Descartes

by A. C. Grayling

  Samuel Hartlib—the Mersenne of England, in that he managed a vast correspondence among European intellectuals (and incidentally also spied for the Parliamentary cause in the English civil war)—visited the Netherlands in the winter of 1634, and recorded meeting Descartes at the house of Princess Elizabeth's mother, Princess Elizabeth Stuart.1Descartes' acquaintance with the Palatinate family at that point could not have been great; his presence at a levee or soiree, at which a visitor like Hartlib was also present, by itself does not imply intimacy, and there are no other references from that time to suggest that Descartes was a frequent visitor at either of the family's houses in the Hague and Arnhem. In 1634 Princess Elizabeth was only sixteen, although she was just in the process of being asked to marry King Wladislas IV of Poland— whom she refused because he was a Catholic and she was a Calvinist and, young though she was, she emphatically knew that she did not want to convert.

  After his defeat at the White Mountain, Elector Frederick V of the Palatinate, the putative King of Bohemia, went into exile in the Netherlands with his wife Elizabeth Stuart. She was cousin to the Prince of Orange, who accordingly gave the exiles a home and an income. Frederick died in 1632 of the plague, caught while visiting his erstwhile lands in the Palatinate, and his widow and children were left to fend for themselves. Princess Elizabeth Stuart had four sons and four daughters by this time, and although her brother was King of England (none other than Charles I) he had troubles of his own, and anyway she felt that her eldest son's claims to the Palatinate would be best served by remaining close by in the Netherlands.

  These were the family circumstances in which the gifted Princess Elizabeth grew up. She made excellent use of her time and opportunities, and even the limitations under which the family lived, by pursuing her studies. She knew six languages, including Latin, and was very good at mathematics. She read Descartes' Discourse and Essays and his Meditations, and conceived a desire to question him about the ideas they contained. She asked Alphonse de Pollot to arrange a meeting. Descartes agreed, for he had heard of her intelligence and was flattered by the interest she showed in his work. The meeting duly took place in the autumn of 1642, Descartes travelling from his home, then in Endegeest, to the Hague, along a canal which passed through "prairies and woods" and among handsome country houses.2 The meeting was repeated again the following spring, but it was not the meetings which mattered so much as the correspondence that sprang up between the two, and the fact that Elizabeth's questions inspired Descartes to produce a treatise he might not otherwise have considered writing, 77ze Passions of the Soul.

  Elizabeth's astuteness reveals itself in her question to Descartes about how, if mind and matter are so different—the first consisting essentially in thought, the second consisting essentially in spatial extension—they can interact? This was not a question that Descartes found easy to answer, and his prevarications to Elizabeth ("Well," he said, "we experience their interaction, and God knows how it works") did not satisfy her.

  A warm mutual affection arose between them. She signed her letters to him, "Your very affectionate friend," and he signed his to her, "Your devoted one." His first letter to her, though expressed in what at first looks like the conventional floweriness of courtly hyperbole, has a current of sincerity borne out by Descartes' unfailing admiration for the Princess both as mind and woman:

  The honour Your Highness does me in sending her commandments in writing is greater than I ever dared hoped for; and it is more consoling to my unworthiness than the other favour which I had hoped for passionately, which was to receive them by word of mouth, had I been permitted to pay homage to you and offer you my very humble services when I was last at the Hague. For then I would have had too many wonders to admire at the same time; and seeing superhuman sentiments flowing from a body such as painters give to angels, I would have been overwhelmed with delights like those that I think a man coming fresh from earth to heaven must feel. Thus I would hardly have been able to reply to Your Highness, as she doubtless noticed when once before I had the honour of speaking with her. In your kindness you have tried to redress this fault of mine by committing the traces of your thoughts to paper, so that I can read them many times, and grow accustomed to consider them. Thus I am less overwhelmed, but no less full of wonder, observing that it is not only at first sight that they seem perceptive, but that the more they are examined, the more judicious and solid they appear.3

  And indeed the specific question Elizabeth had raised with Descartes was a good one: how, given his commitment to the essential difference between body and mind, can the mind make the body perform voluntary actions? How, in other words, can purely thinking stuff act upon matter, or spatial stuff, such that the latter is moved to do the mind's bidding?

  The sentiment conveyed in this first letter remained in all their subsequent correspondence. At the end of 1645 he was writing in an exactly similar vein, "So seldom do good arguments come my way, not only in the conversations I have in this isolated place [he was then living at Egmond-Binnen] but also in the books that I consult, that I cannot read those which occur in Your Highness's letters without feeling an extraordinary joy."4

  In a book about their relationship, Leon Petit claims that Descartes and Elizabeth were in love with one another.5 Genevieve Rodis-Lewis is inclined to agree, though in her opinion it was not a sexual passion. Sexual passions and a considerable amount of associated turmoil were no strangers to the Palatinate household in the Hague; one of Elizabeth's sisters, Louisa, had an affair with a French adventurer, to the annoyance of one of the princesses' brothers, who arranged for a set of criminals to assassinate the adventurer, whereupon the prince himself fled from the Netherlands. This is all good tabloid matter, and as Court scandals go not a bad one, though not too uncommon either. Unluckily for Princess Elizabeth, her mother thought she had been involved in inciting her brother to plot the assassination, and arranged for her to go live with other relatives, the family of the Elector of Brandenburg in Berlin. Elizabeth left the Hague in August 1646. She and Descartes met during the course of that summer, not long before her departure, but they never saw one another again.

