Passions of the SoulRené Descartes
About Passions of the Soul
Descartes published in 1649, the year before his death. It is his most sustained treatment of the relation between mind and body, and his only systematic account of the emotions.
The passions, Descartes argues, are perceptions of the soul caused by motions in the body, specifically by the movement of "animal spirits" through the nerves to the pineal gland, where the soul interacts with the body. He identifies six primitive passions: wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness. All other emotions are compounds or species of these six.
The work is not merely classificatory. Descartes wants to know how the soul can govern the passions. His answer: not by direct command (the will cannot simply abolish an emotion) but by redirecting attention and associating new thoughts with the bodily movements that produce passion. A person who feels fear on the battlefield cannot will the fear away but can fix the mind on reasons for courage until new habits form.
The treatise was written for Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, whose questions about the mind-body union pushed Descartes to address what the had left unresolved. It remains the first modern attempt to treat the emotions as natural phenomena susceptible to systematic analysis.