Abstract

DESCARTES IS USUALLY CREDITED WITH THE INAUGURATION of modern philosophy. This inauguration consists in a mathematical-mechanical understanding of physics and a concern with human self-consciousness. The Passions of the Soul treats, however, fleetingly, that being which can be regarded as both an object of the mathematical physicist and of the speculative philosopher—“de toute la nature de l’homme.” The peculiarity, if not uniqueness, of this subject, who is discontinuous with the rest of nature, implies that Descartes’ words in the preface—“mon dessein n’a pas est d’expliquer les Passions en Orateur, ny mesme en Philosophe moral, mais seulement en Physicien”—cannot be wholly accurate, if only because man is not simply a physical being in the Cartesian sense. Cartesian physics does away with the final cause an explanation in physics: yet the final cause, the end, is fundamental to any discussion of desire, which is essentially futural, that is, goal directed or purposive. And it is only by virtue of desire that any action results from the passions of the soul. It is thus not simply efficient causation that regulates the activity of man taken as a whole: Descartes speaks of “le machine de nostre corps” but not of “la machine qui est l’homme.”