Soft Underbelly of Reason: The Passions in the Seventeenth Century (Routledge Studies in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, 1)

The Soft Underbelly of Reason

A flood of literature on the passions came out of the seventeenth century, and The Soft Underbelly of Reason highlights the thinking of philosophers, theologians, artists and physicians with regard to the nature of passions. Stephen Gaukroger explains that although there were inevitable overlaps, the interests of each group were distinctive. We come to understand that it was in terms of the contrast between reason and passions that fundamental questions about the nature of wisdom, goodness and beauty were pursued in the seventeenth century. We also see that it informed practical questions about selfunderstanding, about the behaviour marking out the philosopher, the statesman and the theologian, and questions about the understanding of psychopathological states. Each of the essays in The Soft Underbelly of Reason, written by the most respected academics in their fields, provides both an insightful and valuable understanding on the different views of the passions in the seventeenth century. Those with an interest in the philosophy of the era, the history of medicine, and women’s studies will find this collection a fascinating read. Stephen Gaukroger is a Reader in Philosophy at the University of Sydney, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. He has written several books, including Descartes: An Intellectual Biography, Cartesian Logic, and Arnauld: On True and False Ideas.

Routledge Studies in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy

1 The Soft Underbelly of Reason Edited by Stephen Gaukroger

The Soft Underbelly of Reason The Passions in the Seventeenth Century

Edited by Stephen Gaukroger

London and New York

First published 1998 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1998 selection and editorial matter, Stephen Gaukroger; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The soft underbelly of reason : the passions in the seventeenth century/ edited by Stephen Gaukroger. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Emotions (Philosophy)—History—l7th century. I. Gaukroger, Stephen. B815.S64 1998 128’.37’09032–dc21 97–24517 CIP ISBN 0-203-44851-0 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-75675-4 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-17054-0 (Print Edition)

Contents

List of illustrations Notes on contributors Acknowledgements

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Introduction Stephen Gaukroger

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Part I The nature of the passions 1 Explaining the passions: passions, desires, and the explanation of action Susan James

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2 Rationalizing the passions: Spinoza on reason and the passions Genevieve Lloyd

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Part II The symbolism of the passions 3 Reading the passions: the Fall, the passions, and dominion over nature Peter Harrison

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4 Painting the passions: the Passions de l’Âme as a basis for pictorial expression Christopher Allen

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Contents

Part III The physiology of the passions 5 Controlling the passions: passion, memory, and the moral physiology of self in seventeenth-century neurophilosophy John Sutton 6 Restraining the passions: hydropneumatics and hierarchy in the philosophy of Thomas Willis Jamie C.Kassler Index

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Illustrations

3.1 Human and animal heads, from Giambattista Della Porta, De humana physiognomia

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3.2 Bovine Man, from Giambattista Della Porta, De humana physiognomia

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3.3 The characters of fear, from Charles Le Brun, Conférence…sur l’expression générate et particuliére des passions

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4.1 Charles Le Brun, Head of a fleeing Persian

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4.2 Illustrations of expressions from Henry Testelin, Sentimens des plus habiles peintres

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4.3 Jean Audran, engraving after Charles Le Brun, Les reines de Perse

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4.4 Nicolas Poussin, The Massacre of the Innocents

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4.5 After Charles Le Brun, ‘La Crainte’, from Picart’s edition of the Conférence

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6.1 The human hydraulus

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6.2 Interior of the encephalon, showing part of the ndchest with its pathways

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6.3 The control unit

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Contributors

Christopher Allen is Research Associate in the Department of Classics, University of Sydney, and Lecturer in History of Art at the National Art School, Sydney; he has been Maître de Conférences at the Collège de France. He is currently working on a critical edition of Dufresnoy’s De arte graphica, and is author of Art in Australia from Colonization to Postmodernism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997). Stephen Gaukroger is a Reader in Philosophy at the University of Sydney, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. Among his recent publications are Cartesian Logic: An Essay on Descartes’ Conception of Inference (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), a collection of essays, The Genealogy of Knowledge (Aldershot: Avebury, 1997), a translation of Arnauld’s On True and False Ideas (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), and an edited collection, The Uses of Antiquity (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991). Peter Harrison is Associate Professor and Head of Department of Philosophy at Bond University, Queensland, Australia. He is author of ‘Religion’ and Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Susan James is a Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, and a Lecturer in Philosophy at Cambridge University. She is author of The Content of Social Explanation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), and Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Jamie C.Kassler has held a number of research fellowships, and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. Among her recent ix

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publications are an edition (with Mary Chan) of Roger North’s The Musicall Grammarian 1728 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and Inner Music: Hobbes, Hooke, and North on Internal Character (London: Athlone Press, 1995). Genevieve Lloyd is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. She is author of The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy (2nd edn, London: Routledge, 1993), Being in Time: Selves and Narrators in Philosophy and Literature (London: Routledge, 1993), Part of Nature: Self-Knowledge in Spinoza’s Ethics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), and Spinoza and Ethics (London: Routledge, 1996). John Sutton is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Philosophy at Sydney University and he has been Visiting Fellow at the Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles. He is author of Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Acknowledgements

The editor would like to thank Her Majesty The Queen for permission to reproduce Figure 4.1, from the Royal Library, Windsor; and the Institut de France (Musée Condé), for permission to reproduce Figure 4.4.

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The question of the nature of the passions has traditionally been motivated by a number of quite distinct considerations, some of which have emerged as quickly as others have disappeared, with the result that what has been demanded from a ‘theory of the passions’ has changed over time. The treatment of the passions in late antiquity by the Alexandrian Church Fathers, for example, centred on a Christological problem about how Christ’s ‘agony in the garden’ was possible if he were God. This led to a study of the nature of the passions, with Athanasius attributing the agony in the garden to Christ’s body alone, and Clement distinguishing between bodily passions, which are necessary for the preservation of life, and passions of the soul. Such concerns are almost completely absent from philosophical discussions of the nature of the passions in the seventeenth century, but they had certainly formed one strand in Augustine’s account of the nature of the passions, whose influence on seventeenth-century discussions was immense.1 We can also find a number of issues that had formed a core part of the discussion of the passions from antiquity up to the end of the early modern era, but which disappeared from such discussion only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One such topic is the idea that a theory of the passions might provide a basis for a therapeutic practice directed, inter alia, to purging psychopathic states, the first modern treatment being Petrarch’s De remediis, a compendium of Stoic techniques for ‘healing the passions’.2 Melancholia was the passion that received greatest attention in this tradition in the early modern era, because it was that imbalance of the humours associated with genius and profundity, and as well as treatises devoted entirely to it, the most famous being Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, writers such as Montaigne and Descartes were particularly concerned with it.3 The 1

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combination of physiology, psychology and ethics that underlay the treatment of melancholy was typical of the kinds of considerations that lay behind thinking about the passions, and they had always been associated with bodily conditions, bringing them under the purview of medicine and physiology, but they were also given ethical meanings, bringing them under the purview of moral psychology and theology. In the seventeenth century, for example, the Christian moral code still centred around the ‘seven deadly sins’—pride, envy, wrath, avarice, gluttony, sloth, and lechery—which, together with the occasional addition of ‘sadness’ (tristitia), made up not merely the cardinal sins but distinct and identifiable passions. Since such passions were virtually constitutive of sin—a feature which, because it effectively left out obligations to God, played an important part in the demise of the seven deadly sins in favour of the Ten Commandments as the basic moral code from the end of the sixteenth century onwards4—the passions, even characterized physiologically, and morality were closely articulated. With the removal of psychopathology from philosophy into medicine, psychoanalytic theory, social theory, etc., what was required of a philosophical account of the passions became refocused accordingly. And this refocusing is very much a narrowing of focus. From the point of view of understanding seventeenth-century thought, it is of some importance that we be able to discern just what the parameters of the passions were in the early modern era. There are two especially important respects in which the early modern era appears to differ significantly from our own. In the first place, discussion of the passions in the work of moral and political philosophers, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as now, was restricted to treatment of those passions that are subject to self-control, whether this was encouraged by study and counsel or by law. Yet medical thought, which was often rather closely associated with philosophical thought in the early modern era (as it had been in earlier eras) also had to take account of those passions over which there is no self-control, ranging from hunger to delirium and mania, whether such passions be temporary or permanent. The notion of self-control has justifiably come to the fore in discussions of the passions, but we must not let that blind us to the larger provenance of the passions. Second, although it is in terms of the contrast between reason and the passions that fundamental philosophical questions—the nature of wisdom, goodness and beauty—were explored in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the aim was not merely to describe the ‘human condition’. Philosophers also constructed an image of themselves as paradigmatic bearers of moral, aesthetic, and intellectual responsibility.

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Their understanding of reason and the passions was intended to be authoritative—whatever individual philosophical quarrels there might be, the philosophical view was not simply one kind of opinion among others—and required the construction of a philosophical persona capable of bearing and displaying this authority: an authority which was, of course, very different from that borne and displayed by theologians and statesmen, whose claims on moral authority, for example, overlapped with those of philosophers. Here the question is not so much that of the relation between reason and virtuous action, but that of the relation between philosophy per se and the behaviour appropriate for the philosopher, or at least the philosophically educated: what kind of persona philosophy does or should shape or encourage. Perhaps the most familiar example of this is Stoicism, for the ‘Stoic’ attitude—indifference to calamity and misfortune—is one that is still readily familiar. It receives an elegant formulation in Philo of Alexandria, at the end of the Hellenistic era, when he sets out how the persona of the philosopher or sage is to be formed: Every person—whether Greek or Barbarian—who is in training for wisdom, leading a blameless, irreproachable life, chooses neither to commit injustice nor return it unto others, but to avoid the company of busybodies and hold in contempt the places where they spend their time—courts, councils, marketplaces, assemblies—in short, every kind of meeting or reunion of thoughtless people. As their goal is a life of peace and serenity, they contemplate nature and everything found within her…. Thus, filled with every excel-lence, they are accustomed no longer to take account of physical discomforts or exterior evils, and they train themselves to be indifferent to indifferent things; they are armed against both pleasures and desires, and in short, they always strive to keep themselves above passions.5 But we must not forget that this was a question that was paramount throughout antiquity, and at least from Socrates onwards the philosopher took on or fostered a distinct persona and attitude which fitted him for everything from kingship (Plato) to the life of a beggar (Diogenes the Cynic), depending on the philosophical doctrine or school. This is particularly marked in the Hellenistic era, when ataraxia, peace of mind, was explicitly the aim of all the major schools, and where regulation of the passions played a major role for Epicureans and Stoics alike in attaining the state of mind, and corresponding behaviour, worthy of or appropriate to a member of their philosophical

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school.6 This philosophical self-fashioning was pursued in a different way in the Christian era, and works like Montaigne’s Essays and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy show that it was alive and well in the early modern era. Philosophical self-fashioning has always turned on the understanding and regulation of the passions, and because of this they have a peculiar centrality, for they have not merely been one object of study among others for philosophers, but something which must be understood if one is to be ‘philosophical’ in the first place. Despite the different motivations behind studying the passions and the correspondingly different demands placed on a theory of the passions, however, there are at least two core questions that can be identified in discussions of the passions from antiquity to the present. These are the determinants of human personality and human action, and the question of the nature of moral judgement. In both these questions, the central contrast is that between reason and the passions. This contrast took on a new significance in the early modern era because of the new significance given to the question of the control of the passions by the reason. The catalyst was the way in which Christianity took over and transformed the idea of self-control. Sexual continence is the form of self-control that marks out Christianity from other religious and cultural practices in which, as often as not, it was culinary taboos or occasionally control with respect to one of what came to be known in Christianity as the seven deadly sins (these had a long pre-Christian heritage), such as anger, that had been the focus, but there was also a strong sense that even the most mundane acts had a divine significance. Clement of Alexandria, for example, in his Paedagogus, describes ‘how each of us ought to conduct himself in respect to the body, or rather how to regulate the body itself, and the focus of the discussion here—rules for daily behaviour—is something that we could describe in terms of etiquette.7 The most developed form of such rules of etiquette, one in which their moral and religious significance is made very clear, is the remarkable series of short treatises on the subject put out by Erasmus between 1500 and 1530. These set out rules for how to behave in church, in bed, while at play, while eating; they cover dress, deportment and gestures, and recommend various facial expressions and demeanours, forbidding others.8 Here, self-control becomes a means for taking responsibility for oneself in a very detailed way, and this is crucial in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries because, as Delumeau has pointed out, the problem for both the Reformation and CounterReformation ‘was how to persuade hundreds of millions of people to embrace a severe moral and spiritual discipline of the sort which had never actually been demanded of their forebears, and how to make them

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accept that even the most secret aspects of their daily lives should thenceforth be saturated by a constant preoccupation with things eternal’.9 This programme of ‘internalizing’ Christianity cannot be ignored in looking at sixteenth-and seventeenth-century notions of the passions, for it was achieved through the idea of the exercise of selfcontrol, which was construed explicitly in terms of the regulation of the passions by the reason.10 What we are dealing with here is not just a religious phenomenon, however, but something that has a more general political and cultural significance. Norbert Elias, for example, has shown how the civilizing process that we find so marked from the early sixteenth century onwards provides above all a prototype for the conversion of ‘external into internal compulsion’, and he takes as his key example French Court society, showing how the absolutist monarchy was able to hold the warrior nobility in check by divesting it of military functions, requiring virtually constant attendance at Court, and inculcating ‘courtly values’ in this class by forcing the nobles into a single site of recognition, where their standing was something wholly subject to the king’s discretion.11 Fostering particular modes of daily behaviour is something that has religious and political significance, and I believe that in those writers of the era who were concerned with pointing scientific activity away from what they saw as the barren disputes of the Scholastics towards a more productive form of scientific activity, we can find a similar concern to reform daily habits and practices in the direction of scientifically productive activity. It is a commonplace that the natural and mathematical sciences were being developed as the model for reason in the early modern era, taking over from law and history, among other disciplines, and as a consequence the passions were the antithesis of the canons of rational enquiry that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries set up for themselves. This encouraged a fascination with, as well as an extensive literature on, the passions, in which they were redescribed, reclassified, explained away, reduced to physiology, used to account for the differences between men and women, used as a basis for a theory of pictorial expression, and so on. They are the ‘dark side’ of reason which must be understood if we are to have any comprehensive grasp of the scientific rationality of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And with the natural and mathematical sciences as the new model for ‘reason’, so correlatively we can find attempts to regulate or dispense with the passions as a precondition for the successful practice of science. Bacon is a good case in point. His account of ‘method’ can be seen either as elaborating stringent procedures that individual scientists should follow, or as setting out the rules governing a new elite

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community subject to stringent measures designed to organize the investigation of nature at a social level.12 But whichever way we see it, what we are concerned with is a strict regimen designed to curb the spontaneous tendencies of the mind (Bacon’s ‘idols’), the most predominant of which are passions. Just what regulating the passions amounted to was not a straightforward matter, however, and traditional disputes over the nature of the passions had revolved around a basic polarity between what can broadly be termed Stoic and Augustinian conceptions of the passions.13 The Stoics treated the passions as false judgements, and following an already strong tradition of intellectualist ethics in Greek thought, they identified virtue and knowledge. On this conception, regulating the passions was tantamount to ridding oneself of one’s passions. On Augustine’s conception, on the other hand, the moral worth of our passions must be seen above all in terms of the will, and there can be both virtuous affections and vicious ones. These cannot be assessed by reference to some criterion of rationality, but must rather be judged in terms of the act of will from which they arise. The choice between a Stoic and an Augustinian model was complicated by the fact that the strengths of the one seemed exactly to balance the weaknesses of the other. The Augustinian model captured the phenomenology of moral decision, with all its ambiguities and complex conflicts, better than the Stoic model’s simple conflict between reason and passion. On the other hand, the Augustinian model tended to encourage the division of the mind into a hierarchy of faculties, whose status as intellectual or corporeal functions was at best vague, and this fragmentation of the mind was worrying to a number of late sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury authors (Descartes being one of its most notable opponents), whereas the Stoic model provided a completely integral conception of the mind. Yet the Augustinian model had one feature which not only pervaded discussions in the seventeenth century, but provided them with a central focus: the centrality of the will. When the question was posed in terms of a contrast between reason and the passions, the question was generally whether it was reason alone or the combination of the two that was responsible for action. The possibility of the passions acting alone is perhaps to be found in Epicurean ethics (their account of the passions is too underdeveloped for us to be confident), but it had not generally been taken seriously in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. But once the question begins to be posed in terms of the contrast between the will and the passions, a third possibility can no longer be ignored: is it the will, the combination of the two, or just the passions acting alone that

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determine action? The third possibility is now raised in earnest by Hobbes, and the nature of the passions takes on a new significance. The first two chapters deal with the general question of the contrast between reason and the passions. The key issues here are practical reasoning and action, and these prompt the questions of what role reason and the passions can play in motivating action, and how they can engage one another, if at all. In her chapter, Susan James looks at the question of how characterizations of reasons for action were transformed in the seventeenth century, and at why this change took place: in particular, how the role of the passions in motivating or initiating action was replaced by the much narrower idea that it is desires, along with beliefs, that we should appeal to in explaining actions. The traditional distinction between actions and passions had been filled out by Descartes in terms of the will and the understanding respectively, and he argued that these work in tandem, complementing one another. The term ‘passion’ here covers those mental states in which things outside the soul are represented to it, and it includes sense perception, natural appetites like hunger and thirst, emotions, such as sadness and joy, and finally ‘imaginings’, such as dreams. It is clear from this that the term does not signify something that has no effect on us, and as Descartes makes clear, no thoughts agitate and disturb the soul so much as passions. So while the ‘passions’ do not initiate behaviour in their own right, they shape our patterns of behaviour in countless ways, for action always proceeds through them. Among these passions, it is the emotions that produce the greatest agitation of all, and, in a way that seems incumbent on those accounts that rejected the simple Stoic antithesis between reason and the passions, Descartes’s characterization of them makes them both functional and dysfunctional. We cannot do without them if we are to act, yet they are not simply a neutral means, for they are naturally destructive and lead us to folly. When we turn to the details of practical reasoning, one passion turns out to be crucial: desire. Action is seen by Descartes as something distinctively directed towards future states, and it is through desire that the passions affect action. Because it is itself a passion, desire consists in a movement of the animal spirits, and the stronger this movement, the stronger the desire. In the case of involuntary actions, the movement of the animal spirits may be sufficient to bring about the action. In the case of voluntary actions, on the other hand, the will is also operative, and here the action will be determined by the relative strengths of the volition, which is a function of the degree of conviction of the accompanying judgement and the desire. So where voluntary actions

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are concerned, the central players are desire, standing in for the passions, and the will, and these may act either in opposition to one another or cooperatively. But at this point the question can be raised of whether the will is needed at all: why cannot we allow that desire is what motivates and drives action? This was Hobbes’s question. Hobbes argues that action is initiated only in so far as our thoughts represent states of affairs as advantageous or harmful, and they take the form of an ‘endeavour’ either towards or from the states of affairs represented in the thought. However, it is not just action but thought itself that Hobbes analyses in this way. Generally speaking, he maintains, much of our thought originates in desire, and indeed is simply about how to realize our desires, and all passions are ultimately to be construed either as desires or aversions. But then he goes even further, arguing that volition, far from being something that the passions either oppose or cooperate with in motivating action, is really only a type of desire. All actions spring from desires, and volition is simply the last appetite, the last stage in deliberation, on which we act. A problem with this kind of account, a problem that Locke was quick to raise, is that we know we can perform voluntary actions that conflict with our desires, and it is impossible to account for this, Locke argues, unless we distinguish between volition and desire. While it is desires, which he characterizes as a form of uneasiness, that alone move people to act, when they act they do so via volitions. This makes the volitions dependent upon desires, and a causal relation is thereby set up between the passions and the will. And once desire is detached from the notion of ‘uneasiness’ we are left with the essentially modern idea that actions are to be explained in terms of beliefs and desires, with a specific account of the nature of different passions no longer relevant to the general account. In her chapter on Spinoza’s account of the relation between reason and the passions, Genevieve Lloyd looks at the question of how, given the contrast between reason and the passions, the one can engage the other. Spinoza is a particularly interesting case here, because at first glance his refusal to absolve the ‘affects’ from the ‘geometrical’ treatment to which he subjects everything else suggests a strongly Stoic account, whereby the passions cede to reason. After all, his aim is to free us from the passions, and his treatment of freedom—as consisting in understanding those things (including the passions) that inexorably govern us—is as intellectualist as anything to be found in the Stoics. But as Lloyd reveals, when we look closely at what he does, we find that the affects or passions cannot simply give way to reason, for only passions can displace other passions. If reason is to perform this role it

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must be transformed, and this is precisely what Spinoza does, making reason itself affective, and in this way able to gain power over the passions. Spinoza believes that the destructive power of the passions can be overcome, not by countering them with other passions, or indeed with reason, but simply by understanding them. Overcoming the passions has nothing to do with the will and, like Hobbes, Spinoza sees no role for the will in accounting for the passions: everything can be explained by the understanding, for the passions are just confused ideas. When we act from reason, rather than from passion, what determines our action is something that does not involve inadequate or confused ideas: our actions are determined, but they are self-determined rather than being determined from outside. But to say that we act from reason rather than passions does not mean that there are two competing motivating forces, reason and passion, and that we are acting from one rather than the other. Rather, what Spinoza is arguing is that, when we act from reason, we are acting from a passion transformed by reason into something which is no longer confused and inadequate. The passion has been transformed, through understanding, into an active emotion, an ‘affect’. But reason, too, is transformed in the process, for to be effective it has to share in the affectivity of the passions, and in doing this it takes on some features of emotion. This transformation of reason is most evident in Spinoza’s account of hilaritas, a reflective joy arising from the mind’s understanding of itself as a unified whole, which Lloyd analyses at length. Lloyd’s paper brings out an important aspect of the reason-passion relationship. In a philosopher like Spinoza, where everything is subservient to reason, the temptation has been to assume that we must first understand reason and then apply this understanding to the passions, that an understanding of reason is prior to an understanding of the passions. But this approach in fact causes us to miss a crucial aspect of Spinoza’s account, which is that reason is called upon to control the passions and must in the process itself be rendered affective: reason is transformed by the passions, not in that they have ultimate power over it, but because if it is to be able to engage with them at all, and so have power over them, it cannot be conceived along the lines of a Stoic-cum‘rationalist’ stereotype. One cannot understand reason in Spinoza unless one understands the process by which it engages the passions, and for this one needs to understand the passions. The chapters in the second section consider two sides of the same coin. They deal, respectively, with the way in which we might read the nature of the passions from the way in which they are represented or

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symbolized in nature, and especially in the animal kingdom, and, conversely, with the way in which, from an understanding of the nature of the passions, we might learn how to represent them. Throughout the Middle Ages, mastery of the passions was frequently associated with a mastery of wild beasts. Exceptional individuals, generally saints, exercised an internal control over their ‘bestial’ passions, and were commonly credited with a corresponding ability to tame wild animals. The story of St Jerome and the lion is the bestknown of numerous examples. Informing such traditions was the biblical account of Adam’s fall from grace, a fall typically interpreted as the seduction of the will by the passions. This interpretation was reinforced by other features of the creation narrative: Eve’s temptation of Adam represented the triumph of the feminine passions over masculine rationality; more importantly, the rebellion of wild animals against their erstwhile masters symbolized the revolt of bestial lusts against angelic reason. In his chapter, Peter Harrison explores the moral drawn from this: when the human race in the person of Adam lost control of the passions, it coincidentally lost its dominion over nature. Only in cases of exceptional sanctity might this loss be temporarily reversed. In the early modern period the link between internal and external mastery is retained, but with some important differences. The interior discipline exemplified in the lives of the saints becomes a universal imperative. In consequence, a more complete and systematic mastery of the natural world is foreshadowed. This power over nature no longer resides in isolated symbolic anticipations of the end times, nor is it a nostalgic reminiscence of the Edenic empire of our first parents. Rather, it is conceived of as a literal restoration of human dominion over nature. The passions are now identified as having distorted all forms of human knowledge, and thus as having impeded the progress of the sciences. The remedy proposed is a thorough knowledge of the passions, made possible by a familiarization with their various manifestations in humans and animals. The ability to read the passions—to know how they are physically represented—is thought to provide a key both to countering their adverse effects on human judgements and to controlling others who are unwitting slaves to the passions. The study of the passions thereby becomes not just something bearing on morals and physiology, but something that plays an important role in projects to advance learning and increase human dominion over nature. In his chapter, Christopher Allen looks at the disappearance of a tradition of representing passions symbolically in art in terms of a specific moral or dramatic context and its replacement by a procedure

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for representing the passions according to a fixed number of physiologically-based stereotypes. No account of the passions was more important in this respect than that provided by Descartes in his Les Passions de l’Âme, and Allen looks at the expression of the passions in late seventeenth-century French painting, where a rather dogmatic version of the Cartesian theory of the passions provided the basis for the representation of the passions in the plastic arts. The expression of the passions was fundamental to the theory and practice of painting from the Renaissance onwards, and central to the style known as ‘classical’ and associated with Raphael and his great seventeenth-century heir Nicolas Poussin. Narrative painting was considered the highest genre for this tradition, and expression was its foundation. Allen shows that the dominant figure in later French classicism, Charles Le Brun, far from offering a continuation of Poussin’s approach, represents a wholly different treatment of the passions, which have now been transformed by Cartesianism. Poussin belonged to the last generation of Renaissance humanist thought, in which moral, scientific and religious considerations are always inextricably combined and overlaid. He begins with the moral significance of the event depicted and conceives each bodily/facial expression as a response to a unique event. Le Brun’s approach is completely different. Allen shows how he attempts to isolate individual passions, analyse their characteristic distortions of the facial features, and then build up his narrative scenes from these distinct elements. For Poussin, on the contrary, there was no such thing as a ‘passion’ in a pure form, and if we take single faces out of their setting in his paintings we find that they are rarely legible in the straightforward way that Le Brun’s are. One way in which we might understand the difference between Poussin and Le Brun is in terms of what their different approaches are supposed to achieve. Poussin sees expression as part of invention, as part of telling a story. Le Brun, on the other hand, sees expression as part of imitation, as part of describing the world, and not only does he put the resources of Cartesianism to use in this endeavour, but the project itself seems shaped by the idea of expression as scientific representation. The physiology of the passions had always played a central role in their conception, and there were specific neurophysiological dimensions to the various discussions of the passions, irrespective of how they might be characterized on other grounds. The chapters in the third section look at two aspects of the way in which neurophysiological theory was brought to bear on the understanding of the passions. The first looks at the way in which seventeenth-century moral physiologists thought of

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the active use of reason as not merely excluding or controlling bodily sources of passion, but also the neural processes by which memory intruded unsuitable mental contents into the moral life of the mind. The second chapter turns to medical physiology, looking at a fully-fledged theory of the passions in which the prime concern is those passions over which we have no self-control, something political and ethical treatments never touched upon. John Sutton argues that seventeenth-century moral physiologists had to deal with older medical conceptions of permeable bodies and churning brains as temporary pockets of stability traversed by multiple environmental forces. Psychophysiological harmony consisted in the maintenance of proper blends in internal fluid environments, for perceptions of active and tumultuous body dynamics survived into mechanical physiology. The standard Cartesian theory of memory invoked ‘quick and nimble’ animal spirits, and confusion and a dangerous mixture of stored items were widely seen to be an inevitable consequence of this account. Descartes, Malebranche and others proposed various ways of mitigating the unwelcome consequences by imposing stability on the dynamic fluid carriers of memory. There was, for example, a clear demonstration of the separation of self from memory in the Cartesian treatment of the passion of wonder. It was hoped that novelty induced a rare fixity in brain traces, an independence between stored items that guaranteed immunity from the melding and confusion of ordinary remembering. It is this imposition of sameness that the rational soul is supposed to learn to mimic and extend in being trained to avoid error, by controlling the fickle associative processes of memory and brain. The reaction in Restoration England to the Cartesian account focuses on the same problem, namely the confusion that would inevitably ensue if fleeting animal spirits were made the medium of memory. It was believed that such confusion would undermine the intrinsic order in cognition which nature and morality required. This led Restoration natural philosophers to offer alternative accounts of the sources of disorder and unnecessary passions. Indeed, it was in the context of dealing with the passions that various accounts of the specialization of functions in brain structure were developed. But it was not only new accounts of neurophysiological localization that were stimulated by these disputes. Techniques for dealing with the passions prompted some of the most distinctive neurophysiological accounts of the period, namely those of reflex and association. Here we have a striking example of how a natural philosophical programme can be shaped around an understanding of the passions. Another example of how concerns in understanding the passions

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helped shape physiology is provided in Jamie Kassler’s chapter. Kassler looks at a classic account of passions which is predominantly concerned with passions over which we have no self-control. Thomas Willis offers a model of the passions in which physiology itself is conceived on the model of a musical instrument. Willis was a physician and neuroanatomist. His central concern was with physiology, by which he denoted the doctrine of the passions in general, that is to say, everything that a person suffers in health and disease. As a consequence of his general construal of the passions, there will be natural and unnatural or preternatural passions. Both types of passion are violent, and, in both, the signs and symptoms may be visible as changes to the countenance or changes in gesture, for example, or they may be audible. The model of the passions that had predominated up to this time had been one in which the mind was conceived as a pilot and the body as a vessel, which is moved either by healthy gales or tossed about by every wind. Willis’s model is different from this. In his Cerebri anatome (1664), the basic text on the anatomy of the brain and nervous system for the next hundred and fifty years, Willis construes the physiology of animals and human beings in mechanical terms, comparing them to different types of hydraulic organ. His version of mechanism is complex, however. In order to avoid the sharp dualism that he associates with Descartes, he gives animal spirits an especially significant role in animal and human physiology, for example. And his organizing model seems to be derived from Platonism, with its trichotomous distinction between intellect, fantasy or imagination, and body, which he fills out in terms of the musician (intellect) using his skills (fantasy) to play on his organ (body). Having outlined the structure of the human hydraulus by considering its operating and control systems, namely the precordia, which is contained within the thorax, and the encephalon, which is contained within the skull, Kassler turns to organ function, considering how the human hydraulus plays and is played upon, and what ‘music’ it plays. Willis conceived of the human hydraulus as being blown by regular winds of instinct or irregular winds of passion. Irregular winds arise instinctively with reference to the welfare of the organism, and their result is silent music conceived as a repertory of muscular movement. This repertory is expressed as external signs, however, and these signs—especially laughing, weeping and singing—enable the physician to determine whether internal parts of the organism are well or ill tempered.

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NOTES 1 See H.M.Gardiner, Ruth Clarke Metcalf and John Beebe-Center, Feeling and Emotion (New York, 1935), and Anthony Levi, French Moralists (Oxford, 1964). 2 See, for example, Letizia A.Panizza, ‘Stoic Psychotherapy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Petrarch’s De remediis’, in M.Osler (ed.), Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquillity (Cambridge, 1992), 39–66. 3 There is a good general coverage in Stanley W.Jackson, Melancholia and Depression (New Haven, 1986). On Montaigne, see M.A.Screech, Montaigne and Melancholy (London, 1983), and on Descartes see my Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford, 1995), ch. 1. 4 See John Bossy, ‘Moral Arithmetic: Seven Sins into Ten Commandments’, in Edmund Leites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1988), 214–34. 5 Quoted in Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford, 1995), 264. 6 See Hadot, ibid., and Paul Rabbow, Seelenführung: Methodik der Exerzitien in der Antike (Munich, 1954). The Epicureans, who did not recruit from within (e.g. from among the sons of their own members) and limited contact with the outside community, needed a particularly striking image of the Epicurean philosopher for recruitment purposes, and they commissioned many more busts of their founder than did other schools. As Bernard Frischer notes in his The Sculpted Word: Epicureanism and Philosophical Recruitment in Ancient Greece (Berkeley, 1982), these busts portrayed Epicurus as at once ‘the philosopher, father-figure, Asklepian healer, Herculean culture-bringer, megalopsychos (‘great-souled man’), and god’ (p. xvii). 7 See the discussion of Clement in Peter Brown, The Body and Society (London, 1988), ch. 6. 8 There is a representative selection of these writings in translation in section 2 of Erika Rummel (ed.), The Erasmus Reader (Toronto, 1990). 9 Jean Delumeau, ‘Prescription and Reality’, in Leites, op. cit., n. 4, 134–58:144. These issues are dealt with in detail in Delumeau’s magnificent tetralogy: La Peur en Occident (Paris, 1978), Le Péché et la Peur (Paris, 1983), Rassurer et Protéger (Paris, 1989), and Une Histoire du Paradis (Paris, 1992). 10 This is particularly marked, for example, in what was (despite its striking lack of originality) one of the formative texts on the passions in the seventeenth century, Pierre Charron’s De la Sagesse (Paris, 1604). 11 Norbert Elias, The Court Society (Oxford, 1983). 12 The latter reading, which seems to me to be at least along the right lines, is defended in J.Leary, Francis Bacon and the Politics of Science (Ames, Iowa, 1994). 13 The Augustinian-Stoic in fact extends much further than the passions and pervades the whole of Renaissance philosophy, and perhaps a good deal of early modern philosophy. See William J.Bouwsma, ‘The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought’, in H.Oberman and T.Brady (eds), Itinerarium Italicum (Leiden, 1975), 3–60.

Part I The nature of the passions

1

Explaining the passions Passions, desires, and the explanation of action Susan James

The view that actions are explained by beliefs and desires is deeply rooted in analytical philosophy, so much so that many philosophers working in this tradition find it virtually inescapable. What interests them, in consequence, is not so much its basic structure as the manner in which it is interpreted, and much current debate focuses on its component terms. Questions such as ‘Are desires the only intentional states that prompt us to realize our goals?’, ‘How do desires differ from preferences?’ and ‘How do desires relate to evaluations?’, aim to explore and refine a model which informs both our everyday and our philosophical understanding of why people act at all, and why they do what they do. Because it is frequently taken for granted that beliefs and desires are the principal antecedents of action, it sometimes comes as a surprise that many early modern authors did not subscribe to this view, and instead explained actions by appealing to items such as passions and volitions. Once we have become sensitive to this fact, however, it is natural to wonder how the modern view (often labelled Humean) arose, and what problems it was designed to solve. This complicated story has two main plots, one about how beliefs acquired a central role, another about the intricate process by which desires came to be singled out as the states that move us to act. In this chapter I shall explore only the second, tracing a series of shifts in the work of Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke, and identifying some of the philosophical pressures to which these authors were responding. The interest of this narrative is in part the historical one of coming to see how a philosophical position which nowadays has the status almost of a dogma began to get established. At the same time, however, acquiring this understanding provides an opportunity to reflect on an instability in the notion of desire which surfaces in debates between contemporary advocates of the Humean model and their opponents and 17

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leads to a kind of stalemate. When non-Humeans object that people sometimes act contrary to their desires, Humeans are liable to reply that they regard ‘desire’ as a shorthand for various distinct states which can cause action (much as Davidson’s pro-attitudes cover desires, urges, social conventions, moral and aesthetic norms, and other things besides). Non-Humeans sometimes respond that this inclusive interpretation of the model is not only vague, but also has the consequence that desires are not necessarily the antecedents of action. At this point, Humeans tend to retreat to the view that an action must, after all, be preceded by a desire, and that desires play a distinctive explanatory role which cannot be taken over by other intentional states, norms, and so on. This movement back and forth has its roots, I shall suggest, in the conceptions of desire developed by Hobbes and Locke. In so far as it remains unresolved in the Humean model, it also remains unclear how much, from an explanatory point of view, that model is intended to achieve. To settle the problem, one would need to formulate and defend a more precise account of desire and its place in action, and here, too, the contrast between contemporary Humeans and their early modern forebears is instructive. The seventeenth-century philosophers whose work I shall discuss all regard desire as a passion, and classify it with states that we now call emotions, such as joy, sadness, hope and fear. To appeal to a desire to explain an action is thus, in their terms, to appeal to a state which is a kind of emotion, so that the explanatory link between emotions and actions is strong. This interpretation of desires as passions contrasts sharply with the analyses given by many contemporary Humeans, who for the most part do not discuss the relation between desire and emotion. Instead, they may, for example, interpret desires as preferences, or (begging the question, perhaps) as dispositions to act. The shift from the earlier of these views to the later raises an obvious question about the relationship between emotions and desires. If we focus on desires as what moves us to act, are we denying that people act out of love, hatred, envy or pity? And if we are not, how do we incorporate into our theoretical account what Hobbes calls ‘the tincture of passion’ that colours our judgements? While the philosophical changes with which this chapter is concerned do not provide an answer to this question, they focus attention on it, and suggest why it might matter. For early modem philosophers, the status of desire as a passion is to be understood in the light of a broader opposition between activity and passivity, which is above all a way of characterizing causal relations. Locke, for example, summarizes one interpretation of this distinction

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when he identifies a passion with the power of an object to be moved, and an action with its power to move itself. We can see this view at work in his assurance that ‘When the ball obeys the stroke of a billiard stick, it is not any action of the ball but mere passion’.1 As Locke goes on to explain, the movement of the ball is a passion because it is caused by something else, in this case the impact of the cue. So, when physical bodies are moved by other things, their movements are passions, and they possess what Locke calls a passive power to be so moved. Passions are effects, and passive powers are what we might call dispositions to be affected in particular ways. What, though, of actions? At this point Locke contrasts passive physical motions with the active power of an object to move itself, which we find in such mental capacities as the power to do or forbear, or to continue or end an action. The difference between actions and passions seems therefore to amount to a difference between the power to be moved (which is a passion) and the power of an object to move itself (which is an action). Locke here appeals to a deeply-entrenched conception of an action as a cause that is not itself an effect of anything else. The obvious candidate for such a role is God, who accordingly appears as pure activity. But, as Locke’s account illustrates, the notion of a self-caused cause could be extended to volitions, so that the opposition between action and passion marked a distinction between two classes of mental states. This is made particularly clear by Descartes, for whom our thoughts are of two principal kinds, some being actions of the soul and others its passions. Those I call its actions are all our volitions, for we experience them as proceeding directly from our soul and as seeming to depend on it alone. On the other hand, the various perceptions or modes of knowledge present in us may be called its passions in a general sense, for it is often not our soul which makes them such as they are, and the soul always receives them from the things that are represented by them.2 Descartes next goes on to elaborate this basic division between volitions and perceptions, clarifying what he means by each. On the side of actions he allows, in writing to Regius, that, strictly speaking, ‘understanding is the passivity of the mind and willing its activity’. But he adds that ‘because we cannot will anything without understanding what we will, and we scarcely ever understand anything without at the same time willing something, we do not easily distinguish in this matter passivity from activity’.3 Because the will and the understanding work

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together, there is a sense in which they are both encompassed by the activity which, strictly, belongs to the will. Equally, when we set ourselves to imagine something non-existent, such as a chimera, or when we apply our minds to objects that are purely intelligible, such as geometrical figures, we cause ourselves to have perceptions which ‘depend chiefly on the volition which makes the soul aware of them. These, too, we usually regard as actions rather than passions.’4 In the case of passions, Descartes distinguishes four types. First, there are ‘perceptions that we refer to things outside us, namely to the objects of our senses’. Second, there are perceptions that we refer to our body, which include natural appetites, such as hunger and thirst, and sensations of pain, heat and so on. Third, there are perceptions that we refer to the soul itself—feelings of joy, anger and the like. And finally there are imaginings, such as we experience in daydreams. All these, Descartes remarks, are passions of the soul, so long as we use the term ‘passion’ in its most general sense.5 The central distinction around which Descartes organizes his account is between those mental states which depend on the soul itself and those which depend on things represented to it. The passivity of what we call the emotions therefore lies initially in the fact that, along with perceptions, sensations and imaginings, they depend on things represented to the soul. But how exactly does this make them passive? Here, again, Descartes is a helpful informant. The passions, he says, can be defined as perceptions, sentiments or émotions of the soul. In calling them perceptions, we signify that they are not actions, i.e. not volitions. In calling them sentiments, we signify ‘that they are received into the soul in the same way as the objects of the external senses, and that they are not known by the soul any differently’. But, Descartes concludes, it is even better to call them émotions because, of all the kinds of thought the soul may have, ‘none agitate and disturb it so strongly as the passions’.6 As we can begin to see, the idea that the passions of the soul are passive works at several levels. Descartes tells us that, like our sensations, they are the effects of bodily motions which are in turn usually caused by external objects and states of affairs. This claim puts a comparatively precise interpretation on a more widespread conception of the passions of the soul as caused by other people and things, as responses to the world. But Descartes also emphasizes that passions of this kind deserve the name of emotions because of their power to move us. They are more agitating and disturbing than sensory perceptions or bodily sensations, or, indeed, than any other kind of

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thought. This remark introduces a further sense in which the emotions are associated with passivity, one partially separable from those so far discussed. Seventeenth-century thinkers conceive of the emotions as states in the face of which we are often passive, in the sense of being unable to control them. The passions are effects, but they are powerful effects which in turn move us to further thoughts and actions. Our susceptibility to emotion thus amounts to a set of dispositions to be powerfully affected by external objects and states of affairs. As between individuals, they are exceedingly diverse. Depending on all sorts of factors such as climate, the circumstances of a child’s conception or the social standing of its family, people are born with various emotional dispositions, some of which may endure, while others change with maturation, experience and education. Despite this variety, however, the passions are susceptible to a general, if unstable, characterization and are conceived as simultaneously functional and dysfunctional. On the one hand, our emotions incline us to seek out states of affairs that we think conducive to our well-being, and to avoid circumstances that we think detrimental to it. They drive us to respond to the external world and to manipulate the objects we encounter, including other people, so that without them we would be condemned to lives of inertia and isolation. As Robert Burton puts it in The Anatomy of Melancholy, ‘No mortal man is free from these perturbations; or if he be so, sure he is either a God or a block.’7 On the other hand, the functional aspects of the passions are counterbalanced by a deep-seated conviction that they are at the same time dysfunctional—they are treacherous and wayward, and lead us to misery, frustration, and despair. These dangers stem from the Tact that, although not blind, the passions are acutely myopic. In a simile that must have been more striking then than now, Thomas White describes them as like green spectacles.8 While they incite us to pursue what we see as our advantage, they are not sufficiently well focused to enable us to make fine discriminations between beneficial and harmful states of affairs, and often dispose us to bring about ends acutely detrimental to our well-being. They are consequently described as arbitrary, unpredictable, enslaving, uncontrollable and even pathological. The emphasis in early modern writing on the destructiveness of the passions, which sometimes amounts to a kind of fascinated revelling in human folly, holds out to us an illicit temptation. We may be inclined to fix on a mistaken conception of the passive character of the passions if we understand them as violent impulses caused by external things beyond our control, and take as paradigmatic examples fits of rage or

