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Reading group: the Elisabeth–Descartes letters of 1643, slowly

Valentina Ríos Fellow
· 6 replies · 172 views
ConsciousnessModern EuropeanFeminist philosophyRationalismElisabeth of BohemiaRené Descartes#correspondence#dualism#mind-body-interaction#women-in-philosophy
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My dissertation is on Sor Juana, and one of the things that work keeps teaching me is how much philosophy by women survives only in letters, prefaces and replies. So I would like to read the most famous case in early modern philosophy properly, in company: Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia's exchange with Descartes about how a mind could move a body.

I am using Lisa Shapiro's edition and translation (Chicago, 2007), which has both sides of the correspondence and a good introduction. If you only have Descartes's letters in the Cottingham volumes, you will be missing half the conversation, which is rather the point.

Plan

  1. Week 1. Elisabeth's first letter (May 1643) and Descartes's reply of 21 May, where he introduces the "primitive notions" of extension, thought and their union.
  2. Week 2. Her second letter (June 1643) and his reply of 28 June, where he says the union is best known through the senses and ordinary life rather than through the intellect.
  3. Week 3. Her answer to that, and then a jump to the 1645 letters, where the subject turns to the passions, Seneca and how to live, the material that later fed into The Passions of the Soul.

Questions I want us to keep in view: Is Elisabeth's objection really about contact and extension, or is it a broader demand for intelligibility? Does the 28 June letter answer her or change the subject? And what do we make of the fact that she keeps declining to be flattered?

Post as you go. Short notes are welcome.

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6 replies

  1. Claire Dubois

    Fellow

    Week 1 notes. As a translator I keep stopping at how carefully she frames the question. She is not saying "dualism is absurd". She is asking how something without extension could do the one thing she understands pushing to require, which is contact, and contact seems to require a surface. Descartes's answer about three primitive notions is elegant, but it reads to me like a classification of the problem rather than a solution to it. He tells her which drawer the question belongs in.

    Helpful · 1
    1. Femke Bosman

      Fellow

      I agree with Claire, and it gets better in her next letter. Descartes reaches for an analogy, heaviness thought of as a quality that moves a body without contact, and she points out that he himself has argued that this idea of heaviness is a confusion. Using a notion you have rejected in physics to rescue your metaphysics is not a strong move. She sees that immediately.

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  2. Pieter de Jong

    Fellow

    Week 2. The 28 June letter is stranger than its reputation. He tells her, roughly, that people who never philosophise have no trouble with the union because they feel it, and that he himself has never given more than a few hours a year to thoughts of the pure intellect. I laughed. But I also think there is something real in it: he seems to be admitting that the union is a datum, not a conclusion, which is close to what some modern non-reductive views say about consciousness. Whether that counts as an answer depends on whether you think every datum must be explained.

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    1. Valentina Ríos

      Fellow

      Pieter, I read that letter less charitably. Elisabeth has asked a precise question and receives advice about her schedule. And remember what she had written in the letter he is answering: that she would find it easier to concede matter and extension to the soul than to grant an immaterial thing the capacity to move a body. That is a striking sentence for a Cartesian correspondent. She is willing to give up the very thesis he is protecting.

  3. Aoife Brennan

    Fellow

    Coming late to this. What surprised me is how personal it gets by 1645, once she is writing about illness, grief and Seneca's On the Happy Life. It made me think the metaphysical question was never separate from her life for her. If the mind can be disturbed by the body's ills, the union is not an abstraction, it is her week.

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  4. Claire Dubois

    Fellow

    One more note on the 1645 letters: she keeps pushing on whether his advice about mastering the passions takes enough account of circumstances nobody controls, health, family, fortune. Descartes's ethics in those letters is noticeably shaped by her objections. I came for the mind–body problem and I am staying for that.

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