  Nevertheless their correspondence continued. From it one sees that the affection between them was not love in Petit's sense, but something more avuncular on Descartes' side—he was the same age as her mother—and halfway between a daughter's and a friend's on Elizabeth's side. She teased him, and disagreed with him, and sought his counsel, as well as debating with him intelligently about his views; and he advised her on how to deal with her depressions, fevers, irritations, rashes, and even constipation. More to the point, he dedicated to her his scientific textbook, The Principles of Philosophy, when it was published in 1644:

  To her Serene Highness the Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia Eldest daughter of Frederick, King of Bohemia, Count Palatine and Elector of the Holy Roman Empire.

  So Descartes begins his dedicatory epistle to Elizabeth, in it acknowledging all the claims of Frederick V and his family to the titles and territories that the Battle of the White Mountain had stripped from them. Descartes always referred to Elizabeth's mother as "the Queen"; at the very least this demonstrates his diplomatic bent, but it is a nice curiosity in view of the history of his allegiances. Did he ever tell Princess Elizabeth where he had been on 8 November 1620, when she was two years old in Hradcany Castle on the hill above Prague's Vltava River, and the army of Duke Maximilian was just a few miles away, with him in it, bent on driving her father from his possessions?

  His dedication to Elizabeth continues:

  The greatest reward which I have received from the writings I have previously published is that you have deigned to read them; for as a result they have provided the occasion for my being admitted into the circle of your acquaintance. And my subsequent experience of your great talents leads me to think that it would be a service to mankind to set them down as an example to posterity . . . when I consider that such a varied and complete knowledge of all things is to b
e found not in some aged pedant who has spent many years in contemplation but in a young princess whose beauty and youth call to mind one of the Graces rather than gray-eyed Minerva or any of the Muses, then I cannot but be lost in admiration . . . together with your royal dignity you show an extraordinary kindness and gentleness which, though continually buffeted by the blows of fortune, has never become embittered or broken. I am so overwhelmed by this that I consider that this statement of my philosophy should be offered and dedicated to the wisdom which I so admire in you—for philosophy is nothing else but the study of wisdom. And indeed my desire to be known as a philosopher is no greater than my desire to be known as your Serene Highness's most devoted servant, Descartes.6

  Dedications written in any century but the last tend to be high-flown and, when addressed to those in socially elevated positions, too toadying for our current taste. But there is something more than formula in this warm and personal eulogy. Over the next half dozen years he frequently praised Elizabeth to others and commented on her outstanding intellect; in a letter written in 1648 he said that he had composed his little treatise The Passions of the Soul "only to be read by a princess whose mental powers are so extraordinary that she can easily understand matters which seem very difficult to our learned doctors."7

  The litde treatise in question grew directly out of Elizabeth's dissatisfaction with Descartes' answer about the mind-body problem. Pressing him, she asked him to explain "the manner of [the soul's] actions and passions on the body." Her interest was not merely theoretical; she observed the effect on her health of her sensitivities and emotional states, and her interest was in part therefore practical. Her first question to Descartes about the relation of body and soul had been put in the summer of 1642, when they met; the following year she was still trying to get a straight answer out of him, and finally in September 1645 she demanded that he give "a definition of the passions." Descartes accordingly sat down and wrote a draft of the treatise, probably the first two thirds of the essay that was eventually revised, extended and published in 1649. It was the last of his works published in his lifetime.

  The Passions iterates Descartes' dualism, gives a mechanistic account of the workings of muscles and nerves, and repeats his view that the pineal gland is the place in the brain where "the soul exercises its functions more particularly than in the other parts of the body."8 "Let us therefore take it," he wrote, "that the soul has its principal seat in the small gland located in the middle of the brain. From there it radiates through the rest of the body by means of the animal spirits, the nerves, and even the blood, which can take on the impressions of the spirits and carry them through the arteries to all the limbs."9 The second part of the work considers individual passions—love and hatred, desire, hope, anxiety, jealousy, confidence, despair, irresolution, courage, remorse, joy and sadness, derision, envy and pity, indignation and anger, pride and shame. Given that Descartes was currently experiencing a number of these—not least the negative ones—in his battles over his theories at the universities of Utrecht and Leiden, he might well have claimed special expertise. He spoke too of laughter and tears, of blushing, of the difference between affection, friendship and devotion, and of the distinction between "concupiscent love and benevolent love."10 In considering the nature of the affection that subsisted between Descartes and the Princess, Rodis-Lewis cites this very distinction, claiming that what Descartes felt for the Princess was "benevolent love." She is probably right.