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amorous infatuation. While this pessimistic reading reverberates through all sorts of early modern texts, it articulates only a part of the sense in which the passions are held to be passive, the part answering to our most overwhelming feelings. If all our passions were as strong as our most intense emotions, this analysis might be adequate. But early modern discussions of the emotions categorize as passive not just these exceptional states, but also a multitude of commonplace affects— admiration for someone’s unfailing politeness, steady affection for a friend, sympathy for a beggar on the street, the desire to write an entertaining letter, and so on. To understand these states as passive, we need to concentrate first on the causal dimension of the notion of passivity, on the fact that ordinary emotions, like our most overwhelming feelings of rage or love, are the effects of our experience of the external world. At the same time, we need to bear in mind the connected claim that none of these states is directly under the control of the will. I cannot simply will myself to admire your politeness, any more than I can will myself to love you. How do desires fit into this picture? Early modern philosophers interpret desire as an affect or passion, and classify it alongside states that are now generally described as emotions. In this they adhere to a longstanding and influential view, shared by the adherents of various otherwise diverse philosophical traditions. Cicero, for example, follows in the footsteps of Stoicism when he identifies desire as one of four fundamental passions: distress (aegritudo), pleasure (laetitia), fear (metus) and desire (libido).9 Equally, when Aquinas elaborates the lists given by Aristotle into a typology of eleven basic passions, he interprets desire as one of the six affections of the concupiscible appetite. These are love and hate (amor and odium), desire and aversion (desiderium and fuga); joy and sadness (delectatio and dolor), the affections we experience as the sensible soul pursues those objects it perceives as good and avoids those it perceives as evil.10 Established interpretations of the passions, such as those of Cicero and Aquinas, continued to exert a considerable influence on seventeenth-century writers. They provided authoritative definitions which served to differentiate one passion from another, and contained accounts of the connection between passion and action. Nevertheless, we can find in some of the most celebrated philosophy of the period a series of significant shifts away from these traditional theories towards a novel understanding of desire and its place in the explanation of action. At the risk of oversimplification, I shall concentrate on tracing these changes in the work of Descartes, Hobbes and Locke. Although they are not the only philosophers who address this issue, they best

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exemplify the transitions which give rise to the view we now call Humean. In addition, their reinterpretations of desire are aspects of their successive attempts to solve a common set of problems inherited from Scholastic Aristotelianism. Once we see them in this context, we can begin to appreciate both what motivated the transitions in question and how they contributed to a wide-ranging debate about the character of the mind. Precisely because this reorientation of desire and its role in the explanation of action is, for the philosophers I shall discuss, part of a much larger project, their treatment of it is designed to answer to several separable problems. I shall summarize only some of these, and shall do so as schematically as possible. Any single problem may be addressed more directly by one philosopher than by another, and I shall not attempt to offer a comprehensive account of how each writer responds to all of them. My aim is only to show how a set of interconnected dissatisfactions with an inherited philosophical stance bears on a specific theme. Christian Aristotelians bequeathed to the seventeenth century a conception of the human soul made up of three parts, each with its own distinctive powers. However, in the opinion of anti-Aristotelian philosophers such as the trio under discussion here, this view suffered from two major limitations. In the first place, although Aristotelians endowed the soul with many powers, they were unable to provide an adequate explanation of how a power performed its distinctive task— how, for example, a faculty of the soul called the will was able to produce volitions. Hence Locke’s heavy-handed insistence that it is hardly enlightening to be told that the digestive faculty digests, the sensible faculty senses, the will wills, and so forth. 11 Second, Aristotelianism lacked a satisfactory account of the way in which powers interact. How, for example, do the memories lodged in one part of the soul change the judgements and volitions occurring in another? As Hobbes protests, to say—as Aristotelians were wont to do—that the senses receive the species of things and deliver them to the common sense, is simply to redescribe the phenomena and does not help to explain them.12 These problems could be resolved, so it was argued, by a conception of the mind which did not posit distinct parts or powers, but this requirement could in turn be satisfied in various diverse ways. Descartes and Locke both claim to meet it when they classify memories, volitions, sensory perceptions and so on as thoughts which are conscious and mutually transparent to one another. The soul is unified, in their view, in so far as it only contains thoughts, and the problem of how one thought can have an effect on another is solved by

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their mutual transparency. However, a very different way of dealing with the problem is proposed by Hobbes, for whom thoughts are corporeal motions. Both the unity of the mind and the capacity of one thought to affect another are explained by the fact that one motion produces other motions in the matter surrounding it. While it was important to find a way of uniting the soul, a satisfactory post-Aristotelian account also needed to be able to explain cases of mental conflict, such as when someone tries but fails to stifle their rage, or succeeds in overcoming their fear. By positing different parts and powers of the soul, capable of battling against one another as well as cooperating, Aristotelianism had offered an analysis of these phenomena which possessed certain attractions, and if the whole theory was to be surpassed, mental conflict would have to be reconciled with a unified mind. As we shall see, this problem exercised Descartes, Hobbes and Locke and shaped their interpretations of desire. To anticipate, Descartes retained the elements of a broadly Aristotelian conception of mental conflict, but relocated it in order to save the unity of the mind. Hobbes regarded this Cartesian view as deeply flawed and offered a radically different, though not altogether original, account of mental conflict itself. Locke struggled to accommodate insights contained in both the Cartesian and Hobbesian analyses, and in doing so arrived at a novel and influential interpretation of the role of desire in the explanation of action. According to Descartes, désir, which is one of six fundamental passions, is distinctive in being about the future. ‘The passion of desire’, he says, ‘is an agitation of the soul which causes the soul to wish, in the future, for the things it represents to itself as agreeable.’13 It can be modified by our judgements about the likelihood of realizing future states, so that, for example, when we desire something and believe we are likely to get it, we feel hope; when we desire something and do not expect to get it, we feel anxiety; and so on. One might think that the forward-looking wanting of desire is an aspect of all our passions. But Descartes does not agree. When he defines love as an emotion of the soul impelling the soul to join itself willingly to objects that are agreeable to it, he specifies that, ‘In using the word “willingly” (volonté) I am not speaking of desire (désir), which is a completely separate passion relating to the future. I mean rather the assent (consentement) by which we consider ourselves henceforth joined with what we love.’14 The idea here seems to be that, on the one hand, I can love something I believe to be good: I can consider myself joined to it. On the other hand, I can desire something: I can want to have it in the future because I believe this will be to my advantage. These passions

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are distinct, but they habitually occur together, because love for something gives rise to the desire to get into a state that will enable me to maintain my love. And the same goes for other passions: hatred gives rise to a desire to get away from the object of the hatred, and so forth. In this analysis Descartes both draws on and repudiates a scholastic analysis to be found in authors such as Aquinas. He emphasizes, as Aquinas does not, that desires are invariably forward-looking. But he takes over Aquinas’s view that our experience is typically organized into sequences of passions. In this case, love gives rise to desire, which terminates in joy or sadness. Desire, then, is one passion among others. But what part does it play in action? Descartes writes unequivocally that ‘the passions cannot lead us to perform any action except by means of the desire they produce’,15 so that desire is always a necessary condition of action. The question of whether it is also sufficient is, however, a little more complicated. In the Cartesian analysis, desires are embedded in sequences of passions and are thus part of more complex causes of action. But we may still ask whether, once a desire exists, an appropriate action will follow. In some cases, Descartes argues, a desire is sufficient for what we would call an involuntary action. When a particularly strong movement of the animal spirits constitutes a particularly strong desire, it can cause motions of the limbs without further ado. But in general people only act on a desire when their will has assented to it. In cases where the desire and volition coincide, both are causes of the action, and in cases where they conflict the outcome depends on the relative strength of the passion and the volition concerned, so that the desire in question may or may not be sufficient for action. On the face of things, this analysis is disturbingly like the Aristotelian one that Descartes so emphatically rejects. If action is the outcome of cooperation or conflict between the passions and the will, has he not posited distinct powers within the mind, so that the connection between them stands in need of explanation? Sensitive to this criticism, Descartes answers by tracing the conflict between passions and volitions to its points of origin. Volitions, he reminds us, are actions of the mind which arise in the soul, whereas passions are our experience of motions in the body. Discord between them is consequently not between thoughts, but between thoughts and motions, or, to put it differently, between the body and the mind. Ingenious as it is, this attempt to guarantee the unity of the soul sits uneasily with Descartes’s own analysis of the passions as states of the body and mind together. To be sure, desires, fears, joys and so on are, on his account, the way we experience particular bodily motions; but they

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are also perceptions of the soul. It would therefore be more accurate to say that the conflict between volitions and passions is a conflict between states of the soul and states of the soul-body composite; and it would then be debatable whether discord of this kind vitiates the soul’s unity. This line of argument, while questioning the success of Descartes’s attempt to replace and surpass the Aristotelian theory of mental conflict, also draws attention to the fact that the Cartesian approach is premised on the view that there are two separate substances, body and mind, which in human beings interact with one another at the pineal gland. As we know, Hobbes found the whole of this claim deeply implausible, and was consequently unpersuaded by Descartes’s analysis of the passions as states straddled between the mental and corporeal. These are among the considerations that prompt him to pursue a quite different solution to the problem in hand, and to offer a classification of our thoughts in which desires play an expanded role. As well as arguing that thoughts are identical with motions, Hobbes pursues the project of unifying the mind at a psychological level. His first step here is to reduce the number of thoughts that need to be unified by claiming that volitions are not distinct from passions—rather, a volition is simply what Hobbes calls the last appetite, the passion that immediately precedes an action. 16 This move has an important corollary. If there is no separate power of willing which can oppose the passions, cases of mental conflict cannot be understood in terms of two clashing forces, passion and will. Rather, Hobbes argues in Stoic vein, conflict is really an alternation of passions. When we find ourselves torn, we oscillate back and forth between different emotions, which are in normal circumstances progressively modified until, in one way or another, deliberation ends and action ensues. At the same time, Hobbes takes a second step. In the Scholastic and Cartesian models of the mind, the will possesses the capacity to direct our thoughts and actions by assenting or withholding assent. But in the Hobbesian account the passions must take over this role. Hobbes therefore faces the problem: what holds our passions together? What binds them into intelligible sequences which result in coherent courses of action? It is in answering these questions that he arrives at a novel conception of desire. The voluntary motions of our bodies are, according to Hobbes, caused by motions which we experience as thoughts,17 but these thoughts must be of a particular kind, representing objects and states of affairs as advantageous or harmful. As he puts it, the thoughts which precede action are ‘commonly called endeavour’. ‘This endeavour’, he goes on, ‘when it is toward something which causes it is called appetite

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or desire…and when the endeavour is fromward something, it is generally called aversion.’18 When our thoughts are not governed by any sustained desire or aversion, we are subject to a kind of madness.19 However, most of our thinking is regulated by some desire or design. ‘From desire ariseth the thought of some means we have seen produce the like of that which we aim at; and from the thought of that, the thought of means to that mean; and so continually until we come to some beginning within our own power.’ 20 Most of our thinking therefore originates in some desire and is then instrumental—it is thought about how to realize the desire in question. The centrality of desire to this account is brought home by Hobbes’s wonderfully blunt remark that to have no desire is to be dead.21 Desire is an essential part of life, not just because without it we would be lifeless, but also because it is insatiable. The satisfaction of one desire simply breeds further desires, so that we are driven on from one to another until death cuts us off. This account gives a priority to desire which we did not find in Descartes’s work. To appreciate it fully, we need to take account of the fact that, although Hobbes at one point distinguishes desire and appetite, explaining that desire is the more general term and appetite is usually reserved for hunger and thirst,22 he nevertheless often uses them interchangeably. The central categories around which his theory is organized are thus, on the one hand, desire or appetite, and on the other, aversion. How, though, is desire related to other passions? Hobbes seems to say that there is a set of eight basic passions which are stages of the process of desiring and attaining things. We start out with desire and aversion, which are motions. We add the ‘appearance or sense’ of these motions, which we call delight or pleasure and trouble of mind or pain. In addition, that which we desire we love, and that which we are averse to we hate. ‘Desire and love’, Hobbes says, ‘are the same thing; save that by desire we always signify the absence of the object; by love, most commonly the presence of the same’, and similarly for aversion and hate. Finally, the expectation of achieving or failing to achieve our desires gives rise to joy or grief. These eight are what Hobbes calls the simple passions, and they are organized around desire and aversion.23 Desire and aversion are therefore what get us going, and the rest of the simple passions are to be understood in terms of them. Moreover, other, more specific passions are modifications of the simple ones, and are thus modifications of the central pair. For example, appetite with the opinion of obtaining an object is hope, aversion with the opinion of hurt from an object is fear, desire of office or precedence is ambition, and so on. There is a significant contrast here with the classification of

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passions compiled by Descartes; for whereas Descartes distinguishes six primitive passions, each of which has many modifications, Hobbes’s passions are for the most part modifications of either aversion or desire. Desire thus no longer belongs to a set of fundamental passions that together can be efficacious in bringing about action. It is the natural disposition, the motivating force, in terms of which the rest of our passions are to be characterized. Moreover, Hobbes does not oppose desires to volitions. Instead he identifies them. So in explaining action we do not have to consider the interplay of two forces, passions and volitions; we need only deal in passions. Nor need we consider a diverse set of passions; we can focus on the various modifications of desire. A further revolutionary feature of Hobbes’s theory, worth noting parenthetically, is that it partly empties out the active/passive distinction. As we have seen, the will was widely interpreted as active in the sense of being self-caused. However, according to Hobbes, all action is to be explained in terms of motions, and because there are no self-caused motions there are no ‘active motions’ or volitions. ‘That which is really within us is…only motion, caused by the action of external objects…The real effect there is nothing but motion or endeavour; which consisteth in appetite or aversion, to or from the object moving.’24 Hobbes reduces what had generally been regarded as active volitions to what had generally been regarded as passive passions (the last appetite), in terms of which actions must be explained, leaving no contrast between the active and passive antecedents of action. So, whether we are engaged in demonstrative reasoning about action or just muddling through our lives, we are moved to both thought and action by our desires and aversions. In denying the existence of anything separate called the will, Hobbes is able to escape from a series of deadlocked negotiations about what volitions are. This move is tempting in its daring and simplicity. There is something exhilarating, too, about Hobbes’s claim that all actions spring from desires. It trades on an intuitive similarity between desires and volitions, and has the advantage of offering a unified account of both rational and irrational actions. Nevertheless, this view was too much for Hobbes’s contemporaries, who regarded the abolition of the will as an unwarranted attack on human freedom. By getting rid of volitions he had, in their view, not only strayed from the tenets of Christianity, but also deprived himself of the means to give an adequate account of the experiences that we describe as acting at will, bringing our wills to bear on our passions, and so on. What was needed,

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therefore, was a theory capable of relating desires to the phenomena traditionally ascribed to the will. This problem exercised Locke in the later editions of the Essay concerning Human Understanding. While he agreed with Hobbes that only desires can move us to action, he wanted to retain the notion of the will to account for our experience of mental conflict and, in an effort to combine these two ingredients, arrived at a further interpretation of the relation between volitions and desires, and of their respective roles in action. According to Locke the will is just the power to do or to forbear, to continue or to end the actions of our minds or motions of our bodies simply by thinking about it.25 Volitions are therefore the bare thoughts that control action, something like choices or preferences, though none of these terms quite captures them. Once he has laid out this position in the Essay, Locke immediately pauses to distinguish it from another view with which he disagrees: ‘I find the Will often confounded with several affections, especially desire; and one put for the other, and that by men who would not willingly be thought not to have had very distinct notions of things, and not to have writ very clearly about them.’26 Locke expands this implicit criticism of Hobbes by pointing out that we know perfectly well that we can voluntarily perform actions which conflict with our desires. This shows, he argues, that willing and desiring are two separate acts of the mind. Since we have a power to will which is distinct from our desires, and indeed from any of our affections, Hobbes’s identification of volition and desire deprives him of the means to account for a familiar kind of conflict—cases where we do one thing but want another. At the same time, Locke agrees with Hobbes’s criticism of the traditional claim that the will is self-determined, and therefore agrees that we have to ask ‘What is it that determines the will in regard to our actions?’27 His reply is best taken in two stages. Our volitions, he first tells us, are determined by something called uneasiness, which he defines as ‘all pain of the body, of what sort soever, and disquiet of the mind…’.28 Uneasiness first appears in the Essay as a synonym for pain, and as one of the hinges on which our passions turn. Sensation provides us with the simple ideas of pleasure-or-delight and pain-or-uneasiness, in terms of which Locke then defines our passions. For example, desire is the uneasiness that a person feels upon the absence of a thing whose present enjoyment carries the idea of delight,29 hatred is what we feel for things that are apt to produce uneasiness, sorrow is uneasiness of the mind upon the thought of a good lost, and so forth. Returning to the claim that uneasiness determines the will, this would seem to suggest that volitions are determined by the various passions that are modifications of uneasiness.

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In fact, however, this is not quite what Locke goes on to say. When he turns to the explanation of volition, and thus of action, Locke emphasizes that only desires move people to act. ‘But that which immediately determines the will to every voluntary action is the uneasiness of desire, fixed on some absent good.’30 We therefore have the following argument. The will is determined by uneasiness. Since uneasiness usually takes the form of a passion, the will is determined by some passion. But not all passions are equally efficacious in this respect, and the passion that plays the pivotal role in the determination of the will is none other than desire, that is, ‘an uneasiness in the absence of a thing whose present enjoyment carries the idea of delight’. As Locke explains, ‘the will seldom orders any action, nor is there any voluntary action performed, without some desire accompanying it.’31 Moreover, when we speak as though our wills were determined by other passions such as aversion, fear or shame, this is because they are mixed with desire, and therefore contain the element of uneasiness that moves the will. ‘These passions are scarce any of them, in life or practice, simple and alone and wholly unmixed with others…Nay there is, I think, scarce any passions to be found without desire joined to it.’32 This apparently innocuous view has a number of significant consequences. First, it implies that it is unduly limited to think of the will as opposing the passions, since nothing less than a passion determines the will. Desire and volition are not opposed forces, but work together to cause our actions. This constitutes a new answer to the question ‘How are desires and volitions connected?’, and points to a more integrated picture of the mind. The will remains; but it is no longer allied with the understanding against the senses, memory and imagination. Second, it implies a reinterpretation of the view that the passions are passive and the will active. The will, it seems, is not active in the sense of being self-determined, or being determined only by God, since it is determined by a passion. Unless we experience some uneasiness, some desire, we will not act. So in what sense is the will active? It is in Locke’s answer to this question that we see most clearly a shift in the balance of power between the will and the passions. Whereas Descartes had upheld a traditional view that the will is a force distinct from the passions which can move us to act, the role allotted to it in the Essay is much reduced. In order for people to act, their will must be determined by uneasiness or desire, and the only independent power possessed by the will is its ability to suspend or postpone action. Thus, when our passions move us to act, we can always will ourselves

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to wait—for example, a mother who is about to smack her child can stay her hand. But this volition only brings about a hiatus, and unless we also possess the resources to alter our desires—unless the mother experiences some uneasiness about delivering the smack—we will have no reason to act differently. Locke therefore reintroduces the division between passions and volitions which Hobbes had obliterated. But he reintroduces a version which concedes one of Hobbes’s central points—that action cannot be explained as a consequence of willing alone. In place of the two sources of action to be found in the Cartesian model we now have one source (passion), and a power to suspend action (volition). Furthermore, internal conflict consists, as it does in Hobbes’s account, in an alternation of desires. For unless we feel some uneasiness about a contemplated course of action, we have no reason to make use of the power to suspend action which belongs to the will. In the work of Hobbes and Locke, then, we find the beginnings of the process by which desire is singled out as an antecedent of action. At the same time, we find in these authors two interpretations of desire which, as I suggested earlier, continue to rub shoulders in the Humean model. According to the view held by Hobbes, desire is a generic term for a group of passions which can all function as the immediate antecedents of action. So when we talk about desire in this context, we are using a general term which can be filled out in various ways. According to the other view, most clearly articulated by Locke, desire is a specific passion which alone moves the will and causes us to act. To say that someone acts out of love, for example, is a simplification, and in order to be more precise we need to specify that love is mixed with desire, and that it is because desire is present that the action occurs. I have suggested that part of the motivation for the development of the Humean view is that it offers a way to deal with various intractable problems which stem from a broadly Aristotelian conception of the mind. But it offers these solutions at a cost. In place of the differentiated theories of motivation contained in earlier accounts of the passions it gives precedence to one overarching passion which moves us to action: uneasiness or desire. Since the seventeenth century we have separated the notion of desire from uneasiness, and indeed from emotion. But we have to a considerable extent retained the idea that a theory of action should be organized around a single force. Desire, thus understood, has many strengths. But it can nevertheless be unduly restricting, so that we sometimes long to enlarge our accounts of motivation to encompass other emotions. When we yearn, in this way, to burst the bounds of

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desire, we are paying the price for the reorganization of the explanation of action begun by Hobbes and Locke.33 NOTES 1 John Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975), II. xxi. 4. See also II. xxii. 11. 2 René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, 17, in J.Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D.Murdoch and A.Kenny (eds), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1984–1991), vol. 1, pp. 325–404. 3 Descartes, Letter to Regius, May 1641, in Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 3, p. 182. 4 Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 20. 5 ibid., 25. 6 ibid., 8. 7 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, eds Thomas C.Faulkner, Nicholas K.Kiessling and Rhonda L.Blair (Oxford, 1989), vol. 1, p. 249. 8 Thomas White, The Passions of the Minde (London, 1621), p. 49. 9 Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, The Loeb Classical Library, trans. J.E. King (Cambridge, Mass., 1927), III, pp. 24–5. 10 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. and trans. the Dominican Fathers (Blackfriars edn, London, 1970), la.2ae, 23, 2 and 4. 11 Locke, Essay, II. xxi. 20. 12 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. R.Tuck (Cambridge, 1991), p. 19. In quoting from this text I have modernized punctuation and spelling. 13 Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 86. 14 ibid., 80. 15 ibid., 144. 16 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 44. 17 ibid., pp. 14,38. 18 ibid., p. 38. 19 ibid., p. 55. 20 ibid., p. 21. 21 ibid., p. 54. 22 ibid., p. 38. 23 ibid. 24 ibid., p. 40. 25 Locke, Essay, II. xxi. 5. This discussion first appeared in the 1690 edition of the Essay but is anticipated in Locke’s journal of 1676. See John Locke: Essays on the Law of Nature, ed. W.von Leyden (Oxford, 1954), pp. 60–80. 26 Locke, Essay, II. xxi. 30. 27 ibid., II. xxi. 31. 28 ibid., II. 29 ibid., II. xx. 6. 30 ibid., II. xxxi. 33. 31 ibid., II. xxi. 39. 32 ibid.

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33 I have benefited from discussing earlier drafts of this chapter with several audiences, and would like to thank the other contributors to this volume, the Departments of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut and the University of Essex, The Cambridge Social and Political Thought Seminar, and the joint seminar organized by the Department of History and Philosophy of Science of Cambridge University, together with the Philosophy Department of East Anglia University. I am also particularly grateful to Stephen Gaukroger and Quentin Skinner for their comments.

2

Rationalizing the passions Spinoza on reason and the passions Genevieve Lloyd

Spinoza regarded it as a strong point of his philosophy that it treated human passions as just as fitting a subject as mathematics for rational investigation. The affects, he says in the Preface to Part Three of the Ethics, should be treated in the geometrical style, just as if their investigation were a question of ‘lines, planes and bodies’.1 This way of studying the passions, he acknowledges, may seem strange to those philosophers who see human beings as disturbing, rather than following, the order of nature. It may seem strange, that is, that he should wish to treat in that way things which are contrary to reason. But our passions are part of nature, not aberrations from it. Nothing happens in nature which can be attributed to any flaw in it, for the laws and rules according to which all things happen and change from one form to another are ‘always and everywhere the same’. What I want to focus on here is one aspect of Spinoza’s ‘geometrical’ treatment of the passions, which seems, in fact, to move in a very different direction from what we might expect from the analogy with lines and planes. Spinoza’s rational and systematic scrutiny of the passions does not, as we might expect, distance them as neutral objects of a detached, unemotional intellect. Spinoza, it is true, does stress that we gain freedom from the passions precisely through understanding the necessities that govern them along with the rest of nature. But this is an understanding which transforms the passions into a different kind of emotion—active and rational. And in the process we are given a new form of reason, very different from that associated with the geometry of lines and planes—a form of reason which is itself affective. Spinoza’s treatment of the reason-passion relation, for all his rationalism, takes us in the direction of Hume. Hume, unlike Spinoza, saw reason as an inert faculty, unable to engage directly with passion. For him, only another passion can conflict with or struggle with a passion. Spinoza’s move, in contrast, is to make 34

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reason affective. What he shares with Hume is the claim that it is only by being affective that reason could have power over the passions. This shift towards a convergence of reason and affectivity is confirmed in Spinoza’s treatment of that elusive form of joy he calls hilaritas. Spinoza’s hilaritas, I will suggest, is a reflective pleasure—a pleasure of reason. Rational reflection here takes on the status of an affective state which belongs in the realm of emotion. But first it is necessary to take a quick look at Spinoza’s treatment of the reason-passion relation and his transformation of reason into something which can engage directly with passion.2 The ‘celebrated Descartes’, Spinoza acknowledges in the Preface to Part Three of the Ethics, had already made a praiseworthy attempt to bring together freedom and the understanding of the passions. But in fact his attempt showed nothing but ‘the cleverness of his understanding’. Elaborating on what was deficient in Descartes’s version of reason’s remedy for the passions in the Preface to Part Five, Spinoza suggests that, in endorsing a causal interaction between the rational will and the movement of the animal spirits, Descartes assumed a hypothesis more occult than any of the occult qualities for which he had so often censured the Scholastics. Spinoza ridicules Descartes’s idea that an act of will, quaintly united with a ‘little portion of quantity’ at the pineal gland, can redirect the course of the animal spirits, as if it were like training a house-dog to hunt or a hunting-dog to refrain from chasing hares. Faced with the challenge of including the relations between reason and the passions in the scope of rational investigation, the celebrated Descartes abandons his own high standards of adequacy in explanation. Both the understanding of the passions and their remedy become casualties of Descartes’s failure to resolve the tensions between mind-body separateness and their union in that Cartesian anomaly—an embodied human being. Where Descartes emphasised the will—strengthened, it is true, through the knowledge of good and evil, the ‘proper arms of the soul’, as he describes it in the Passions of the Soul—Spinoza defines the power of the mind by understanding only. It is understanding alone that contains the remedy of the passions. Descartes’s cumbersome story of a motivating force, originating in the will and mediated through judgements of good and evil that come from elsewhere, is replaced by a story in which all the work is done by the understanding. In his ‘general definition of the affects’ at the end of Part Four, Spinoza defines the passions as confused ideas by which the mind affirms of its body or its parts a force of existing greater or less than before, and which determines the mind to think of one thing rather than another. This

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determination of the mind incorporates into the definition a reference to Spinoza’s version of desire. But that is less important for our purposes than the fact that the definition also ensures that every passion has joy or sadness as an integral part. In the preceding definitions of the specific affects, Spinoza has defined joy as the transition to a greater state of activity or perfection, sadness the transition to a lesser. These transitions to greater or lesser states of activity are crucial to Spinoza’s account of how reason remedies the passions without any reference to a faculty of will. Among the modifications of the body, Spinoza claims, there are many that serve to increase or decrease its characteristic power of activity, its force for existing. Since the mind is an idea of the body, the ideas of bodily transitions to greater or lesser states of activity are not matters of indifference to it. At Proposition 11 of Part Three, he tells us that the idea of anything that increases or diminishes, aids or restrains, the body’s power of acting, increases or diminishes, aids or restrains, the mind’s power of thinking. Out of joy and sadness, Spinoza reconstructs more specific emotions, each involving either joy or sadness, together with an associated idea of what is regarded as its cause. Spinoza’s version of the passivity involved in the passions centres on these ideas of bodily transition to greater or lesser activity and of their causes. In the case of those affects that are passions, the ideas are inadequate. Here the mind is acted upon, so that its own activity is thwarted. Through understanding the passion—transforming the inadequate idea of bodily transition to greater or lesser activity into a more adequate one—the mind moves from passivity to activity and hence from bondage to freedom. So, where Descartes’s account of reason’s role in remedying the passions rests on the radical distinction between mind and body, and on the will, through which the mind acts causally on the body, Spinoza’s rests on the distinction between adequacy and inadequacy of the ideas involved in the affects. This yields a very different picture, not only of the role of reason in relation to passion, but of reason itself. The ‘knowledge of good and evil’, rather than mediating—as it did for Descartes—a virtuous will’s transactions with the body, now becomes supervenient on bodily change—a reflection of the body’s transitions to greater or less activity. The knowledge of good and evil, Spinoza says at Proposition 8 of Part Four, is nothing but ‘an affect of Joy or Sadness, insofar as we are conscious of it’. For Spinoza, then, there are conceptual connections between affects, the understanding of them, and the ‘knowledge of good and evil’. Through understanding the affects, replacing the inadequate ideas they

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initially involve with more adequate ones, we do not simply retreat from the turmoil of passion into a realm of thought. The affect is itself transformed from a passion—an inadequate idea of a transition to a greater or lesser state of activity—to an active rational emotion, incorporating an adequate idea. This is Spinoza’s remedy for the passions—the passage from passivity to activity, from bondage to freedom through understanding. For Spinoza it is precisely through understanding the passions that we become free of their destructive force. Descartes, as Spinoza tells the story, failed to see that the very exercise of bringing the passions under the scope of rational understanding was the source of freedom. He superimposed on the understanding of the passions a cumbersome story of the will counteracting their force—a task for which the will must call to its aid judgements of good and evil which do not arise from the understanding of the passions themselves. Spinoza’s version of reason, in contrast, engages directly with the passions through understanding them. Freedom resides not in an act of will imposed from above to disrupt our ‘natural’ condition, but in adequately understanding our natural state, our passions of joy and sorrow. Freedom from the bondage of passion comes from understanding their necessity. Our power to overcome the passions, far from being a mark of our transcendence of the necessities of nature, depends on our inclusion under them. Spinoza’s simplification of the ‘cumbersome’ Cartesian account brings with it a simplification in the classification of the passions. Where Descartes had six primary affects—joy, sorrow, desire, wonder, love and hate—Spinoza makes do with three, namely desire, joy and sadness. Love and hate are explained in terms of joy and sadness, in association with the idea of an external cause. And wonder is strictly not an affect at all, since—as a kind of a stasis, when the mind is surprised by novelty—it does not involve any transition to greater or lesser activity. Spinoza’s three primary affects, moreover, have an interconnection they lacked in the Cartesian scheme. In the ‘general definition of the affects’, as we have already seen, he integrates them into his account of what it is to be an affect at all, providing a framework in which transitions to greater or lesser activity, and the determination of the mind’s movement between ideas, allow for a new way of thinking of reason in relation to the passions. When we understand our passions rather than being ‘determined’ by them, from outside as it were, we come instead to be ‘determined by reason’. To every action to which we are determined from an affect which is a passion, Spinoza says at Proposition 59 of Part Four that we

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can be determined by reason, without that affect. But the claim is not that we can be determined to act without any affect. Nor is he saying that to act without passion is to act without affectivity. To act from reason is to act without those affects which are passions—that is, without affects that incorporate inadequate ideas—affects that are inadequately understood. Spinoza’s affects are thus determinations in which the mind, as an idea of the body, is aware of transitions to greater or lesser states of activity. In so far as that awareness involves inadequate ideas, the affects are passions. But when the mind replaces inadequate ideas of joy and sadness by adequate ones, it is no longer determined by an affect which is a passion. And the process is itself affective. Since it involves the mind’s transition to a greater state of activity, it is by definition joyful. So this form of reason—Spinoza’s version of the ‘knowledge of good and evil’—involves understanding affects of joy and sadness. But even where its object is sadness, this transition from inadequacy to adequacy is itself joyful; for it involves a mental transition to greater activity. The underlying view of the mind as idea of body, rather than a separate substance causally interacting with it, allows for a much more direct relationship between reason and passions than was possible for Descartes. Reason now enters the realm of emotion, becoming an alternative source of the ‘determination of the mind’. Descartes was drawn to the insight that our passions follow the same laws as other things. But, Spinoza complains, he withdrew from its full consequences under the influence of the idea of the mind as transcending nature. Spinoza avoids the consequences that Descartes feared—that the mind is bound by external causes and hence unfree— by transforming the concept of self-determination. For Descartes, to be self-determined is to belong to a completely different causal story from that of determination by external causes. For Spinoza the two states, although very different from one another, are interconnected. We become self-determined through understanding the causes that initially determine us from outside. He does, it is true, say that everything to which the mind is determined by an affect that is a passion, can also be determined by reason without that passion. But this does not mean that reason is a separate motivating force, competing with the passions— like the Cartesian will. Spinoza’s point is rather that, for any determinate state in which the mind is affected by passion, reason can transform that passion by replacing inadequate ideas with more adequate ones. Elaborating this point, in the Scholium to Proposition 4 of Part Five, Spinoza stresses that all the appetites or desires are passions only in so far as they arise from inadequate ideas, and are

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counted as virtues when they are aroused or generated by adequate ones. It is the contrast between inadequacy and adequacy that is crucial, ‘for all the Desires by which we are determined to do something can arise as much from adequate ideas as from inadequate ones…’. So, when Spinoza talks of our being determined first from passion and then from reason, his point is not that we can go out and perform from reason, without emotion, the same action to which we might be impelled by passion. The point is rather that, finding ourselves in a state of joy or sadness, we can replace the inadequate ideas involved with adequate ones, so that a passion is transformed into an active emotion— a reflective joy. So passions of joy are transformed into more durable joys which are still affects, though no longer passions. And the passion of sadness, in so far as we understand its causes, ceases to be a passion and, to that extent, ceases to be sadness. By understanding its passions the mind moves from passivity into activity and freedom. As he sums it up in the Scholium to Proposition 4 of Part Five, ‘each of us has—in part, at least, if not absolutely—the power to understand himself and his affects, and consequently, the power to bring it about that he is less acted on by them’. It is important to see that this liberating understanding is an understanding focused on the particular passion, sharing its structure while rendering its constitutive idea more adequate. Spinoza is not urging us to gain freedom from our passions by thinking of geometry instead, or even by thinking instead of a theory of the passions in general. The whole point is that reason engages with what the mind is currently undergoing. Reason is effective against the passions only to the extent that it allows itself to share in their affectivity: ‘No affect’, he says at Proposition 14 of Part Four, ‘can be restrained by the true knowledge of good and evil insofar as it is true, but only insofar as it is considered as an affect.’ So we have here a new field of variations, interlocking with that of the passions, but not simply mirroring it. An active affect can be an understanding of a transition to lesser activity; and a passion can be a state of awareness, not clearly understood, of transition to greater activity. To the extent that the mind’s endeavour to understand its passions is thwarted, it will undergo sadness, even in the midst of the passion of joy. The detachment involved in this exercise of understanding passion is very different from Cartesian withdrawal into the citadel of thought. Understanding has here become conative and affective. Spinoza’s treatment of the reason-passion distinction is well on the way towards Hume. Reason, in this context of the understanding of the passions, has taken on some features of emotion. And there is a

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similar rapprochement in the other direction. Emotions include an idea component, however confused, which always has the potential for transformation into the adequacy of reason. The most striking illustration of the Spinozistic rapprochement between reason and emotion comes in Spinoza’s description of the state he calls hilaritas, translated by Curley as ‘cheerfulness’, and by Elwes3 as ‘mirth’. Hilaritas is closely connected with one of Spinoza’s most important concepts, conatus—‘endeavour’ or ‘striving’—and hence with his version of the well-functioning individual mind.4 Thriving and striving are inseparable for Spinoza, and where we have a wellfunctioning, striving and thriving mind, there we have hilaritas. This is an emotion of which, Spinoza says, we cannot have too much. What content can we give to this state? What would it have to be in order for it to be plausible that there cannot be too much of it? For Spinoza it is one of a cluster of concepts centred on joy. Joy (laetitia) is, as we have seen, one of Spinoza’s three primary affects, out of which all the passions are constructed, along with pain or sorrow (tristitia) and desire (cupiditas). Spinoza defines joy in his definitions of the affects at the end of Part Three as ‘a man’s passage from a lesser to a greater perfection’. The notion of dynamic transition is crucial here. Joy, he goes on to explain, is not ‘perfection itself’ but the transition to greater perfection: ‘If a man were born with the perfection to which he passes, he would possess it without an affect of Joy.’ So Spinoza’s God, although—indeed precisely because—he is perfect, lacks joy. At Proposition 17 of Part Five, Spinoza makes it clear that there can be for God no transition to greater perfection, and hence no affect of joy. Although joy is the passion by which the mind passes to a greater perfection, not all joys are unqualified goods. It may seem strange that something defined as transition to a greater perfection could conceivably be bad. But not all joys share the immunity of hilaritas to destructive excess. Here Spinoza’s concern with the body as a union of subsidiary bodies—a synchronization of forces—is crucial. He locates hilaritas in his taxonomy of the passions, at Proposition 11 of Part Three, as joy ‘related to the Mind and Body at once’, although of course this is for him not a matter of separate, interacting kinds of substance. There are joys which relate to mind alone. Wherever an inadequate idea is replaced by a more adequate one—in the study of geometry, for example—mind moves to a greater state of activity and hence, by definition, experiences joy. The mind’s awareness of adequate ideas increases its activity. To the extent that it feels those transitions from inadequacy to adequacy unimpeded, it rejoices; to the extent that it feels them thwarted, it is saddened. Hilaritas, as a joy relating to mind and

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body at once, belongs in that realm where reason and emotion converge in the understanding of the passions. It belongs in Spinoza’s story of the interlocking of the mind’s transitions to greater or lesser understanding with the related transitions in the body of which it is the idea. But being thus related to mind and body at once does not suffice to distinguish hilaritas as a distinctive form of joy. The state Spinoza calls ‘pleasure’ (titillatio) he also describes as a joy which relates to mind and body at once. What distinguishes hilaritas from mere ‘pleasure’ is the crucial idea of the body operating as a whole, as a union of subsidiary forces. The state Spinoza calls ‘pleasure’ is ascribed to a person when one part of the body is affected more than the rest, whereas hilaritas is ascribed when all are equally affected. The idea of a body in which all parts are equally affected may seem odd. But the point is that, whereas pleasure is a transition to greater activity in some bodily part or parts, hilaritas is a transition to greater activity in the body conceived as a unity—in the body as a whole. We now need one final distinction to locate hilaritas fully in Spinoza’s taxonomy of joy: its difference from the state he calls gaudium, translated by Curley as ‘gladness’. Gaudium is a distinctive joy, relating to the individualizing role Spinoza gives conatus—the affective dimension of essence: ‘Each affect of each individual’, he says at Proposition 57 of Part Three, ‘differs from the affect of another as much as the essence of the one from the essence of the other.’ Elaborating the point in the Scholium, he says that both horses and human beings are driven by a ‘Lust to procreate’. But equine lust differs from human lust: So also the Lusts and Appetites of Insects, fish and birds must vary. Therefore, though each individual lives content with his own nature, by which he is constituted, and is glad of it, nevertheless that life with which each one is content, and that gladness, are nothing but the idea, or soul, of the individual. And so the gladness of the one differs in nature from the gladness of the other as much as the essence of the one differs from the essence of the other. These soul-characterizing joys can also vary within a species. It follows, Spinoza says, that there is ‘no small difference’ between ‘the gladness by which a drunk is led’ and ‘the gladness a Philosopher possesses’. Gaudium operates—on a different level from what Spinoza calls lust (libido)—as a higher-order pleasure. There are characteristic pleasures that go with being a horse; and even those that arise from features

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common to different species are none the less specific pleasures. The soul of a horse is expressed in—indeed, it seems, identical with—what is distinctive about its lust. There is an equine soul, an equine gladness, that goes with satisfying equine lusts. The horse thrives as a horse in having those pleasures. But, as I understand Spinoza, although there is equine gladness, there is no equine hilaritas. Hilaritas is a higher-order joy in a different way: a pleasure of reflection. It demands something more than just being the idea of a body engaged in unimpeded activity, a mind functioning well in the here and now. This is a joy which involves a special relationship to time. It is a joy related to that capacity of consciousness which Kant later talked of as the ‘unity of apperception’. It demands that the fragments of consciousness stand together in a whole not confined to the present. For Spinoza, too, although the distinctions available to him are less subtle and less convoluted than those invoked in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, selfconsciousness and the distinctive state of hilaritas which mark its good functioning involve a special relationship to time. Hilaritas pertains to the activity of the human body as a union of parts. But to grasp the concept we have to think of the self not just as a spatial unity but also as a temporal one. Hilaritas bears a different relation to time from that of mere ‘pleasure’ or even soul-characterizing ‘gladness’. This helps explain why Spinoza says, in the Scholium to Proposition 44 of Part Four, that the state of hilaritas, unlike pleasure, is ‘more easily conceived than observed’. For it involves a balancing out of the pleasures of a body which is a unity of many parts of different natures— an accommodation which is to be achieved not through the suppression of pleasure, but by engaging in a wide range of activities over time: ‘Nothing forbids our pleasure’, Spinoza says in the Scholium to Proposition 45 of Part Four, ‘except a savage and sad superstition. For why is it more proper to relieve our hunger and thirst than to rid ourselves of melancholy?’ Spinoza goes on to reinforce the point in his famous description of the sensuous pleasures of the wise: It is the part of a wise man, I say, to refresh and restore himself in moderation with pleasant food and drink, with scents, with the beauty of green plants, with decoration, music, sports, the theatre, and other things of this kind, which anyone can use without injury to another. For the human Body is composed of a great many parts of different natures, which constantly require new and varied nourishment, so that the whole Body may be equally capable of all the things which can follow from its nature, and hence, so that the mind also may be equally capable of understanding many things.

