Loving the imageless: Descartes on the sensuous love of God

ABSTRACT

Descartes claims that we can love God sensuously. However, it is prima facie unclear how this is possible, given that he is also committed to the impossibility of sensing or imagining God. In this essay, I show that Descartes has the metaphysical and psychophysical resources necessary to alleviate this tension. First, I discuss Descartes’s account of the intellectual love of God, demonstrating that the intellectual love of God constitutively involves the love of God’s creation. Second, I argue that an image of God’s creation is sufficient for communicating the intellectual love of God to the body, so as to produce a sensuous love of God. And third, I discuss Descartes’s reasons for developing an account of the sensuous love of God.

KEYWORDS:

• Descartes
• God
• love
• passions
• body

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Abbreviations to editions of Descartes’s works are: AT: Oeuvres de Descartes, Vols. I-XII and Supplement. Edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. Paris: Leopold Cerf, 1897–1913; CSM: The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vols. I and II. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985; CSMK: The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. III. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, Anthony Kenny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

It should be noted that there has been considerable attention paid to Descartes’s account of love, but quite little committed to his account of the conditions that make the love of God possible. For a sampling of the available literature, see: Alanen, “Self and Will in Descartes’s Account of Love,” 2019; Beavers, “Desire and Love in Descartes’s Late Philosophy,” 1989; Boros, “Love as a Guiding Principle,” 2003; Brown, Descartes and the Passionate Mind, 2016; Frierson, “Learning to Love,” 2002; Frigo, “A very obscure definition,” 2015; Kambouchner, “Spinoza and the Cartesian Definition of Love,” 2019; Kambouchner, Lettres sur l’amour, 2013; Kambouchner, L’Homme des passions: Commentaires sur Descartes, Tome I, 1995, Tate, “Imagining Oneself as Forming a Whole with Others,” 2021; Tate, “Love in Descartes’s Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy,” 2020; Wee, “Self, Other, and Community in Cartesian Ethics,” 2002.

2. This view conflicts with Deborah Brown’s claim that Descartes is committed to the impossibility of a sensuous love of God. She claims that it is “God’s lack of embodiment that […] precludes us from having a sensuous love for Him” (Brown, 2016, 162).

Surprisingly little has been written about Descartes’s account of the love of God. A few exceptions include: Alanen, “Descartes and Spinoza on the Love of God,” 2016 and Brown and Normore, “Larger Than Life,” 2019. That said, of what has been written, quite little has been said about the conditions for the possibility of such a love, either intellectually or sensuously. This paper, thus, aims to fill a gap in the secondary literature.

3. This principle is stated elsewhere, too. See: AT IV 293–294.

4. This argument is further supported by his comments to Elisabeth of Bohemia: “[T]o conceive the union between two things is to conceive them as one single thing” (AT III 692). But by the same logic offered above, we would never be able to conceive of ourselves and God as one single thing.

5. This is also noted in Hatfield, “The Passions of the soul and Descartes’s machine psychology,” 12.

6. This is noted in Tate, “Imagining Oneself as Forming a Whole with Others,” 6. As Tate correctly notes, this is in conflict with both Marion (1991, 209) and Matheron (1988, 434), who maintain that sensuous love is essentially joining in volition.

7. I hope to sidestep any controversies over whether sensuous passions are primarily representational or primarily motivational. There is a rich literature on this subject, and I cannot engage in the topic, here, for fear of getting sidetracked. But roughly, I operate along the lines that passions are representational perceptions that (at the very least) can motivate the will, insofar as they represent objects as good, bad, or worthy of further attention. I take them as motivational, since the will is something that is drawn to the good. And if passions represent objects as good (or not), the will can be drawn to assent. For more on this debate, see: Jayasekera, “’All in Their Nature Good’: Descartes on the Passions of the Soul,” 2021; Brassfield, “Never Let the Passions be Your Guide,” 2012; Greenberg, “Descartes on the Passions: Function, Representation, and Motivation,” Greenberg, 2007.

8. This reciprocal relation between intellectual emotions and sensuous passions is noted well by Denis Kambouchner in his insightful work, L’homme des passions : commentaire sur Descartes, Tome I, Kambouchner, 1995. He notes that “D’où résultera cette condition décisive: empiriquement, dans le concret de l’expérience interne, l’émotion intellectualle et la passion s’ensuivront de si près l’une de l’autre qu’elles paraîtront à l’âme ne former ensemble qu’une seule et même affection[…]. Mais en tant que nous sommes composés d’une âme et d’un corps, nous ne sommes pas simplement capables de ressentir les unes ou les autres: elles sont ‘ordinairement’ jointes ensemble de la même façon, et du fait même, que notre âme est jointe avec notre corps, et qu’une fois joints certains mouvements ou dispositions intérieures du corps avec certaines pensées, le retour des unes ne peut guère manquer de causer celui des autres [Hence this decisive condition will result: empirically, in the concrete of internal experience, intellectual emotion and passion will follow so closely from each other that they will appear to the soul to form together one and the same affection […]. But in so far as we are composed of a soul and a body, we are not merely capable of feeling one or the other: they are ‘ordinarily’ joined together in the same way, and by the very fact that our soul is joined with our body, and that once certain movements or interior dispositions of the body are joined with certain thoughts, the return of the one can hardly fail to cause that of the other” (356).

9. I borrow this example from Gary Hatfield, since it figures so usefully in two of his papers: Hatfield, “The Passions of the Soul and Descartes’ machine psychology,” Hatfield, 2007; Hatfield, “Did Descartes Have a Jamesian Theory of the Emotions,” Hatfield, 2008. The comments I offer here are broadly consistent with the view he defends in both of these papers.

10. We get a similar image in a letter to Elisabeth, only Descartes is “zooming-in,” as it were. Descartes writes, “After acknowledging the goodness of God, the immortality of our souls and the immensity of the universe, there is yet another truth that is, in my opinion, most useful to know. That is, that though each of us is a person distinct from others, whose interests are accordingly in some way different from those of the rest of the world, we ought still to think that none of us could subsist alone and that each one of us is really one of the many parts of the universe, and more particularly a part of the earth, the state, the society and the family to which we belong by our domicile, our oath of allegiance and our birth. And the interests of the whole, of which each of us is a part, must always be preferred to those of our own particular person[…]” (AT IV 293; CSMK 266).

11. Descartes says something similar to the Principles passage in his letter to Chanut, “[God sees] with a single thought all that has been, all that is, all that will be, and all that could be” (AT IV 608; CSMK 309).

12. For more on the relationship between God’s attributes, see Alice Sowaal’s paper, “Descartes’ Reply to Gassendi: How We Can Know All of God, All at Once, But Still Have More to Learn about Him,” 2011.

13. For more on the causal feedback loops that are produced by passions, see: Schmitter, “’I’ve Got a Little List’: Classification, Explanation, and the Focal Passions in Descartes and Hobbes,” 2017. There she attends to Descartes’s innovative inclusion of ‘wonder’ in his list of primitive passions.

14. For a more extended discussion on regret and repentance in Descartes, see: Brassfield, “Descartes and the Danger of Irresolution,” 2013 and Blessing, “What’s Done, is Done: Descartes on Resoluteness and Regret,” 2013.

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Notes on contributors

Zachary Agoff

Zachary Agoff is a PhD candidate in the Philosophy Department at the University of Pennsylvania. He works primarily in the history of early modern philosophy, and much of his work engages with theological themes within that period.