  "A distinction is commonly made between two sorts of love," Descartes wrote, "one called 'benevolent love,' which prompts us to wish for the well-being of what we love, and the other called 'concupiscent love,' which makes us desire the things we love. But it seems to me that this distinction concerns only the effects of love and not its essence. For as soon as we have joined ourselves willingly to some object, whatever its nature may be, we feel benevolent towards it—that is, we also join to it willingly the things we believe to be agreeable to it: this is one of the principal effects of love . . . We may, I think, more reasonably distinguish kinds of love according to the esteem which we have for the object of love, as compared with ourselves. For when we have less esteem for it than ourselves, we have only a simple affection for it; when we esteem it equally with ourselves, that is called friendship'; and when we have more esteem for it, our passion may be called 'devotion.'"11

  The most remarkable part of the transactions between Descartes and Elizabeth lies in a series of letters they exchanged from July 1645 onwards in which they discussed Seneca's De Vita Beata, "On the Happy Life." Descartes proposed it to Elizabeth as a help to her in the difficult circumstances of ill-health and family pressures then besetting her, but he did so before he had read it properly himself, so when he next wrote he said that he had come to think it was not sufficiently rigorous to serve as the subject of their discussion. He therefore begins (rather characteristically) by telling her how Seneca should have discussed the topic. In subsequent letters he examines Seneca's arguments, iterating his complaint that the ancient author does not express himself accurately and does not properly understand what he wished to say; and after a while he abandons him altogether and sets out his own lebensphilosophie instead. The account he gives is as follows.

  Happiness, he tells the Princess, consists in "perfect contentment of mind and inner satisfaction." The key question is how this contentment is to be attained. The things that promote it, Descartes says, fall into two classes: those that depend on our minds, such as wisdom and virtue, and those that depend on factors outside ourselves, such as honours, wealth and health. Echoing the acknowledgement of Aristotle that it is easier to be happy when fortunate in one's circumstances, he observes that "a person of good birth who is healthy, and lacks nothing, can enjoy a more perfect contentment than one who is poor, ill and deformed, granting that both are equally virtuous and wise." But even though this is so, "a small cup can be just as full as a large one, even though it contains less liquid; likewise if we regard everyone's contentment as the full satisfaction of his desires, duly regulated by reason, I do not doubt that those who are poorest and least blessed by fortune, can be as fully contented and satisfied as anyone else, even though they do not have as many good things."12

  And anyone can be contented if he respects three conditions: first, if he tries to use his reason as well as he can when thinking what to do in the various circumstances he finds himself in; secondly, if he firmly adheres to what reason thus recommends, without being distracted by his passions and appetites—"virtue, I believe, consists precisely in firmly holding to this resolution"—and lastly, if he remembers that "all the good things he does not possess are all entirely outside his power."13 Descartes claims that these three principles are related to the rules of morality he had set out in his Discourse on Method.

  In adhering to these principles, Descartes continues, there are four truths that are most useful to us. The first is that there is a God on whom all things depend, who is infinitely perfect, all-powerful, and cannot be disobeyed. This teaches us to be calm in the face of everything sent by God to test us. The second is that our souls exist independently of the body, are much nobler than the body, and are capable of enjoying satisfactions not found in the physical world; which prevents us from being afraid of death, and warns us against attaching too great affection to things of this world. Thirdly, we must entertain an idea of the immensity of the universe, which is God's creation, and marvel at the fact that it exists wholly for our service. Fourthly, we must consider that although we are each individuals, yet we are all connected to one another, and our interests are so interwoven that the whole must be regarded as more important than each part. "If someone considers himself to be part of the community, he delights in doing good to everyone," Descartes observes, "and does not hesitate even to risk his life in the service of others when the occasion demands. So this consideration is the source and origin of all the most heroic actions done by men."14

  These pious thoughts provid
e a Christianisation of what, until Descartes introduces them, is in substance a version of Stoic practical morality. The "three conditions" to be observed in attaining contentment would not be out of place in the writings of the two great later Stoic teachers, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. But the last of the "four truths" is not specific to any religion or ethical view, but is wholly general in the way it premises the interconnectedness of the human family. However much of a cliche this is, it has the merit of being a worthy one. Descartes was not, as the foregoing shows, always able to put it into practice in his dealings with others.

  Elizabeth's witty and intelligent younger sister Sophie—who later married Ernest-August of Hanover, and gave him a son, George-Louis, who in 1714 became King George I of England—gave a pen-portrait of Elizabeth at the time of her friendship with Descartes: "My sister, who is called Madame Elizabeth . . . loves to study, but all her philosophy cannot keep her from chagrin when the circulation of her blood causes her nose to turn red . . . She knows all the languages and all the sciences, and has a regular commerce with Monsieur Descartes, but this thinker renders her a bit distracted, which often makes us laugh."15

  One reason for Descartes' enjoyment of Elizabeth's intellect was that—as indeed she herself noted in her letter thanking him for the dedication of The Principles of Philosophy—her intellect was unspoiled by Aristotelian philosophy. Her sharp, receptive intelligence doubtless made a refreshing change from the prejudices of the traditionalists who opposed his ideas in their universities. It is an interesting consideration that, even as those battles raged, he was discussing Seneca, the happy life, and the passions of the soul with her.