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Hilaritas is more readily conceived than observed because it is never really there at any one time. It pertains to a self construed as engaging in a range of activities over time. The wise man goes to the theatre, looks at plants and engages in a wide range of other conatus-strengthening activities. But he cannot do all those things at once. And if he does any one of them to the exclusion of the others he risks having his pleasures take on a fixity that Spinoza sees as akin not to wisdom but to madness. The ideal body here is not one driven to ever-greater activity, as in a relentless exercise programme. That model of ‘greater activity’ captures rather the state Spinoza calls ‘pleasure’, i.e. transition to greater activity in some bodily part or parts. Pleasure can be ‘excessive and evil’, he says in the Demonstration to Proposition 43 of Part Four, because, in so far as it is related to the body, it consists in one or several of its parts being affected more than the others. The power of such an affect can ‘surpass’ the other actions of the body. It can, as he puts it, become ‘stubbornly fixed’, keeping the body from the ideal state of being affected in a great many ways. Here pain can be good, in so far as it can restrain pleasure so that it is not excessive. All that can be discerned from our observations of bodies in action, he says in the Scholium to the following Proposition, is that ‘the affects by which we are daily torn are generally related to a part of the Body which is affected more than the others’. The state of hilaritas, in contrast, involves an assessment of a life over time. In this respect, Spinoza’s hilaritas is similar to Aristotelian eudaemonia. This brings out an important aspect of Spinoza’s claim that there cannot be an excess of hilaritas. Since eudaemonia involves the assessment of a life as a whole, it would not make sense to find a life defective for having too much of it. Despite Aristotle’s preoccupation with finding the mean in all things, this is something it makes no sense to talk of overdoing. Likewise, the attribution of hilaritas involves the assessment of a human being as a temporal whole. But this can be only a partial analogy. Spinoza’s hilaritas stands in a very different relation to Spinoza’s concept of the good from that in which Aristotle’s eudaemonia stands to his. For self-preservation has become for Spinoza the foundation and end of virtue, the good itself. Rather than the good being identified independently of the self-preservation necessary to achieve it, the good consists just in preserving our being. The endeavour to persist in being—to persist in doing the things the doing of which are what it is to be that thing—becomes the thing’s good, its distinctive pleasure, its very soul. The shift can be seen in the twist Spinoza gives to the obvious and banal truth that if we want to live well, we must first live: ‘No one’, he

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says at Proposition 21 of Part Four, ‘can desire to be blessed, to act well, and to live well, unless at the same time he desires to be, to act, and to live, i.e., to actually exist.’ To be, to act, to live, rather than being a formal prerequisite for virtue, becomes what we desire in desiring virtue, the thing itself. Hilaritas is the reflective joy a thriving human being is able to take in having in this sense ‘a life’, in being a unified whole in which a wide range of pleasures come together without any having the ‘stubborn fixity’ that inhibits others. There is no analogous equine hilaritas. The body of the horse lacks the complexity which enables the human body to retain traces of experience at times other than the here and now in which it happens. That complexity in the human body allows the comparisons between different experiences which yield Spinoza’s version of the ‘common notions’ of reason. So hilaritas is a pleasure of reason, which has its basis in the complexity of bodily structure. Despite Spinoza’s image as the philosopher of eternity, there is in all this a new sense of the interrelations between self-consciousness and time. Hilaritas is possible because the human mind, as the idea of a complex bodily structure, is not confined to the here and now. In being the idea of the human body, with all its complex parts and their conflicting activities, the self has a much more complex relation to time than those things which simply endure through it. It is not just the parts of the body and its activities that must be brought together in a wellfunctioning union. The wise mind must also get together into a coherent whole all the fragments of experience that stay with it as a result of its being the idea of a complex bodily structure. The mind is both the idea of a body existing in the present and the idea of all that has been retained of that body’s past. Hilaritas is the elusive attribute of a mind which has achieved a unity as a well-functioning temporal as well as spatial whole. It reflects the ways in which the mind, as an idea of a human body, has a past—has, in the relevant sense, a ‘life’. Reason, memory and emotion here come together in a view of self-consciousness which puts a new emphasis on the self’s relations with time. In Spinoza’s ideal of hilaritas we see emerging a new sense of the distinctively temporal predicament of selfhood. The challenge to the Cartesian self was to assure itself of the existence of a world fundamentally ‘external’ to it. In Spinoza’s philosophy that predicament of the self cut off from the external world—the spatial predicament of selfhood, as it were—disappears. There is no real room for doubt about the existence of the world, no real possibility of scepticism of the kind Descartes entertained and thought

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he laid to rest. For Spinoza, self-consciousness arises within a world of which the self is undoubtedly a part, a world whose existence is never and cannot ever be in real doubt. For him the doubt which Descartes directed at all ‘external’ things—even his own body—cannot be coherently expressed. The mind just is the idea of a body which is what it is, and does what it does, by virtue of being part of wider wholes reaching up to the totality of the material world. The new challenge which now emerges has to do with the temporality of the self. The elusive state of hilaritas—of which, if only we can get it at all, we cannot get too much—is a matter of getting it all together in ways that go beyond merely being, like the thriving horse, a cheerful union of bodily parts functioning well in the here and now. Spinoza’s version of the well-functioning human being involves a continuing balancing-out of those things from the past that make our consciousness what it is as we move into the future. The challenge is to see that no one thing becomes ‘stubbornly fixed’ as the answer to the question: ‘What am I?’ NOTES 1 2

3 4

Quotations are from The Collected Works of Spinoza, edited and translated by Edwin Curley (Princeton, 1985). The discussion of Part Three of the Ethics which follows is a synoptic version of the reading offered in Chapter 3 of my Part of Nature: Self-Knowledge in Spinoza’s Ethics (Ithaca, 1994). R.H.M.Elwes, Spinoza, On the Improvement of the Understanding, The Ethics, Correspondence (New York, 1955), p. 217. I have given a fuller treatment of Spinoza’s distinctions between the different kinds of joy, and of the significance of his account of hilaritas, in Chapter 3 of my Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Spinoza and the Ethics (London and New York, 1996), pp. 90–8. Some sentences from the following discussion also occur there.

Part II The symbolism of the passions

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Reading the passions The Fall, the passions, and dominion over nature Peter Harrison

INTRODUCTION

Recent studies of the passions in the early modern period have drawn attention to the resurgence of Augustinian accounts of the passions, focusing in particular on their relation to neo-Stoic views. The lively seventeenth-century debate about the nature of the passions is typically presented as a discussion dominated by philosophical and theological considerations. One of the central features of the Augustinian approach to the passions, however, tends to be routinely overlooked: Augustine’s emphasis on the human Fall, and its enduring legacy of original sin. These allied notions played a central role in the seventeenth-century treatment of the passions. For both Augustine and his early modern disciples, the Fall was not so much a theological doctrine as an historical event which explained the depravity of the human condition and held out prospects for its alleviation. An important dimension of the seventeenth-century literature on the passions is this historical or mythological component. In this chapter I shall show how the narrative of the Fall informed the major seventeenth-century treatises on the passions. The story of Adam’s Fall from grace, moreover, enabled seventeenth-century thinkers to link the mastery of the passions to the scientific enterprise and the quest for dominion over nature. Control of the passions thus became, for the seventeenth century, a means of achieving control over the natural world. THE FALL AND THE PASSIONS IN PATRISTIC AND MEDIEVAL LITERATURE

According to the traditional reading of the Genesis account of the Fall, in the state of prelapsarian perfection Adam’s passions had been 49

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governed by his reason, and both reason and passion were subservient to his will. Adam was Lord of the whole sublunary world, exercising dominion over all creatures, and enjoying a perfect knowledge of their natures. In the social realm, Adam and Eve had shared in an equal relationship, and in time, with the begetting of children, they and their posterity would have lived in peace without the necessity of civil government or recourse to rule by law. The Fall, which was in essence a rebellion against God, precipitated a catastrophic unravelling of the ordained order of things, and a dramatic reversal of prelapsarian patterns of domination and subjection ensued: the passions overwhelmed reason; Adam lost his perfect knowledge of the natures of things; animals became wild, turning against each other and against their erstwhile human master; and Eve, for her weakness and complicity, was placed under the tutelage of her husband. The Fall was thus the occasion of a momentous overturning of the natural order and an unbalancing of proper relations which set in place an ongoing series of conflicts between reason and passion, mind and body, human and animal. Patristic exegetes were quick to explore the rich symbolic connections between the exterior and interior domains suggested by the Genesis narrative. The loss of dominion over nature was linked to the domination of reason by bestial and carnal affections, and the beasts themselves were identified with individual passions. Such readings of the Fall were reinforced by the classical conception of the human being as a microcosm. As the third-century Church Father Origen explained: ‘Understand that you have within yourself herds of cattle…flocks of sheep and flocks of goats…and that the birds of the air are also within you…you are another little world.’ 1 For Origen the granting of dominion over the creatures was to be interpreted psychologically, for the various animals represented ‘the dispositions of the soul’, the ‘thought of the heart’, ‘bodily desires’ and ‘the motions of the flesh’.2 This identification of the beasts with the passions was to become a common feature of Patristic exegetical exercises on the first chapters of Genesis. ‘Even the beasts have each, as one may say, one single passion’, wrote the fourth-century Doctor of the Church, John Chrysostom, ‘and that by nature Man, when he has cast away the dominion of reason, and torn himself into a commonwealth of God’s devising, gives himself up to all the passions, is no longer merely a beast, but a kind of many-formed motley monster.’3 The story of our first father’s infelicity thus came to underscore a central feature of the Fathers’ moral teaching: the beasts within need once again to be brought under the dominion of reason.4 Chrysostom

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declared: ‘You see, just as on this wide and spacious earth some animals are tamer and others more ferocious, so too in the wide spaces of our soul some of our ideas are more lethargic and resemble brute beasts, others more ferocious and savage. So there is need to control and tame them and submit them to the rule of reason.’5 Similar sentiments can be found in Augustine and Ambrose of Milan. ‘Then the wild animals are quiet and the beasts are tamed and the serpents rendered harmless: in allegory they signify the affections of the soul’, wrote Augustine of the sanctified soul. He continues: ‘So in the “living soul” there will be beasts that have become good by the gentleness of their behaviour…. For these animals serve reason when they are restrained from their deathly ways.’6 Augustine’s mentor Ambrose shared this image: ‘But now through the Holy Spirit, the madness of lions, the spots of leopards, the craftiness of foxes, the rapacity of wolves have passed away from our affections.’7 While it was generally agreed that the only cure for a debased human nature lay with the grace of God, the individual could none the less cooperate in the process of sanctification. Voluntary control of the passions could be re-established, in part, through the systematic suppression of carnal desires. Ascetic practices generally, and the more formal monastic ‘rules’ specifically, came to be recognized as means by which the passions could once again be brought under the dominion of reason. Fasting, wrote Chrysostom, is undertaken ‘to curb the exuberance of the flesh and bring the beast under control’. The aim of this, and of similar ascetic exercises, is to ‘banish the flood of unworthy passions’. This self-control, this inner dominion, might then be reflected externally in a variety of ways. Again it is Chrysostom who makes this explicit. Explaining how it is that we enjoy a limited dominion over wild beasts, he wrote that ‘the superiority of our dominion’ can be attributed to the fact that ‘we live in self-command.’8 Self-control would also confer a mastery over others. Those who would be rulers must first learn to rule their own passions, ‘for how shall he instruct others to rule that passion, who has not taught himself?’9 These political implications follow from the assumption that the human soul is not only a microcosm of the natural world, but of the social organization as well. The mind was a commonwealth in which the rabble of the passions had overcome the legitimate rule of reason. ‘The passions are the tyrant: if then we despise them, we shall be great’, wrote Chrysostom.10 The association of the beasts with passions was not solely a feature of an allegorical reading of Genesis, nor was it a mere rhetorical strategy to be exploited for the purposes of moral edification. A

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concrete connection was provided by actual instances of control over irrational creatures by those who mastered their own irrational passions. In cases of exceptional piety, it was thought, the dominion over wild beasts once enjoyed by the innocent Adam could be revisited, hence the numerous medieval traditions in which wild beasts keep company with holy men and women.11 In Western iconography the austere St Jerome is typically depicted in the company of a lion—a beast which he had befriended and to which he assigned such duties as guarding his donkey. The animals in paradise would presumably have provided similar services for Adam. To the familiar image of St Jerome and the lion may be added countless other examples: St Simeon Stylites and the dragon, the abbot Helenus and the crocodile, St Marcarius and the hyena, Gerasimus and the lion, St Columban and the beasts of the Vosges, and so on.12 ‘If we keep the commandments of our Lord Jesus Christ,’ declared one of the desert hermits, ‘these animals will be afraid of us; but through our sins we have become slaves, and it is we, rather, who are afraid of them.’13 Best known of all, perhaps, is the example of Francis of Assisi, whose powers over wild beasts Bonaventure was to describe in these words: ‘the piety of this blessed man…had such remarkable power that it subdued ferocious beasts, tamed the wild, trained the tame and bent to his obedience the brute beasts that had rebelled against fallen mankind.’14 Thus, central to Patristic and medieval accounts of what had happened to the passions as a result of the Fall was the premise that selfcontrol could not be dissociated from that dominion over nature which our patriarch had once enjoyed in paradise. As Thomas Aquinas was to express it: ‘Man in a certain sense contains all things; and so according as he is master of what is within himself, in the same way he can have mastership over other things.’15 These Patristic and medieval themes were to have a tenure which extended into the Renaissance and beyond. The Spanish humanist scholar Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540), in his influential account of the passions, described the ordained pattern of the cosmos thus: ‘This is the order of Nature, that Wisdom be the rule of the whole, that all creatures obey man; that in man, the body abides by the orders of the soul, and that the soul itself comply with the will of God.’ In the pious man, Vives goes on to say, ‘the lower passions should be controlled by reason’.16 This was the order which had been overturned by the Fall, the effects of which were visible both in the rebellion of the creatures and in the intransigence of the passions.

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THE LANGUAGE OF THE PASSIONS

A number of seventeenth-century writers on the passions assumed the same cosmic ordering of things which informed earlier accounts of moral psychology, and pointed as well to the disruption of this order which resulted from human disobedience. ‘As soon as his soul rebell’d against God,’ wrote Jean-Francois Senault, author of two important seventeenth-century works on the passions, ‘his body rebelled against his soul’, and there followed a more widespread insurrection: ‘If man were divided in his person, he was not more fortunate in his condition, wherein he underwent a Generall Rebellion, the Beasts lost their respects, they all became Savage, and violence or Art is required to the taming of some of them.’17 Such a rebellion marked the end of natural human domination of the world, and could as easily be regarded as the result of human misfortune. Edward Reynolds stated in his Treatise of the Passions (1647) that ‘Gods Image in Man, is by this fall much weakened, as wee may observe by the Rebellion and Insurrection of the Creatures against him.’ ‘Sin had so strangely disfigured and disguised him’, concluded another author, ‘that none of his Subjects could remember to know him, or think, or believe him to be their natural Prince.’18 William Ayloffe wrote of Adam in his Government of the Passions (1700) that ‘he had no sooner fallen, but the Beasts did rebel against his authority’.19 To moral weakness was thus attributed the loss of human dominion, and, as we shall see, the natural conclusion was also drawn that dominion over nature was to be accomplished, in part, through the control of the passions. At the same time, a number of writers continued to understand dominion primarily in moral terms, as control of the passions. The passions are accordingly described in moral treatises as ‘Beastly and Sensual’, ‘wilde beasts which are never tamed’, ‘monsters, and rebellious slaves’, ‘serpents & basilisks’.20 During the Renaissance, however, an additional element, largely absent from the Patristic and medieval discussion, was to add a new dimension to the creation narrative, and link it to human control, both psychological and material. This was the tradition according to which, after the creation of the animals, God had paraded them past Adam to be named. As a consequence of his naming of the beasts, Adam was assumed to possess an encyclopaedic knowledge of the natural world. The names, read from the external appearances of things, were thought to constitute a language of nature in which was encoded the secret essences of all natural objects. Subsequently, this language had been lost, either with the Fall or later with the confusion of tongues at Babel.21 The Renaissance and early modern preoccupation with the

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language of nature thus arose out of the belief that the Adamic language held the key both to knowledge of nature and to dominion over it. Physician and astrologer Nicholas Culpeper, for example, informed readers of his popular Herbal (1653) that ‘you may know what infinite knowledge Adam had in his innocence, that by looking upon a creature, he was able to give it a name according to its nature; and by knowing that, thou mayest know how great thy fall was and be humbled for it even in this respect, because hereby thou art so ignorant’.22 According to John Pettus, ‘the whole Body of Philosophy’ was contained in ‘the true Primitive Names of all Creatures’. 23 Educational reformer John Webster went so far as to suggest that the recovery of this language of nature should be the chief business of the universities of England.24 The idea of a language of nature lay at the heart of the Renaissance doctrine of signatures—that all natural objects bore signs indicating their use. Knowledge of the creatures, or more specifically of their essences, came from the examination of their external forms, which, for the studious observer, could be read as a language: ‘The whole outward visible World with all its Being is a Signature, or figure of the inward spiritual World’, explained the German mystic Jacob Boehme. ‘Whatsoever is Internally, and howsoever its operation is, so likewise it hath its Character externally.’ Boehme went on to claim that ‘by the external form of all Creatures, by their instigation, inclination and desire, also by their sound, voyce and speech which they utter, the hidden spirit is known; for Nature hath given unto every thing its Language’. 25 The Swiss physician Paracelsus also promoted the doctrine, claiming that ‘nothing is without external and visible signs which take the form of special marks’. Adam had been the first interpreter of this ‘art of signs’, a lost art, which now ought to be recovered.26 For Boehme, Paracelsus, and their numerous followers, in the morphology of various animals, plants, and even stones, could be discerned signs which constituted a kind of natural language. In the case of plants, the use of the signature was to communicate its virtues or healing powers. Plant signatures, wrote the Cambridge Platonist Henry More, are ‘like the Inscriptions upon Apothecaries Boxes’.27 In its simplest application, those plants whose physical features bore some resemblance to a part of the human body could be used as cures for that part. The walnut, for example, bore ‘the signature of the head and the brain’, and was accordingly prescribed under this system for maladies of the head.28 The efficacy of these cures relied upon sets of similitudes posited by the link between microcosm and macrocosm: ‘Man’, wrote the metaphysical poet George Herbert, ‘is in

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little all the sphere; /Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they/ Finde their acquaintance there.’29 The signs which animals bore, however, were given a different application. While some might be interpreted as conveying information about internal virtues for the purposes of ‘physick’, others were thought to give evidence of the interior operations of animals; more specifically, of their passions. The passions, it was thought, expressed themselves in physical signs or caractères, and, taken together, these constituted an intelligible language. If the signatures of plants had an obvious application in the healing arts, the ability to read the passions in animals was thought to bring with it a knowledge of human passions as well, and, by extension, a power over both animals and fellow human beings. Luther had expressed the common view that from Adam’s ability to ‘read’ animals there followed ‘the rule over all the animals’ such that he was able ‘to compel lions, bears, boars, tigers’ with a single word.30 Francis Bacon agreed that ‘the imposition of names’ was one of the summary parts of knowledge, and that with such knowledge came dominion: ‘whensoever he shall be able to call the creatures by their true names he shall again command them.’31 Knowing the signs of the passions was the first step in controlling them, for, as Adam’s dominion had lain in his facility with the language of nature, it was thought that his prelapsarian dominion might be revisited through a knowledge of the characteristic somatic signs which betrayed the presence of passion. On account of the affinity between animal and human passions, moreover, power over the animal creation might be extended to the political arena. For Boehme, the link between human and animal passions rested upon the notion of the human microcosm. Adam’s disobedience, as we might expect, was read by the Boehmenists as a fall into bestiality, in which the human mind became a menagerie of fierce beasts. ‘The disobedience of the Beasts towards Man, and their wildnesse’ are consequences of Adam’s rebellion: ‘Man is become a wolf to them, and they are Lyons against him.’32 Men thus learn of their own natures through studying the beasts, for they are represented by the ‘greedy ones’, ‘the Haughty proud Beasts’, ‘the venomous Creatures’, and ‘the cruel wrathful ones’. Various races exhibit affinities with particular beasts: Americans are like beasts of prey, for they devour raw flesh and serpents; Tartars like dogs and cats, for they (apparently) remain blind for five days after birth.33 Yet the study of the display of passion in animals and its subsequent application to human psychology did not invariably rest upon the presupposition of the microcosm and macrocosm. One

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further justification for this comparative approach—one which became increasingly common in the seventeenth century as commitment to the arcane conception of the microcosm waned—was the belief that in the irrational creatures the passions were manifested in their purest forms. It was claimed that the signs of the passions were more easily apprehended in animals, for here the motions of the sensitive appetite were never moderated by reason, but were displayed in their primitive simplicity.34 Animals, moreover, would more frequently display single passions, and were not given to feigning and dissembling: ‘Animals, void of Reason, less conceal from us the inclinations of their nature’, as one writer expressed it. Animals are always uniform in all their actions’, he continues. ‘The Lyon is alwayes generous, the Hare ever cowardly; the Tyger, cruel; the Fox, crafty.’ 35 Marin Cureau de la Chambre, author of Les Caractères des Passions (5 vols, 1658–63), wrote that in animals the virtues ‘are more distinct’.36 In human beings, by way of contrast, the passions were often complex and difficult to decipher. Senault expressed the view in his Use of Passions (1671) that the beasts ‘have but a few Passions; almost all of their motions are caused out of a fear which possesseth them, or a desire with which they are affected’. Human passions, by way of contrast, ‘rise up in a croud’.37 ‘There is more irregularity in the Passions of Man, than in those of Beasts’, agreed William Ayloffe.38 Descartes was also to note that the signs of the passions in animals are natural and invariant, whereas in humans they can be modified by the soul: ‘the soul is able to change facial expressions, as well as expressions of the eyes…. Thus we may use such expressions to hide our passions as well as reveal them.’39 A further point of difference between human and animal lay in the use of language. The conventional language of speech, commonly used to communicate the passions, was even more susceptible to the communication of false information than was the feigning of bodily language. As Hobbes observed of the signs of the passions: ‘Of these signs, some are such as cannot easily be counterfeited, as actions and gestures…others there are which may be counterfeited; and those are words or speech.’ 40 All of this recommended close study of the behaviours and physiognomies of animals to arrive at an understanding of the signs of individual passions, expressed in their simplest and purest forms. Accordingly, when Thomas Wright, in his Passions of the Minde (1601), introduces the eleven basic passions (love and hate, desire and abomination, delight and sadness, hope and despair, fear and audacity, and ire), he illustrates them by making reference to the behaviours of

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the sheep and the wolf.41 La Chambre devoted several chapters of his book on the signs of the passions to animals, explaining: ‘It is therefore requisite there should be so many chapters design’d, wherein must be treated, of the natures of these Animals, and especially the parts of them, whereto those of men may have any resemblance, and of the inclinations they denote.’ 42 Hence we may learn which men are courageous by considering the signs of courage to be found in the lion: ‘large mouths, a harsh and thick hair, the forehead full of folds and contractions, between the Eye-brows, the extremities large and tough, the flesh hard and musculous, the voice big and resounding’.43 A familiarity with the characters of the passions as they are expressed in the beasts would thus lead to the ability to judge the passions of men: As by experience men may discouer the inclinations of dogges, horses, and other beastes, euen so by certaine signs wise men gather the inclinations whereunto other men are subject.’44 Senault also made much of the characteristic signs of human passions which were shared with the beasts: ‘The greatest Conquerours have no motions which are not common to them with Lions, Lovers jealousie is not more noble then is that of Buls, and the husbandry of the Avaritious is not more just then is that of Owles and Ants.’ 45 These comparisons drew a measure of support from such earlier works as Giambattista della Porta’s De humana physiognomia (1593), which contains imaginative illustrations depicting humans with animal-like physiognomies (Figures 3.1 and 3.2). Various corporeal locations vied for the status of primary site of the manifestation of the characters of the passions. Perhaps not surprisingly, the face proved most popular: ‘The passions of our minde’, wrote Wright, ‘woorke diuerse effects in our faces.’ The studious observer will thus be able to divine in facial expressions of others, by ‘an external physiognomy’ as it were, ‘an image of that affection which doth raigne in the minde’.46 La Chambre also regarded the face as the most important locus of the outward manifestation of the passions. The face, he thought, ‘is an abridgement of all the outward parts’.47 Nature, he wrote elsewhere, ‘hath expos’d his soul, to be observ’d on the out-side, so that there is no necessity of any window to see his Motions, Inclinations, and habits, since they are apparent in his face, and are there written in such visible and manifest characters’.48 John Bulwer, in an essay entitled Athomyotamia, or a Dissection of the Signitive Muscles of the Affections of the Mind (1649), went so far as to set forth what he called ‘the Moral Anatomy of the Body’, seeking not in facial expressions, but in the musculature responsible for them, the language of affections. In tracing the ‘Discoursing Actions of the Head

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Figure 3.1.

Human and animal heads, from Giambattista Della Porta, De humana physiognomia

to their spring’ he sought to uncover the ‘principles upon which their outward signification depends’.49 The eyes, in particular, were regarded as keys to the secret motions of the soul. They were ‘Speculum Animi, the doors or outlets of the Brest, the index of the Countenance, the conversators and dispensators of the Cogitationes, the indexes of Love, Mercy, Wrath, and Revenge’. The eyes, according to another authority, were ‘the most faithful messengers of the countenance’ and ‘the true mirror of the Body and Soul’, showing

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Figure 3.2.

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Bovine Man, from Giambattista Della Porta, De humana physiognomia

‘hatred and love, anger and fear, joy and sadness’.50 Thomas Wright provided a systematic key to the passions expressed in the eyes: eyes given to moving, heavy dull eyes, eyes given to winking, eyes inflamed or fiery, eyes quiet and peaceable—all were indicative of a particular passion. Descartes, too, allowed that ‘there is no passion which some particular expression of the eyes does not reveal’, but demurred from the prevalent view that such expressions might be reliably interpreted, pointing out that facial expressions could easily be feigned. Bodily changes present a more certain guide to the passions, because, for example, ‘we cannot so easily prevent ourselves from blushing or growing pale’.51 If the occasion of a particular passion was registered somewhere on the body, so too were permanent dispositions to passionate states. Those corporeal characters which bore witness to tendencies to particular passions carried with them a greater conviction than the transient signs, for, again, no amount of voluntary effort could counterfeit them. Persons disposed to anger, or joy, envy, or fear, or any of the primary passions, bore permanent evidence of their temperament in their general demeanour and physical appearance: bodies bore signs of those passions to which individuals were particularly prone. A propensity to certain passions would thus be correlated with a specific physiognomy. Descartes noted that envious persons, for example, usually have a ‘leaden complexion’, like a ‘livid bruise’, such an

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appearance resulting from the flow of bile which was ‘very great, and of long duration’.52 A fearful person, according to Richard Saunders, would have a bowed or inclined body, which would be lean and hairless. The face would be ‘pale and sorrowfull’, the forehead big and fleshy (or bony), the mouth ‘little with spare lips’.53 A brave man, thought La Chambre, would exhibit ‘largeness of the breast and shoulders, the nimbleness and strength of the junctures, the openness of the nostrills, and the greatness, or wideness of the mouth’.54 That character could be read from physical appearance was never seriously questioned in the seventeenth century. The decline of the Renaissance doctrine of signatures and the associated idea of the microcosm-macrocosm relation was thus accompanied by the emergence of a number of alternative versions of the language of nature. Galileo famously pointed out that mathematics was the language of the book of nature, a claim which seemed to be fulfilled with the labours of Isaac Newton. But while mathematics seemed well suited to the task of rendering intelligible the behaviours of simple objects, complex living creatures required something more. Students of animals and humans sought in bodily expressions an alternative natural language which would provide both a knowledge of its subject and power over it. La Chambre spoke of ‘a language in his forehead and eyes’ written in ‘visible and manifest characters’.55 These characters ‘are called Signs, because they denote, signifie, and design the things that are obscure’, they are ‘imprinted on the Body’.56 ‘All natural bodies’, wrote Richard Saunders, ‘present their natural qualifications before our eyes by certain signs.’ Saunders claimed to be able to teach his readers ‘the method of knowing the internal affections of natural bodies by the external signs thereof’.57 Descartes’s Passions of the Soul can also be read as presenting a rudimentary language of the passions. As Amy Schmitter has described it, this work sets out ‘an enumeration and ordering, a kind of taxonomy, of expressive significations: one that might be called ‘natural’ because of its causal base, but which can operate independently (as a signifying system)’.58 Perhaps the most explicit attempt to systematize the outward manifestations of the passions may be found in Charles Le Brun’s enormously influential work on painting the passions, Conférence…sur l’expression générale et particulière des passions (1698). Le Brun, who drew extensively upon both La Chambre and Descartes, argued that the passions are most clearly expressed in the face, and more specifically in the eyebrows. The movements of the eyebrows up or down represent respectively the two appetites of the soul—the concupiscible and the irascible. The complexity and strength of their movements, moreover,

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reflect the complexity and intensity of the underlying passion.59 In the Conférence, each of twenty passions is depicted three times, two in profile (for examples, see Figure 3.3), accompanied by Le Brun’s written commentary. This work thus presents itself as a pictorial lexicon of the passions of the soul, accompanied by theoretical justifications based on current philosophical treatments. In the standard seventeenth-century accounts, then, signs of the passions were thought to constitute a kind of natural language. Facility in that language, as we shall see, brought with it power. Knowledge of the characters of the passions, it was believed, reestablished three levels of control: of self, of others, and of nature.

Figure 3.3.

The characters of fear, from Charles Le Brun, Conférence…sur l’expression générale et particulière des passions (Amsterdam and Paris, 1698)

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PASSION AND POLITICAL DOMINION

The seventeenth-century interest in the semiology of the passions, common both to popular accounts of the passions and to the more scientific, physiological treatments, can be understood partly as an extension of the Renaissance interest in signatures, partly as an expression of a perennial human curiosity about the emotional lives of others. Equally, it may be linked to the seventeenth-century preoccupation with natural languages which, when mastered, would lead to a restoration of human dominion. But, unlike those medieval traditions in which individual control of the passions is associated with only an occasional and miraculous re-establishment of a lost dominion over nature, one of the chief applications of the language of the passions is now to do with the maintenance of social and political hierarchies. Master-servant, husband-wife, ruler-subject, these are the concerns of seventeenth-century treatises on the passions. The signs of the passions—both those visible physiological changes which accompany the passions, and the gross physical types which were correlated with particular dispositions—were accorded special status because they constituted a language which could not be falsified, and thus in principle could provide an infallible guide to the secret motions of every soul. This knowledge, in turn, might provide a basis for the exercise of power over others. Learning the signs of the passions, in other words, could give rise to political dominion. If the relative ease with which passions could be discovered in animals related to the fact that the passions were never altered by the agency of reason, the general principle was that the less rational the creature, the more easily the passions could be discovered.60 This notion was to be applied not only across species boundaries but within the human realm as well. Indeed, for many seventeenth-century authorities, this was one of its most significant applications. The human race was subdivided according to the perceived allotment of reason each group had been endowed with. The masculine, the aristocratic, the philosophical, were ranged against the feminine, the vulgar, the bestial. The former, it was thought, ought to be able with relative ease to read the passions of the latter, to exercise a rightful dominion over them, and thus establish or maintain those social and political relations presumed to be in some sense natural. The link between the mastery of the passions and the notion of dominion was thus redirected to the social and political sphere. Thomas Wright suggests that one of the chief applications of a knowledge of the signs of the passions is that ‘superiours may learne to

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coniecture the affections of their subjects mindes, by a silent speech pronounced in their very countenaunces’. The transparency of the passions of women provides a clear example: ‘And this point may be obserued in women whose passions may easily be dicouered; for as harlots by the light & wanton motions of their eyes and gestures may quickley be marked, so honest matrons, by their graue and chaste lookes, may soone be discerned.’61 This was not merely an assertion about the signs of the passions in women, but a claim that the passions themselves were given greater rein in women than in men. This was to be expected, because women had been granted a lesser portion of reason than men. Women were frequently depicted as weak, inconstant, fearful, to name but a few of their putative deficiencies. Fortunately, their affinity with the innocent, yet passionate, beasts excused them from what would otherwise appear to be a culpable deficiency of virtue. Women tend to act in accordance with their natures, as do animals, and thus cannot be held to account for doing what comes naturally. La Chambre pointed out that ‘it is no imperfection in a Hare to be fearfull, nor in a Tygre, to be cruel, for as much as their natures require those qualities in them; so can it not be said, that Timidity, Distrust, Inconstancy &c., are defects or imperfections in a Woman, in regard they are natural to her Sex, which would be defective, if it were depriv’d thereof. Early modern primitivism, which lauded the virtues of innocent beast and noble savage alike, might thus also excuse the apparent failings of the weaker vessel. A less sanguine analysis was provided by certain readings of the Fall. Augustine had written that ‘we cannot be tempted by the devil except through that animal part, which reveals, so to speak, the image or exemplification of the woman in the one whole man’. 62 A number of seventeenth-century thinkers adopted this perspective. Eve, wrote Sir Thomas Browne, had ‘subject[ed] her reason to a beast, which God had subjected unto hers’. This reversal of the proper order of things was mirrored in Eve’s temptation of Adam. Adam’s Fall, observes Browne, may be thought of as ‘the seduction of the rationall and higher parts, by the inferior and feminine faculties’.63 The restoration of the divinely ordered pattern of subjection and dominion thus called for the domination of women by men. If the medieval and Renaissance connection between beasts and the passions of the soul had rested upon the idea of the microcosm, so the identification of the passions with the mob or the vulgar relied upon the allied conception of the human mind as a commonwealth. In The Republic, Plato had set out the influential idea that the soul is a microcosm of the state. As in mind the rational should control the spirited and appetitive faculties, so in the ideal state the philosopher

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kings should rule over the soldiers and the masses. This model still attracted adherents during the Renaissance. Erasmus wrote that philosophy was requisite for princes, for it ‘frees the mind from the false opinions and ignoble passions of the masses’. The prince was to the people as mind to body: ‘As the mind is to the body, so is the prince to the state; the mind knows, the body obeys.’64 Seventeenth-century thinkers, too, relied upon this ancient idea. Reason is the prince in the mind, wrote Reynolds, implying that temporal rulers ought to be embodiments of reason, exerting control over their subjects, who were ruled by passion. If reason is the prince, of course, the passions are the people.65 In the chapter on the passions in De la Sagesse, Pierre Charron states that ‘Man may not unfitly be resembled to a State or Commonwealth, and the condition of the Soul, to that of a Monarch…’. Understanding, he goes on to say, ‘is the King in Man’, and, continuing the metaphor, ‘the Mobb, that is, the Passions’ give rise to ‘False Notions, and the unthinkable cry of the Vulgar’.66 While the prince is master of his own passions, however, he must master others, not by appeals to reason, but by playing on the passions. If the mob is itself ruled by passion, it may be persuaded to peace and civility only through the manipulation of its passions. Again, the necessity of mastering not merely one’s own passions, but those of others, becomes a vital prerequisite for the acquisition of political power. Senault claimed that it was futile to attempt to persuade the people by reason. Rather, ‘to gain their good will, their Passions must be won upon, and…the lower part of their souls must be mastered, so to assubject the higher part thereof. Accordingly, ‘to know and win upon men, we must study their passions’. 67 The manipulation of the passions by the princes had been the pattern of all human societies, according to Edward Reynolds: ‘The first reformers and drawers of men into Civill society, and the practise of vertue, wrought upon the Will by the ministrie rather of the Fancie then of rigid Reason.’68 The seventeenth century is thus somewhat ambivalent about the use of rhetoric, which appeals not to reason but to passion. Were it not for the universal infirmity of reason, the appeal to passion would be unnecessary: ‘If the affections in themselves were pliant and obedient to reason, it were true there should be no great use of persuasion and insinuations to the will, more than of naked proposition and proofs’, wrote Bacon; ‘But in regard of the continual mutinies and seditions of the affections…reason would become captive and servile, if eloquence of persuasions did not practise and win the imagination from the affections’ part.’69 The place of the passions in the political arena is more fully

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developed in Hobbes’s conception of the stable state, and his identification of the chief enemies of peace as ignorance and passion. According to Hobbes, the enduring threat to civil stability conies from those who allow their passions to make moral determination, denominating ‘right and wrong, good and bad, according to their passions’. Through eloquence, the authors of rebellion then play upon ‘the passions of the hearer’, persuading him or her to insurrection.70 The destructive exercise of eloquence, wrote Hobbes, ‘is a commotion of the passions of the mind, such as are hope, fear, anger, pity and derives from a metaphorical use of words fitted to the passions’. The root cause of this dubious ability is ignorance: ‘this kind of powerful eloquence, separated from the true knowledge of things, that is to say, from wisdom, is the true character of them who solicit and stir up the people’.71 The state of nature was nothing other than ‘the dominion of the passions’, characterized by ‘war, fear, poverty, slovenliness, solitude, barbarism, ignorance, cruelty’. By contrast, civil society was ‘the dominion of reason’, characterized by ‘peace, security, riches, decency, society, elegancy, sciences, and benevolence’.72 Norberto Bobbio thus writes: In agreement with the Augustinian-Lutheran conception of the state, Hobbes thought of the state as a remedy for the corrupt nature of man…. The condition of corruption which human beings had to leave was…that of the natural passions. It was the task of philosophy to describe and classify these passions as we describe and classify the parts of the body. The state was thus not a remedy for sin, but a means of disciplining the passions.73 Once an epitome of the whole natural order, the human being becomes a microcosm of a more circumscribed social realm. Mastery of the passions makes possible a dominion over others. THE PASSIONS AND THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE

It should not be thought that in seventeenth-century treatments of the passions all connotations of dominion and control were redirected towards the political sphere. The quest for dominion over nature was, after all, one of the most important rhetorical justifications for the advancement of the sciences, and it would be surprising if the traditional connections between control of the passions and mastery of nature disappeared entirely. In the seventeenth century we find that, alongside conceptions of political mastery, there develop notions of a

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restoration of human power over nature. Now, however, this dominion is not associated with the partial restoration of proper hierarchical relations, nor with the manipulation of sympathetic causal links between microcosm and macrocosm. Instead, the link is an indirect one. Potential human power over nature is seen to lie in knowledge—for, as Bacon famously pointed out, ‘knowledge and human power are synonymous’—and the passions are posited as impediments to the gaining of knowledge. 74 In order to extend human dominion over nature, the passions need to be held in check, because they consistently contaminate the most fundamental judgements on which the sciences are based. As Robert Hooke observed: ‘The only way which now remains for us to recover some degree of those former perfections, seems to be, by rectifying the operations of the Sense, Memory, and Reason, since upon the evidence, the strength, the integrity, the right correspondence of all these…all our command over things is to be establisht.’75 In seventeenth-century discussions of the relationship between the passions and power over nature, we thus witness a shift of focus, away from a divinely-instituted hierarchy of being and microcosm-macrocosm relations, to methods of investigation and epistemology. As a measure of this change, seventeenth-century readings of the Fall tend to attribute Adam’s loss of dominion less to his disobedience and the collapse of cosmic order than to the loss of his once-perfect knowledge of the natures of the creatures. The loss of this knowledge, in turn, was attributed to the wounding of human reason, now conspicuous in the imperfections of the sciences, in the preponderance of popular errors, and in the perceived growth of scepticism. In large measure, this new orientation was due to the Reformation emphasis on the epistemic consequences of the Fall. Adam’s lapse, according to the Reformers, debilitated not only the will, resulting in wrong actions, but also the intellect, resulting in false judgements. John Calvin thus castigated those ‘who regard original sin as consisting only in lust and in the inordinate motion of the appetites’. Rather, corruption ‘pervades the whole soul, and each of its faculties’ and ‘seizes upon the very seat of reason’.76 Adam’s fault lay in his ‘despising the truth, and turning aside to lies’.77 In consequence, his posterity was doomed to ignorance: ‘As the human mind is unable, from dullness, to pursue the right path of investigation, and, after various wanderings, stumbling every now and then like one groping in the darkness, at length gets completely bewildered, so its whole procedure proves how unfit it is to search the truth and find it.’78 The impoverished condition of the sciences could thus be attributed to the infirmity of the human intellect,

