descartes, “can be seasoning for a disor-dered love” (Kenny 1970, 218).13
Strikingly, Descartes’ characterization of these dangerous effects that arise from exces-sive and unreasonable love is similar to Pascal’s anthropological approach of love. Despite his radically different background – he approaches the passions not as a physician, but as
12 AT XI, 388–389: “(…) encore que les passions qu’un ambitieux a pour la gloire, un avaricieux pour l’argent, un ivrogne pour le vin, un brutal pour une femme qu’il veut violer, un homme d’honneur pour son ami ou pour sa maîtresse, et un bon père pour ses enfants, soient bien différentes entre elles, toutefois en ce qu’elles participent de l’amour elles sont semblables. Mais les quatre premiers n’ont de l’amour que pour la possession des objets auxquels se rapporte leur passion et n’en ont point pour les objets mêmes.”
13 Cf. AT IV, 616: “Mais l’amour est toujours plus coupable que la haine des maux qu’on attribue à l’amour, pour ce que, si nous aimons quelque chose, nous haïssons, par même moyen, tout ce qui lui est contraire.”
a moralist – Pascal also pays attention to the immoral dangers of a cooperation between the imagination and the passion of love.