Summary: Passions of the Soul

This work is divided into three parts:

I/ The passions in general

II/ The six primitive passions

III/ The particular passions

The study of the passions is not difficult, since everyone can feel them within themselves. Yet, Descartes argues, the Ancients said little about them.

Action and passion designate one and the same thing, but which is called differently according to whether it is considered from the point of view of the agent or the patient: what is a passion of the soul is commonly an action of the body.

A preliminary question needs to be asked: how do we know what belongs to the body and what belongs to the soul?

Descartes maintains that what we can conceive of belonging to an inanimate body belongs to the body, while the rest belongs to the soul. Thus thought belongs to the soul because we do not conceive that the body thinks in any way ¹. Conversely heat and movement belong to the body because they can be found in objects such as a candle.

Contrary to Aristotle, Descartes asserts that the soul is not the principle of the body's movement. The body has its own movement, which ceases at death.

Descartes describes examples of the body's movement, to show how the machinery of our body is composed ².

So food goes down into the stomach: the juice mixes with the blood and increases its quantity.

In the heart, blood passes from the vena cava on its right side to the lung, then into the left side of the heart, ending up in the great artery that leads to the whole body.

The movements of the limbs depend on the muscles, as well as the nerves, which are little pipes coming from the brain and contain a very subtle wind, which are called "animal spirits".

Descartes maintains that there is a continual heat in our heart, which is a kind of fire that the blood of the veins maintains, and this fire is the bodily principle of all the movements of our limbs ³.

Only the most subtle parts of the blood enter the brain, the animal spirits, which are only bodies, very small and moving very fast ⁴. They activate muscles by contact (spirits that come from the brain push those that were in the muscle).

Three things determine the course of the animal spirits, hence the reactions of the body: our will, the objects of the senses and the machinery of our body.

The objects of the senses move the end of the nerve, which moves the other end in the brain (like a rope) and with it, the animal spirits.

The objects of the senses are sources of motion in as many diverse ways as they make us see diversity in things ⁵. The bell and the torch are perceived differently because they excite two different movements in our nerves.

The machinery of our body is responsible for all the movements we make without our will contributing to them ⁶ (e.g. breathing, digestion...).

This type of movement is produced by the course that animal spirits naturally follow in our bodies, in the same way that the movement of a watch is produced by the sheer force of its spring and the figure of its wheels ⁷.

So we have just determined what belongs to the body alone, but what belongs to the soul? Our thoughts ⁸. We distinguish two kinds of thoughts, those that are actions of the soul (will and imagination) and those that are passions of the soul (perception, knowledge, imagination).

Imagination can fall into either genre because we ourselves create fictions and other dreams, but sometimes this is not the case, as in the example of mirages.

All this allows Descartes to define his object of study: the passions of the soul are perceptions, or sentiments, or emotions of the soul which are caused by some movement of the minds ⁹.

The soul is not situated in this or that part of the body but joined to the whole body. For this reason one cannot conceive of half or a third of a soul or what extent it occupies ¹⁰. Nevertheless there is one part of the body where the soul exercises its functions more particularly than in all the others ¹¹: the pineal gland, a small gland situated in the centre of the brain, suspended in such a way that the slightest changes which occur in the course of the spirits can do much to change the movements of this gland ¹².

¹ Passions of the Soul, article 4
² article 7
³ article 8
⁴ article 10
⁵ article 13
⁶ article 16
⁷ ibid.
⁸ article 17
⁹ article 27
¹⁰ article 30
¹¹ article 31
¹² ibid.