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the corruption of its judgements by the passions, and to the central role played by passion in fruitless disputation, in unreasoning adherence to opinion, and in the perpetuation of prejudices and vulgar errors. Numerous seventeenth-century writers repeated this refrain. In Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Thomas Browne attributes all intellectual failings ultimately to the fall of reason: ‘The first and father cause of common Error, is the common infirmity of humane nature.’ Our first parents, he continues, ‘were deceived through the conduct [i.e. conduit] of their senses, and by temptation from the object it selfe, whereby although their intellectuals had not failed in the theory of truth, yet did the inservient and brutall faculties controle the suggestion of reason’.79 All of Adam’s progeny suffer the same fate, for ‘The irrationall and brutall part of the soule, which lording it over the soveraigne facultie, interrupts the actions of that noble part, and choakes those tender sparkes, which Adam left them of reason.’ 80 The motions of the passions, wrote Thomas Wright, are ‘thornie briars sprung from the infected roote of original sinne’, which work in the mind for ‘the preuenting of reason’.81 The consequence is twofold: ‘blindnesse of vnderstanding, persuasion of the will’.82 Edward Reynolds claimed that the Fall wrought in the human mind ‘a generall corruption’ and an ‘infatuation’ of the mind. Had it not been for Adam’s misfortune, ‘there should have been in all men a greater facilitie to apprehend the mistereyes of Nature, and to acquire knowledge (as we see in Adam)’.83 According to Jean-Francois Senault, following upon the Fall the intellect ‘is become slave unto the sense, and cannot discover truth’. Man, he concludes, ‘is almost never rationall, because he is always passionate’.84 Nicolas Malebranche agreed, describing the plight of the fallen Adam in his Recherche de la vérité (1674) in these terms: ‘his passions obey’d not his Orders, rebell’d against him, and enslav’d him as they do us to all kinds of Sensible Objects’.85 The passions, on this account, systematically distort the judgements of reason, leading to the impoverishment of human knowledge and the proliferation of error. How, then, might the sciences be rehabilitated? A number of solutions were proposed. The first step was to recognize that a problem existed. The Aristotelian science which had flourished in the schools since the thirteenth century had been based upon generalizations drawn from ordinary experiences of the world. At the heart of Aristotelianism lay the assumption that the world ‘out there’ is much the same as the world as represented to us by our senses. Scholastic philosophers had justified this assumption by appealing to the principle that God would have been unlikely to have furnished us with sense organs which systematically misled us.86 With the renewed emphasis on the Fall

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which came in the wake of the Reformation, however, this optimistic and uncritical epistemology was called into question. God had in fact equipped us with the means to arrive at true knowledge of the world, but the Fall had changed matters. As we have seen, the once veridical perceptions of the soul were now understood to be routinely distorted by sense, imagination and the passions. The Stoics, whose views on the passions played a central role in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century debate, had at least recognized that there was a problem. Their view of the passions, in certain respects, could be accommodated within the post-Reformation pessimism about the prospects of making true judgements about the world. The passions, for the Stoics, were ‘false or distorted judgements’—a formulation which gained wide acceptance in the seventeenth century. 87 Less acceptable, however, was the means put forward by the Stoics for the correction of these judgements: the elimination of the passions. For a variety of reasons, the proposal that the passions be completely annihilated was rejected. It was argued that God must have created the passions for a purpose, one of which was for the preservation of the body; Adam and Eve in their innocence had exercised the passions correctly; Christ had been subject to the passions; passionate states had even been predicated of God.88 Even the more moderate solution—that the passions be governed by reason—was problematic, for it begged the question of how the passions came to rebel against reason in the first place. If reason itself was flawed it could not be expected to rein in the passions and rectify false judgements. For some, the only solution was a supernatural one: ‘Grace must assist Reason to repel the violent Emotions of our Passions; for of our selves we are not capable of remedying their Irregularity, though we do not approve of it’, wrote William Ayloffe.89 Indeed, the seventeenth century generally finds it difficult to articulate an epistemology in which God does not play some indispensable role. An alternative, or perhaps adjunct, solution lay in the close analysis of the passions, with a view either to interpreting them, or to neutralizing their distorting influences. The passions might have been false perceptions or judgements, but they were still perceptions of a kind. As we have seen, they betrayed their presence with various signs, and while these signs did not resemble their causes, they were none the less thought to convey information about those causes.90 Once it is understood that the passions are not veridical perceptions but confused judgements expressed by particular signs, it follows that they might be interpreted or deciphered, rather than read at face value. What is presented to the mind in no way resembles its cause, yet they are signs

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of that cause. Decoding the signs of the passions, then, is not merely to satisfy curiosity about the emotional lives of others, nor is it just a means by which others might be manipulated, but, when applied to one’s own judgements, becomes a necessary stage in the process of arriving at truth. Although his specific concern was not solely the passions, Francis Bacon provides a good example of the kind of response provided to the problem of knowledge in the seventeenth century. He gives a general indication of the nature of the problem, pointing to the dual losses suffered by the human race as a result of Adam’s fall from grace: ‘For man by the fall fell at the same time from this state of innocency and from his dominion over creation. Both of these losses however can even in this life be in some part repaired; the former by religion and faith, the latter by arts and sciences.’91 The specific mechanisms which lead to the corruption of knowledge are then identified: these are Bacon’s ‘idols’.92 Finally a set a procedures is suggested for circumventing the distorting effect of those mechanisms.93 As Stephen Gaukroger has suggested in his Introduction to this book, the guidelines set out by Bacon seek to impose a discipline at a social level which will control the wayward inclinations of fallen minds. Where the monastic Rules of the Middle Ages had sought to restore to individuals an interior dominion over fractious passions, the seventeenth-century articulation of rules for the investigation of nature has as its ultimate aim the control of the external world. This pattern was repeated in other works which set forth the sociology of ignorance. If the Fall was the first cause of error for Thomas Browne, the second cause was ‘the erroneous disposition of the people’. The vulgar were ‘so illiterate in point of intellect, and their sence so incorrected, they are farther indisposed ever to attaine unto truth, as commonly proceeding in those wayes, which have most reference unto sence, and wherein their lyeth most notable and popular delusion’. The popular reliance on the undisciplined sense was, for Browne, ‘a reciprocation, or rather an Inversion of the creation’.94 Pierre Charron explains, in similar vein, that a major source of the corruption of knowledge is ‘the False Notions, and unthinkable cry of the Vulgar, when we look upon our selves oblig’d to Approve and Dissapprove, as Others do’. Thus ‘it often, very often happens, that the Nature of the Object is directly contrary to our Apprehensions and ought to move Resentments, just opposite to those we feel upon its Account. And such in general are our Passions.’95 Charron thus places upon the vulgar a double burden. They represent the passions not merely in their capacity to revolt against legitimate authority, but also in providing impediments

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to the attainment of valid knowledge. The developing rules for ‘epistemological decorum’, which Steven Shapin accords a central place in seventeenth-century science, serve to exclude from genuine scientific testimony the judgements and reports of the vulgar, deemed to be governed by passion and enthusiasm.96 Other writers focused more closely on epistemology. The vulgar might have had a particular propensity for error, but every human being was an heir to the Fall. Standard explanations for the specific mechanisms of distortion of knowledge generally invoked the unreliability of the senses, or the union of the soul with the body. Some thoughts and perceptions are confused because the mind has access to the external world only through the body. The soul of man, explains Reynolds, is ‘not an absolute independent worker’, but receives ‘all her objects by conveyence from these bodily instruments’. The soul has no inherent weakness, ‘but only as it is disabled by Earthie and sluggish Organs; which being out of order, are more burthensome than serviceable thereunto’.97 Descartes, while not explicitly relying on the narrative of the Fall, none the less arrives at a similar diagnosis. According to his influential analysis, the passions of the soul are ‘confused thoughts which the mind does not have from its own nature, but, rather, because something is being experienced by the body to which the mind is closely joined’.98 It is the close association of mind and body which leads to mistaken perceptions. Truth may be the concern of the mind, but the passions are more to do with the preservation of the body. Truth is thus a casualty of the conflicting interests of the mind and body. Malebranche follows the Cartesian analysis, arguing that the union of the mind with the body ‘extremely debases it, and is at this Day the Principal Cause of all its Errours and Miseries’.99 Malebranche further argues that the passions result in confused perceptions—in the Cartesian terminology, perceptions which are not ‘clear and distinct’—when the sign is presumed to resemble its source. He explains that the senses and passions give rise to errors in much the same way: The most general Cause of the Errours of the Senses, is, as we there have shewn, on attributing to external Objects, or to the Body, the proper Sensations of our Soul, annexing Colours to the Superficies of Bodies, diffusing Light, Sounds, and Odours in the Air, and fixing Pain and Titillation to those Parts of our Body that receive some Changes by the Motion of other contiguous Bodies… Almost the same thing may be said of the Passions: we too rashly ascribe to the

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Objects, that cause, or seem to cause, them, all the Dispositions of our Heart, our Goodness, Meekness, Malice, sowreness, and all the other Qualities of our Mind. The Object that begets some Passion in us, seems after a sort to contain in it self the passion produced in us.100 In Malebranche’s view, the illicit attribution of mental properties to material bodies is the chief cause of false judgements. This is because we confuse the mental sign, which represents an object to consciousness, with the thing itself. The senses, the imagination and the passions all impose on the soul, but the effects of the passions upon its judgements are the most insidious: ‘Those that will earnestly apply themselves to search after Truth,’ Malebranche insists, ‘must above all stop the Motions of the Passions, which make so powerful an Impression on the Body and the Soul.’101 The consequence of not carefully distinguishing the attributes of our mental representations from those of the objects represented is not just that occasional judgements are flawed, but that whole systems of human learning are false and erroneous. The passions, according to Malebranche, ‘are such general and fruitful Principles of Errour, Prejudice, and Injustice, that it is impossible to believe the consequences of them’.102 In the Search for Truth, he informs the reader that ‘In this Work we encounter several Errours, especially such as have been of longest Growth, of universal Reception.’103 The chief examples cited by Malebranche were the geocentric hypothesis and Aristotelian science generally.104 The rule of the passions had hindered the progress of the sciences, leading to relativism, scepticism or simple error. Malebranche believed that if his analysis of the causes of erroneous perceptions were to be applied, nature would once again become transparent: ‘Could I carry this Design to its utmost Perfection, which I present not, this being but an Essay towards it, I might boast to have found out an Universal Science, which would make those truly learned that knew how to make use of it.’105 It was Malebranche’s conviction that the ability to neutralize the baleful effects of the passions would lead to the rediscovery of the encyclopaedic knowledge of the first man, and from that knowledge would follow dominion. Seventeenth-century analyses of the negative role played by the passions in the pursuit of truth thus tend to fall into a similar pattern. As a starting-point, the Fall is identified as the source of error and nescience.106 This is followed by a more specific aetiology of error in which the particular mechanisms which distort human knowledge are identified. Finally, positive proposals are set out to overcome the

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infirmities of the human mind. These positive proposals might consist of a general method, as in the case of Bacon, of a social-psychological perspective which warns against the beliefs of the common herd, as for Browne and Charron, or of a more sophisticated epistemology of the kind we see in Descartes and Malebranche. CONCLUSION

The Genesis narrative of the Fall played a vital role in the seventeenthcentury treatment of the passions and in projects which sought to counter their distorting influence. If Patristic and medieval readings of the Fall had inspired the mastery of the beasts within, in the seventeenth century the related conceptions of mastery of the passions and dominion over the earth were applied not solely to the interior realm of the mind, but to the material world as well. In addition, the potent idea of a language of nature informed a variety of attempts to devise a taxonomy of affective states and to set out a lexicon of their characteristic signs. These, it was thought, would allow a reading of the passions, and in turn provide for the manipulation of the passions of others and the control of one’s own. Finally, in the recognition of the characters of the passions lay the prospect for the neutralization of their nefarious effects. In this manner, human judgements could be purged of the corrupting influence of the affections, the sciences placed on a firm foundation and the task of dominating the natural world begun again. NOTES 1 Origen, Homilies on Leviticus, 5.2, quoted in Patricia Cox, ‘Origen and the Bestial Soul’, Vigiliae Christianae 36 (1982), 115–140 (122). 2 Origen, Homilies on Genesis, 1.16 (Fathers of the Church [FC], Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1947ff), vol. 71, p. 69. For similar readings see Jeremy Cohen, ‘Be Fruitful and Increase, Fill the Earth and Master It’: The Ancient and Medieval Career of a Biblical Text (Ithaca, 1989), pp. 228f. 3 John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of St John, II (Nicene and PostNicene Fathers, Series I [NPNF I], XIV, 7). 4 Cf.Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis, VIII.14 (FC 74, 113). 5 Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis, IX.7 (FC 74, 121f); Cf. ‘Hence even the Sacred Scripture, with these sorts of disturbing passions in mind, in many places applies the names of brutes and wild beasts to those gifted with reason…. And it adds other names appropriate to the various passions in the hope that eventually they may feel ashamed of this behaviour and turn back to their true nobility, coming to terms with their true nature and giving the laws of God pride of place before their own passions…’. (Chrysostom, XII.10 (FC 74, 162f)). 6 Augustine, Confessions, XIII.xxi, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford, 1991), p.

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291. Cf. Jerome, Commentariorum in Hiezechielem, 1.1.6/8 (Corpus Christianorum series latina, LXXV, 11f). Ambrose, The Holy Spirit, ch. 10, 109 (FC 44, 134). Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis, VIII.14 (FC 74, 113); Homilies on Philippians, VII (NPNF I, XIII, 218). Chrysostom, Homilies on Titus, II (NPNF I, XIII, 525). Cf. ‘For of what advantage, tell me, is it to reign over nations of our fellow-men, and to be the slaves of our own passions?’ Homilies on I Timothy, XVIII (NPNF I, XIII, 472); ‘When our soul is violently carried away by the passion within, no outward government, not even the imperial throne, is of any profit, since reason is deposed from the throne of empire by the violent usurpation of the passions, and bows and trembles beneath their insurrectionary movements.’ Select Homilies and Letters ‘To Those who had not Attended the Assembly’ 4 (NPNF I, IX, 226f). Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, XLVIII (NPNF I, XI, 291). There were precedents for such events. Daniel had survived the ordeal of the lions’ den, Augustine had thought, on account of his subjection to divine authority: ‘because Daniel acknowledged God above him, the lions acknowledged him above them’. At an individual level, Daniel had reinstated the prelapsarian pattern of authority. Augustine concluded that ‘subjected to us shall all things be, if we here be subjected to God. Homilies on the First Epistle of St John, VIII.7 (NPNF I, VII, 509). See Helen Waddell, Beasts and Saints (London, 1949), pp. 25–9; David Bell, Wholly Animals: A Book of Beastly Tales (Kalamazoo, 1992), p. 17; Joyce Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (London, 1994), pp. 168f. Quoted in ibid, p. 168. Bonaventure, The Life of St Francis, in Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey into God, The Tree of Life and The Life of St Francis, trans. Ewert Cousins (London, 1978), p. 261. A further aspect of the social implications of self-control was to do with the status of women. Women who adopted the ascetic life could escape the curse of subjection to men, to whom they had been made subject on account of the Fall. The otherwise inexplicable popularity of the vocation of virginity can be accounted for by the fact that for many young women this represented a far preferable alternative to a life of servitude to a husband. Renunciation represented a liberation from what had become a standard pattern of subordination, legitimated by the authority of Genesis: ‘your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you’ (3.16). See, e.g., J.E.Salisbury, Church Fathers, Independent Virgins (London, 1991); Augustine, City of God, XII. 22, 23, 28; XIV, passim. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, la, 96, 2, Blackfriars edn (London, 1964–76). Vives, Opera Omnia, I, 1216a; IV, 401, quoted in Carlos Noreña, Juan Luis Vives (The Hague, 1970), pp. 201f. Vives was the only previous authority to whom Descartes refers in his Passions of the Soul (127). The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, [CSM] trans. J.Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and Douglas Murdoch (Cambridge, 1984–91), I, 372. Vives, like Descartes, rejected the standard Scholastic classification of the passions. See Patrick Goervan, ‘The

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Peter Harrison “Passions of the Soul”: Descartes’ Shadow on Theories of Emotion’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 68 (1994), 515–28 (esp. 518). Jean-Francois Senault, Man Becom Guilty, Or, the Corruption of Nature by Sinne, according to St. Augustin’s Sense (London, 1650), pp. l0f. Edward Reynolds, A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soul of Man (London, 1647), pp. 435f. R.Franck, A Philosophical Treatise of the Original and Production of Things (London, 1687), p. 161. William Ayloffe, The Government of the Passions According to the Rules of Reason and Religion (London, 1700), p. 22. Ayloffe continues: ‘From this mighty Disorder proceed all the Malignity of our Passions, and though they are equally Daughters of the Soul and Body, yet these so unnatural Children only serve to encrease the Division between their Parents. Thus the Spirit of Man can never be at rest, but is forced to nourish in his Bosom those very Vipers, which he sees devouring him.’ Reynolds, Treatise of the Passions, p. 62; Senault, Man becom Guilty, p. 203; Senault, The Use of Passions (London, 1671), Epistle Dedicatory; Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde (London, 1601), p. 3. John Donne wrote that moral life could make ‘that ravening Wolfe a Man, that licentious Goate a man, that insinuating Serpent a man’. Sermon on Genesis 1.26, in The Sermons of John Donne, ed. G.Potter and E. Simpson, 10 vols (Berkeley, 1953–62), IX, 58. Also see ‘To Sr.Edward Herbert at Julyers’, Complete English Poems, ed. C.A.Patrides (London, 1994), p. 200. John Bono thus describes the account of the Fall and the confusion of tongues as a ‘master narrative’ which informed a variety of early modern strategies for the interpretation of nature. The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine (Madison, 1995), pp. 53–84. Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s Complete Herbal (Ware, 1995), p. vii. John Pettus, Volatiles from the History of Adam and Eve (London, 1674), p. 60. John Webster, Academiarum Examen (London, 1654), pp. 26–31, 76. Jacob Boehme, Signatura Rerum (London, 1651), pp. 77, 4. Paracelsus, Die 9 Bücher der Natura Rerum, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Karl Sudhoff and Wilhelm Matthiessen, 15 vols. (Munich, 1922–33), XI, 393, 397. On Paracelsian signatures as a language of nature, see Bono, Word of God, pp. 129–39. Henry More, Antidote against Atheism, 2nd edn (London, 1662), p. 56. John Edwards, A Demonstration of the Existence and Providence of God, From the Contemplation of the Visible Structure of the Greater and the Lesser World (London, 1696), p. 134; cf. Oswald Croll, A Treatise of Oswaldus Crollius of Signatures of Internal Things; or A True and Lively Anatomy of the Greater and Lesser World (London, 1669), Preface; William Coles, Adam in Eden: or, Natures Paradise (London, 1657), p. 3; Richard Saunders, Saunders Physiognomie and Chiromancie, Metoposcopie, 2nd edn (London, 1671), Preface. George Herbert, ‘Man’, lines 23ff. Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, 55 vols, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut Lehman (St Louis, 1955–75), I, 119–21. Cf. George Walker, The History of the Creation (London, 1641), pp. 193, 229.

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31 Bacon, Advancement of Learning, I.vi.6, ed. Arthur Johnston (Oxford, 1980), p. 38; Bacon, Of the Interpretation of Nature, I, in Works, 14 vols, ed. James Spedding, Robert Ellis and Douglas Heath (London, 1860), III, 222. 32 Boehme, The Second Booke concerning The Three Principles of The Divine Essence (London, 1648), p. 216. 33 Edward Taylor, Jacob Behmen’s Theosophick Philosophy Unfolded (London, 1692), pp. 75, 29. 34 Thus what was a fault in human beings became a virtue in beasts. As La Chambre put it in The Art How to Know Men (London, 1665), pp. 161f: ‘the motions of the sensitive Appetite, which, in all other Animals, are the more perfect, the more they are inclin’d to the excess and defect which is natural thereto, ought to be moderate in Man, in regard that he being subject to Reason, it is requisite they should be conformable thereto…’. Cf. Senault, Man becom Guilty, p. 193. 35 A General Collection of Discourses of the Virtuosi of France, trans. G. Havers (London, 1664), p. 139. Cf. Hobbes, De Homine X.1, in Man and Citizen (New York), pp. 37f. At the same time, it was widely recognized that specific passions were not restricted to the animal with which they were most usually associated. This had been pointed out in Aristotle’s Phyiognomonica, 805b, 808b. 36 La Chambre, Art How to Know Men, p. 88; cf. A Discourse of the Passions (London, 1661), Sig. a2r. 37 Senault, The Use of Passions, pp. 84f. 38 Ayloffe, Government of the Passions, p. 29. 39 Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 113 (CSM I, 368); Discourse on the Method, V (CSM I, 139f). 40 Hobbes, Human Nature, XIII. 1. Cf. I, X.1, Works, ed. William Molesworth (London, 1840), IV, 71, 40. Hobbes, however, does not recommend the study of the passions of animals on this account, the difference between animal and human being too great. See De Corpore Politico, I.vi.5 (Works, IV, 120f). 41 Thomas Wright, Passions of the Minde, pp. 41f. Wright follows Aquinas, Summa theologiae, la.2ae, 25, 3 (Blackfriars edn, 19, 55) in his classification of the passions. The first six are the concupiscible passions and the latter five the irascible passions. 42 La Chambre, Art How to Know Men, p. 214. Cf. Discourses of the Virtuosi, p. 141. 43 La Chambre, op. cit., p. 20; cf. Discourse of the Passions, Pt. II, pp. 57–65. 44 Wright, Passions of the Minde, p. 160. 45 Senault, Man Becom Guilty, p. 193. Cf. La Chambre, Discourse of the Passions, Pt. II, pp. 69f. 46 Wright, Passions of the Minde, pp. 49f. 47 La Chambre, A Discourse on the Principles of Chiromancy (London, 1658), p. 17; Art How to Know Men, p. 269. 48 La Chambre, Art How to Know Men, Preface, Sig. B2v; cf. Discourse of the Passions, Pt. I, pp. 1f. 49 John Bulwer, Athomyotamia (London, 1649), Sigs. A3r, A4r. Bulwer is perhaps better known for his Chirologia: Or the Naturall Language of the Hand (London, 1644). Gestures of the hand, he wrote there (p. 3), constitute ‘an

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Peter Harrison universall character of Reason [which] may well be called the tongue and generall language of humane nature’. Saunders, Physiognomy, p. 193; Discourses of the Virtuosi, p. 439. Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 113, 114 (CSM I, 368). ibid., 184 (CSM I, 394f.). Saunders, Physiognomy, p. 271. La Chambre, Art How to Know Men, p. 23. ibid., Preface (Sig. B2v). ibid., pp. 184, 191. Cf. Discourse of the Passions, Pt. I, pp. 3–6. Saunders, Physiognomy, Preface. Amy Schmitter, ‘Representation, Self-Representation, and the Passions in Descartes’, Review of Metaphysics, 48 (1994), 331–57, (336, n.8). Le Brun, Conférence…sur l’expression générale et particulière des passions (Verona, 1751), pp. 28–32. On Le Brun on the passions, see Stephanie Ross, ‘Painting the Passions: Charles Le Brun’s Conférence sur l’Expression’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 45 (1984), 25–47, and Christopher Allen’s chapter in this book. Thomas Hill, in his sixteenth-century digest on physiognomy, describes his subject as ‘a science: which instructeth a man by outwarde notes, to foretell the naturall motions, and actuall conditions, that consist and dwell in many persons, especially in those, which lyue after their affections, and appetites, rather than governing themselves with reason’. The significations of his work, he later adds, apply mostly to ‘the brutish sort’. The Contemplation of Mankinde (London, 1671) fols 2, 126. Wright, Passions of the Minde, pp. 50, 53. La Chambre, Art How to Know Man, p. 29; Augustine, Against the Manichees, II. xvii.28 (FC 84, 123). Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Li, ed. Robin Robbins, 2 vols (Oxford, 1981), I, 5. Elsewhere Browne suggests that: ‘the inservient and brutall faculties [did] controle the suggestion of reason.’ I.i (I, 8). Margaret Mann Phillips, The Adages of Erasmus (Cambridge, 1964), pp. 217– 19. Cited in William Bouwsma, ‘The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought’, in Itinerarium Italicum, ed. H.Oberman and T.Brady (Leiden, 1975), p. 25. Reynolds, Treatise of the Passions, p. 4. Later (p. 46) Reynolds adds: ‘And it is true as well in Mans little Common-wealth, as in greater States, That there are no more pestilent and pernicious disturbers of the publicke Good, than those who are best qualified for service and imployment.’ Bacon also considers the mind to be a microcosm of government. See his brief discussion of the passions, Advancement of Learning, II.xxii.6 (pp. 163f.). Pierre Charron, Of Wisdom (London, 1697), pp. 171–3. Senault, The Use of Passions, pp. 176, 157. Reynolds, Treatise of the Passions, p. 20. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, II.xviii.4 (pp. 140f). Hobbes, De Corpore Politico, II.viii. 12–14, Works, IV, 209–11. In the previous century, Juan Luis Vives had also suggested that the control of the passions was the key to peace and stability: De concordia (1526), De anima et vita (1538). Hobbes, De Cive, XII.12, in Man and Citizen, pp. 253f. Cf. p. 244.

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72 Hobbes, De Cive, X.1, in Man and Citizen, p. 222. 73 Norberto Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition, trans. D.Gobetti (Chicago, 1993), p. 68. Bobbio fails to appreciate the link between the Fall and the insurrection of the passions, which both Augustine and Calvin stress. 74 Bacon, Novum Organum, I.3. 75 Robert Hooke, Micrographia (London, 1665), Preface. 76 John Calvin, A Commentary on the First Book of Moses called Genesis, trans. J.King (Grand Rapids, 1984), iii.6 (p. 155). Before the Fall, by way of contrast, ‘Adam was endued with a right judgement, had affections in harmony with reason, had all his senses sound and well regulated…. In the mind perfect intelligence flourished and reigned, uprightness attended as its companion, and all the senses were prepared and moulded for due obedience to reason, and in the body there was a suitable correspondence with this internal order’ (1.26). Cf. Institutes of the Christian Religion, II.i.9, trans. Henry Beveridge, 2 vols (London, 1953), I, 218. 77 Calvin, Institutes, II.i.4 (I, 213). 78 ibid., II.ii.12 (I, 234). 79 Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, I.i (I, 5, 7). 80 ibid., I.iii (I, 17). 81 Wright, Passions of the Minde, pp. 2–3. 82 ibid., p. 86. A third consequence is alteration of humours, which leads to maladies and diseases. Cf. Hugh of St Victor, who spoke of a threefold depredation at the Fall: man’s punishment was mortality of the body, concupiscence of the flesh, and ignorance of the mind. On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, trans. Roy Deferrari (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), I.viii.l (p. 141). 83 Reynolds, Treatise of the Passions, pp. 5f. Cf. ‘…so that herein consists a great part of mans infelicitie by the Fall; that albeit his Vnderstanding it selfe be blinded’, (p. 44). 84 Senault, Man Becom Guilty, p. 78. Cf. Senault, Natural History of the Passions (London, 1674), pp. 74f. 85 Malebranche, Father Malebranche his Treatise Concerning the Search after Truth, trans. T.Taylor, 2nd edn (London, 1700), I.i.vi (Pt. I, p. 12) 86 On the rejection of Aristotle’s account of perceptual cognition and its seventeenth-century legacy, see Stephen Gaukroger’s introduction to Antoine Arnauld, On True and False Ideas (Manchester, 1990), pp. 1–14. 87 See, e.g., Jeffrey Barnouw, ‘Passion as “Confused” Perception or Thought in Descartes, Malebranche, and Hutcheson’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 53 (1994), 397–424. 88 For the rejection of the Stoic prescription on these grounds, see Wright, Passions of the Minde, pp. 30–4, 57; Malebranche, Search after Truth, Pt. I, p. 12, Pt. II, pp. 3f, 122; Ayloffe, Government of the Passions, p. 5; Senault, The Use of Passions, pp. 1–3, 39–53. Cf. Augustine, City of God, XIV.6, 9, 10. 89 Ayloffe, Government of the Passions, p. 24. 90 Strictly speaking, there were two sets of relations: Object-Passion; PassionSign. This raises the question of the nature of the connection between the object of passion, the passion itself, and the expession of the passion. One way of approaching this is to ask whether the object of a passion is the cause of the

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4

Painting the passions The Passions de l’Âme as a basis for pictorial expression1 Christopher Allen

The most important thing in a history painting is the variety of expressions, of joy or pain or any of the other passions suited to the individuals represented…. To which should also be added the variety of attitudes of the head and body. For it is especially these beauties that touch the spectators of a painting, at once leading them with pleasure to a perfect understanding of the subject, and inducing in them the same feelings of joy or wonder experienced by the figures represented.2

The most common misapprehension about French seventeenthcentury art is the assumption that Charles Le Brun and his collaborators at the Academy of Painting were the natural heirs to Nicolas Poussin. That the Academicians themselves claimed such an affiliation and used the authority of the ‘French Raphael’ in their various theoretical or political controversies surely cannot blind anyone to the extraordinary difference in almost every respect between the grandiose decorative ceilings of Versailles and Poussin’s modest, intellectual and contemplative easel paintings, executed for a small and discerning clientèle. Poussin himself spent most of his life in Rome—he was born in 1594, and lived in Rome from 1624 until his death in 1665, except for a period of some 22 months in 1640–42, when he was more or less compelled to come back to Paris; there, although he was appointed First Painter of the King and showered with honours, he loathed the work he was asked to do—decorating the Great Gallery of the Louvre, painting large conventional religious paintings, and executing many other small but distracting commissions. This was, on the other hand, precisely the sort of work at which Le Brun excelled; he was a prodigiously gifted designer, a brilliant impresario and an indefatigable worker. Poussin worked slowly and intensely, without assistants and rarely repeating himself. 79

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Temperamentally, they could hardly have been more different. But the divergence between their work goes much deeper than that. I would like to suggest that what separates Poussin and Le Brun—and beyond them, classicism and academicism (for all the reservations one may have about such stylistic labels)—is their relation to Cartesian thought: classicism is contemporary with Cartesianism, while academicism comes after it, and arises in an intellectual ambience already saturated with the influence of Descartes.3 I am not suggesting that this is the only factor, of course, but some others, such as the political system of Colbert and Louis XIV, also have their connections with Cartesian rationalism. In order to substantiate this relationship between Cartesianism and contemporary art theory, I must briefly explain what I take to be the basis of classicism. The great intellectual dynamic of the early modern period was the emergence of science and technology—not merely as intellectual speculation, but from the first as a new way of being in the world of nature. The essential epistemological operation, in which painters played an important part,4 was the conception of an objective world; the discovery of space and perspective were intimately involved in articulating the separation of a knowing subject from a knowable object. Metaphysically, the corresponding conception was that of inanimate matter, isolating a domain of quantifiable phenomena, susceptible of mechanical explanation and determined by externally applied, efficient causality. This scientific view of the world developed gradually, and with the active involvement of art—which of course is not to say that this was the only, or even the principal, concern of Renaissance artists—from the time of Giotto onwards. It gave a powerful impetus to modern European culture in many domains, but its inherent tendency to reductivism and utilitarianism ultimately gave rise to profound stresses. The tension between irreconcilable values first appears openly in painting at the end of the sixteenth century, perhaps most pointedly in the work of Caravaggio: the inescapably material body is paradoxically conjoined with the supernatural soul of the contemporary religious revival.5 Faced with what was already a very difficult relationship, even before the intervention of Descartes, I believe that Baroque6 might be defined as a style that dramatizes the impossibility of the soul’s harmony with the body—hence the violent energy generated in Baroque composition, and its love of transcendence—while classicism is the will to find a harmonious accommodation between the two; a will to immanence, which is articulated in composition, in subject-matter,

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and, as we shall see, in expression. Descartes was a contemporary not only chronologically but also in his concern to define the relations of soul and body, in part to escape the sceptics’ arguments that the mind is subject to the disorders of the body; but the rigorous dualism to which he was led is fundamentally inimical to the classical quest for equilibrium. In this chapter I will try to explore the problem in stages: first of all to show the difference between Poussin’s and Le Brun’s approaches to the representation of expression in practice; second, to survey briefly the critical terminology applied to the question of artistic expression in the Renaissance and seventeenth century, and to consider the idea of ‘passions’ with particular reference to Descartes; third, to discuss Le Brun’s and Poussin’s respective theories of expression in relation to this tradition. This would in itself constitute a sufficient demonstration of the difference I am trying to establish,7 but the following section attempts to situate the whole debate in a deeper understanding of early modern art theory, and the chapter will conclude with a discussion of Poussin’s famous idea of délectation. I am of course conscious that any comparison of Poussin with Le Brun will inevitably be to the latter’s disfavour; it is not my intention to demonstrate the obvious, nor to disparage a man of great talents, but to emphasize and explain a profound difference between two ways of thinking about and representing human experience. Finally, before proceeding with the main part of this chapter, I should point out that interest in the passions, in expression and in physiognomy was widespread in the early modern period, and extended far beyond the domain of art. This interest had implications for ethics, politics and social life in general, but its specific ambition was summed up in the title of a mid-seventeenth century treatise, L’Art de connaître les hommes.8 The question is historically significant; it marks not only a new awareness of the individual character of men, but a changing social reality in which the dissolution of traditional social roles, the growth of mobility and the concentration of population in cities meant that one lived, increasingly, among strangers. Much depended on the ability to judge the character of those who were to be one’s associates, friends and servants. The motivation remained the same, although the conceptual basis changed radically from Cardan’s sixteenth-century ‘metoposcopy’, the study of the lines traced on the human features by the influence of the stars, to Lavater’s quasi-scientific physiognomy two centuries or more later.9 The counterpart of this fascination with discovering the character of others was a concern with the management of one’s own appearance, conduct, bearing and expression; with the

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cultivation of discretion and the preservation of privacy in social life. It is not always easy to distinguish between such social precautions and the philosopher’s attempt to achieve mastery over his passions; in principle, the former is at worst a facade and the latter at best a profound self-transformation, but there is a point at which both may overlap in a common concern for autonomy and freedom, whether in relation to oneself or to others. However, the possibility of a reconciliation between prudence and wisdom assumes an ultimate harmony between the individual and the community; such an assumption was already undermined in the seventeenth century, an age of rationalism perhaps, but also the age of Pascal and La Rochefoucauld’s merciless definitions of man’s capacity for self-deception. In the eighteenth century, in spite of the superficial sociability of the time and a generally more lighthearted tone, the sense of social life as a theatre of hypocrisy became pervasive.10 POUSSIN AND LE BRUN

All of this is part of the background, which we cannot afford to overlook, to the artistic concern with ‘expression’, or the ‘expression of the passions’. Artists were certainly not uninfluenced by the debates and publications in this field. But a fundamental distinction must be made between the aims of all this quasi-scientific exploration of human character and the intention of the painter. Expression, as an artistic concern, is not a means for analysing the character of any real person, but rather for constructing the picture of imaginary ones; it is the fundamental instrument of narrative or historical painting, as is clear from the passage from André Félibien at the beginning of this chapter. I shall return to the question of narrative painting below. But from the outset I would suggest that the study of character (or physiognomy) was far less important to artists than the study of expression (or pathognomy). The master trying to assess the character of a prospective servant might be interested in the permanent aspects of the servant’s character, and anxious to see through the superficial smile or temporarily respectful bearing, but the artist was interested in precisely the mobile and the impermanent play of the features. In practice, hypocrisy was rarely a question for the history painter.11 The result was that classical art in general tended to adopt a generalized construction of the facial features, with grades for age, rank and sex, just as it did for bodies. The sort of physiognomic exploration illustrated in Charles Le Brun’s very striking drawings of the analogies between human and animal features, following in the tradition of Della Porta, was certainly

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attuned to the general interests of the time, but was of marginal importance for the practice of art. The proof, if it were needed, is that Le Brun’s own work, like that of his pupils, shows barely a trace of the notorious animal analogies. Le Brun’s explorations in physiognomy were a brilliant experiment, but they were of little direct relevance to his art; their success today is due to their prominence in what seems to modern tastes an otherwise bland or pompous œuvre. The unfairness to Le Brun begins almost fatally when we set his diagrams or even studies of the passions beside details from Poussin’s paintings. We are struck by the clarity and economy of the latter’s expression; everything is legible (a word he used himself),12 yet neither simplified nor overstated. Complex affective states are represented, and yet nothing is treated as inexpressible or ineffable: the body seems perfectly suited to housing the soul, permeable, as it were, to the experience of the mind.13 In contrast, Le Brun’s drawings seem stiff, schematic and, worst of all, devoid of anything but the mask of feeling. And yet such a comparison is not as inequitable as it may seem. It is clear that Le Brun regularly conceived figures in his paintings from the outset as epitomizing distinct passions. There is both pictorial and textual evidence for this. The fleeing Persian in the Battle of Arbela (Figure 4.1) was always ‘l’effroy’, even before Le Brun slightly modified his original study to make him into a type14 and then a diagram. When Testelin’s Sentimens des plus habiles peintres was published in 1696,15 it contained a plate with a dozen heads representing various passions (Figure 4.2), all from works by Le Brun, many of them drawings prepared by him in connection with the famous lecture on expression of 1668. Most telling is the appearance of four heads taken directly from his early masterpiece Les reines de Perse…(Figure 4.3) and now labelled l’Étonnement, la Crainte, l’Inquiétude and l’Abatement.16 Le Brun attempts to establish a finite repertoire of human expression by applying a mechanistic model of affective behaviour, based on the principle of action and reaction. I shall come back to his theory later, but even from his works it is clear that he sees expression as a matter of reacting to an external stimulus, and perhaps it is no coincidence that so many of the works emphasize violent actions and reactions; when the external stimulus and the corresponding reaction are of a more subtle variety, as in the figure of Alexander, who is moved to pity by the wretched fate of the women at his feet, Le Brun is surprisingly bland. Perhaps this is in fact because the action-reaction model is primarily physiological, primarily concerned with what is not much more than an

Figure 4.1.

Charles Le Brun, Head of a fleeing Persian (Windsor, Royal Library)

Figure 4.2.

Illustrations of expressions from Henry Testelin, Sentimens des plus habiles peintres (1696)

Figure 4.3.

Jean Audran, engraving after Charles Le Brun, Les reines de Perse (1660–61). Upper row right: ‘L’Étonnment’; lower row from centre to right: ‘L’Abatement’, ‘L’Inquiétude’, ‘La Crainte’

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elaboration of the reflex of flinching; the mind, properly speaking, has little to do with a largely involuntary corporeal process. For the same reason, Le Brun’s approach leaves little room for the modification of affective response by the complex of other circumstances surrounding the individual. Finally, because each figure tends to be assigned one or other of the passions from the repertoire, Le Brun’s group scenes are built up of individuals isolated in their different emotions, side by side but not adding up to anything more than an aggregate. It is a flattenedout version of Poussin’s complex dramatic groups. The difference, in the first place, is that Poussin does not represent the passions as existing separately. Can we identify any of these figures with a schema from an academic handbook? Certainly not the two beautiful young women from the Eliezar and Rebecca, but nor, I think, even the terrified mother of the Massacre of the Innocents (Figure 4.4).17 For Poussin, there is no such thing as joy or sorrow apart from, or prior to, this or that specific joy or sorrow. Everything starts with the particularity of the situation, the unique human conjunction. More importantly still, it begins with the significance of the event, that is to say the totality of the social, political, metaphysical or religious implications and consequences—depending on the subject—of the event to be represented. And this goes well beyond a simply psychological understanding of the passions, such as that which predominates, for example, in Pietro da Cortona’s Rape of the Sabines.18 This sense of the subject’s significance, in the fullest sense of its moral import for all concerned, is the epicentre of Poussin’s painting, the generative ‘idea’ or pensée, in his own terms. It conditions the particular psychological response of each protagonist, and thus endows the experience from the first with a collective character. The figures in a Poussin painting are ‘taking part’ in an event, not aggregately constituting it: the collective aspect is a priori. And this explains why his figures are both more and less ‘expressive’ than those of Le Brun: more, because they are part of something bigger and more important than a personal affective response; less, because they rarely epitomize a single or even a readily classifiable passion. They play a part in a whole which includes not only the facial expressions of all the other characters, but also the totality of physical attitudes, the play of colour and light, and so on.19 Thus, in the story of Rebecca, the two young women are onlookers responding to a joyful event: but they are not called upon to act ‘joy’ and ‘wonder’ respectively. They merely have to take part—one already seeing, the other turning to see; for Poussin’s mastery is not just in the understated eloquence of the figures, but in this

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Figure 4.4.

Nicolas Poussin, The Massacre of the Innocents (1624–25, detail) (Chantilly, Musée)

wonderful aspectual discrimination—between the continuative and the inceptive, so to speak. I have just used the word responding, and that is clearly a further crucial difference between the two approaches: Poussin’s figures are not merely reacting to some stimulus which has impinged upon their sense of self-preservation. They are responding, that is to say, reaching out beyond their sphere of self-interest, extending themselves in sympathy towards the experience of another. After all, they are human beings, not machines (though this emphasis on sympathy also has Stoic associations which are important for Poussin); and the same capacity for involvement with others contributes to that mutuality and that

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collective aspect which, as we have just seen, is inherent in Poussin’s treatment of expression, and which Le Brun is incapable of apprehending or emulating because of the limitations of his method. In Poussin’s group compositions, no two individuals respond in the same way, but nor do they respond in isolation from their neighbours. In short, Poussin’s approach to expression begins with the sense of an event’s moral, metaphysical and poetic significance, and is based on the active, mutually involved response of the participants in that event. Le Brun starts from the opposite point of view—from passions considered as immediate corporeal reactions to outside stimuli; as atomistic states; as the reactions of isolated individuals—and from that he must build up the whole. According to the Zen art of archery, if you think of the target, you will handle the bow in the right way and hit it; but if you think about the bow, you will forget the target and miss it. Poussin thinks of the meaning, and he finds his expressions; Le Brun is obsessed with the mechanics of expression and he misses the meaning. THEORIES OF EXPRESSION

I want to turn now to the theory of expression, and consider whether a similar contrast can be drawn between Poussin and Le Brun in this regard. But first of all we must pause to take stock of the terminology and the tradition of writing about this subject. I have not come upon any comprehensive historical and critical treatment of this question, although much very useful material is collected and reviewed in Dr Jennifer Montagu’s The Expression of the Passions: the Origin and Influence of Charles le Brun’s ‘Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière’. Even a glance at the principal theorists from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, however, reveals a collection of different terms which cannot all be taken as equivalent in meaning; some indeed appear to be active, others passive, and others indeterminate or variable. Thus the first writer on the subject, Alberti, does not speak of passions at all, but of movements of the soul, motus animi: A history painting will move the soul of the spectator when the men represented in it reveal the movements of their own souls as clearly as possible. For nature has so disposed things…that we weep with those who weep, smile at those who smile, mourn with those who mourn. But these movements of the soul are made known by the movements of the body…20

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Leonardo speaks of passions, but also of concetti, and notes on another occasion: ‘The mind works in [or: through] the movements of the body’ (La mente opera nei movimenti);21 ‘’That figure is most praiseworthy which best expresses in its actions the passion of its soul’ (Quella figura è piv laudabile che con l’atto meglio esprime la passione del suo animo);22 The painting or the painted figures should be so made that the spectator may with ease understand from their attitudes the concetto of their soul’ (La pictura over le figure dipinte debbono esser fatte in modo tale che li riguardatori d’esse possino con facilità conoscere mediante le low attitudini il concetto dell’animo loro). 23 Domenichino speaks of the affetti, 24 as does Agucchi—la viva espressione degli affetti—although in a another passage attributed to him he refers to the passioni dell’animo, 25 Mancini mentions expression d’attione et affetto.26 Charles-Alphonse Dufresnoy, the French painter and theorist living in Rome at the same time as Poussin, speaks of both motus animorum and affectus: ‘Besides this, to express the movements of the soul,/And the affections hidden in the heart; with a few colours/To paint the very soul, and give it to the eyes to see…’ (Hœc prœter, motus animorum, et corde repostosl Exprimere affectus, paucisque coloribus ipsamlPingere posse animam, atque oculis prœbere videndam…).27 On the face of it, then, we discover something like the contrast between Poussin’s active, responsive model of expression and Le Brun’s passive, mechanical one. A passion, as its etymology tells us, is something suffered; motus, concetto and attione all suggest, on the contrary, something active. Affetto is ambiguous, but closer no doubt to passion. The most suggestive thing, perhaps, is that active and passive terms are often combined or used at different times by the same author: thus concetto and passione; attione and affetto; motus and affectus. But this is still only a beginning. We need to locate the source of the conceptual apparatus at work, and account for its development over the course of the period under consideration. At least for the idea of passion, I think it may be possible to sketch a partial answer. THE PASSIONS

The main current derives, as one might expect, from Scholasticism and, ultimately, from Aristotle. Aquinas’s philosophy, as renovated by the Jesuits in the sixteenth century, was official doctrine in the Catholic world, and constituted the fundamental intellectual equipment imparted even to schoolboys. Descartes himself attended a famous Jesuit college, and it seems likely that Poussin, too, was educated by the Company. It is

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remarkable how often members of the Academy resorted to Scholastic forms of argument in their debates with one another. Cartesian influence might profoundly modify the intellectual ambience of the time, but, except in the case of professional philosophers, it would not systematically eradicate all the old habits. Etienne Gilson summarizes Aquinas’s doctrine on the passions: A purely spiritual substance like an angel cannot experience passions, but the soul, which is the form of the body, necessarily experiences repercussions to the profound changes which the body undergoes. Inversely, since it is the soul that moves the body, it can be the principle of changes which the body must undergo. We can, therefore, distinguish the passions according to their source. Corporeal passions arise from the action of the body on the soul, which is the form. Animal passions arise from the actions of the anima on the body which it moves. In either case, the passion ultimately affects the soul. An incision made upon a member causes a sensation of pain in the soul: this is a corporeal passion. The thought of danger causes in the body the disturbances that accompany fear: this is an animal passion. But we all know from experience that disturbances in the body have repercussions in the soul, so that ultimately every passion is a modification of the soul resulting from its union with the body…. Passions, properly so called, affect the soul in its function of animator of the body at the point where it is most actively engaged in this function. Just as will accompanies the intellectual activity of the soul, so a more modest form of desire accompanies its animating activity. It is the sensitive appetite, which is called sensuality, and which is but the desire that is born from the perceiving of an object which is of interest to the life of the body. It is this lowest form of desire which is the seat of the passions. They are its intensest movements; and it is through them that man experiences most strongly, sometimes most tragically, that he is not a pure Intelligence but the union of a soul and a body.28 Aquinas’s concept of the passions, then, is both active and passive, like that of the art theorists we have briefly surveyed. It is also broadly epistemological, concerned in the first instance with our cognition of the world, not with ethical judgement. In the Scholastic philosophy, dominated by teleology, animation and will, cognition must inevitably involve desire or aversion, and this is not at all incompatible with reason. It is a doctrine that seems to correspond well with the general range of theories of expression.

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This morally neutral ‘mainstream’ account, however, is complicated by the second current of neo-Stoicism, with its very different concept of the passions. Petrarch already could write: ‘I have in hand a book, De remediis…in which…I attempt to weaken, or if that were possible to extirpate both my own and my readers’ passions [strictly, passions of the soul].’29 Petrarch was among the forerunners of the neo-Stoic revival which was to enjoy such a fortune with Justus Lipsius and others in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. 30 And Stoicism considered the passions to be perturbations of the soul which were, as Petrarch put it, to be weakened or uprooted. The wise man must attempt, as far as possible, to be without passions, to strive for . Perhaps it is the interference of this quite different although homonymous concept that accounts for the avoidance of the term ‘passion’ by some authors. But again, this remains tentative. I shall show at the end, however, that there is good reason to think this second concept of the passions influenced the thinking of Poussin, who was strongly drawn to Stoicism, even in his theory of expression. The third current is that of the Cartesian critique. All of Descartes’s writings attacked the assumptions of Scholasticism, but Les Passions de l’Âme, published in French in 1649 (and therefore immediately accessible to lay readers) specifically attacked the traditional view of the passions. In the first place,31 the soul was deprived of its function as the principle which animates the body; the body was an automaton that required no such external agency; the soul, meanwhile, was restricted to the functions of will and intellect. Second, and as a direct consequence of this strict dualism, the whole domain of sensory cognition and affective response to the world was attributed to the body; the complex involvement of soul and body envisaged by Aquinas was replaced by a reductive and mechanistic account. Third, and again consequently, the soul was reduced to an essentially passive role in at least the experiencing of the passions: whereas previous authors could use the expression passions of the soul to refer to a complex involvement with the world that was both active and passive, in the Cartesian account a passion was, at least in the first instance, something experienced passively. Of course, this is a very simplified account of Descartes’s theory. This is not the place to discuss the peculiar theory of the pineal gland by which he hoped to explain the mutually causal relation of soul and body, but the fact of this relation was not in doubt, and it was vital to the conception of human freedom. For although the passions were primarily the mental apperceptions of physical events, they were also the foundation of human liberty. An animal’s behaviour, for example, is

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based on a simple sequence of action and reaction; it sees something, which in turn provokes an automatic response, and it acts accordingly. The process in man is exactly identical, except that the automatic response of the body—for example to flee danger—registers in the soul as the passion of fear; and it is this supplementary stage of consciousness that allows the faculty of will to intervene, and, if necessary, to resist and override the automatic response: to stand and fight in battle. In spite of his radical departure from Scholastic metaphysics, Descartes’s moral estimation of the passions was, like that of the Aristotelians, moderately positive. The physical mechanism that underlay the psychological event existed to preserve the body from danger; and the psychological event, as we have just seen, was what allowed reason and will, the peculiarly human faculties, to override instinct when necessary. Nonetheless, the influence of neo-Stoicism is visible in the emphasis on learning to dominate the passions. LE BRUN’S THEORY OF EXPRESSION

In spite of these nuances, the importance of Descartes’s theory for painting was that it emphasized a mechanistic sequence of action and reaction as the basis of the passions, the mental apperception appearing as a secondary stage in the process. Before, the passions had been inner movements of the soul, which might or might not manifest themselves adequately on the surface of the body; now the physical manifestation was the primary event, and the artist could expect, by concentrating on the measurable movements of the facial muscles, to grasp and convey the essential properties of the passions. Of course in reality, as we have seen, this led to the isolation of each figure in its own action-reaction sequence, and worse still, to a fundamentally passive understanding of the figure’s reaction which ruled out anything like the complex moral responses that characterize Poussin’s work almost from the beginning; such responses are not those of a mechanistic body, but a moral being with memory and desire and intentionality. It is easy to see how such a system could appeal to a man like Le Brun, intelligent but not a deep thinker, an efficient, capable, highly energetic man who shared his generation’s love of rules and systems (even if he was not as dogmatic as is usually alleged).32 Without the philosopher’s subtlety of mind or intellectual caution, he simplified and schematized—as Stephanie Ross has shown33—what was already a reductive system, and produced the repertoire of passions that we have seen. At the same time, if in his practical system Le Brun is more

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reductive than Descartes, his theory, as we shall see, is far less systematic, and full of reminiscences of the Scholastic theories. Le Brun’s interest in the passions is attested from the beginning of his career as the painter of Louis XIV—indeed, expression was his principal theoretical interest. The young king used to come and watch him painting the Reines de Perse in 1660–61, and this enormously successful picture was the subject of a special publication by André Félibien in 1663, describing among other things the particular passions of each figure. One—she was to be la crainte among the illustrations that later accompanied the published lecture (Figure 4.5)— demonstrates his early tendency to physiological reduction: There is…a Persian lady…And as fear has caused the blood to withdraw around the heart to preserve it, because it is the most noble part of the body…we can see that this woman is extremely pale; that her lips are colourless; her eyes sunken and dark; her eyebrows fallen and drawn; she hunches her shoulders and clasps her hand.34 Le Brun continued to be preoccupied with the practicalities of expression during the Battles of Alexander series which he worked at on and off during the 1660s and until he abandoned the project after a showing of the immense works in 1673. In 1667, after several false starts, the Academy finally began to hold regular monthly lectures, an account of which was published in 1668 by Félibien. In that year, too, Le Brun gave his famous pair of lectures on expression at the Academy. A sample from the text published in 1698 was quoted and commented on by Charles Darwin: [Dans la frayeur] Le sourcil qui est abaissé d’un côté et élevé de l’autre, fait voir que la partie élevée semble se vouloir joindre au cerveau pour le garantir du mal que l’âme apercoit, et le côté qui est abaissé et qui paraît enflé, nous fait trouver en cet état par les esprits, qui viennent du cerveau en abondance, comme pour couvrir l’âme et la défendre du mal qu’elle craint…([In fear] The eyebrows, which are lowered on one side and raised on the other, show that the raised part seems to want to join itself to the brain to protect it from the evil which the soul perceives, and the side that is lowered and appears swollen, is in this state because of the spirits which come from the brain in abundance, as though to cover the soul and defend it from the evil which it fears…). I have thought the foregoing sentences worth quoting, as specimens of the surprising nonsense that has been written on the subject.35

Figure 4.5.

After Charles Le Brun, ‘La Crainte’, from Picart’s edition of the Conférence (London, 1701)

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We should remember that none of these texts comes to us directly from the hand of Le Brun. The first two, as I have pointed out, are paraphrased by Félibien, and the famous Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner les passions itself was published posthumously.36 As Alan McKenzie points out, ‘Le Brun’s lecture notes for the Conférence on the passions survive and have been published (as an Appendix to Jouin). The text published in 1698, a more orderly and proper one, seems to have been based on a recasting of the lecture by the secretaries of the Académie.’37 We must beware of caricaturing a conception of the passions which is easily ridiculed, and also of assuming that his whole sensibility was limited to a reductive theory. It seems likely that the unnamed speaker in the Académie’s discussion of 3 September 1667 was Le Brun,38 who reminds his colleagues that it is easy to paint violent passions, but that Raphael is admirable for representing ‘[des] passions qui n’agissent que peu & foiblement, ou de ces affections cachées dans le fond du coeur’.39 The artist, he continues, must understand the nature of these emotions, how they are engendered in the soul, and in what manner they are manifested, in order to form on the bodies of his figures the signs that will make them understood, but true and natural signs; which, without forcing the organs, nor making them act against their nature, nonetheless allow them to reveal what is taking place in the soul of the person represented.40 Odd as this may seem, the idea that the passions are generated in the soul and expressed in the body is also to be found in the text of the Conférence on the passions itself.41 Similarly un-Cartesian is Le Brun’s retention of the distinction between ‘concupiscible’ and ‘irascible’ passions.42 His ‘soul’, moreover, seems much more like the motor of the body than Descartes’s unextended thinking substance; it seems to have much too close an affinity with the ‘animal spirits’. He even speaks of the ‘sensitive soul’,43 all of whose functions are attributed by the philosopher to the domain of the body. The answer to this confusion may be, first of all, that Le Brun is not a trained thinker, and that although he has borrowed from Descartes the essential idea of a mechanistic system of the passions, as well as much detailed analysis of particular cases, he does not fully understand the broader metaphysical framework to which these ideas belong. Failing this, he falls back on the general, common-knowledge background of Scholastic ideas, as well as old habits inherited from

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the art-theoretical tradition; his new theory is incompletely Cartesianized, one might say. But this confusion should not perhaps be explained only as a failure to grasp the Cartesian principle of sweeping away the accretions of inherited commonplaces before building a new edifice. Le Brun also had an interest in preserving the traditional idea that expression was the manifestation of the soul. It was an essential part of painting’s claim to nobility as an art. It seems that Le Brun did understand and adopt a version of the Cartesian mechanistic model of the passions, but that he tried to cobble it together with some of the more traditional ideas on the subject, for a variety of reasons: conservatism, concern for the dignity of the art, and no doubt the sincere desire to maintain the classical equilibrium of soul and body. Thus, in discussing Poussin’s Manna, he insists on the unity of expression and the collective nature of the event: As the author of this picture is admirable in the diversity of movements, and as he understands how one should give life to his figures, he has made all their diverse actions and different expressions derive from their principal subject.44 This, as we shall see in the next section, is quintessentially Poussinian doctrine. But Le Brun could not avoid the radical consequences of the theory and practice that he had adopted; and they made it impossible to generate the whole expressive economy of the picture from its ‘principal subject’. POUSSIN’S THEORY OF EXPRESSION

Poussin’s theoretical pronouncements on expression are of an entirely different order, as we might by now expect. He speaks of ‘reading’ his paintings.45 He is conscious of beginning a work by searching—through the process of drawing—for what he calls the pensée46 of the subject: in other words, what I have referred to as its significance. Perhaps I should repeat that this emphatically does not mean he had in his head an idea that could have been put into words before starting work; rather, the work itself is a form of pictorial articulation, and the pensée is constituted by the choice of narrative moment, the dramatic relations of the figures, the composition of the bodies, etc. Poussin saw, too, that this approach to expression involved not only the interrelationship of all his figures, but the involvement of every aspect of the composition; this was the point of his famous allusion to the Greek musical modes, which he made to his friend and patron Chantelou in 1647,47 in answer to the

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complaint that a picture he had painted for another patron seemed to be filled with a greater love or tenderness: Do you not see that the reason for this lies in the nature of the subject, and your own disposition, and that the subjects I paint for you require to be represented in a different manner? This is the whole artifice of painting. Forgive my frankness if I tell you that you have been precipitate in your judgement of my works. To judge well is very difficult, if one does not have considerable theoretical and practical experience of this art. It is not by appetite alone that we must judge, but by reason…. Our good Ancient Greeks, the inventors of all beautiful things, discovered several modes by means of which they produced marvellous effects…48 The section of the letter that follows is copied from Zarlino’s Istituzioni harmoniche (Venice, 1558), of which we need only consider a brief sample: The modes of the ancients were a composition of several things put together, so that from their variety arose a certain difference of mode…from which proceeded a power to evoke various passions in the souls of their spectators. Hence the ancient scholars attributed to each its properties according to the effects they saw it produce.49 Félibien (who had known Poussin in Rome in 1647–49 and had even been accorded the rare privilege of a few painting lessons) paraphrases his theory in the preface to the Conférences of 1668: M.Poussin, rightly believing that the beauty of a painting consists in ensuring that everything that enters into its composition should have a particular character of what the work is to represent in general, made this his principal concern, and we can see that in those he painted the expression of the subject so thoroughly pervades the work that there is everywhere anger or sweetness according to the nature of his story. He had imagined that just as in music…different sounds cause different movements in the soul… so he did not doubt that the manner of presenting objects in a composition of movements, and an appearance of more or less violent expressions, and in colours placed one beside the other and variously combined, should produce when seen various sensations which could predispose the soul to different passions.50 Thus Félibien grasps very well the general character of expression in

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Poussin’s work; and he concludes, quite naturally, that the intention is to evoke corresponding emotions in the spectator. But is this really the aim of Poussin’s art, or even his final thought on the matter? INVENTION, IMITATION AND EXPRESSION

So far we have presented the contrast between Poussin and Le Brun essentially in relation to philosophical ideas of the passions; in order to grasp the opposition clearly as an art-theoretical question, however, we need to reconsider precisely the terms in which the contemporary arttheoretical debate posed itself, or the fundamental intentions that underlay the critical discussions of the time; the deepest differences may not always appear on the surface. From the beginning of the Renaissance, art had two distinct ambitions: one was to tell important stories about matters human and divine; the other was to represent the world as we see and experience it. The second of these ambitions is the one that remains most familiar today, even if modernism has consistently presented it as illusory and trivial. In the Renaissance, the curiosity and concern which art has almost always demonstrated for the phenomena of nature was transformed into a systematic attempt to understand the world of senseexperience. The invention of perspective, for all the artificiality of the monocular system, was not only a ‘rationalization of sight’; it was also the constitution of that cognitive viewpoint outside the domain of nature which, as we have already said, is the basis of modern science. No Renaissance artist or theorist ever thought, however, that the aim of art could be simply a naturalistic, if ‘rationalized’, view of the world of sense-experience. From the beginning, and explicitly in Alberti’s De Pictura, there was the parallel demand for beauty, and the idea, inherited from antiquity, that art could surpass nature. This was most commonly expressed in empirical form in the story of Zeuxis selecting the most perfect parts of the most beautiful maidens of Croton in order to compose an image of ideal beauty.51 In the sixteenth century the underlying idea found its clearest expression in the writings of Vincenzo Danti: if the world of natural things were as it should be, we could simply ‘trace’ what we see—I don’t think that is too free a translation of ritrarre in this context52—but, because nature most often does not succeed in fully realizing her intentions, we are required to undertake the more difficult task of imitazione. As Danti understands Aristotle’s mimesis,53 this is a matter of discovering the intention of nature and then producing an image corresponding to the perfetta forma intenzionale della natura.54

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But the pursuit of the ‘intention’ of nature could lead to a neglect of empirical appearance, and such a way of thinking did indeed encourage what seemed already to the seventeenth century the abuses of sixteenthcentury mannerism. In the practice and theory associated with the Carracci, it became clear that imitation could neither ignore nor be limited to the data of empirical experience: it required a balance between faithful description and the sort of teleology of which Danti spoke. The successful resolution of these complementary demands was the very essence of the classical doctrine of idealization, which was both faithful to the appearance of nature and true to her intentions, and thus, in the end, arguably ‘truer’ than nature herself.55 The other ambition of art in the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, even more foreign to the modernist sensibility, is that of telling stories. This raises quite different problems: not those of representing the visible world, but of discovering the crucial moments of a story, of putting together the elements of a narration, of establishing a clear and intelligible representation of the sense of the event. From the beginning of Renaissance art theory, this constructive as distinct from mimetic aspect of the artist’s work was assimilated both to poetry and to that art which particularly fascinated the Renaissance (and strongly influenced Renaissance poetics), the art of rhetoric. Alberti had already attempted to establish a parallel between the elements of pictorial composition and the construction of the oratorical period.56 Later the assimilation was between the discovery of what Poussin called the idea of the narrative and the process by which the orator first ‘finds’ the argument or line of reasoning of his discourse. This first phase in the elaboration of a speech, inventio, was followed by compositio, in which the idea was articulated into successive steps, and finally elocutio, in which it was put into words. Because of its immense prestige among the humanistic disciplines, the theory of rhetoric was often taken as the paradigm of other arts, and particularly of painting, which lacked the theoretical tradition it needed to be taken seriously as an intellectual calling. There were many attempts to identify the fundamental ‘parts’ of painting with these three phases, including the claim implicit in the tripartite subtitle of CharlesAlphonse Dufresnoy’s De arte graphica: Caroli Alfonsi Du Fresnoy de Arte graphica liber, sive diathesis graphidos et chromatices, trium picturae partium, antiquorum ideae artificum nova restitutio. Lutetiae Parisiorum apud Claudium Barbin, 1668.57 These Hellenizing terms, diathesis, graphidos and chromatices, which correspond more or less to what we would call composition, drawing and colour, seem intended to parallel the three parts of

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rhetoric.58 The difficulty is immediately apparent, however, when we find that ‘composition’ has taken the place of invention, and drawing that of composition. This is not a problem that need concern us any further in the present context, except to observe that it recurs with every attempt to assimilate the parts of rhetoric and the parts of painting, and that it is largely attributable to the confusion between the two quite different ambitions of contemporary painting. They can be labelled, for the sake of brevity, narration and imitation;59 and we have already seen that imitation itself entails the reconciliation of two competing demands, teleology and description. The successful resolution of these demands in the process of idealization is what prepares the way for narration.60 From what has been said, it should be clear that the question of expression really belongs to the domain of narration: it is part of the art of story-telling. Expression may of course come into the domain of imitation, as part of the study of the natural world, including the movements of the human body—and art theorists time and again suggest studying the expressions of real people in the circumstances of their daily lives.61 But, like everything else that pertains to imitation, it is really, in the classical doctrine, subordinate to the demands of narration. We said, intuitively as it were, that Poussin’s work begins with the sense of the significance of the subject: in the terms of contemporary theory, we may say that he begins with the invention of the subject, with its ‘idea’, and that everything else, gesture, facial expression, and even composition and colour, flows from this single source. All mimetic problems are rigorously subordinated to the narrative end. Le Brun’s obsession with the mechanics of facial expression can be understood, not simply as a difference of degree or emphasis with regard to Poussin, but as an essentially different problem. Le Brun approaches the expression of the passions first of all as a question of imitation, and more specifically as one of description. This pole of imitation, as we saw earlier, had a longstanding association with the scientific exploration of the empirical world. That association was often a source of great energy, but could also be a dangerous temptation. In Le Brun’s case it was Descartes who held out the temptation of scientific description in the domain of expression; at the same time the general tenor of Cartesian thought was radically opposed to the teleology with which classicism balanced the naturalistic study of the world; and still more importantly in this case, the Cartesian split between spirit and matter, mind and body, discouraged attempts to venture beyond the ‘scientific’ study of the

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mechanics of the face. Le Brun, who had always been more interested in expression than in any other aesthetic problem, and who knew that it lay at the very heart of the classical idea of narrative painting, ended up exiled far from the sources of classical expression. In consequence, even when Le Brun came to ‘invent’ a historical composition, he proceeded as it were from the outside, or backwards, by an ingenious assemblage of the mechanical expressions he had studied; it is therefore not surprising that so many of the figures in his diagrams could be taken straight from his paintings, as the illustrations of distinct passions, or that in the paintings themselves they have so little mutual involvement. Poussin’s expressions emerge, singly and collectively, from a central intuition; in Le Brun the process is reversed, and the repertoire of expressions is assembled into an a posteriori ‘invention’. Hence the hollowness beneath the virtuosity of almost all Le Brun’s work: it does not spring from a poetic centre, and it cannot lead the viewer to a vision that did not exist in the first place. EXPRESSION AND DÉLECTATION

If rhetoric was a powerful theoretical paradigm for painting, however, it could also be potentially misleading. The passions were an important part of rhetorical theory; it was one of the objects of oratory to provoke them, as required, in the audience. And it was natural enough to assume that such was also the function of the passions represented in painting: animos spectantium movere, as Alberti puts it. The same idea seems present in Poussin’s letter to Chantelou, quoted earlier: ‘une puissance d’induire 1’âme des regardants à diverses passions’. Horace’s si vis me flere appears to take the idea of moving the audience for granted, even though one is hardly likely to be moved to tears by his own writing. This assumption was confirmed in a famous anecdote of the early seventeenth century, which Poussin would certainly have known. Annibale Carracci, it is said, could not decide which of his two pupils, Guido Reni or Domenichino, was the better artist. One day he was standing in a church in which he had had the two paint frescoes side by side. An old woman leading a little girl came in and admired the Guido painting for some time, attentively but in silence. Then she turned to the Domenichino. Soon she was telling the little girl about it, pointing out details, and the child was following her description and asking questions too. Then Annibale realized that Domenichino understood the affetti better than Guido.62 Poussin may not have consciously questioned this understanding of the end of expression earlier in his life, but his last great letter on art

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theory, written to Chantelou’s brother Fréart de Chambray early in the year of his death, 1665, contains this definition of the art of painting: ‘It is an imitation made with lines and colours on some surface of all that is to be seen under the sun; its end is delectation’ [C’est une imitation faite avec lignes et couleurs en quelque superficie de tout ce qui se voit dessous le soleil, sa fin est la délectation.] Much might be said about the precise meaning and philosophical antecedents of délectation,63 but it must no doubt be understood first of all in the light of Poussin’s interest in Stoicism, and then in the specific context of his art theory. This may be the point, foreshadowed earlier, at which the Stoic moral theory of passions has a direct effect on art theory (as distinct from simply contributing to the understanding of this or that passion). For a Stoic could hardly consider the exciting of passions in the viewer of paintings as an end in itself;64 the wise man, after all, seeks detachment. In this particular context, moreover, when the underlying rhetorical model leads one naturally to assume that passions are evoked in order to be communicated, Poussin’s assertion that the end of art is something quite different, something indeed opposed to a state of passionate emotion, takes on a much more considerable programmatic weight.65 I think that Poussin understood that expression itself was the means to an end. His work begins with the sense of a subject’s significance; the painting is the working out or articulation of that significance, through expression; and in the end, the viewer understands but tran-scends the passions expressed. If there is a moment of sympathetic emotion, it is a stage in the experience of the picture. For both viewer and artist, the end is contemplation. CONCLUSION

I have tried to show that Le Brun cannot be considered the natural successor of Poussin, confining my remarks, on the whole, to one aspect of the art of painting, but one that was of central importance to both of them: the expression of the ‘movements of the soul’, the affetti or the passions, as they are variously known. For Poussin, expression epitomizes the immanence of mind in the body, the union of the mental and the corporeal, which I take to be a defining characteristic of ‘classicism’. Le Brun, on the other hand, influenced both generally by the ambience of Cartesian mechanistic thought and specifically by Descartes’s Passions de l’Âme, emphasizes the physical and mechanical operation of the facial features, to the detriment of the more complex moral and psychological dramas conveyed in Poussin’s compositions.

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The contrast between the two artists can thus be established directly, so to speak; but it can be developed further if we take into account the two different but related ambitions of art in the early modem period, to narrate ‘histories’ and to represent the world of sensory experience. These twin ambitions can be conveniently summed up in the concepts of narration and imitation. Inasmuch as the highest form of art was traditionally considered to be history painting, imitation serves narration, and produces the idealized nature that lends itself to the purposes of narration. Poussin’s art is entirely focused on the ‘narration’ of the subject, the discovery of its inherent significance (which we defined as the moral import of the event for all concerned), and its realization not only in action, gesture and facial expression, but even in colour and light. Le Brun remains trapped in problems of imitation, in the study of the natural phenomena of facial expression; he assembles his subjects out of these prefabricated units, rather than generating the whole from a single point of meaning. In this excessive concern for the problems of imitation, we may see once again the influence of science on modern art. But we can be more specific than that: looking at the matter more closely, we find that the doctrine of ‘imitation’ itself involves a further duality between teleology and empirical description of the world. Once again we may detect Descartes’s influence, both generally in his elimination of teleology (the world is driven by efficient causality, not final causality), and particularly in the example of his book, which led Le Brun to believe that he could find the solution to the artistic problem of expression in a descriptive study of the human features. Le Brun’s repertoire of passions produced some disastrous imitations, but they are insignificant beside the real loss, which was of the very possibility of dramatic expression in painting, at least in anything like the complexity that it reached in the hands of Poussin. Who are the masters of expression in subsequent centuries? In the eighteenth, it is not the academics, but Watteau or Chardin, who deal rather in mood and qualities of sentiment than in narration; or Goya, and after him various other great portraitists, who are concerned with character in the first instance, not expression (if Goya can develop a world-view in a portrait, it is because of his extraordinary sense of the sitter’s personal drama). Poussin’s was perhaps the last generation that really believed in a soul and a body, and in the possibility that the one might effectively, if not without tensions, inhabit the other.

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NOTES 1 This chapter was revised during a six-month appointment as Maître de Conférences at the Collège de France in Paris; I am grateful to the Collège and especially to Professor Jacques Thuillier for the opportunity to complete this and other projects in such an exceptional environment. 2 ‘Ce qui est le plus important à la perfection de la Fable ou de l’Histoire, sont les diverses expressions de joye ou de douleur, & toutes les autres passions convenables aux personnes qu’on figure…A quoi l’on peut encore ajoûter la varieté des airs de tête et des attitudes. Car ce sont toutes ces belles parties qui touchent davantage ceux qui considerent un Tableau, & qui en les portant avec plaisir dans une parfaite connoissance du sujet que l’on traite, les font entrer dans les mêmes sentiments de joye ou d’admiration que souffrent les personnes qui sont représentées.’ André Félibien des Avaux, L’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (Paris, 1669), unpaginated Introduction, p. 16. 3 We are only concerned with the question of expression in this context, but the presence of Descartes underlies the important debate about the status of line and colour that arose in the Academy in the late 1660s and came to a head in 1671–72. 4 It is arguable that painting had a more direct involvement with epistemology in the Renaissance, precisely because of the nature of contemporary epistemology, than at any other time in its history. 5 It is this very restriction of the domain of the ‘natural’ that produces the category of the ‘supernatural’. 6 I am well aware how unsatisfactory such stylistic categories can be, especially when one attempts to apply them to individual works; but since, beyond the particularity of the individual, general forms are discernible, we must try to find some way of describing them. We need only remember the Aristotelian principle that existence is of the particular, knowledge of the general; and be equally wary of procrustean generalities and of vertiginous particularism. After all, the problem is as old as Heraclitus’ river. 7 The paper as originally delivered at the colloquium consisted essentially of these parts, the final section on Poussin’s idea of délectation serving as a conclusion. 8 M.Cureau de la Chambre, L’Art de connoistre les hommes (Paris, 1659). For this subject in general, cf. Jean-Jacques Courtine and Claudine Haroche, Histoire du visage: Exprimer et taire ses émotions (XVIe-XIXe siècle) (Paris, 1994), which contains a vast amount of bibliographical matter scattered unsystematically through the endnotes to the various chapters. 9 Cardan’s Métoposcopie was published posthumously in Paris in 1658;J. C.Lavater’s L’Art de connaitre les hommes par la physiognomie appeared in ten volumes in Paris in 1806–7 (edited by L.J.Moreau de la Sarthe). 10 Michael Shortland has discussed this sense of systematic falsehood, and the attempts to get behind pretence to essential character, among other things, in his valuable essay ‘Skin deep: Barthes, Lavater and the legible body’, in Mike Gane (ed.), Ideological Representation and Power in Social Relations: Literary and Social Theory (London, 1986).

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11 Is there a single subject in Poussin’s work that represents hypocrisy as such? The disgraced schoolmaster of Falerii was no doubt a hypocrite, but he is painted after everything has become known. In fact, apart from anything else, hypocrisy as such is a low subject, comical or grotesque, but in any case rarely appealing to the noble aesthetic of history painting. Portrait painting, of course, is a rather different matter, which cannot be discussed here. 12 See below for a further discussion of these ideas, with references. A new edition of Poussin’s correspondence, by Professor Jacques Thuillier, is forthcoming. 13 Cf. Svetlana Alpers: ‘Simply put, Rubens’ approach, which is that of the classically oriented artist, assumes that human feelings, no matter how complex, can be acted out and made public. Rembrandt’s art, as in his depiction of Saul’s sorrow, or Bathsheba’s sense of being desired, suggests, in a way much closer to our view today, that human feelings do not necessarily issue forth or find their correspondence in external action but may remain internalized (and as such perhaps they are harder for a painter to paint, at least one working in a representational tradition, than for a poet to set forth in words).’ The Decoration of the Torre de la Parada (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, Part IX; London, 1971), p. 173. 14 Cf. Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the Passions: the Origin and Influence of Charles le Brun’s ‘Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière’ (New Haven and London, 1994), p. 151. 15 The first edition seems to have been in 1693, but the illustration in question only appeared in the better-known 1696 edition: Sentimens des plus habiles peintres sur la pratique de la peinture et sculpture mis en tables de préceptes (Paris, 1696). 16 As we shall see below, these figures were clearly identified even at the time of painting, years before the lecture. 17 The figure of l’Effroy is so intent on acting the passion that its eyes are vacant, lacking any object of terror; Poussin’s mother is absolutely concentrated, with terribly intense eyes, on the horror of the event. 18 In ‘Antigone at the University of Sydney’, Didaskalia, 1994, I commented on the difficulty modern actors have in transcending a merely psychological and personal sense of their ‘character’ and grasping what is more deeply at stake, for example, in the opposition of Antigone and Creon. As Aristotle pointed out, action comes before character. Poussin’s focus on the sense of the event illustrates the same principle. 19 I do not mean to suggest that Le Brun was unaware of this wider sense of expression; the question is discussed at greater length below. 20 ‘Animos deinde spectantium movebit historia, cum qui aderunt picti homines suum animi motum maxime prae se ferent. Fit namque natura…ut lugentibus conlugeamus, ridentibus adrideamus, dolentibus condoleamus. Sed hi motus animi ex motibus corporis cognoscuntur.’ Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture: the Latin texts of De Pictura and De Statua, trans. and ed. Cecil Grayson (London, 1972), p. 80 (all original texts translated by the present author). Alberti is directly alluding to one of the most famous and seminal passages in Horace’s Ars Poetica, ll. 100–102:

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ut ridentibus arrident, ita flentibus adsunt humani vultus: si vis me flere, dolendum est primum ipsi tibi: tune tua me infortunia laedent…

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There are other important literary passages concerning the natural inclination to sympathize with the misfortunes of others (Virgil, Aeneid I, 462; Euripides, Electra, 290–1). Among philosophical systems, Stoicism laid a particular stress on the sociability of man, although the most rigid of the Stoics condemned the emotion of pity. Cf. Gilbert Murray: ‘All the world is working together. It is all one living whole, with one soul through it. And, as a matter of fact, no single part of it can either rejoice or suffer without all the rest being affected. The man who does not see that the good of every living creature is his good, the hurt of every living creature his hurt, is one who wilfully makes himself a kind of outlaw or exile…’— ‘The Stoic Philosophy’, in Humanist Essays (London, 1964), pp. 146–7. Leonardo da Vinci, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, 2 vols, ed. J.-P. Richter (London, 1970), vol. 1, p. 28. ibid., p. 341. ibid., p. 344 (concetto is not easily translated; it is that which is conceived in the mind, related to ‘concept’ or the old sense of ‘conceit’). Denis Mahon, Studies in Seicento Art and Theory (Westport, Conn., 1977), p. 124. ibid., p. 257. Mahon also quotes (p. 149) Agucchi’s analysis of Annibale’s Sleeping Venus, now in the Musée Condé at Chantilly: ‘l’esprimere nientedimeno apparentemente e l’allegrezza, e la mestitia, e l’ardire, e il timore, l’ira, e la piacevolezza, e l’amore, e l’odio, ed altri tali passioni dell’animo; è una eccellenza, per mio credere, tanto propria del Sig. Annibale, che io no sò, se nel possederla altri gli vada a pari’ (cited originally in Malvasia, Felsina pittrice, 1678,I, p. 514). ibid, p. 330. Charles-Alphonse Dufresnoy, L’Art de Peinture (De Arte Graphica), trans. Roger de Piles (Paris, 1668), pp. 230–2. A critical edition of Dufresnoy’s poem is currently being prepared by the author in collaboration with Frances Muecke and Yasmin Haskell of the Department of Classics at the University of Sydney. Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas (London, 1961), pp. 272–3. ‘Est mihi liber in manibus, De remediis ad utranque fortunam, in quo… nitor et meas et legentium passiones animi mollire, vel si datum fuerit, extirpare.’ Charles B.Schmitt, Quentin Skinner and Eckhardt Kessler (eds), Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, 1988), p. 364, n. 362. Several of Lipsius’s most important texts have recently been republished by Jacqueline Lagrée: Juste Lipse: La Restauration du Stoïcisme: Etude et traductions de divers traités stoïciens (Paris, 1994). For Lipsius in relation to contemporary art (specifically Rubens), cf. Mark Morford, Stoics and Neostoics (Princeton, 1991). Of course, many of these ideas had appeared in earlier works. Cf. Christopher Allen, ‘How dogmatic was Le Brun?’ in Paul Duro (ed.), Perspectives on Academic Art, Papers of the Art Association of Australia, III, 1991.

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33 Cf. Stephanie Ross, ‘Painting the Passions: Charles LeBrun’s Conference sur l’Expression’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 45 (1984), pp. 25–47. 34 ‘Il y a…une Dame Persienne…Et comme la peur fait que le sang se retire autour du coeur pour le conserver, parce qu’il est la partie du corps la plus noble…on voit que cette Femme a le visage extrêmement pasle; que ses levres sont sans couleur; ses yeux enfoncez et obscurs; ses sourcils abatus et retirez; elle hausse les épaules, & joint les mains.’ André Félibien, Les Reines de Perse aux pieds d’Alexandre (Paris, 1663), p. 16. She is the figure who appears in the table of expressive heads in Testelin’s Sentimens des plus habiles peintres…(1696) as La Crainte. 35 Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Chicago, 1965), p. 4. Cf. the text as published with variants in Montagu, op. cit., p. 118. 36 It is another indication of the general unfamiliarity with this period that I have seen it written in reputable books that Le Brun ‘published’ the lectures in 1698, when he died in 1690! 37 Le Brun, Charles, A Method to Learn to Design the Passions, trans. John Williams (London, 1734; The Augustan Reprint Society, Los Angeles, 1980), preface by Alan McKenzie, p. v. The whole complex question of the text of the lecture and of its subsequent editions and illustrations is dealt with very thoroughly in Montagu, op. cit. 38 This session witnessed the most open confrontation thus far recorded between the partisans of Raphael and and those of Titian (later to be replaced by the far more controversial Rubens); the difference was settled by an unnamed voice too authoritative to have been anyone but the Premier Peintre; and it appears to be the same speaker who goes on to make these remarks about expression. 39 André Félibien, L’Académie Royale, p. 43. 40 ‘doit scavoir la nature de ces émotions, comment elles sont engendrées dans l’ame, & de quelle sorte elles paroissent au dehors, afin de former sur le corps de ses figures des signes qui les fassent connoistre, mais des signes veritables & naturels; qui sans forcer les organes, ni les faire agir malgré eux les mettent en état néanmoins de découvrir ce qui se passe dans l’esprit de la personne qu’on a voulu representer’, ibid. 41 Montagu, op. cit., p. 112. 42 ibid., p. 113. 43 ibid., p. 112. 44 ‘Comme l’Auteur de cette Peinture est admirable dans la diversité des mouvemens, & qu’il scait de quelle sorte il faut donner de la vie à ses figures: il a fait que toutes leurs diverses actions & leurs expressions diférentes ont des causes particuliéres qui se rapportent à son principal sujet.’ André Félibien, L’Académie Royale, p 72. 45 Of his painting of the Manna, he wrote: ‘lisés l’istoire et le tableau’. Poussin, Correspondance, ed. Ch. Jouanny, in Archives de l’art francais, nouvelle période, tome V (Paris, 1911), p. 223. 46 Poussin, op. cit., pp. 372, 428 (letters of 24 November 1647 and 16 February 1653). 47 ibid., pp. 372ff. (letter of the 24 November 1647). 48 ‘Voyez vous pas bien que c’est la nature du sujet qui est cause de cet effet, et votre disposition, et que les sujets que je vous traite doivent être représentés par

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une autre manière. C’est en cela que consiste tout l’artifice de la peinture. Pardonnez à ma liberté si je dis que vous vous êtes montré precipiteux dans le jugement que vous avez fait de mes ouvrages. Le bien juger est très difficile, si l’on n’a en cet art grande théorie et pratique jointes ensemble. Nos appétits n’en doivent pas juger seulement, mais la raison…. Nos braves anciens Grecs, inventeurs de toutes les belles choses, trouvèrent plusieurs modes par le moyen desquel ils ont produit de merveilleux effets.’ ‘Etant les modes des anciens une composition de plusieurs choses mises ensembles, de leur variété naissait une certaine différence de mode… d’où procédait une puissance d’induire l’âme des regardants à diverses passions. De là vint que les sages anciens attribuèrent à chacun sa propriété des effets qu’ils voyaient naître d’eux.’ ‘Mr Poussin croyant avec raison que la beauté d’un Tableau consiste à faire que toutes les choses qui entrent dans sa composition aient un caractére particulier de ce que l’ouvrage doit représenter en général, faisoit de cela sa principale étude, & l’on voit dans ceux qu’il a peints que l’expression de son sujet y est si généralement répandue qu’il y a par tout de la colere ou de la douceur selon la nature de son histoire. Il s’étoit imaginé que comme dans la Musique…la diference des sons cause à l’ame des mouvemens diferens…il ne doutoit pas que la maniere d’exposer les objets dans une disposition de mouvemens, & et une apparence d’expressions plus ou moins violentes, & et sous des couleurs mises les unes auprès des autres & mélangées diversement, ne donnât à la vûë diverses sensations qui pouvoient rendre l’ame susceptible d’autant de passions diferentes.’ André Félibien, Conférences, Préface (pp. 22–3). Alberti, De Pictura, III, 56 (n. 20, p. 99); Cicero, De Inventione, II, ii, l–3 (apparently Alberti’s direct source); Pliny, Natural History, XXXV, 64. Vincenzo Danti, in Paola Barocchi (ed.), Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento (Bari, 1960), vol. 1, p. 264. Aldus Manutius published the first reliable Greek text of Aristotle’s Poetics in 1508; this was followed in 1536 by Pazzi’s Latin translation. ‘The Poetics was known in the Middle Ages only through a Latin translation of a paraphrase by the Arabian philosopher Averroes, and a badly flawed Latin translation by Lorenzo Valla that was published in the late 15th century.’ Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetics, p. 1025. Danti, loc. cit., p. 265. Man is able to achieve what nature could not because he is, partly at least, free of the deterministic influence of the stars which rule the natural world: ‘l’uomo con la sua libera volontà puo dominare, come si dice, alle stelle, sfuggire l’inclinazione de’ cieli, e rimediare, opponendosi con l’intelletto e con la ragione, agli accidenti contrari.’ ibid., p. 219. The tension between these demands remained real as long as the classical tradition survived, no matter how much it was in other respects transformed by subsequent movements of ideas; Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses are full of the rivalry between fidelity and enhancement. Cf. Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: humanist observers of painting in Italy and the discovery of pictorial composition 1350–1450 (Oxford, 1988), p. 131. Alberti writes (in Grayson’s translation): ‘Composition is the procedure in painting whereby the parts are composed together in the picture…Parts of the “historia” are the bodies, part of the body is the member, and part of the member

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is the surface. The principal parts of the work are the surfaces, because from these come the members, from the members the bodies, from the bodies the “historia”, and finally the finished work of the painter. From the composition of surfaces arises that elegant harmony and grace in bodies, which they call beauty.’ De pictura II, 35 (p. 73). The parallel was thus between the hierarchy Historia-Body-Member-Surface and Period-Clause-Phrase-Word. This subtitle only appears in the rare first edition—one should almost say prefirst edition—that came out, under somewhat mysterious circumstances, a few months before the first generally-known edition in 1668. The poem had been substantially composed two decades earlier. See C. Allen, ‘Les deux premières éditons de De arte graphica’, in J.C.Boyer (ed.), Pierre Mignard le Romain (Paris, 1997). This is confirmed in the text, 75ff.—‘Disponenda typi…/Machina, quae nostris INVENTIO dicitur oris…’; in the second of the editions referred to above, the editor, Roger de Piles, adds in the margin: ‘Inventio, prima Picturae pars’. The confusion is already present in Book II of De pictura, where Alberti sets out the three parts of painting as circumscription, composition, and light and colour. Compositio has retained its place, light and colour seem a plausible analogy of elocutio, but circumscriptio has nothing to do with inventio; it is quite clearly a question of mimesis. There is a related ambivalence in an important passage of Bellori’s Life of Poussin: the poet Marino, finding the young Poussin ‘pronto, ed efficace nelle inventioni, e ne gli affetti, lodavalo, quasi concitato dalle Muse, non altrimente che li Poeti, all’imitazione.’ (The passage is quoted in the catalogue of the exhibition Poussin before Rome by J.Thuillier, trans. C.Allen, London, R.L. Feigen and Co., 1995). At the other end of the tradition, we can see that the rhetorical paradigm has become remote when Füssli can mistake invention, which pertains to narration, for the reconciliation of the real and the ideal which is idealization. Poussin’s ‘idealized’ figures, for example, are endowed with solid materiality, but sufficiently removed from naturalism for no random naturalism to distract us from the actions and expressions with which they are endowed for the purposes of narration. Leonardo recommends such observation of daily life: ‘spesse volte nel tuo andarti a spasso vedere e considerare i siti e li atti delli omini in nel parlare, in nel contendere o ridere o zuffare insieme, che atti fieno in loro, che atti faccino i circumstanti, i spartitori, i veditori d’esse cose…’ op. cit., p. 338. The story is quoted in Denis Mahon, op. cit., pp. 271–2. Originally told by Mosini, it was repeated in Bellori’s Vite de’ Pittori, Scultori e Architetti moderni, and was singled out for special mention by the reviewer of Bellori’s book in Le Journal des Scavans (1676, XX, 7 December). Cf. Cicero, Brutus, quoted by Montagu, op. cit., p. 50 and note. Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin, 2 vols, (London, 1967), pp. 354–5. Blunt discusses Saint Augustine, who dwelt, in the Confessions, on the paradoxical pleasure we find in the painful experiences of tragedy. Descartes also refers to this problem: ‘C’est presque la mesme raison qui fait qu’on prend naturellement plaisir à se sentir émouvoir à toutes sortes de Passions, mesme à la Tristesse, & à la Haine, lors que ces passions ne sont causées que par les avantures estranges qu’on voit representer sur un theatre, ou par d’autres pareils sujets, qui ne

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pouvant nous nuire en aucune facon, semblent chatoüiller nostre ame en la touchant.’ Les Passions de l’Âme, ed. Geneviève Rodis-Lewis (Paris, 1991), II, xciv (p. 134). Cf. also Racine: ‘Ce n’est point une nécessité qu’il y ait du sang et des morts dans une tragédie; il suffit que l’action en soit grande, que les acteurs en soient héroïques, que les passions y soient excitées, et que tout s’y ressente de cette tristesse majestueuse qui fait tout le plaisir de la tragédie’, Preface to Bérénice, quoted in Christian Delmas, La Tragédie de l’âge classique (Paris, 1994). This is related to the question of the pleasure to be found in the pictorial representation of things that are ugly or terrifying in reality. 64 Indeed, after the passage in Félibien’s life of Poussin on which his letter on the Theory of Modes is quoted, one of the speakers expresses his uneasiness: ‘Il seroit bien dangereux, dit Pymandre, que la Peinture eût autant de force que la Musique pour émouvoir les passions…’. André Félibien, Entretiens…(Amsterdam, 1706), vol. 4, p. 40. 65 Cf. Fumaroli, L’âge de l’éloquence: Rhétorique et ‘res literaria’ de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique (Paris, 1994), p. iii: ‘On compte trois finalités du bien dire: convaincre (docere), plaire (delectare), émouvoir (movere)…’—which specifically establishes delectatio as something distinct from the eliciting of an emotional response. It was, incidentally, a persistent criticism of theatre that it excited the passions, and therefore encouraged immorality—cf. Bossuet’s Maximes et réflexions sur la comédie.

Part III The physiology of the passions

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Controlling the passions Passion, memory, and the moral physiology of self in seventeenth-century neurophilosophy John Sutton

INTRODUCTION: CONTROLLING BRAIN AND MEMORY It is difficult to determine for sure whether this relation or connection between the thoughts of man’s mind and the movement of his body is a punishment of sin or a gift of nature…We know that before his sin man was not the slave but the absolute master of his passions and that with his will he could easily arrest the agitation of the spirits causing them.1

Some natural philosophers in the seventeenth century believed that they could control their own innards, specifically the physiological animal spirits coursing incessantly through brain and nerves, in order to discipline or harness passion, cognition, and action under rational guidance. Moralizing wishes and recommendations for the self’s action on turbulent internal fluids were buttressed by reference to the prelapsarian limit case: ‘before the Fall, the soul could erase the brain’s images’ and ‘instantaneously arrest the disturbance in the brain’s fibers and the agitation of its spirits merely by considering its duty’.2 The result of sin is that the inner dynamics of traces and animal spirits no longer depend on the will: our efforts ‘to combat licentiousness’ and ‘the confused pleasure of the passions’ must now be indirect, the product of long, weary acquaintance with ‘the charms and endearments’ and ‘the threats and terror that the passions cause in us’, as the seeker after truth becomes inured to coping with ‘their clatter and shadows’.3 In this chapter I try to understand the mechanisms thought necessary after Eden for controlling the physiology of passion. They were entangled with related techniques for organizing and ordering the past, since passions operate in time, desire inevitably colluding with memory. The tragedy of human embedding in the body, with its 115

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cognitive and moral limitations, was paired with a sense of our confinement in sequential time: whereas ‘Adam needed no spectacles’ and no knowledge of history, and angels have no need of memory,4 we are engaged in an ongoing struggle to tame the past. Memories could be disciplined in both personal and theoretical contexts, in the intimacy with which the self dealt with its unruly brain traces, or in the ridicule and denigration of models of memory which overemphasized that unruliness. I use two strands of seventeenth-century natural philosophy to exemplify forms of the perceived connections between physiology, memory, and the passions. I deal at length with Cartesian mechanism,5 and much more briefly with some tendencies in Restoration natural philosophy in England.6 First I outline in some detail the link between the passion of wonder and the physiology of memory in Descartes and Malebranche to show that the problematics of psychological control involved not just the old dualist diatribe against the body, but also consideration of how to deal with certain sorts of mental representation. It is not just (and not even) that a life oriented towards the good and the true would neglect or suppress the body, as the Phaedo and certain forms of Christianity encouraged; but that, because memory as well as the body carries the personal past, the struggle is to keep that past in order, to retain distinctness from and thus control over the collection of memories layered through the folds of the brain. Cartesian ethics demands, in part, the gradual use of habit and association (to be understood through knowledge of the mechanisms of memory and of the idiosyncrasies of a specific brain and body) in order to encourage the bodily sources of passion to shift into morally sanctioned paths. The recommendations of Descartes’s Passions of the Soul are not just scientistic ravings, not an exasperated response to Elisabeth which madly asks us just to engage in direct introspection of our brain states:7 rather, they are provisional maxims, applicable differently in each individual, for applying intelligence to the reflexes, and (fallibly, interminably) recolonizing the body.8 Elsewhere in this volume Susan James suggests that modern philosophers of mind lost touch with earlier, more differentiated theories of motivation when the many varieties of passion which could cause action were reduced to a single notion of ‘desire’ meant to combine with belief. But one of the reasons it is difficult to think back into those prior, ‘pre-modern’ systems is that the psychological states (fears, hatreds, and joys, or memories, images, and beliefs) were all closely tied to, constrained by, or identified with physiological states (the metaphysics of mind, often crucial theologically, was less relevant for moral physiology). Love, wonder, dreams, desire, and memory were

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all implicated in the greater circulations of spirits, fluids, and humours in the body and between body and world, just because they were (or were carried by, or correlated with) diverse and patterned motions of animal spirits through nerves and brain pores, and because those spirit motions were influenced by all the environmental and cultural input which whirled across and through the body. This permeability was, to a great extent, retained in the mechanized picture of the body developed by Descartes. Both Descartes’s interactionist metaphysics of mindbody relations and Malebranche’s occasionalism still required, in the practical realm of moral physiology, intense engagement, in the moral quests for knowledge and for mental purification, with the confusing, fleeting body fluids: ‘all the changes occurring in the imagination and the mind are only the consequences of those encountered in the animal spirits and the [brain] fibres.’ 9 The unobservable animal spirits, strangely surviving through to the mid-eighteenth century, threaten the entire domain of cognitive processes with their wriggling power, and must be rigorously neutralized and employed by the expert. I then go on briefly to examine English responses to these models of memory. Before the increasing division of physiology from both ethics and philosophy of mind in the later eighteenth century, many worried that Cartesian memories, thought of as motions (rather than stable, static, ordered bodies lodged in neat cells), would indiscriminately mix with each other, ‘and bring all into confusion’. How could chaos be averted if access to the past was filtered through the fickle, affect-ridden animal spirits, which would scarcely allow ‘any determinate motion’ to be ‘long preserved untaynted in the braine’?10 Because the history of theories of memory and of brain anatomy has been seen primarily in the context of the search for the localization of function in specific brain structures, and of consequent concerns about materialism, key forms of rhetoric have been missed: the perceived need to keep memories in place, stated in terms of an order/confusion dichotomy, was coupled with a conception of virtue, the control of excessive passion, as the institution of appropriate relations between self and memory, or between self and those parts of body and brain which carry memory. Why are memories often ‘rouzed and tumbled out of their dark Cells…by some turbulent and tempestuous Passion’ without the involvement of the soul?11 Do we really have a hand in the process of forgetting? What knowledge is required, what moral stance necessary, for the rumble of reminiscence to be brought under the sway of the will and thus to be made, presumably, less troubling? These are fruitful historical domains for seeking to connect cognition and culture, since relations of domination, disruption, or accommodation

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between present and past are in play for both selves and societies. As Susan James further suggests, the sense of ‘activity’ against which early modern philosophers of mind defined the ‘passivity’ of the passions is too extreme for us to understand fully, because of the strength of dualist requirements of mental autonomy. But this allows us to investigate their stratagems of control over those thoughts, memories, or passions which were not officially active but which, indubitably, had their own powerful, experienced force. Unintegrated feelings, or wayward items arising in stray recall, had to be constructed as lying outside the self, produced in an alien dynamics of body fluids beneath the compass of attention and the will. Without the metaphysical insurance of confident dualism, we are even less confident than was Descartes that we can deal with the strangeness in our selves, if those selves just are, in part, the mixed sediment of particular pasts in specific brains and bodies. It is too easy, though still important, to carp at historical moralists blithely idealizing mental independence, to undermine their ‘relentless optimism about the autonomy and power of the will’,12 by exposing ‘the soft underbelly of reason’ in affect and the passions: but there is so much more to do in examining historical hints or methods for working with the psychophysiological mix, for dealing with or stabilizing excess flux from within, for accepting the embedded fate of self and passions in the environmental, social, and bodily dynamics in which they inevitably exist and shift. MECHANISM AND THE PASSIONS Man never remains the same for very long; everyone has sufficient inner evidence of his changeability. At one moment we judge in one way, the next in another, on the same subject. Briefly, man’s life consists only in the circulation of the blood, and in another circulation of his thoughts and desires. And it seems we can hardly use our time better than in seeking the causes of these changes that happen to us, thereby learning to know ourselves. …our main goal here is to control the mind.13

Epistemology of the innards

Malebranche, describing changes in the animal spirits which roam the body, suggests a method for testing his ‘simple explanation’ of the mechanisms: when ‘surprised by some violent passion’, one must be ‘careful to reflect upon what one feels in one’s entrails and in the other parts of the body where the nerves are embedded’.14 How can this strange body-phenomenology of emotional turbulence promote the

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moral life? How could the ideal of cognitive penetration beneath the skin, of entrails transparent to the eye of reason, have seemed to offer progress in the search after truth? In particular, the brain seems the most absent of body parts, but early modern theorists found it oddly relevant in moral contexts: the brain came to notice only when something was wrong, with the sensing of turbulence or stagnation, and with concerns over psychological transience or surrender to the sensuous projected inside onto the fleeting, violent, random animal spirits in commotion in the moralized interior.15 In Cartesian theories of the passions, goodness depends on knowledge of bodily mechanisms. In particular, Cartesian treatments of the crucial passion of wonder are in the strange realm of moral physiology, a zone of engagement, both theoretical and practical,16 with memory and the body. Ethics must be, in part, neurological.17 Physiology and wonder

Wonder (l’admiration or admiratio) is for Descartes ‘the first of all the passions’: it normally augments almost all other passions.18 It occurs ‘when our first encounter with some object surprises us and we find it novel’. The causes of the ‘sudden surprise of the soul’ in wonder are twofold: ‘an impression in the brain, which represents the object as something unusual’, and a movement of the spirits, which the impression disposes both to flow with great force to the place in the brain where it is located so as to strengthen and preserve it there, and also to pass into the muscles which serve to keep the sense organs fixed in the same orientation so that they will continue to maintain the impression in the way in which they formed it.19 The utility and the danger of wonder both spring from its physiological peculiarity. Even though Descartes professes to discuss all the passions ‘only as a natural philosopher and not as a rhetorician or even as a moral philosopher’,20 scattering the subtle animal spirits across his explanations of love or of vanity, wonder receives a more detailed neurophilosophical treatment than any other passion. This is, I suggest, for two reasons. Wonder theory is more closely tied to memory than other passions are, because Descartes needs to explain how a surprise results in the tracing of impressions in the brain pores which are, unusually, not already formed by the tracks made by animal spirits over long experience and prejudice: Descartes’s existing physiology of memory lies behind his

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suggestion that wonder, uniquely, offers the hope of an open cognitive engagement with the world which is not already overlaid by the past. Second, and in consequence, the isolation of a memory trace from others which occurs in wonder is a model for Descartes’s preferred picture of psychological control: wonder is the passion in which internal body dynamics, which carry the peculiarities of individual history and the accretions of learned tradition and habit, make the least contribution. In wonder, the external world is the controller, and the brain submits to the world: likewise, as a result of training, the rational soul, mimicking and extending this control of the brain by the world, can impose distinctness on brain traces by controlling the fickle dynamics of association, minimizing psychophysiological confusion. I develop these readings below. But, in anticipation, it is natural to ask what historians of the passions are meant to do with references to ‘those “traces” that still plague psychology’ and to the ‘inherently selfcontradictory concept’ of animal spirit, that ‘common subterfuge of ignorance’.21 How can Descartes’s Passions of the Soul be in any way related to the establishment of the ‘sure foundations in moral philosophy’ towards which (as Descartes told Chanut) physics would help,22 if the relevant part of physics is this ‘antiquated’ physiology? Must we assume that the physiological details, while ‘extremely ingenious, are of comparatively little importance in this context’?23 Descartes’s speculative psychophysiology, notoriously, is ‘quaint’, ‘a little fantastical’. His microreductions of emotions, temperaments, and humours to diverse mixtures of animal spirits are ‘intuitive but extraordinarily simplistic’, and his physiological treatment of memory is ‘particularly incoherent’.24 Rationalist inattention to observation and anatomy in preference for the drama of a whirl of invisible spirits in hollow nerves, it is thought, is a symptom of Descartes’s reduction of the phenomenological complexity of lived bodily experience to the atomic combinations of mythical particles: his exuberant confidence in neurophilosophical ‘explanation’, critics complain, marks his ‘attempt to cut ourselves off from the norm of animal existence’, bypassing ‘the concrete life of feeling’ which he ‘had done his best to avoid’.25 Mechanism, memory, and method

I want, however, to combat a common double line of criticism here. The critic first overstresses the inertness of Cartesian bodies and their parts, granting Descartes the very meagre mechanical ontology which must allegedly be derived from his first principles of method, and then, second, complains that (when dealing with the passions, memory, and

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other puzzling phenomena of the body-mind union) Descartes illegitimately introduces ‘smuggled goods’, cerebralizing mental functions (like memory) and psychologizing the animal spirits, which ought to be dutiful, passive, corporeal bodies.26 A full response to this complaint would both demonstrate the roles of forces and activity in Cartesian bodies once set in motion in a plenum, and argue for a large intermediate class of behaviours which lie between simple hard-wired automatisms and incorporeally-mediated rational actions.27 It is more relevant here, in the context of the desire to know and to control internal bodily motions, to address the post-Wittgensteinian motivation for the critics’ complaints. Neither mental representations nor bodily processes, they argue, need be the immediate object of the will, intervening between intention and willed action: neither a sensory image of my arm rising, nor a complex set of patterns in my animal spirits, need be the precursor of my raising my arm. The Wittgensteinian lament against both Cartesian mentalism and scientistic physicalism is that they unnecessarily introduce a complicated relationship between self and body (or self and mental representation), where common sense would never dream of even opening up the shadow of a gap between decision and action. Descartes ‘failed to realize that he was introducing an extraordinary use of the word “body” ’, in which a ‘distinction between himself and his body’ makes sense (where it allegedly does not in ordinary language).28 It seems strange, too, to locate memory outside the mind, as Malebranche must to note that those most prone to error include ‘scholars, who use their memories more than their minds’.29 Thus the rhetoric of common sense, for example in Grene’s work, of replacing the disastrous, science-fictional philosophizing of animal automata and ‘turbulent animal spirits’ with invocations of the need for ‘full-bodied’ concepts in ‘a world where, though in a complicated and often messy way, things make sense’ and in which ‘without the artifice of Cartesian method, we would find ourselves spontaneously at home’: all that philosophers should do, following Aristotle, Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, or J.J. Gibson, is to ‘restore our primary means of making contact with the realities around us to an organic place in the living world’.30 It is true, in our anti-dualist age, that we prefer to say, against Descartes, that we are our bodies than that we have them. But, with struggles against dualism and its oppressions won, it will, I suggest, be misguided to say wearily that there are no problems here, that the dropping of the ghostly soul acting behind and through the dead flesh leaves us with a simple, successful (Aristotelian/phenomenological/ direct realist) view of mind and action: all the difficult issues remain,

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for the bodies which we are are neither simple nor unified. They include conflicting memory traces, opposing desires, beliefs in tension, as well as multiple purely physiological processes which escape our notice and which continue beneath attention, or against the demands of the currently dominating thought and cultivated moral character. The dislocations and fragmentations between the parts of a somatopsychic ‘unity’ still require attention: we do sometimes flee from memory and the passions, or seek to escape genuine, puzzling, experienced conflicts between self and thoughts. Our difficulties with memory in the late twentieth century suggest that it is not so stupid to ask questions about the possible range of relations between self and memories and between body and self. We might not now characterize control over wayward memories as ‘virtue’, but we are aware of the difficulty of altering the ways in which norms, attitudes, and fears are internalized in memory.31 One way of demonstrating the complexity of the relations between body, time, and mind in Descartes is through the theory of memory embedded in what Hume would refer to as ‘the Cartesian philosophy of the brain’.32 Apart from its interest as a model of memory, Descartes’s inchoate neurophilosophy is particularly relevant because of an unnoticed connection with his treatment of wonder and the passions. Corporeal memory and superpositional storage

In the soulless world of Descartes’s L’Homme, earthen machines exhibit life functions just like ours. These animated statues are not, however, restricted to behaviour inevitably determined by the interaction of hard-wiring and current stimuli: these dreaming machines not only walk, breathe, sleep, and reproduce, but also exhibit what are to us cognitive functions, including sensation, imagination, memory, and passions. Descartes’s fable seeks to catch at the very pulse of the machine.33 This is accomplished (thanks to God’s skilled craft) by the animal spirits, incessantly undergoing criblage or tamisage (sifting, filtering, sieving) in the textured brain mesh, forming and reforming patterns of motions across the inner surfaces of the fibrous brain tissue. Corporeal ideas are the figures which animal spirits trace on the surface of the pineal gland. Whether these figures derive from sensory impressions, from imagination, or from other internal causes, the spirits then imprint traces of the figures ‘in the internal part of the brain, which is the seat of Memory’. 34 Descartes sketches a theory of recall or retrieval. The patterned motions of spirits over time leave structural alterations in the brain pores, which are bent and rearranged in such a way that

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[figures] that existed previously on this gland can be formed again long afterward, without requiring the presence of the objects to which they correspond. And it is in this that Memory consists.35 The reconstruction of figures depends only on physical variables (such as the degree and pattern of openness of pores, and the direction and strength of the flow of spirits), but functions over long time-periods. Figures need not endure in the same form over the temporal gap between experience and remembering, but are evoked by the interaction in a context of current spirit-flow and residual dispositional traces in brain tissue. Total recall is possible on partial input.36 But this initial treatment of memory does not deal with the mechanisms of retention and storage: what happens in the pores and spirits when a particular trace is unactivated, which yet allows its future reconstruction? Later in L’Homme, Descartes describes how movements of the pineal gland can be caused by sensory input, or by the differing flow of spirits leaving it. Idea-figures can be formed without the involvement either of the soul or of the currently-perceived external world, when caused, for example, by ‘the imprints of memory’, which tend to impress in the spirits any associated figure ‘at the region of the brain toward which the gland is inclined’: And it is thus that past things sometimes return to thought as if by chance and without the memory of them being excited by any object impinging on the senses. But when, as ‘usually happens’, ‘several different figures are traced in this same region of the brain almost equally perfectly’, the spirits acquire a combined impression of them all: this is how chimeras and other monsters arise in the daydreaming imagination, when the disciplinary constraints of reason and perception are relaxed.37 This suggests that memory storage is superpositional, with many traces in the same region. Since they are ‘stored’ implicitly, as dispositions for the reconstruction of explicit figures, interference and blending among memories naturally occurs in the mix. Traces are not inevitably distinct one from another. Imagination is, then, the work of memory, rather than a separate capacity, a disturbing possibility which would haunt early modern moral physiology. Memory traces act in a causally holistic way, all potentially influencing the course of ongoing processing: there is no place for a single, independent memory item in an inner locus or address.38

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This is confirmed in a series of references to memory in the letters of 1640. Descartes is specifying which physical regions may be involved in memory storage, and canvasses the gland, the brain, nerves and muscles, the hands of a lute player, and external storage systems like books.39 These suggestions are not due to recognition of the problem of finding room in the brain for every memory:40 although this had concerned Descartes at the time of the Regulae, the use of superpositional storage in the later memory model rendered the idea that the brain is too small to contain every memory simply a ‘prejudice’, as Malebranche would state.41 Descartes reiterates that it is ‘especially the interior parts’ of the brain ‘which are for the most part utilized in memory’.42 There does not need to be such a large area of brain tissue dedicated to memory, because ‘the folds of the memory get in each other’s way’, with many traces in the same place: ‘a single fold will do for all the things which resemble each other’.43 My reading of Descartes’s model of memory as a distributed one is supported by its more explicit development in Malebranche. Differences in animal spirits cause differences ‘in the depth and clarity of the traces in the imagination’.44 Malebranche’s account of the lasting effects of experience on the brain which result is central to his wish to explain ‘all the errors of men and their causes’.45 Vestiges or ‘traces’ of perceptual impressions survive, and become reciprocally connected. Some ‘natural connections’ are ‘necessary to the preservation of life’, but others are acquired and fortuitous: it is the latter, which may ‘rise again’ together without perceptual or rational source, which lead to dangerous plasticity in memory. Brain fibres altered by previous flows of spirits ‘retain some facility for receiving these same dispositions for some time. Now, memory consists only in this facility…’.46 Because these dispositional traces are superposed, interference is likely. Brain traces can become ‘confused with each other, because there are so many of them’: it is ‘nearly impossible for so many traces, formed without order, to avoid becoming mixed up and bringing confusion into the ideas’.47 The preservation of original order is not a natural property of distributed memory, and temporal fragmentation is always more likely: the avoidance of confusion is an achievement, for there are no permanent independent traces, and confusion is the primitive mechanism of remembering. Body holism and hydrodynamics

That a Cartesian model of memory took this form is surprising for many reasons, for it conflicts with fundamental assumptions about

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early modern mechanism and theories of mind. I address below its relation to Descartes’s ‘intellectual memory’. But there is a more urgent objection. Descartes’s mechanical philosophy requires, notoriously, that matter (including the human body) be passive, pure extension in motion: doesn’t this vitiate the picture I am sketching of a dynamic physiology in which brain and body are always active? A curious consensus across analytic history of philosophy and cultural studies promotes the image of Descartes as anti-magus, stripping nature and the human body of power and activity: ‘the Cartesian legacy has furnished contemporary thinking with a paradigm of the body as an inert, closed, and anonymous object’.48 But in fact, as Malebranche puts it in introducing his account of the passions, the Cartesian view of the body implies that ‘we are to some extent joined to the entire universe’: the forces of cosmos and culture traverse and permeate the innards, influencing the animal spirits, for everyone is joined ‘through his body to his relatives, friends, city, prince, country, clothes, house, land, horse, dog, to the entire earth, the sun, the stars, to all the heavens’.49 It takes revision of received wisdom to find room in Cartesianism for the picture of highly theorized, porous, particular bodies as temporary pockets of stability embedded in social and physical worlds. The resulting orientation renders less surprising the notion of distributed memories, always in motion, never stored passively and faithfully in inert cells in a memory palace, but superimposed and reconstructed according to the peculiarities of history and current context. It is not quite true that in Descartes’s work ‘all spirits were effectively removed from nature’.50 The survival of paradoxically corporeal spirits was not an accidental residue: their incessant motion was one of a variety of forms of genuine activity which remained in the mechanical cosmos, ultimately deriving, even as it did, from God. The spirits’ coalescences, breachings, foldings, and commotions, retaining and transforming patterns over time, disrupt historiography as much as they did the will. Descartes’s physiology, like his cosmology, was modelled on fluid dynamics: everything affects everything else in the plenum.51 The focus on the constant collision of bodies should upset critics’ stress on the evil effects of mechanistic reductionism, for Descartes’s concern is not to explain the isolated interactions of discrete units of matter, how a body ‘behaves when not under constraint, but rather to account for what happens when a body moves from one system of constraints to another’: ‘systems of constraint are constitutive of the phenomena under investigation.52 Distributed memory traces are not anomalous, for they exhibit in a

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particular domain the context-dependence and causal holism typical of all natural interactions. The specific form of any reconstructed trace depends not only on current input from world, body, or soul, but also on the contingent dispositional states of the pores in the relevant brain regions, and also on a messy range of factors influencing the state of the animal spirits. In the case of memory, the relevant constraints are those that tie the organism to its particular body, its particular past. This is not, then, ‘the submergence of the organism by the machine’, the reduction of all bodies to sameness, the imaging of automata as ‘endlessly repeatable, and by definition not particular, not the subjects of a specific history’.53 It is not only that the homeostatic ‘maintenance system’ in the self-moving automata which organic bodies are must remain healthy to ground reliable information-processing:54 in fact, the Cartesian ‘body, with its interactive openness’, far from being inevitably moulded to a single hard-wired model, is the means by which difference is introduced into the human compound.55 In ancient and Renaissance physiologies of humours and spirits, across boundaries between Aristotelian and Hippocratic/Galenic systems, the body was by nature open, the internal environment always in dynamic interrelations with the external environment. Its state depended on interaction with the ‘non-naturals’ (such as air or climate, diet, sleeping and waking, evacuation and repletion, and the passions), on regulation of temperature, and on the maintenance of fragile internal fluid balances. Certain proper mean states could seal its openness, allowing resistance to immediate stimuli and avoiding surrender to temporary environmental upheaval. Steps could be taken, for example, to close off its vents and windows, barring the orifices by which external agitations could intrude to taint the animal spirits. But this seasonal body was always vulnerable to climatic effects and permeated by the environment by way of diet, place, and so on.56 Almost all of this survived in Descartes’s ‘corpuscularized Galenism’,57 transformed into principles of fluid mechanics by which inner and outer interact. Because animal spirits are derived from the blood, they are affected by anything that ‘can cause any change in the blood’: this is why Descartes’s accounts of memory and corporeal ideas are prefaced by long descriptions of the effects on blood and thus on spirits of food, digestion, respiration, and climate, and of the states of liver, gall bladder, spleen, and heart. 58 There are lines of causal influence straight from cosmos and culture to the quality and contextspecific nature of ‘cognitive’ functions like memory, imagination, and

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sensation. The causal factors affecting the spirits and all psychophysiological functions do not stop at the skin. It is not that Descartes’s mechanization is incomplete, leaving him with an oddly baroque physiology in a general physics of barren matter, but that a psychophysiology modelled on hydrodynamics explicitly theorizes an active, runny, permeable body, embedded in a full fluid universe. The moral advice on psychological control, which I address below, is then in part a set of maxims for trying to bind this open body, to stabilize the flux. The strangeness of this demand is again worth pausing over. It should complicate further the difficult attempt to document conceptual and phenomenological shifts in the early modern period from grotesque and open to classical and closed bodies, from spectacular to docile bodies, or from public to private bodies. Theory which itself is alien to us imposes puzzling requirements for self-control, in which the part of nature that it is most important to master is the part we might have thought we already possessed, our own body. Wonder and body

One reason that wonder is an unusual passion, for Descartes, is precisely that its operation is isolated from this body holism. Other passions demonstrate the interrelatedness of emotional, neurological, and circulatory processes, since they involve brain and nerves in tandem with heart and blood, with animal spirits mediating the two systems. Wonder, in contrast, ‘has no relation with the heart and blood…but only with the brain’, the sudden movement of spirits to the new impression effecting a temporary isolation of the brain.59 Wonder is free of the vicissitudes of intervention from below, giving it importance in the imposition of cognitive discipline. But the absence of interference from irrelevant contextual influences outside the brain is matched in wonder by a freedom from interference within the folds of memory. Wonder fixes a memory trace as if it were local, as animal spirits flow between brain, muscles, and sense organs so as to ‘continue to maintain the impression in the way in which they formed it’. This is not merely a temporary perceptual fixation, for wonder contributes directly to longer-term changes. It is useful because ‘it makes us learn and retain in our memory things of/which we were previously ignorant’.60 The ‘novelty’ and the strength of the motions of spirits61 conspire to isolate a memory trace and render it, temporarily, independent of others.62

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Wonder and intellectual memory

One of Descartes’s arguments for a non-physical intellectual memory of universals, unique to humans, with folds and traces of its own, depends on the claim that there cannot be any corporeal trace of novelty. The mind must recognize that brain traces were ‘once newly impressed’, and must ‘have made use of pure intellect’ at the time of their first impression in order ‘to notice that the thing which was then presented to it was new’.63 Brain traces are not sufficient for memory, the claim seems to be, but are, rather, parasitic on the soul’s initial surprise. But this is in some tension with the discussion of wonder in the psychophysiological context of the Passions. There, Descartes does accept that it can ‘perhaps’ be through ‘an application of our intellect as fixed by our will in a special state of attention and reflection’ that the trace of something novel and extraordinary is retained in the memory: but, in apparent contradiction of the claim that ‘there cannot be any corporeal trace of this novelty’, he writes that an idea of something novel can also be ‘strengthened in our brains by some passion’.64 It has been suggested that Descartes’s discussions from 1640 to 1648 of an ‘altogether spiritual’ memory, ‘not found in animals’, which ‘we mainly use’65 were due to an abandonment of the theory of L’Homme by relegating corporeal memory to beasts alone.66 But this fails to explain Descartes’s continued adherence in the Passions, where the intellectual memory is not mentioned, to the spirits-and-traces account of memory.67 My diagnosis, instead, is that Descartes was aware of the philosophical limitations of this odd form of memory, the objects of which are universals, rather than particular events in a personal past, and which are in fact ‘not strictly remembered’ at all.68 Beyond noting that the letters to Arnauld are among the contexts where Descartes sought to show the distance of mind in his theory from the corporeal and forgot what the brain can do, it is possible to pinpoint in his treatment of wonder a hope for greater cognitive and moral discipline within the corporeal realm. The deep encoding of a local, independent memory trace, its continual explicit representation, is rare within the general distributed model. It is, normally, difficult for the corporeal mechanism to sense (or to reveal to the soul) the novelty of a newlypresented object, because new traces are almost always already superposed on other traces in the same fold of the brain. Since a pattern of animal spirit motions through brain pores must be reconstructed (rather than reproduced from cold storage), there is no internal mechanism to tell whether an object of perception has or has not been perceived previously.69 This contrasts with the easy localist account of

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the perception of duration and of the temporal placing of memories according to the location of each independent item on the coils of memory which critics like Hooke would prefer (see p. 136, later in this chapter). To put the point differently, the normal situation according to the Cartesian philosophy of the brain is that every sensation is, in a sense, many sensations, every memory many memories. Wonder, uniquely, provides a possibility of contact between mind and world less mediated by physical, perceptual, and mnemonic habits, of seeing in the moment without the accretions which tradition, prejudice, and experience have marked on the fibres and tissues. Wonder and error

Because error is so easy, confusion so natural, on a distributed model, the kind of safe, pure cognitions which moral physiologists desire are an achievement, to be worked at and valued. Two chapters in Malebranche’s treatment of the passions as sources of error deal with the ill and the good effects of wonder, of what happens ‘when the brain is struck in places in which it has never been struck before, or when it is struck in an entirely new way’.70 Wonder can work ill effects through the dangerous traces formed by violent and unruly animal spirits. But, of the passions, only wonder ‘illumines the mind’, making it alone potentially ‘useful to the sciences’.71 This is because in wonder, the animal spirits are forced toward those parts of the brain representing the new object as it is in itself; there they make distinct traces that are deep enough to be preserved a long time. Consequently, the mind has a sufficiently clear idea of the object and easily remembers it.72 Where other passions move the spirits so that ‘they represent objects only according to their relation to us and not as they are in themselves’, wonder seems, sometimes, to allow acontextual remembering. Malebranche thinks, then, that clear and distinct remembering requires the difficult isolation or localizing of each memory trace from others. Wonder is the limiting case in which this happens, when one trace is distinct, deep, and independent enough to be preserved explicitly for a long time: it partitions representational space into sufficiently orthogonal traces to guarantee their immunity from melding. This contrasts with the normal case on a distributed model, whereby, in the superposition of traces, no particular trace is itself

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explicitly preserved for a long time. It is very hard, Malebranche says, to apply oneself to something which fails to excite wonder, ‘since then the animal spirits are not so easily led into those parts of the brain necessary to represent it’.73 The self must train the spirits, wishing or hoping to achieve some local representation, desiring that distributed memory not be all. Again, men are in greatest need of stratagems here, techniques for controlling the brain by the use of wonder, for men are most prone to psychophysiological confusion. The extra delicacy, in general, of women’s brain fibres renders their access to local representations easier: because they ‘consider only the surface of things’, they are more prone to wonder, easily distracted by the slightest cry or the least motion, with ‘great motions’ produced in their brains by any ‘insignificant things’.74 Male susceptibility to the passions is more dangerous, men’s supposed access to depth a curse. If one is not defended against violent passions, error inevitably follows through the confusions of brain traces. Fixations and obsessions can result. If one passion dominates, then as some animal spirits ‘violently descend’ in unnatural motions to the periphery of the body, others, ‘swirling irregularly in the brain, stir up so many traces’ that the soul, which is ‘continually constrained to have the thoughts tied to these traces’, ‘becomes, as it were, enslaved to them’. Vigilance must, therefore, be unceasing.75 Malebranche is worried here not about fixity in itself (stasis is in fact to be willed), but about loss of control. The necessary effort to be exerted in disciplining the male brain must evolve out of knowledge of these patterns of error, of the various ways in which the spirits, in passion, can suck the moral agent towards insanity or tempt him with garish imaginings. Before treating memory directly, Malebranche had outlined the difference (of degree only) between veridical perception and imagination. Agitation by the spirits of the fibres leading to the brain is sufficient for the soul to have perceptions. Imagining occurs when the flow of animal spirits disturbs the fibres without the presence of the object. But this was the definition of memory, not imagination, given by Descartes in L’Homme. Memory has become, in the Cartesian philosophy of the brain, the work or production of imagination.76 Due to imagination’s liberty ‘to transpose and change its ideas’, it does not inevitably preserve the order of past events, and in its operation ‘nature…is totally confounded’.77 Because of Descartes’s physiological ‘assimilation of imagination and memory’, the deceptiveness of imagination taints memory too.78 The peculiar sanctity of memory’s ordered access to a real past seems reduced to mere confabulation. These concerns are at once about the

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lure of easy factual errors, and the seductions of morally impure ideas and memories, thoughts ‘on which it is not good to dwell’.79 Malebranche tried to cut off this worrying line of thought with the retort that, fortunately, brain fibres are usually ‘agitated much more by the impressions of objects than by the flow of spirits’. But confidence in the hook-up between ideas and world is swiftly undermined: However it sometimes happens that persons whose animal spirits are highly agitated by fasting, vigils, a high fever, or some violent passion have the internal fibers of their brain set in motion as forcefully as by external objects. Because of this such people sense what they should only imagine…80 The list of contextual factors which, through the body, can disrupt the spirits and confuse cognition is long. Disease and fever, fright and shock, peculiarities of diet, of religious behaviour and feeling, and of emotional extremity can all cause unnatural internal turbulence and consequent error. What contexts are safe? Whence cognitive purity, among so many forms of danger, when at the slightest bodily disturbance the animal spirits are ‘impelled into confused Motions, and their Ranks and Connexion broken or ruffled’?81 So Malebranche advises on the control of these fickle spirits, explaining techniques for controlling the brain and keeping the order of the past unruffled. He warns against the seduction of youth by the wonders of poetry and science. The young man (sic) ‘must always guard the purity of his imagination, i.e. he must prevent those dangerous traces that corrupt the heart and mind from being formed in the brain’.82 The animal spirits, which ‘receive many secret directives from the passions’, and are ‘easily diverted from the new and difficult channels into which the will would lead them’, must be tamed. How? The will, which we often find ‘exhausting itself in controlling the unruly spirits’, is not sufficient: it must trick the imagination ‘in order to stir the spirits’ by using ‘cleverness’ and ‘stratagems to deceive an enemy that attacks only by surprise’. Suggested techniques include thinking of things opposed to the objects of the dominating desire (in order to induce revulsion), and as a last resort adding ‘the thought of eternity, or some other solid thought’. This is a remarkable line of attack, or defence, on one’s own innards: fixity is to be imposed on the fleeting spirits by halting their natural dynamics with unmixed thoughts of the ultimate. Yet not even ‘this sort of defense’ renders us ‘impregnable’: sometimes the ‘motion of the spirits can be so violent that they occupy the soul’s entire capacity’.83 Even the thought of eternity, the last line in this helpless

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physics of the self, can (Malebranche had earlier sadly admitted) itself excite violent passions, because we use traces even when thinking of universals or insensible spiritual things: the roaming spirits, whether sluggish or transient, agitated or decayed, naturally tend to cause various degradations of character.84 The poor, oppressed soul, its power dependent on unlikely ‘obedience rendered to it by the animal spirits’, buffeted by their every new distribution and their every heavy flood, is blind to the body’s activities.85 Possible sources of evil and error are internal. Body fluids are not self, not good, not true, not pure. Despite the necessary rhetoric of control, the mind is fated ‘to sit in the brain merely as a spectator of this play which is acted out in the scene of the body’.86 Wounds to the brain

Virtue, then, is the process of working out in advance methods to organize and discipline the brain and body, subduing or warding off the unwanted cognitions and actions for which the spirits agitate, exercising volition by watching and modifying, with an active mind, associative responses and gradually becoming an architect of one’s own passions, and (correspondingly) of the landscape of pores and fibres which the spirits sculpt. The process is, in this life, endless and fallible, for always operating beneath consciousness are the lures of various ‘libertine spirits, which do not voluntarily submit to the commands of the will’ and which may ‘cause the most important secrets to be revealed’.87 ‘Acquired‘ connections between traces, and between the corresponding ideas or memories, are more dangerous than natural connections (where the latter can mean either innate or objective/ rational).88 A confusion of traces is the tendency of spirits, given the history of their motions through a set of pores, to reconstruct or reform a pattern which is (accidentally, historically) related to the pattern which a more objective input (whether the world or the soul) calls for. Once the dispositions of confusion are in place in a set of superposed traces, it is hard to displace them, for ‘wounds received by the brain heal with greater difficulty than those in other parts of the body’. The task of virtue is to isolate or cordon off the dangerous traces, to drain the spirits of their moral venom by repeatedly encouraging safer associations and memories: ‘it is very difficult to close brain traces tightly because they are exposed to the flow of spirits…a prejudice is entirely cured only when the trace has been tightly sealed’.89 How is this ever possible in the context of the passions, where the soul’s attention is not voluntary and the will depends essentially on the body?90

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Association, self, and training

Descartes believes that the dangers of wonder can be overcome, for its tendency to fix permanent representations can be put to use in strengthening and prolonging good thoughts which ‘otherwise might easily be erased’.91 The mechanisms of association are available to the soul, so that we can learn ‘to separate within ourselves the movements of the blood and spirits from the thoughts to which they are usually joined’.92 In Descartes’s associationism, the focus is not, as might be expected, on a distinction between, on the one hand, all reflexes (unconditioned and conditioned), and, on the other, non-automatic action caused by the soul. Rather, the wide set of responses which interests him most includes both cases of long-term conditioning and the long-term workings of associative memory in linking things not naturally related. Unlike immediate and simple automatic responses (the blink reflex in humans, sheep running from wolves), conditioned responses and long-term learned associations can potentially be altered, providing a hold for the soul in the wayward dynamics of spirits and memory. A dog howls and runs at the sound of a violin which has been coupled with whipping, and setters are trained (against natural inclination) to stop at the sight of a partridge until a gun is fired:93 significantly, Descartes links both of these examples of training in dog-machines with more complex human cases which he considers equivalent in principle. One man may want to dance when another wants to cry if the latter has ‘never heard a galliard without some affliction befalling him’, because ‘it evokes ideas in [his] memory’. The case of the setter, in the crucial final section of Part 1 of the Passions on psychological conflict, is worth noting in order to encourage each one of us to make a point of controlling our passions. For since we are able, with a little effort, to change the movements of the brain in animals devoid of reason, it is evident that we can do so still more effectively in the case of men.94 Since ‘the movements of the brain’ will change with experience anyway, we can will, when not under the sway of violent passion, various thoughts which oppose or counteract those typically produced by association. When he understood that his long standing ‘inclination to love’ people with a squint was due to a childhood association of the passion of love with the visual image of a particular cross-eyed girl, Descartes freed himself from the tyranny of his animal spirits.95

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So, by applying the intellect in conjunction with the will, it may be possible to fix and confirm a single isolated trace.96 This is the process of extended auto-persuasion recommended in Descartes’s advice to Elisabeth: the deliberate alteration of the physiology of passion by way of effort and habit is simply a development of the ordinary processes of long-term memory, by which control can be extended into domains of body and cognition which are normally (without the preparations characteristic of virtue) out of conscious reach.97 Against the immediate dictates of the preservation of the body, the task is to work towards the permeation of body and brain by the intellect and the will, a permeation directly parallel and often contrary to that already enacted by the physical world on the body. As thinking beings embedded in living body-machines, we must often correct for the hasty norms appropriate for those machines as biological beings alone. Only thus might the compound creature which thinks and eats, reasons and dreams in such a marked, particular body ever become more truly what, as a unified whole, it is. ENGLISH SELVES AND BODIES This I thinke that haveing often recourse to ones memory and tieing downe the minde strictly to the recollecting things past precisely as they were may be a meanes to check those extravagant or turning flights of the imagination.98

Localization and confusion

In his posthumous Select Discourses, John Smith, a Cambridge Platonist, describes in the discourse on the immortality of the soul the animal spirit physiology of ‘a late sagacious Philosopher’. Smith warns that it may not only be the soul (which ‘sits enthroned, in some mysterious way’) which is ‘apt to stir these quick and nimble spirits’, the state of which, ‘either disorderly and confus’d, or gentle and composed’, determines our actions and cognitions. Moral worth depends on the soul’s knowledge of and control over the ‘subtile Mechanicks of our own Bodies’: without this, souls have not ‘by the exercise of true Vertue got the dominion over them’. Spirits and body are themselves always active, the forces of ‘not-self already on the march, besieging souls which, too easily ‘mov’d by the undisciplin’d petulancy of our Animal Spirits, shall foment and cherish that Irrational Grief, Fear, Anger, Love, or any other such like Passions contrary to the dictates of Reason’.99 In England, too, then, moral exhortation on the

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disciplining of self by self was necessarily physiological in form, requiring the wishful surveillance of these fleeting spirits. In the realm of the passions, this just is the nature of virtue. Even before Locke suggested that continuity of personal identity, along with the concomitant responsibility and morality, depends on memory and the extension of consciousness backwards into the personal past,100 the mind finds its true activity in exercising its dominion over the brain traces and mental representations to which, sadly, it is tied. For this reason the Cartesian theory of reconstructive memory was loathsome, morally abhorrent to the English. The idea that memories are just patterned motions of spirits through brain pores denied the systematicity, stability and structure characteristic of true thinking, reducing all cognition to mere association and the chance con/fusions of jumbling particles. A more pressing danger than materialism, distributed representation threatened to expose the soul to all the excesses of passion by stripping its ability to moderate and discipline mental contents. The requisite authoritarian task of the soul seems too hard if memory is just motions of animal spirits, since it is ‘as inconceivable how it should direct such intricate Motions, as that one that was born blind should manage a Game at Chess, or marshal an Army’.101 The English reaction to the Cartesian physiology of memory was not a democratic revolt of free spirits against the authoritarian implications of mechanical models of mind,102 but the theoretical importing of extra, excess order into the coils of memory. It is not surprising that memory and the passions it arouses should have increasingly occupied English philosophers after 1660. The obsession with order after the Civil War and after the uncontrolled multiplicity of opinions of the Interregnum produced not only impositions of unity in worship, dress, and conduct, but also a set of attempts to keep the past in place. Both collective and cognitive memory had to display unity and concord, even at the cost of imposing false continuities on the political and personal past, by developing clear, clean narrative structures to organize uncertain or fearful events. A fixation on sameness required external discipline to be applied as much to internal, potentially anarchic psychophysiological flux as to unruly social forces. Too many descriptions of memory did not encourage confidence in its stability or accuracy: Margaret Cavendish in 1656 described memory as ‘Atomes in the Brain set on fire’.103 So Royal Society members wished for control over brain and body as much as over the cosmos. In 1667 secretary Oldenburg asked a correspondent in Connecticut ‘to remember, that we have taken to taske the whole Universe’: the disappointments of their desires to play wider roles in

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running the country104 were matched by slow progress and waning interest in ordering the body physiologically, but a residue of assumptions about cognitive discipline may have had more lasting impact. The Cartesian model failed, critics complained, to explain how motions of ‘very thin and liquid’ animal spirits could be preserved in the ‘pervious’ and ‘clammy’ brain for as long as memories last.105 Worse, the superpositional storage which Descartes envisages would result in ‘a great deal of preposterous confusion’: the motions of memory would inevitably ‘interfere, thwart, and obstruct’ each other, so that remembering anything would ‘put all the other Images into a disorderly floating, and so raise a little Chaos of confusion, where Nature requires the exactest order’. 106 For Glanvill, a theory of memory must guarantee that traces are ‘capable of Regularity’, and the reader is made complicit in demanding that memories ‘should so orderly keep their Cells without any alteration of their site or posture, which at first was allotted them’. But although the claim that memory is ordered rather than being subject to ‘tumultuary agitations’ is meant to be descriptive, outlining indisputable explananda, in fact it reads like a prescriptive, nostalgic wish that memories ought to remain free of ‘Ataxy and disorder’.107 Morally-charged language accentuates the danger: memory-motions in matter would become ‘strangely depraved, if not obliterated’ in ‘a necessary confusion of all’.108 Positive accounts of memory developed in opposition to Descartes did indeed guarantee traces’ immunity from melding, warding off the moral dangers which intrinsic misassociation would bring. Digby took memories to be ‘exceeding litle’ bodies emitted from objects which are driven into the brain, ‘where at length, they find some vacant cell, in which they keepe their rankes and files, in great quiett and order… and there they lye still and are at rest, until they be stirred up’ by appetite, chance, or will.109 Storage is separate from processing, and each memory trace remains independent of others. Robert Hooke saw memories as distinct ideas laid out spatially in the ‘spirals’ of the brain. He argued that these ‘material and bulky’ ideas must be ‘in themselves distinct; and therefore that not two of them can be in the same space, but that they are actually different and separate one from another’. 110 This requirement marks off distributed models like Descartes’s, in which many memories can be (dispositionally) in the same space, from localist models which postulate only atomic items in memory. So, very schematically, it is possible to characterize the difference in

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these historical approaches. The Cartesians acknowledged the activity and potential confusion of volatile body mechanisms, seeing memory as a motion, and requiring the careful development of individual strategies for control: in contrast, the English removed or denied the autonomy or danger of the body bits and of the mental representations, seeing memory as a body rather than a motion, thus rendering traces fixed and already ordered in nature.111 But Jamie Kassler has argued that Hooke has a partly non-localized theory of memory.112 Explaining this apparent disagreement allows the useful separation of different senses of ‘localization’ in the history of neuroscience. Kassler takes the distinction to mark theorists’ views of the amount of body and brain substance involved in storage: Descartes is then seen as a localist because he locates mind-body interaction at a specific point, the pineal gland, whereas Hooke, like Hobbes, is a nonlocalist because he extends remembrance through the physical system of memory coils. This way of setting up the issues means that there is no special distinction between local and distributed apart from the problem of whether the soul is coextensive with the body or acts at a particular seat. The issue here is whether executive control is local or distributed. But I have been using the terms, in line with other uses in the cognitive sciences, to mark instead whether, in any theory, representations are local or distributed, discrete or superposed. These differences affect interpretation of the plausibility of the different theories as accounts of human memory. Distributed models in my sense (whether using animal spirits or neural nets) have to explain how any memory is ever retrieved distinctly, while local models have to explain how the phenomena of interference between memories which seem characteristic in humans can occur. Hooke accepts interference as an explanandum, but his account remains atomist and localist. When the soul seeks a memory idea, another idea may interpose, as the sun’s radiation on the moon may be impeded by the intervention of the earth.113 Traces do not fuse or blend, but are only juxtaposed in a particular spatial collocation which blocks executive access. Interference does not fall naturally out of the model, as it did in the Cartesian philosophy of the brain. Association and anatomy

Theories of associative memory in England and Scotland owed as much to the Cartesians as to Hobbes, with early eighteenth-century philosophers as likely to study L’Homme as the Meditations, and psychophysiology as much as occasionalism in Malebranche.114 Their

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development occurred in the context of these concerns about interference and confusion: Locke’s influential chapter on association was a response to Malebranche, demonstrating various conspiracies of cultural and sub-cognitive influences which alter ‘Trains of Motions in the Animal Spirits’ and consequently ‘set us Awry in our Actions, as well Moral as Natural’. 115 It is far from clear whether Hume’s extension of association to cover all mental sequences, rather than just dangerous and undesirable ones, was intended, by ‘reducing all reasoning to association’, to expose ‘the sordid background of reason itself’:116 but certainly the spectre of misassociation did counteract confidence in the possibility of distinguishing appropriate from inappropriate causes of cognition and action. Is it the external world or the contagious imagination, the incorporeal soul or the devilish art of an evil spirit which is altering or tainting the animal spirits? There had to be a neurological counterpart to sound social status, but Shaftesbury’s desire that everyone ‘must prove the Validity of his Testimony by the Solidity of their Brain’117 was hopeless, for everyone knew that brains have the consistency of mushy porridge and are filled with wriggling animal spirits, satirized by Swift as ‘a Crowd of little Animals, but with Teeth and Claws extremely sharp’.118 The physiological basis of associationism would fade over the eighteenth century, as the imagination was tamed and aestheticized and as more specialized sciences of brain and body drifted away from the moral psychology of sensibility and the philosophical metaphysics of mind. But the safe metaphorizing of animal spirits only hid the ways in which concerns about chaos, order, and psychological control would inevitably continue to operate inside the hardest, most rigorous domains of neuroscience.119 Recognition that the key issue connecting cognition and culture in early modern moral physiology was about the separateness or mixture of memory traces (about localism in respect to representations rather than function or executive control) is the first step towards using historical cognitive science positively in analysing later and contemporary models. Despite the difficulty of integrating affect with cognition in large-scale theories of brain and mind, the capacity to treat passion and memory together is necessary for any future cognitive sciences even to begin addressing issues which those outside the field care about: the rhetoric and the fears of historical debates, in which it is easier for us to spot the links between social/ moral assumptions and theoretical prescriptions than it is for current sciences, offer some prospect for helpful speculation about the stakes in our modern struggles with repetition and with temporal fragmentation.

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NOTES 1 Nicolas Malebranche, The Search After Truth, trans. T.M.Lennon and P.J.Olscamp (Columbus, Ohio, 1980), Book 5, chapter 1, 339. Further references to De la recherche de la vérité are given to this translation (LO) of Genevieve Rodis-Lewis’s edition in Oeuvres Complètes I–II (Paris, 1962–3), in the form LO 5.1, 339. 2 Malebranche, LO 5.4, 360 3 LO 5.4, 357, 362 4 Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661, reprinted Brighton, 1970), 5; Malebranche, Oeuvres Complètes XVIII, 40; John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford, 1975), II. 10.9, 154. 5 Although a number of Cartesian moral physiologists picked up on Descartes’s suggestions about memory and the passions, Malebranche’s developments are, in this area, explicit and (in my view) faithful. Although neurophilosophy occupies a huge amount of Malebranche’s writing, it has been neglected by both French and Anglophone historians, despite Alquié’s note that ‘chez lui comme chez Descartes, les conseils de méthode sont inséparables d’une conception physiologique de la mémoire, de l’imagination, et de l’association des idées’, Le Cartésianisme de Malebranche (Paris, 1974), 30. But see John Yolton, Thinking Matter (Oxford, 1984), 160–2. On related concerns in other Cartesians see Solomon Diamond, ‘Seventeenth-Century French Connectionism: La Forge, Dilly, and Regis’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 5 (1969), 3–9. 6 This chapter extends and develops themes which I mention without sustained treatment throughout the historical sections of my Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge, 1998). 7 Marjorie Grene, ‘Cartesian Passions: the ultimate incoherence’, in Descartes (Brighton, 1985), 23–52. 8 Thanks to Doris McIlwain for suggesting this way of formulating my interpretation. 9 LO 2.2.2, 134. 10 Kenelme Digby, Two Treatises…(1644, reprinted London 1978), 284. 11 Locke, Essay, II.10.7, 152–3. 12 Amelie Rorty, ‘Descartes on Thinking with the Body’, in J.Cottingham (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Descartes (Cambridge, 1992), 384. 13 Malebranche, LO 2.1.1.iii, 90; LO 5.6, 369. 14 LO2.1.4.iii, 98. 15 Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago, 1990), 111–14, 69–106; Jean Mundy and Warren Gorman, ‘The Image of the Brain’, in W.German, Body Image and the Image of the Brain (St Louis, 1969), 187–251. On histories of the invisible and on techniques for visualizing a shadow realm of bodily spirits, see Barbara Duden, Disembodying Women (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 8–10; Barbara Stafford, Body Criticism (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 1–83, 401–63. 16 Ian Hacking, arguing that the sciences of memory were new in the late nineteenth century, claims that both architectural mnemonics and early-modern models of memory like Locke’s were only or primarily disciplines or technologies, not part of a search for knowledge about memory: see ‘Memoro-

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politics, trauma, and the soul’, History of the Human Sciences 7 (1994), 29–52; Rewriting the Soul: multiple personality and the sciences of memory (Princeton, 1995), 198–209. I suggest, in contrast, that practical advice and the inculcation of methods for imposing rigidity and order on the mind, for avoiding spillage and catastrophic interference between memory items, were intimately entwined with theoretical quests for facts about memory, knowledge-that as well as knowledge-how. Indeed the Foucauldian models for examining historical technologies of the self on which Hacking builds include abundant analysis of the close interplay between theoretical knowledge-claims and mundane bodily and psychological practice. The civilizing process of learning to tame one’s own body was not just a matter of maintaining appropriate habits at table and in bed: it required also intense attention to medical theories about internal fluids and the regulation of memories. This has long been recognized for the eighteenth-century ethics of sensibility: see G.S.Rousseau, ‘Discourses of the Nerve’, in F.Amrine (ed.), Literature and Science as Modes of Expression (Dordrecht, 1989), 29–60. But the point is less familiar in the context of seventeenth-century mechanism: see however John J.Blom, Descartes: his moral philosophy and psychology (Brighton, 1978), 6– 11, 84–90. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul (1649), Book 2, paragraphs 53, 72; Oeuvres Philosophiques, C.Adam and P.Tannery (eds) (Paris, 1964–1976) (=AT), vol. xi, 373, 382; The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. J.Cottingham, R.Stoothoff and D.Murdoch (Cambridge, 1985) (CSM), vol. 1, 350, 353. I give further references to this work in the text in the form Passions 2.53, AT xi.373, CSM 1.350. See also the useful edition by Stephen Voss (Indianapolis, 1989). Passions 2.70, AT xi.380–1, CSM 1.353. Prefatory letters to Passions, 14 August 1649, AT xi.326, CSM 1.327. Grene, Descartes, 43; D.P.Walker, ‘Ficino’s spiritus and Music’, in D.P. Walker, Music, Spirit, and Language in the Renaissance, P.Gouk (ed.) (London, 1985), 150; William Harvey, ‘Second Letter to Riolan’ (1649), in The Circulation of the Blood and other writings (London, 1990), 117. On the history and historiography of animal spirits, see my Philosophy and Memory Traces, chs 2, 8–10. To Chanut, 15 June 1646, AT iv.441, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. III: The Correspondence (CSM-K) (Cambridge, 1991), 289. Blom, Descartes, xvii, 80, 85; Anthony Levi, The French Moralists: the theory of the passions 1585 to 1649 (Oxford, 1964), 279. Margaret Wilson, Descartes (London, 1978), viii; Ferdinand Alquié, Descartes: Oeuvres Philosophiques I (Paris, 1963), 479; Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford, 1995), 273; Graham Richards, Mental Machinery: Origins and Consequences of Psychological Ideas, 1600–1850 (London, 1992), 41. Grene, Descartes, 52. Genevieve Rodis-Lewis, ‘Limitations of the Mechanical Model in Descartes’s Conception of the Organism’, in M.Hooker (ed.), Descartes: Critical and Interpretive essays (Baltimore, 1978), 152–4; Grene, Descartes, 46–9; Emily Grosholz, Cartesian Method and the Problem of Reduction (Oxford, 1991), 126–7.

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27 This intermediate class includes behaviour involving (corporeal) memory, imagination, passion, and sensation, which can occur in other animals. They do involve the pineal gland (unlike simple reflexes) but need not involve the soul, and they occur over long periods of time, well beyond the span of any simple reflex arc. They include functions we would call cognitive, but for Descartes, strictly speaking, they are life functions rather than mental functions, just because he restricts the latter to consciously mediated functions. This point in no way reduces their importance, for him or for us. 28 John Cook, ‘Human Beings’, in P.Winch (ed.), Studies in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein (London, 1969), 118–21, 123–6. 29 LO 2.2.3, 137. 30 Grene, Descartes, 36, 52, 199, 206–9. 31 On the ‘prospects for strategic control of memory’, compare John Kihlstrom and Terrence Barnhardt, ‘The Self-Regulation of Memory’, in D.Wegner and D.Pennebaker (eds), Handbook of Mental Control (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1993), 88–125. Remembering is, in part, a skilled activity, dependent on narrative training in a society (Robyn Fivush and Elaine Reese, ‘The Social Construction of Autobiographical Memory’, in M.Conway et al. (eds), Theoretical Perspectives on Autobiographical Memory (Dordrecht, 1992), 115– 32): neither its cultural nor its sub-cognitive and physiological causes are available for voluntary inspection or easy deliberate tampering in the service of goodness, discipline, or peace. 32 ‘Hume’s Early Memoranda’, E.C.Mossner (ed.), Journal of the History of Ideas 9 (1948), 502. Hume is noting a case of amnesia which, he thinks, confirms the Cartesian theory. 33 T.S.Hall (trans.), René Descartes: Treatise of Man (Cambridge, MA, 1972); AT xi.119–202; brief extracts in CSM 1.99–108. I refer below to Hall’s translation as H. 34 AT xi.177, H 86–7, CSM 1.106. The language of figures and traces does not imply that these corporeal ideas are images in any straightforward sense. Here, as elsewhere, Descartes denies that representation must function by simple pictorial resemblance. 35 AT xi.178, H 87–88, CSM 1.107. 36 AT xi.179, H 90. This account of the memory trace is all but repeated in the Passions 1.42, AT xi.360, CSM 1.344. 37 AT xi. 184–5, H 96; David Krell, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing: On the Verge (Bloomington, 1990), 72–3, on ‘higgledy-piggledy’ impressions ‘prone to moral turpitude, lassitude, lethargy, and benumbment’. 38 This is one reason for Descartes’s hostility to Renaissance techniques of local memory: compare Dennis Sepper, Ingenium, memory art, and the unity of imaginative knowing in the early Descartes’, in S.Voss (ed.), Essays on the Philosophy and Science of René Descartes (Cambridge, 1993), 142–61; John Sutton, ‘Body, Mind, and Order: local memory and the control of mental representations in medieval and Renaissance sciences of self, in A.Corones and G.Freeland (eds), 1543 and All That: Word and Image in the Proto-Scientific Revolution (Dordrecht, 1997). 39 A concern with the localization of memory function, in this sense, is quite distinct from a belief in the local (as opposed to the distributed) nature of

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specific memory traces. There could be a memory module in the brain (localized in the first sense), in which distributed (non-local in the second sense) memories are stored superpositionally: it is quite consistent to argue that ‘representations…are local at a global scale but global at a local scale’ (G. E.Hinton, J.L.McClelland and D.E. Rumelhart, ‘Distributed Representation’, in Rumelhart and McClelland (eds), Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA, 1986), 79. John Morris, ‘Pattern Recognition in Descartes’s Automata’, Isis 60 (1969), 451–60. Malebranche, LO 2.1.5.iii, 107; Descartes, Regulae, Rule 12, AT x.415, CSM 1.41–2. Finding room in the brain is only a problem for memory models employing local representation, and was of such concern in Robert Hooke’s localist model of 1682 that he engaged in laborious calculation of the maximum independent atoms of information likely to be stored in an individual lifetime: Hooke, Lectures of Light, in The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke, R.Waller (ed.) (1705, reprinted London, 1971), 143; J.J.MacIntosh, ‘Perception and Imagination in Descartes, Boyle, and Hooke’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 13 (1983), 327–52. To Mersenne, 1 April 1640, AT iii.48, CSM-K 146. To Mersenne, 11 June 1640, AT iii.84, CSM-K 148; to Mersenne, 6 August 1640, AT iii.143, CSM-K 151. See also to ‘Hyperaspistes’, 8.1641, AT iii.424– 5, CSM-K 190; to Mesland, 2 May 1644, AT iv.114, CSM-K 233. The letters also mention ‘intellectual memory’ with ‘its own separate impressions’, which I discuss below. LO 2.1.1.iii, 89. Malebranche explicitly links his views on animal spirits and the brain to Descartes’s L’Homme (the reading of which, in 1664, made his heart palpitate with excitement) at LO 2.1.2.iii, 93. LO 1.4.iii, 18. LO 2.1.5.iii, 106. LO 2.2.4, 141. Steve Burwood and Gill Jagger, call for papers, Body Matters Conference, University of Hull, 1995. LO 5.2, 342. Although, as I show below, Malebranche attributes women’s presumed weakness to projected excesses of vulnerability in the female brain, here men are the marked sex: men are not self-contained autonomous agents set off from society and nature in contrast to overly embedded women, but suffer from excesses of relatedness. Cartesian physiology depicts the parts of men’s bodies as too intimately interconnected, turning fears about the scholar’s fragile virility, for example, into a theory of the mutual interchangeability of the animal spirits supplying cognitive energies and the reproductive spirits driving libidinal energies (Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces, ch. 9). Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York, 1980), 204. Gaukroger, Descartes, 84–9, 228–56. Gaukroger, Descartes, 247–8. Examples of the critical complaints I have in mind include, from quite different perspectives, Merchant, The Death of Nature, 227–35; Grene, Descartes, 195–213; Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and

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Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore, 1986), 62–7, 117– 18. Merchant, Death of Nature, 193; Timothy J.Reiss, ‘Denying the Body? Memory and the dilemmas of history in Descartes’, Journal of the History of Ideas 57 (1996), 587–608. Rorty, op. cit.; Ann Wilbur Mackenzie, ‘Descartes on Life and Sense’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 19 (1989), 173–5. Rorty demonstrates clearly the interdependence of epistemology and physiology in Descartes: what she calls the maintenance and informational systems are even less distinct than she assumes, since animal spirits, the bearers of accurate or distorted information, are themselves generated in and marked by non-cognitive bodily processes. Véronique Foti, ‘Presence and Memory: Derrida, Freud, Plato, Descartes’, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 11 (New School for Social Research, 1986), 76; Reiss, ‘Denying the Body?’. To fill in detail on this rapid sketch, see for example Marie-Christine Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages (New Brunswick, 1990); Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Renaissance Medicine (Chicago, 1990); Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, 1993), 1–22. Grosholz, Cartesian Method, 120. L’Homme, AT xi.130, H 21; AT xi.167–70, H 73–5. On the cosmobiological model of circulation see also Richard Carter, Descartes’s Medical Philosophy (Baltimore, 1983); Carter, ‘Descartes’s Bio-Physics’, in G. Moyal (ed.), René Descartes: vol. IV (London, 1991), 194–219. Carter does not, however, use the material in L’Homme. See also Malebranche’s discussion of the influences of air, climate and culture on the spirits and thus on character and psychology at LO 2.1.3, 94–5. Passions 2.71, AT xi.381, CSM 1.353. Descartes stressed to Elisabeth that wonder ‘cannot be caused solely by the condition of the blood, as joy and sadness can’: but it can (asymmetrically) cause bodily changes (5.1646, AT iv.409–10, CSM-K 286–7). This asymmetry between wonder and body is exactly parallel to that between wonder and memory: although wonder, in league with other passions, ‘makes us learn and retain in our memory things of which we were previously ignorant’ (Passions 2.75, AT xi.384, CSM 1.354), it is not itself affected by prior memories. 2.75, AT xi.384, CSM 1.354. 2.72, AT xi.382, CSM 1.353–4. My reading is thus in one sense the reverse of that proposed by Luce Irigaray, ‘Wonder: a reading of Descartes’ The Passions of the Soul’, in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Ithaca, 1993), 72–82. She portrays wonder as a windowpassion, an intrusion of otherness and of fluidity into an otherwise static Cartesian system: for me, in contrast, wonder is anomalous because it provides the only hope of fixity in an otherwise fluid system. Memory is always already reconstructing, always filtering perception, but wonder temporarily cuts off memory by shocking the spirits into ‘more tender’ parts of the brain, parts not accustomed to the usual incessant flow (Passions 2.72, AT xi.382, CSM 1.354). Irigaray, further, sees wonder as ‘a mourning for the self as an autarchic entity’ because it bridges without foreclosing the gulfs between self and other and

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between past and future: but in fact it provides a rare context in which Descartes’s ideal of autonomy is conceivable, since in wonder the self is purely present, in contact only with the novel object rather than encrusted with past traces. Elsewhere Descartes is more sanguine about the impossibility of realizing his wish to bypass memory entirely, and accepts that the process of ‘rejuvenating one’s brain’ (Irigaray, 81) cannot be the wholesale willed erasure of every layered memory. To Arnauld, 29 July 1648, AT v.220, CSM-K 356; to Arnauld, 4 June 1648, AT v.192–3, CSM-K 354. Passions 2.75, AT xi.384, CSM 1.355. To Mersenne, 6 August 1640, AT iii.143, CSM-K 151. Morris, ‘Pattern-Recognition’, 455–7. Indeed the continuity between the physiological-fantastical theories of L’Homme and the Passions is rarely noticed. One example is Descartes’s account of how animal spirits ‘move very strangely’ towards and in the brain in the case of hatred (Passions 2.103, AT xi.405, CSM 1.364; compare L’Homme H 75, AT xi.169). Morris has to downplay the importance of the Passions, strangely suggesting that ‘Descartes was not yet prepared to defend the doctrine [of intellectual memory] in public’. This is implausible, given its theological orthodoxy (Eckhard Kessler, ‘The Intellective Soul’, in C.B.Schmitt and Q.Skinner (eds), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, 1988), 509–18). Paul Landormy, defending Cartesian dualism in ‘La mémoire corporelle et la mémoire intellectuelle dans la philosophie de Descartes’, Bibliothèque 4 (1902), 259–98, argued that intellectual memory is the reconstructive force in Descartes’s scheme, since corporeal memory must be passive and static, merely combining the debris of past impressions. Descartes’s Conversation with Burman, J.Cottingham (ed.) (Oxford, 1976), 8– 9, AT v.150; to Hyperaspistes, 8.1641, AT iii.425, CSM-K 190–1. Compare to Huygens, 10 October 1642, AT iii.598, CSM-K 215–16; to Mesland, 2 May 1644, AT iv.114, CSM-K 233. In Philosophy and Memory Traces, ch. 3, I discuss the implications of intellectual memory for Descartes’s views on universals and particulars, on personal resurrection and on infantile amnesia. Just as there are no ‘other eyes within the brain’ to inspect visual images and decide which objects they resemble (Descartes, Optics 6, AT vi.130, CSM 1.167), so there is no memory-homunculus to compare a current trace with a veridical previous trace: the current trace is all there is. LO 5.7, 375. LO 5.8, 385. LO 5.8, 385. LO 5.8, 385. LO 2.2.1, 130–3. 2.2.1, 141; 5.3, 349; 3.1.2, 203; 2.2.2, 151. ‘No imagination without memory; no memory without imagination’ (Diderot, quoted by Marie-Helene Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 103). David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature (1739, Oxford 1978), 85, 10. Véronique Foti, ‘The Cartesian Imagination’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 46 (1986), 636.

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79 Descartes, Passions 2.74, AT xi.383, CSM 1.354. 80 LO 2.1.i, 88. 81 Richard Blackmore, A Treatise of the Spleen (London, 1725), 31. On error and physiology in early modern philosophy see also Michael Ayers, ‘Belief without Reason’, forthcoming in The Cambridge History of SeventeenthCentury Philosophy; Michael DePorte, Nightmares and Hobbyhorses (San Marino, 1974), 3–53. 82 LO 5.8, 388. 83 LO 5.8, 386–9. 84 LO 5.2, 345; 6.2, 502–3. 85 LO 2.1.i, 88; 5.3, 350–2. 86 William Croone, De Ratione Motus Musculorum (London, 1664), 161. 87 Malebranche, LO 2.1.2.iii, 92; 2.2.2, 135. 88 John P.Wright, ‘Association, Madness, and the Measures of Probability in Locke and Hume’, in C.Fox (ed.), Psychology and Literature in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1987), 111–14. 89 LO, Elucidation 9, 607. 90 Descartes, Passions 1.46, AT xi.363, CSM 1.345; Malebranche, LO 5.1, 337. 91 Passions 2.74, AT xi.383, CSM 1.354. 92 Jeffrey Barnouw, ‘Passion as “Confused” Perception or Thought in Descartes, Malebranche, and Hutcheson’, Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992), 406– 8. Compare pp. 397 and 400 on Descartes’s inchoate acknowledgement of ‘the virtues of confusion’ and its inevitability in passion and cognition. 93 To Mersenne, 18 March 1630, AT i.133–4, CSM-K 20; Passions 1.50, AT xi.370, CSM 1.348. 94 Passions 1.50, AT xi.370, CSM 1.348. 95 To Chanut, 6 June 1647, AT v.57, CSM-K 322. 96 Passions 2.75, AT xi.384, CSM 1.355. 97 Walther Riese, ‘Descartes as a Psychotherapist’, Medical History 10 (1966), 238; Descartes, Passions 1.44, AT xi.361–2, CSM 1.344–5. Malebranche, noting the similarity between memory and habit, repeats that it is through the animal spirits that the soul can recover its control over the body (LO 2.1.5, 107–8). 98 John Locke’s journal, 22 January 1678, in Kenneth Dewhurst, John Locke (1632–1704): physician and philosopher (London, 1963), 101. 99 John Smith, Select Discourses (1660, reprinted New York, 1979), 116–19. 100 An account which, Locke worried, might be threatened by ‘Absurdity’ if we knew how the soul was ‘tied to a certain System of fleeting Animal Spirits’ (Essay, II.27.27, 347). Here I stick to the contexts of physiology and memory, which reveal direct conceptual connections across some otherwise quite distinct theorists. On the general physiological background see T.M.Brown, ‘Physiology and the Mechanical Philosophy in Mid-Seventeenth Century England’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 51 (1977), 25–54; Robert G.Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists (Berkeley, 1980). 101 Glanvill, Essay against Confidence in Philosophy, 5, in Essays on Several Important Subjects (London, 1676). 102 Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery, 122–36. 103 Quoted by B.R.Singer, ‘Robert Hooke on Memory, Association, and Time Perception’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 31 (1976), 126.

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104 Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge, 1981), 13, 37, 136; Hunter, The Royal Society and its Fellows 1660–1700 (Oxford, 1994), 35–54. 105 Henry More, An Antidote Against Atheism, in A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings, vol. 1 (1662, reprinted London, 1978), Book 1, chapter 11, paragraph 2, p. 33; Glanvill, Vanity of Dogmatizing, 35, 38. 106 More, The Immortality of the Soul, in A Collection, vol. 2, 2.2.7, 68; Glanvill, Vanity, 39, 35–6. 107 Glanvill, Vanity, 36, 39. 108 More, Immortality, 2.10.9, 105; 2.5.7, 83. 109 Digby, Two Treatises, 284–5. 110 Hooke, Lectures of Light, 142. (This was a 1682 lecture on memory to the Royal Society.) 111 This theoretical imposition of order went together, for Hooke, with practical but external schemes for the organization of information about the past in diaries, lists and other memory aids: see Lotte Mulligan, ‘Robert Hooke’s “Memoranda”: memory and natural history’, Annals of Science 49 (1992), 47– 61. 112 Jamie Kassler, Inner Music: Hobbes, Hooke, and North on internal character (London, 1995), ch. 3. 113 Hooke, Lectures of Light, 144. This is a strict analogy between ‘the Soul in the Center of the Repository’ and the sun irradiating or resonating throughout the sphere of the bodies which it regulates and governs by an attractive power. Compare More, Antidote, 1.11.11, 36. 114 John P.Wright, The Sceptical Realism of David Hume (Manchester, 1983), 5– 9, 70–4, 212–15, 224–6. 115 Locke, Essay, II.33.6, 7. 116 Wright, ‘Association, Madness, and the Measures of Probability’, 116–20. 117 Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (1708), quoted by DePorte, Nightmares and Hobbyhorses, 43–4. 118 The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit (1704), quoted by Hillel Schwartz, Knaves, Fools, Madmen, and the Subtle Effluvium (Gainesville, 1978), 53. 119 Roger Smith, Inhibition: history and meaning in the sciences of mind and brain (Berkeley, 1992); Georges Canguilhem, La Formation du Concept de Réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe Siècles (Paris, 1955); Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, trans. R.Howard (New York, 1965), 124–46; G.S.Rousseau, ‘Towards a Social Anthropology of the Imagination’ (1969), in his Enlightenment Crossings (Manchester, 1991), 1–25; W.F. Bynum, ‘The Anatomical Method, Natural Theology, and the Functions of the Brain’, Isis 64 (1973), 445–68.

6

Restraining the passions Hydropneumatics and hierarchy in the philosophy of Thomas Willis Jamie C.Kassler

So long as the brain is still, a man is in his right mind. (Hippocrates, The Sacred Disease1)

INTRODUCTION

From the time of the ancient Greeks, there has been a recurring theme in which the passions are conceived as storms at sea or tempests in the air. This theme occurs in two different versions. One version, deriving from the Stoics, regards passions as fatal to a tranquil mind, so that Francis Bacon, for example, wrote: ‘as the sea would of itself be calm and quiet, if the winds did not move and trouble it; so…the mind… would be temperate and stayed, if the affections, as winds, did not put it into tumult and perturbation’.2 The other version, deriving from Aristotle, regards the passions as spurs to action, so that Henry More, for example, maintained that the brisk winds of passion serve as active forces guarding man’s vessel from inertia.3 To extend the metaphor of the passions as winds, one might conceive of the body as a ship, either moved by healthy gales or tossed hither and thither by every wind, and the mind as a pilot or steersman, since reason is supposed to rule the passions. But John Bramhall lamented, for example, that reason is too seldom the guide at the helm, because passion, ‘like an unruly passenger…thrusts reason away from the rudder’.4 Although the ship model has been used by many writers from antiquity right up to the present day,5 this chapter presents an analysis of a different model constructed by Thomas Willis (1621–75), perhaps the most prominent English physician after William Harvey (1578–1657).6 From the single contemporary source that describes Willis’s medical practice, we learn that he was a caring physician;7 and from his writings, we discover an astute anatomical and clinical observer.8 But his philosophy is Janus147

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faced, and, hence, presents difficulties for the interpreter.9 Anatomically, Willis put the mechanisms of the brain and nervous system on their modern footing, in so far as could then be done. But he eschewed the machine theory of Cartesianism, interpreted not only as pure mechanism but also as a dualism that seemed to have been carried too far, thereby posing the ultimate theological problem of God’s power and presence in His creation.10 To combat Cartesianism, therefore, Willis chose to re-animate the machine by recourse to spirits and other ancient doctrines deriving from Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Galen and others. In this way he hoped to reconcile his philosophy with orthodox Anglicanism.11 Although, in the course of his writings, Willis modified details of his philosophy, two features remained constant. First, he conceived humans as hydraulic organs, inspired by gentle winds of instinct or vehement winds of passion. Those winds, arising automatically with reference to the welfare of the organism, result in the affections, conceived as a complex of internal motions—harmonious or disharmonious, the external signs of which enable the physician to determine which internal parts of the organism are well- or ill-tempered. Second, since hydraulic organs are compound machines that operate on a hydropneumatic principle, Willis could describe the person in meteorological terms: the normative, regenerated person is ‘like a Calm Sea, with a smooth Superficies’, whereas the unregenerated human equivalent is ‘troubled’, ‘like water shaken into various Circles, and waving by the blasts of the Winds, or by some solid thing cast into it’.12 THE HUMAN HYDRAULUS

In his Cerebri anatome, Willis developed in detail his model of the human hydraulus with its four main parts: first, bellows and reservoir, complete with operating mechanisms; second, windchest, combining soundboard and pipe rack with pipes; third, a barrel pricked with automatic tunes; and fourth, a keyframe and action parts (see Figure 6.1).13 The first of the four parts constitutes the operating system with its hydraulic and blowing mechanisms, whereas the remaining three parts constitute the control system with its keyframe, barrel and windchest mechanisms. The ‘seats’ of these two systems are, respectively, the precordia and the encephalon. In Willis’s doctrine of anatomy the term ‘precordia’ includes the heart itself, as well as the parts about the heart (diaphragm, hypochondria, lungs, pericardium), whereas the term ‘encephalon’ signifies the cerebrum, cerebellum and their common appendix, the ‘medullar Trunk’. Although the mechanisms constituting the human hydraulus are so

Figure 6.1.

The human hydraulus

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constructed as to provide a constant and perpetual wind, the source of this motive power is water pressure, namely, the blood that circulates round the body. During this process, an oily humour, enkindled in the blood within the heart and lungs, is circulated with the arterial blood; and a spiritous liquor, distilled from the blood in the cerebral and cerebellar cortex, is circulated and further sublimed within the grey matter of the encephalon. In treating these two products of distillation, Willis drew on the two-semen theory of Hippocratic doctrine, according to which female and male semen exist in all persons, regardless of sex.14 In Willis’s proto-chemical version of this theory, the oily humour, or female semen, is the matter, and the spiritous liquor, or male semen, is the form of nourishment. Being in sympathy, the two types of semen commingle or ‘marry together’, thus imparting the ‘energy’ or ‘plastic virtue’ that blows the human hydraulus.15 Willis’s doctrine of circulation, therefore, is not the same as that of William Harvey.16 Indeed, the two men held different views about the heart, the valves and the blood. Harvey argued that the pulsific force of the heart is intrinsic to muscle fibre, for it is a relation between stretch and tension (contractility). He observed that, although the heart maintains pressure in the vessels, it is the valves that mechanically direct the flow of the blood. And he insisted that living blood is the unit of life, because, in circulating, it brings its vital principle to the parts where it exercises their special functions. By ‘vital principle’ Harvey denoted heat, spirit and blood as one unit, for he assumed that blood became particulate only in the dead, when, as cruor, it separated into fibrous, gelatinous and serous fractions.17 Though constantly changing in vitality and function, living blood did not change its physical properties—it did not become vaporous. Harvey, therefore, condemned spirits as a deus ex machina and the recourse to them as an asylum of the ignorant.18 According to Willis’s doctrine, the fibres of the heart, or any other muscle, have no intrinsic property of contractility, because contraction is due to a chemical process that causes the blood to boil, the vapours to ascend and the heart to inflate. 19 There seem to be few, if any, strategically-placed valves, because circulation is maintained by the peristaltic motion of the innervated vessels.20 And living blood is no single unit, because circulation is a distillatory process: blood is the liquid to be distilled; the distillate is the portion that evaporates when heat is applied and that is subsequently condensed by cooling; and the distillation residue is the portion which does not evaporate.21 Just as distillation separates evaporable substances from non-evaporable or less easily evaporable ones, so too does circulation function in the same

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way, for it is a process that separates substances according to their volatility. In observing that there was a greater richness of blood supply to the grey nervous matter than to the white, Willis concluded that volatile spirits were distilled in the cephalic grey matter and that the white ‘medullar’ matter formed merely their paths of travel. 22 He also concluded that the medullar trunk or windchest extended from the grey matter of the cerebrum through the cerebellum to the os sacrum, the ridge on which the backbone rests (see Figure 6.1). 23 From the windchest originated the cerebral, cerebellar and spinal nerve pipes, the seats of what Willis called ‘reflex action’.24 Indeed, he gave numerous instances of automatic acts, with special attention to singing, laughing and weeping.25 In reflex action, a stimulus is promptly followed by movement without conscious participation of the will. The spirits run up the sensory nerve pipe, reach the windchest and thence run down the motor nerve pipe. The higher up towards and into the grey matter of the cerebrum a reflex action occurs, the more does conscious mind attach to it. According to ancient as well as Cartesian doctrine, the cerebellum was the seat of memory.26 Willis, however, departed from this doctrine when he located the seats of innate and acquired memory in the cerebellar and cerebral cortex, respectively.27 In this way he could conceive the cerebellum as a cistern for spirits that control reflex actions as well as reinforce the motor powers of the cerebrum.28 For organ harmony there must be a strict ‘sympraxis’ or consent between the mechanisms of the operating system; and this requires regulation by spirits that blow in a smooth, even fashion.29 These gentle winds are the vital instincts (innate impulse) that produce regular, unforced motions, for example, of the diaphragm in respiration.30 But intrinsic, as well as extrinsic, causes may excite spirits into a short ‘fury’ or a longer ‘rage’, so that they blow either as tempests or as whirlwinds. These vehement, uneven winds are the natural and preternatural passions (acquired impulse) that interrupt organ harmony either temporarily or for a longer duration, thereby producing forced and irregular motions, for example, of the diaphragm in laughing. When this motion is instigated, the mechanisms of the operating system ‘intimately conspire and agree among themselves, that although one of them do a thing inordinately, rather than there shall be a Schism, the rest do imitate or follow its irregularity’.31 Willis believed that irregular motions are ‘much more signal’ in humans than animals, because in the former, but not the latter, there is a ‘wonderful’ consent between the precordia and the face.32 He attributed this consent to the conformation of the ‘intercostal’ or great

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sympathetic nerve, which reaches into the precordia and viscera of the whole abdomen and continues by its superior ramification into the eyes and parts of the mouth and face.33 Hence, in every passion the eyes, face and mouth correspond with the affections of the precordia ‘often unknown to us or against our minds’, so that we automatically betray ‘the most intimate sense of the heart by the countenance and aspect’.34 Indeed, because many shoots of the intercostal nerve are sent to the nerve of the diaphragm, Willis supposed that ‘risibility is the proper affection of man’.35 In summary, we may say that Willis’s human hydraulus effects vascular work as water work and nervous work as wind work. But the source of this work is the blood, a hydropneumatic principle, conceived as ‘chemical work’,36 the distillatory processes of which occur in various reservoirs and cisterns, including the encephalon itself, which sublimes spirits from the bloody mass, ‘inspires’ the windchest and controls the entrance of spirits into the nerve pipes, as well as into the nerve fibres that innervate the muscles. Nervous work, therefore, is performed by the products of distillation—the vapours or breaths that Willis called ‘spirits’. THE SOUL IN THE MACHINE

Although Willis admitted that spirits are invisible, he treated them as a heap of real, impenetrable little bodies, since he compared their constitution (systasis) to ‘Atoms or subtil Particles…chained and adhering mutually one to another’.37 On this premiss he could argue two things. First, if spirits are substances, or that which subsists, they must be the essence (hypostasis) of the soul. And second, since that which changes is their qualities, attributes or accidents, we may imagine mutation (metathesis) as an interchange of little bodies or groups of little bodies, whereby spirits are ‘figured together in a certain Species’ or informing form.38 Hence, just as wind is the life or internal energy of the hydraulic organ, so too are spirits the psychic life of the human hydraulus. Psychic life, however, has non-rational as well as rational powers, each of which has distinct skills. To the rational ‘soul’ belong all ‘pure Affections, and such as are Simple, coming without perturbation or trouble’, whereas to the non-rational ‘corporeal soul’ belong ‘all the vehement Affections or Perturbations of the Mind, by which it is wont to be moved, and inclined hither and thither, for the Prosecuting the Good, or shunning Evil’.39 This kind of dualism may be traced to the Aristotelian tradition that would have been part of Willis’s medical

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training.40 Indeed, in Cerebri anatome there is considerable evidence that Willis continued aspects of that tradition. Like Aristotle, he believed that the affections can be controlled and modified by the rational power, since he argued that, even though sense impressions that set up a reflex may be perceived ‘without our knowledge or intention’, we may become aware of the resultant muscular effect.41 Moreover, he hinted that acts of prudence and virtue rely on such awareness, which is the ground for learning, by habituation, to control the reaction.42 The affections, therefore, might be considered rational in that they are capable of obeying the rational power. So far, then, Willis continued the Aristotelian tradition. But his adherence to this tradition is called into question when we consider the highest skill of the rational power. For Aristotle, that skill is speculative reason, the ability to know universals.43 This knowledge relies on the non-rational power, since universals exist only in particular, concrete, sensible things. Aristotle’s speculative reason, therefore, depends upon phantasms built up through successive sense impressions. For Willis, however, the highest skill is insight—self-perception—and this suggests Platonic beliefs.44 In Cerebri anatome Willis had little to say about this skill. Instead, he focused on the skills of the corporeal soul: vital, in which impulse is due to intrinsic (sympathetic) properties of the human hydraulus; natural, in which impulse is due to external stimuli; and animal, in which impulse is due to ‘phantasie’, a faculty directed to conscious and intentional action. Hence, we might ask: how is phantasie directed? Willis answered this question in De anima brutorum, a treatise on psychology and pathology,45 in which he observed that the skill of phantasie is twofold.46 First, there is receptivity, since ‘she’ (note the pronoun) apprehends ‘simple things’ suggested either by instinct or by habit. Second, there is imagination, since she composes or divides ‘many things at once’, and from thence makes ‘enunciations’ or phantasms. But the psychic life of the body suffers and is corrupted by intrinsic as well as extrinsic causes. Hence, phantasie’s skill must be moderated and controlled; and this is done by intellect, which ‘beholds’ all enunciations conceived by phantasie and, judging them to be true or false, orders and disposes them into series of notions ‘accommodated to speculation or practise’. When ‘adorned by Learning’, intellect ‘sublimes’ and divests phantasie of matter so as to form universals from particulars and to frame thoughts and speculations on such higher notions as infinity, eternity, angels, God and ‘it self’. But intellect,

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even as it beholds all the Phantasms, and Orders and Rules them at its pleasure…not only perceives, but whil’st it is its self, governs and moderates, all Concupiscences, and Floods of Passions, that are wont to be moved also within the Phantasie; and so, as it [intellect] approves these Affections, and rejects those, now excites others, now quiets them, or directs them to their right ends, the Rational Soul it self is said to exercise certain Acts of the Will or Power, by these kind of Dictates of hers [i.e., phantasie’s enunciations or phantasms], and that she her self wills or wills not, the same thing, which by her Permission or Command, the Sensitive Appetite desires or hates.47 There are three points to note about Willis’s doctrine of the soul. First, there is an identity between intellect and rational will, just as there is an identity between phantasie and sensitive appetite.48 Willis, therefore, utilized these terms as different ways of understanding psychic processes. Phantasie is a shorthand term for the non-rational power or corporeal soul that mediates changes in both the operating and control systems of the human hydraulus. But there are two parts to this process, passive/sensory and active/motor.49 During the first part of the process, the corporeal soul suffers either intrinsically derived stimuli— sympathies and antipathies—or extrinsically derived stimuli— pleasures and pains. But what follows, in the second part of the process, is a complex of affections, whereby the organ mechanisms are perturbed. The intellect is immediately aware of this perturbation and associates with it an opinion of good and evil. That opinion is an act of pure cognition and not, apart from the accessory suffering and perturbations, a passion or an affection. But in this synthesis, or ‘conjugal compact’, the psychic process is completed.50 Second, intellect and phantasie both occupy the same seat in the corpus callosum, the material substrate of imagination (see Figure 6.2). Willis conceived this mental end-organ as the dark chamber of a camera obscura with a double convex lens (‘dioptric Looking-Glasses’).51 On this model, species or informing forms are ‘intromitted’, like rays of light, through sensory nerve pipes to the focus or corpus striatum (‘objective Glass’), the material substrate of common sense. From that body they pass to the corpus callosum, where the species are represented as phantasms ‘upon a white Wall’. If a phantasm imports only knowledge of an object, it is sent for storage from the corpus callosum to the cephalic cortex, the material substrate of memory. But if, from sense or from memory, the phantasm imports either good or evil, the species are reflected from the corpus callosum to the windchest—the trunk that originates where the corpus callosum ends

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and the corpus striatum begins, continues into the corpora quadrigemina and pons, enters the spinal cord and extends to the os sacrum (see Figures 6.1 and 6.2). From the trunk, wind is admitted to one or more of the motor nerve pipes and nerve fibres implanted in the muscles, so that the good or evil may be embraced or removed. Third, even though intellect beholds phantasms and employs rational will in making use of them, there is no identity between intellect and phantasie, because the one is created by, and has its gifts from, the deity, whereas the other is ‘traduced’ by, and has her gifts from, the male parent.52 The latter gifts include, but are not limited to, the temperament or ‘Idiocrasie’ of the male and female semen—the elementary particles that constitute the two chief humours in the blood. 53 Those seminal principles, having pre-existed from the beginning of time, ‘rise up’ to the predestined form of the body by the law of creation, not by a chance concourse of atoms.54 Once inherited, however, they persist during life ‘and have their times of crudity, maturity, and defection’.55 The ‘seed plots’, therefore, produce innate predispositions, whereas ‘custom’ produces acquired dispositions, so

Figure 6.2.

Interior of the encephalon, showing part of the windchest with its pathway from below (in A) the corpus callosum and corpus striatum through the thalami, (in B) the corpora quadrigemina, (in C) the pons, and the spinal cord (cut off)

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Figure 6.3.

The control unit, showing: (A) cerebral cortex—keyboard, seat of acquired memory; (B) corpus callosum— musician’s room, seat of intellect and phantasie; (C) cerebellar cortex—barrel, seat of innate memory; (D) medullar trunk—windchest with soundboard and pipe rack (cut off), seat of reflex action

that the two together account for differences between persons as well as in the same person over time. Despite the differences, Willis identified three ways in which good and evil are brought to a person: either they respect the corporeal soul by her self, abstracted from any other relation; or they respect her as joined to the body that she ‘cherishes’; or they respect her as subdued by the rational soul.56 But phantasie tends either to obtrude beyond ‘the bounds of the Body’ or to retire from the sphere of her ‘Emanations’, since in pleasure ‘she stretches forth her self into a great Compass’ whereas in pain she contracts ‘more narrowly’; and from ‘this twofold Affection…all the other Passions [of the mind] take their Origine’.57 Phantasie, therefore, is the unregenerated person, the inconstant, undisciplined human equivalent of intellect. Adhering to the flesh, she inclines to sensual pleasures and has to be helped by the intellect, either

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by means of ethical rules or by divine favour. Intellect, therefore, is Willis’s supreme regulatory principle—the normative, regenerated person conceived as a simple, unextended ‘pure spirit’, seated, during earthly life, in the mind’s eye, like a musician seated in his organ room (see Figure 6.3). Indeed, Willis affirmed that one most subtilly Corporeal Soul, is joyned immediately to the Body, and is intimately united, and that by the intervention of this Soul, another immaterial, residing in its Bosom, inhabits the Body, and is the supream and principal form of the whole Man: But that after Death, the Corporeal Soul being extinct, this survives and is Immortal.58 CONCLUSION

From the foregoing we may conclude that Willis adopted a mystical approach to the passions. A person is both affected and not affected by a passion, which is a natural phenomenon that takes place in the person and of which she or he is aware, while at the same time the person remains unmoved and detached.59 To solve this seeming paradox, he accepted the trichotomy of Platonism, since he made a distinction between intellect (mens) as the immortal musician, phantasie (anima) as the musician’s skill, and body (mechanism) as the musician’s instrument. But Platonism is apparent also in Willis’s conception of blood (nature) as superior to mechanism (matter), because life is in the blood. As the product of intrinsic seminal sympathy, life is instinct—the gentle, even winds that blow the human hydraulus regularly, vitally and artfully in order to attain ends.60 But if intrinsic sympathy is perturbed, so too is the sympraxis between the organ mechanisms, as, for example, in laughing. As noted previously, laughter may be instigated by the vehement, uneven winds of passion, natural or preternatural. In natural passion there is a fury, and in preternatural passion, a rage of spirits in the corpus callosum. Unless restrained, therefore, these cerebral ‘storms’ excite phantasie’s emanations to blow commensurately. In a fury there is a transient delirium or frenzy (delirious excitement), whereas in a rage there is a more vehement commotion that may be temporary (delirium proper) or longer-lasting (frenzy proper).61 Although differing in force and duration, all cerebral storms are disordered mental states of acute onset, characterized by less or more confusion, disorientation, disorders of perception (hallucinations and illusions), delusions, vigilance and overactivity of psychomotor autonomic nervous system

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functions. In the case of raging storms, intellect becomes alienated; and the physician is required to intervene.62 Only when ‘itself and unalienated, therefore, can intellect, as rational free will, restrain phantasie, so that her emanations, no longer dancing ‘like mad Bacchanals’, perform regularly according to ‘certain numbers, ways and measures’. 63 Like Ion, Plato’s rhapsodist, phantasie’s skill is artful by a divine allotment that is apprehended in a non-cognitive, non-sober and, therefore, ‘mad’ intuition (obscure imagination). 64 When so inspired, phantasie, like an automaton, becomes ‘metaphysically’ excited. Conveying her divine frenzy to the rest of her emanations, sympraxis is restored; and the organ mechanisms produce harmonious music, rather than cacophonous noise. Thus we may understand Willis’s argument from design, that the music of the hydraulic organ ‘deservedly amazes us, and we acknowledge this Effect, far to Excel both the matter of the Instrument, and of the hand of the Musician striking it’.65 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Stephen Gaukroger and Bettina Wahrig-Schmidt, whose separate conferences on the passions (Sydney 1995) and on sex and the soul (Lübeck 1996) provided me with valuable opportunities to reexamine Willis’s texts from two quite different points of view. NOTES 1 ‘The Sacred Disease’ trans. J.Chadwick and W.N.Mann, Hippocratic Writings, ed. with an introduction by G.E. R.Lloyd (Harmondsworth, 1978), pp. 237–51, p. 249. 2 F.Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. A.Johnston (Oxford, 1974), p. 163. 3 H.More, Enchiridion ethicum (New York, 1930), p. 34. 4 J.Bramhall, Works (Oxford, 1844), vol. 4, p. 416. 5 See, e.g., K.M.Grange, The Ship Symbol as a Key to Former Theories of the Emotions’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine vol. 36 (1962): 512–23. 6 For biographical details, see K.Dewhurst, Thomas Willis as a Physician (Los Angeles, 1964); H.Isler, Thomas Willis 1621–1675: Doctor and Scientist (New York and London, 1968); R.G.Frank Jr., ‘Thomas Willis’, Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. C.C.Gillespie, 16 vols (New York, 1970–80), vol. 14, pp. 404–9; and the introductory matter in K.Dewhurst (ed.), Willis’s Oxford Casebook (1650–52) (Oxford, 1981), pp. 1–0. 7 I.e., Roger North (1651–1730); see J.C.Kassler, Inner Music: Hobbes, Hooke and North on Internal Character (London, 1995), p. 263. 8 E.g., P.F.Cranefield, ‘A Seventeenth Century View of Mental Deficiency and Schizophrenia: Thomas Willis on “Stupidity or Foolishness” ’, Bulletin of the

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History of Medicine vol. 35 (1961): 291–316; and J.C. Kassler, ‘On the Stretch: Hobbes, Mechanics and the Shaking Palsy’, 1543 and All That: Word and Image in the Proto-scientific Revolution, ed. G.Freeland and A.Corones (Dordrecht, 1997). Especially, T.Willis, Cerebri anatome (1664) and De anima brutorum (1670); for problematic translations, see The Remaining Medical Works of Thomas Willis…Englished by S.Pordage (London, 1681), and Two Discourses concerning the Soul of Brutes, which is that of the Vital and Sensitive of Man…Englished by S.Pordage (London, 1683) hereafter cited as Willis 1664/ 1681 and Willis 1670/1683. E.g., Willis 1670/1683, p. 3, who claimed that Descartes introduced a version of the Epicurean hypothesis when treating spirits as the essence of ‘the Soul of Brutes’. For aspects of the English response to Epicureanism, see H.Jones, The Epicurean Tradition (London and New York, 1992), pp. 186–213. See Willis 1664/1681, epistolary dedication to the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Civil War interrupted Willis’s plans to become an Anglican clergyman, according to Dewhurst, op. cit. (n. 6). Willis 1670/1683, p. 45. The pipes are not shown in Figure 6.1. A detailed account of Willis’s model (Willis 1664/1681, with modifications in Willis 1670/1683) will appear in my book, Musical Ear (in preparation). For the Hippocratic theory, see ‘The Seed and The Nature of the Child’, trans. I.M.Lonie, Hippocratic Writings, op. cit. (n. 1), pp. 317–46. For Willis’s version of the two-semen theory, see Willis 1664/1681, pp. 89, 129, 135 (‘our Hypothesis’, ‘a Paradox and very abstruse’). See also ibid., unpaginated table ‘Energy, The force, or operation, or virtue of a thing’; ‘Plastic, Formative, or that worketh and formeth’; and Note 33 below. W.Harvey, The Anatomical Exercises: De Motu Cordis [1628] and De Circulatione Sanguinis [1649] in English translation, ed. G.Keynes (New York, 1995). ibid., especially p. 157. ibid., p. 155: ‘it is no wonder if Spirits, whose nature is left so doubtfull, do serve for a common escape to ignorance: For commonly ignorant persons when they cannot give a reason for any thing, they say presently, that it is done by Spirits, and bring in Spirits as performers in all cases; and like as bad Poets do bring in the gods upon the Scene by head and ears, to make the Exit and Catastrophe of their play.’ Willis replied, 1670/1683, p. 23: ‘I shall say nothing to those, who wholly deny these Spirits, for…the exi[s]tencie of which, is almost palpable, and may be proved demonstratively by the effects.’ Willis’s doctrine of muscular motion is an inflation theory, for which see Kassler, op. cit. (nn. 7 and 13). In systole, the heart, like a blast bellows, ‘blows up’, that is, fills with blood, whereas in diastole there is an ‘explosion’ or driving out of the blood. Hence, ‘blowing up’ denotes inflation, whereas ‘explosion’ signifies blast, as when a forcible stream is driven out. For inflation and blast, see Willis 1664/1681, unpaginated table of hard words: ‘Inflated, Blown or puffed up as a Bladder with wind’; ‘Exploded, A Thrust forth, or driven out’. This usage has been ignored by commentators, who interpret Willis’s doctrine as an explosion theory; see, e.g., R.G. Frank Jr., Harvey and the Oxford

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Physiologists: Scientific Ideas and Social Interaction (Berkeley, 1980), p. 221 et seq.; R.Hierons, ‘Willis’ Place in the History of Muscle Physiology’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine vol. 57 (1964): 687–92; J.A.Bennett, ‘A Note on Theories of Respiration and Muscular Action in England c.1660’, Medical History vol. 20 (1976): 59–69, p. 65. For valves, see Willis 1664/1681, p. 149 (‘little doors’ in the trunk of the vagus nerve) and unpaginated table: ‘Valves, A part of the brain, made like folding doors so called.’ For peristaltic motion, see ibid., passim and unpaginated table: ‘Peristaltick, Motion, a certain motion compassing about, as in certain Convulsions’, i.e., in peristalsis the vessels are ‘pulled and hauled’. This motion affects not only all blood vessels (veins, arteries and ‘bosoms’, i.e., auricles and ventricles of the heart and the ‘Choroeidal Infolding’), but also ibid., p. 179, all other vessels, lymphatic and nervous. In 1808 Thomas Young (1773–1829) overturned the notion that the peristaltic contraction of the walls of the arteries was an important cause of circulation; until then, however, that notion was widely held. For blood as particulate (heap, mass), see Willis 1664/1681, pp. 80, 88, 104–5, 107, 110, 114, 123, 128–9, 131, 133–4, 136, 165. In addition to the greater circulation, distillatory processes include lesser circulations in various cisterns, separation, extraction, reduction, sublimation, conjunction and generation. For the ‘procreation’ of spirits, see Willis 1664/1681, passim, especially p. 126: ‘Spirits are procreated only in [the cortex of] the Brain [cerebrum] and Cerebel [cerebellum], from which they continually springing forth, inspire and fill full the medullar Trunk: like the Chest of a musical Organ, which receives the wind to be blown into all the Pipes…’. See also ibid., p. 90, where Willis rejected the ancient notion, still held in his day, that the meninges (the pia and dura mater) contract and, hence, pump out the spirits. For the ‘exercise’ of spirits, see ibid., p. 95 et seq., 114 et seq.. For the windchest, see ibid., passim, especially p. 124: ‘all this whole medullar Trunk, which is continued from the bottom of the Brain [cerebrum] even to the Os sacrum, seems like the Pneumatick Chest…of a pair of Organs, which includes the blast or breath destinated to every Pipe i.e., ‘act of reflection’. For nerves as pipes, i.e., poroi or channels, see Willis 1664/1681, pp. 103, 127. ‘Tube-like substance of them, like an Indian Cane’, p. 132. For background, see E.Clarke, ‘The Doctrine of the Hollow Nerve in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Medicine, Science and Culture, ed. L.G.Stevenson and R.P.Multhauf (Baltimore, 1968), pp. 123–41. For laughter, weeping and singing, see Willis 1664/1681, pp. 117, 119, 141–3, 154–5, 163, 175, and Willis 1670/1683, pp. 80–1. See R.Descartes, Treatise of Man…[1662], trans. T.S.Hall (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), who localized common sense and imagination in the cerebral ventricles and reason in the pineal gland; see also S. Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford, 1995). Against Descartes, Willis 1664/1683, pp. 97, 106, argued that the ventricles are ‘sinks’, and the pineal gland, a reservoir that receives and retains ‘serous humors deposited from the arterious blood, till the Veins being emptied…sup them back’. Until the work of Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828), the founder of ‘organology’

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(craniology), most physicians regarded the cortex as merely vascular tissue. Willis was one of the exceptions to this rule. For dual memory, see Willis 1664/1681, p. 118. For the doctrine that the encephalon proper (i.e., minus its appendix) is a double cistern, see ibid., pp. 89, 91, 101, 108, 111, 113–16, 119–20, 124–6, 132,149, passim. For organ harmony, see ibid., passim and unpaginated table: ‘Symphony, A consent or agreement in harmony’; ‘Sympraxis, A joynt exercising or agreement in practice or action; a consent of operation.’ For respiration, see ibid., pp. 11, 112, 114, 115, 123, 136, 150–5, 163–5, 174–6. Willis, ibid., p. 155, rejected the ‘received Opinion’ that the lungs are merely passive instruments, on the grounds that these wind bellows are innervated by many branches of nerves so that they feel ‘the first instincts of their motions, and…do in some measure exercise themselves, and endeavour the Systole and Diastole, and design them according to the sense of its proper necessity’. ibid., p. 155. Because laughter hinders respiration, it was of particular interest not only to Willis but also to other physicians, including R. Lower, A Treatise on the Heart (trans. K.J.Franklin), R.T.Gunther, Early Science in Oxford (Oxford, 1932), vol. 9, pp. 90–1. According to Lower (p. 245), not only respiratory but also cephalic function may be affected, because ‘the blood cannot…in laughing…be poured or driven back from the [cephalic] sinuses into the cerebral veins’. Willis 1664/1681, pp. 174–5. ibid., unpaginated table: ‘Sympathy, Is a natural passion of one thing to another, or an agreement in qualities’; ‘Sympathic, Agreeing in affections or passions’. For feelings of sympathy and antipathy (‘molestation’), see ibid., pp. 109, 114, 115–16. These feelings, which arise from the agreement or disagreement in ‘qualities’ (intrinsic elementary mixtures), are the basis of the harmony or disharmony that the involuntary nervous system brings about. Willis’s doctrine of mixture is overlooked in the otherwise excellent article by R.Y.Meier, ‘“Sympathy” in the Neurophysiology of Thomas Willis’, Clio Medica vol 17 (1982), 95–111, p. 103. Willis 1664/1681, p. 117. ibid., pp. 117, 163, 175, unpaginated table: ‘Risibility, Laughter, or the faculty of laughing’, perhaps echoing Porphyry the Phoenician, Isagoge, trans. E.W.Warren (Toronto, 1975), p. 57, passim. For a critique of Willis’s supposition, see J.Mayow, Medico-physical Works [1674] (Edinburgh and London, 1957), pp. 201–2. Willis 1664/1681, p. 88. ibid., p. 132; for the spirits’ systasis, hypostasis and metathesis, see ibid., p. 130, passim. ibid., pp. 77, 92, 111, 117–20, 123, 127, passim and Willis 1670/1683, passim. Willis thus retained the Peripatetic doctrine of species (‘forms’, ‘impressions’, ‘marks’, ‘schemes’, ‘types’), according to which movements like eddies represent the action of the transmuted ‘power’ of percussion; such action, though conceived as incorporeal, invisible and ‘spiritual’, by moving corporeal ‘instruments’ at any time becomes ‘material’. Harvey’s friend, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), deconstructed this doctrine. See Kassler, op. cit. (n. 7), p. 50 et seq.

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39 Willis 1670/1683, pp. 42–3. 40 According to Dewhurst, op. cit. (n. 6), Willis probably had a good grounding in classical medical texts. For Aristotle, see T.J.Tracy, Physiological Theory and the Doctrine of the Mean in Plato and Aristotle (Chicago, 1969). 41 E.g., Willis 1664/1681, p. 114: ‘unless by the effect it [the feeling of sympathy] cannot be known’. 42 ibid., p. 162: ‘Certainly the Works of Prudence and Vertue depend very much on the mutual commerce which happens to the Heart and the Brain [cerebrum]: because, that cogitations about the acts of the Appetite or Judgment may be rightly described, it is behoveful for the flood of the blood to be restrained in the Breast, and the inordinations of it and of the Heart itself to be governed by the Nerves…and to be composed into requisite and apt motions.’ 43 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 100a59. 44 E.g., Willis 1670/1683, pp. 39, 41, passim. 45 For the term ‘psychology’ see ibid., pp. 7, 18. According to the main and supplementary volumes of the OED, three seventeenth-century sources used the term in 1653, 1680 and 1693. Willis’s usage is not listed. 46 ibid, pp. 38–44. 47 ibid., pp. 42–3. 48 A doctrine of the identity of the will and intellect was commonly held among seventeenth-century Platonists in opposition to the received Thomistic doctrine of the real distinction of these two powers. For background, see D.W.Dockrill, ‘Spiritual Knowledge and the Problem of Enthusiasm in Seventeenth Century England’, The Concept of Spirit, ed. D.W.Dockrill and R.G.Tanner [Prudentia Supplementary Number] (Auckland, 1985), pp. 147–71; and The Heritage of Patristic Platonism in Seventeenth Century English Philosophical Theology: The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context, ed. G.A. J.Rogers, J.M.Vienne and Y.C.Zarka (Dordrecht, forthcoming). 49 Willis 1664/1681, p. 95: ‘But there happen to this [corporeal soul], because it is apt to be moved with a various impulse, and so to contract or dilate its species [emanations] in whole, or in part, for that reason divers manners both of Actions and of Passions, to wit, the Senses, which we call its Passions; and Motions, which we name the Actions of the same’. 50 Willis 1670/1683, p. 47, passim. 51 ibid., pp. 24–5, corresponding to the bodily eye, pp. 75–85. The conception of the eye as a camera obscura became commonplace after the demonstration by Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) of the retinal image by means of a camera obscura with a lens. See, e.g., T.Browne, ‘The Garden of Cyrus’ [1658], The Major Works, ed. by C.A.Patrides (Harmondsworth, 1984), pp. 376–7. 52 Willis 1670/1683, p. 42: ‘Wit, Temperament, Ingenuity, the Affections, and other Animal Faculties…proceed immediately from the Corporeal Soul, which we grant to be begotten by the Father, together with the Body, but not the Rational Soul.’ 53 Willis 1664/1681, unpaginated table, ‘Idiocrasie, The proper disposition or temperament of a thing or Body’, ‘Idiosyncrasie, The property of the temperament of Bodies’; see also Willis 1670/1683, unpaginated preface, passim. Although Willis’s doctrine of mixture is proto-chemical, he couched it in terms of ancient, especially Galenic, doctrine, ibid., pp. 105–234. The

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elementary mixtures, whether inherited or acquired, affect the fluids and containers (too wet, dry, cold, hot) and, hence, the ‘complexions’ (choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic and sanguinic) of a patient. For his doctrine of special creation, see, e.g., Willis 1670/1683, p. 30. The ‘beginning of all things proceeds wholly from divine Providence, directing Generations, to the Ends and Ideas of Forms, according to the original Types primitively ordained by the same’. ibid., pp. 204, 211,216. ibid., p. 46. From these three ways, Willis arrived at a classification of the passions in general—physical, moral and metaphysical. Regarding the second class, Willis (ibid., pp. 42–3) observed that, as the corporeal soul is ‘nearer to the Body’, she bears ‘a more intimate Kindness or Affinity towards the Flesh’ and is ‘tied wholly to look to its Profit and Conservation’. ibid, p. 48. ibid., unpaginated preface. Willis’s doctrine is close to that of Robert Boyle (1627–91), who also conceived the living body as an ‘hydraulicopneumatical engine’. For Boyle, the intellect is capable of judging when illumined by ‘the evidence of perception’—insight or ‘intuition’—because he believed that judging is performed without ‘instruments’, i.e., rules, hypotheses, theorems or conclusions in philosophy or divinity. Boyle also believed that intellect is so constituted that it has both ‘inbred’ and ‘acquired ideas and primitive axioms…by relation or analogy whereunto it judges of all other notions and propositions’. See R.Boyle, The Works, ed. T.Birch, 6 vols (London, 1965–6), vol. 5, pp. 225, 406 et seq., 717 et seq. See H.M.Gardiner, R.C.Metcalf and J.G.Beebe-Center, Feeling and Emotion: A History of Theories (New York, 1937), p. 72, for five distinct approaches to freedom from subjection to the passions: Stoic, Peripatetic, common-sense, mystic and psychological. A similar doctrine was held by the Cambridge Platonists, Ralph Cudworth (1617–88) and Henry More (1614–87). Relying on the authority of Scripture for their truth, these men, like Willis, sought to reanimate the Cartesian machine with Plato’s anima mundi—the Cambridge men’s ‘plastic nature’, ‘spirit of nature’, ‘hylarchic principle’, etc. See, e.g., R.L.Colie, Light and Enlightenment: A Study of the Cambridge Platonists and the Dutch Arminians (Cambridge, 1957), pp. 55–7, passim. Their connection to Willis seems to have been indirect, through Willis’s patient and More’s pupil, Anne Conway (1631– 79). Another patient, however, was Willis’s direct source for Scriptural authority. This was the Revd Henry Hammond (1605–60), whom Willis (1670/ 1683, pp. 40–1) described as ‘the glory of Learned Men’ (for Hammond’s medical case history, see ibid, p. 224). For delirium and frenzy, see ibid., pp. 179–87. For the Hippocratic tradition, see ‘Epidemics, Books I and III’, trans. J.Chadwick and W.N. Mann, Hippocratic Writings, op cit., (n. 1), pp. 87–138, where the term ‘delirium’ signified a temporary or transient state of being out of one’s mind. But the anonymous physician, pp. 103 and 138, also distinguished between delirium without excitement, where the patient is silent, and delirium with excitement, the signs of which include, but are not restricted to, ‘much talking, laughter, singing’. Willis 1670/1683, unpaginated preface, passim.

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63 Willis 1664/1681, p. 179; see also p. 119. 64 Plato, ‘Ion’, with an English translation by W.R.M.Lamb (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1962). See also M.H.Partee, ‘Inspiration in the Aesthetics of Plato’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 30 (1971), 87–95. 65 Willis 1670/1683, p. 33.

Index

abomination 56 action 4, 7–9, 17–32 passim Adam and Eve and the Fall 10, 49–72 passim, 115–16 Agucchi, Giovanni Battista 90 Alberti, Leon Battista 89, 99, 100 Allen, Christopher 10–11 ambition 27 Ambrose of Milan 51 anger 2, 4, 55, 56, 58, 59, 65, 134, 151, 157–8 animals 10, 49–72 passim, 82–3, 92–3 animal spirits 7, 12–13, 35, 115–38 passim, 150 appetites 22, 27, 91 Aquinas, Thomas 22, 25, 52, 75n.41, 78n.90, 90, 91, 92 Aristotle 22, 23, 24, 25, 43, 67, 71, 90, 99, 105n.6, 121, 148, 152–3, 161n.39 association 12, 133–4 Athanasius 1 audacity 56 Augustine 1, 6, 49, 51, 63, 77n.88 avarice 2 aversion 27 Ayloffe, William 53, 56, 74n.l9, 77n.88 Bacon, Francis 5–6, 55, 64, 66, 69, 72, 147 belief, 8 17–32 passim, 116 Bobbio, Norberto 65 Boehme, Jacob 54, 55 Bonaventure 52 Bossuet, Jacques 111n.65 Boyle, Robert 163n.59

Bramhall, John 147 bravery 60 Browne, Thomas 63, 67, 69, 72, 76n.63, 162n.52 Bulwer, John 57–9, 75–6n.49 Burton, Robert 1, 4, 21 Calvin, John 66 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 80 Cardan, Jerome 81 Carracci, Agostino 100 Carracci, Annibale 100, 102 Carracci, Ludovico 100 cause 18–19 Cavendish, Margaret 135 Chardin, Jean Baptiste Sim on 104 Charron, Pierre 69, 72 Chrysostom, John 50–1 Cicero 22 Clement of Alexandria 1, 4 Coles, William 74n.28 conatus 40, 41 Conway, Anne 163n.61 Cortona, Pietro da 87 Counter-Reformation 4–5 courage 57 Croll, Oswald 74n.28 Cudworth, Ralph 163n.61 Culpeper, Nicholas 54 Cureau de la Chambre, Marin 56, 57, 60, 63, 75n.34, 78n.90 Danti, Vincenzo 99 Darwin, Charles 94 Davidson, Donald 18 delight 56

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Index

Delumeau, Jean 4–5 Descartes, René 1, 6, 7, 11, 12, 13, 17, 19–26, 28, 30, 35, 59–60, 72, 80–1, 90–1, 92–3, 96–7, 101, 103–4, 105n.3, 110–11n.63, 116–18, 119– 29, 142n.44, 148, 151 desire 7, 8, 7–32 passim, 36, 37–9, 56 despair 56 Diderot, Denis 144n.76 Digby, Kenelm 136 Diogenes the Cynic 3 Domenichino 102 Donne, John 74n.20 dreams 116 dualism see Descartes Dufresnoy, Charles-Alphonse 90, 100–1 Eden, Garden of 10 Elias, Norbert 5 emotions 9, 17–32 passim, 36–8, 40, 96 endeavour 26–7,40;see also conatus envy 2, 18, 59 Epicureans 3, 6, 159n.11 Erasmus, Desiderus 4, 64 etiquette 4 faculty psychology 6 fantasy 13, 154–7 fear 25, 27, 56, 59, 60, 61, 63, 65, 83, 116, 134 Félibien, André 79, 82, 94, 98–9 Franck, Richard 74n.l8 freedom 34–45 passim Galen 148 Galileo Galilei 60 Gall, Franz Joseph 161n.28 gaudium 41–2 Gaukroger, Stephen 70 geometry 20, 34 Gibson, J.J. 121 Gilson, Etienne 91 Giotto 80 Glanville, John 136, 139n.4, 145n.l01 gluttony 2 Goya, Francisco 104 greed 55 Grene, Marjorie 121

grief 27, 134 Hacking, Ian 139–40n.16 Hammond, Henry 163n.61 Harrison, Peter 10 Harvey, William 140n.21, 147, 150 hate 18, 37, 56, 59, 116 Herbert, george 55 hilaritas 9, 35–45 passim Hill, Thomas 76n.60 Hippocrates 148, 150 history 5 Hobbes, Thomas 7, 8, 9, 17, 18, 22, 23–4, 26–9, 31, 56, 65, 75n.35, 137, 161–2n.39 Hooke, Robert 66, 136, 137, 142n.41 hope 56, 65 Hugh of St.Victor 77n.82 Hume, David 17, 18, 22, 34–5, 39, 122, 138 imagination 13, 30 intellect 13 ire see anger Irigaray, Luce 143n.62–3 James, Susan 7–8, 116, 118 Jerome, St 10, 52 joy 25, 27, 36, 37, 38, 41, 59, 87,116 judgement 4, 7 Kant, Immanuel 42 Kassler, Jamie 13, 137 Kepler, Johannes 162n.52 La Rochefoucauld, François 82 laughter 14, 151, 157 Lavater, Johann Kaspar 81 Le Brun, Charles 11, 60–1, 79–104 passim lechery 2 Leonardo da Vinci 90 Lipsius, Justus 92 Lloyd, Genevieve 8–9 Locke, John 8, 17, 18–19, 22, 23, 29– 31, 138, 145n.100 love 18, 22, 25, 27, 37, 56, 58, 59, 116, 134 Luther, Martin 55

Index McKenzie, Alan 96 Malebranche, Nicolas 12, 67, 70–1, 72, 77n.88, 115, 116, 118–19, 121, 124, 125, 129–32, 137–8 Manchini, Francesco 90 mechanism 13, 92, 115–38 passim, 147–58 passim medicine 2, 12 melancholia 1–2, 4; see also sadness memory 12, 30, 115–38 passim mercy 58 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 121 method 5–6 mimesis 99 Montaigne, Michel de 1, 3–4 Montague, Jennifer 89 More, Henry 54, 147, 163n.61 music 13, 158 nature, dominion over 10, 49 neuro-anatomy 13, 147–58 passim neuro-physiology 11–13, 115–38 passim, 147–58 passim Newton, Isaac 60 North, Roger 158n.8 Oldenburg, Henry 135 Origen 50

167

Raphael 11, 79, 96 reflex 12, 116, 133, 141n.27 Reformation 4–5 Regius, Henricus 19 Reni, Guido 102 revenge 58 Reynolds, Edward 53, 64, 67, 76n.65 Ross, Stephanie 93 sadness 36, 38, 56, 59; see also melancholia Saunders, Richard 60, 74n.28 Schmitter, Amy 60 Scholasticism 23, 35, 67, 90, 92, 96 self-control 2, 4, 5, 12, 51, 133–8 Senault, Jean-François 53, 56, 57, 67, 74n.20 sensation 30, 70–1, 91 sexual continence 4 Shapin, Steven 70 sloth 2 Smith, John 134 sorrow 37, 60, 87 Spinoza, Benedict 8–9, 34–45 passim Stoicism and Neostoicism 3, 6, 7, 8, 22, 26, 49, 68, 88, 92, 103, 147 Sutton, John 12

Paracelsus 54 Pascal, Blaise 82 passions, classification of 11, 28, 37, 56 Petrarch 1, 92 Pettus, John 54 Philo of Alexandria 3 pineal gland 35, 92, 141n.27, 160n.27 pity 18, 65 Plato and Platonism 3, 13, 63–4, 116, 148, 153, 157, 158 pleasure 41 Porta, Giambattista della 57, 58, 59, 83 Poussin, Nicolas 10, 79–80, 81, 83, 87– 9, 90, 91, 97–9, 101–4 practical reasoning 7 pride 2, 55 psychopathology 1, 2, 21

Taylor, Edward 75n.33 Testelin, Henry 83, 85

Racine, Jean 111n.63

Zarlino, Gioseffo 98

Vives, Juan Luis 52, 76–7n.70 volition see will Walker, George 75n.30 Watteau, Antione 104 Webster, John 54 White, Thomas 21 will 6, 7, 10, 17–32 passim, 36, 50, 121–38 passim Willis, Thomas 13, 147–58 passim Wittgenstein, Ludwig 78n.90, 121 wonder 37, 116, 119–29 wrath see anger Wright, Thomas 56, 57, 59, 62–3, 67, 74n.20, 77n.88