8The Love between Body and Soul

Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback

PLATONIC LOVE: THIS is perhaps the epithet one is most likely to hear in a discussion about Descartes and love. Descartes defines and discusses love in his Passions of the Soul. However, most of his thoughts on love are found in letters to his friend Pierre Chanut. Moreover, there are also his letters to Princess Elisabeth, letters of affection, dedicatory letters of devotion, the modes of love he describes in Passions. Descartes’s letters to Elisabeth are love letters, letters that represent a philosophical emotion. For the sake of sketching out Descartes’s conception of love, we should look at Descartes’s love letters and letters on love.

The correspondence with Princess Elisabeth is regarded as exemplar correspondence since it “has been accomplished as specific genre.”¹ Descartes met Elisabeth in The Hague and became impressed with her beauty, grace, sensibility, philosophical intelligence, and “admirable mind.” In his letters to her, Descartes always confesses his admiration, affection, and devotion. No explicit declaration of love can be found in these letters, and as commonly claimed, these letters should be read above all as testimony of Descartes’s view of philosophy as an activity for everyone, including women, an expression of his revolt against scholars and erudition.² But there are passages on “love” in these letters, and it is difficult to deny that these letters are moved by love, even if very much unconfessed.

In the first of the two letters on love that Descartes wrote to Chanut, Descartes reveals a certain strategy. He says:

It is true that the custom of our speech and the courtesy of good manners does not allow us to tell those whose condition is far above ours that we love them; we may say that we respect, honour, esteem them, and that we have zeal and devotion for their service. I think that the reason for this is that friendship between human beings makes those in whom it is reciprocated in some way equal to each other, and so if, while trying to make oneself loved by some great person, one said that one loved him, he might think that one was treating him as an equal and so doing him wrong. But philosophers are not used to give different names to things which share the same definition, and I know no other definition of love save that it is a passion which makes us join ourselves willingly to some object, no matter whether the object is equal or greater or less than us.³

The strategy he uses when the beloved has a “condition far above ours” is to speak about devotion, admiration, wonder, and affection instead of confessing love and the desire of being together. One of the main threads in Descartes’s correspondence to Elisabeth is about the unity of body and soul, indeed, about their togetherness. It can be said that the main subject of these letters is love, and indeed the love between body and soul, what makes one join willingly the other. Maybe there is a coded fable in Descartes’s writings about the love of body and soul.

Cartesian love as the love between body and soul: this fable can be read to a certain extent in the letters on love that Descartes wrote to Pierre Chanut, his diplomat friend who served in Stockholm and through whom Descartes was brought to Sweden in 1649 to teach Christina, the queen of the “land of bears and ice,” and where Descartes would meet his death. Chanut wrote to Descartes on December 1, 1646, in request of Christina who was wondering about some subjects and desired to receive the philosopher’s answer. Her wanderings were formulated in three questions: What is love? Does the natural light by itself teach us to love God? Which is worse if immoderate and abused, love or hatred? Descartes responds to these questions in two letters, dated February 1, 1647, and May 11 of the same year. In these letters, which consist primarily of thoughts that will be published in Passions, Descartes begins by answering the first question by means of a distinction between rational and sensuous love. Rational love is exemplified by love to knowledge and love of knowledge. It consists in the joining willingly what the soul perceives as good, either present or absent; if present, then the “movement of the will” that accompanies the knowledge is joy; if absent, then this movement is sadness. What concedes rationality to this love of and on knowledge is the transparency of the movements of its will, of its joy and sadness, for nothing “could fail to be perfectly aware, provided it reflected on its own thoughts.”⁴ Although distinct from rational love, sensuous love is not its opposite. Thus, “since our soul is joined to the body, this rational love is commonly accompanied by the other kind of love, which can be called sensual or sensuous.”⁵ Sensuous or sensual love is a “confused thought, aroused in the soul by some motions of the nerves,”⁶ but it is from this confusion (which we shall not forget is for Descartes a “thought”) that “makes it disposed to have the other, clearer, thought which constitutes rational love.” As much as a chaos must be invented for the sake of reaching Cartesian order, which Jean-Luc Nancy, based on his attentive reading of the Cartesian text, inspiringly called a chaogito,⁷ sensuous love or confused thought is what disposes one to have the clearer thought called “rational love.” Descartes described sensuous or sensual love as a “mysterious heat” felt around the heart that, combined with the feeling of a great abundance of blood in the lungs, “makes us open our arms as if to embrace something and this inclines the soul to join itself willingly the object presented to it.”⁸ Even if Descartes considers the possibility of having a “feeling of love” without any object and of joining willingly something without feeling love, he connects very clearly sensuous or sensual love to rational love and to the feeling of a “mysterious heat around the heart.” He says very explicitly that “these two loves occur together; for the two are so linked that when the soul judges an object to be worthy of it, this immediately makes the heart disposed to the motions which excite the passion of love.”⁹ Precisely when acknowledging this intimate link between the two kinds of love, Descartes revisits his recurrent thought that, because of the “soul’s natural capacity for union with a body,” there is an association between thoughts and certain motions or conditions of the body, so that when the same conditions occur in the body, the soul tends to have the same thought as much as the same thought occurring in the soul may provoke the same conditions in the body. With this thought, Descartes describes the e-motion, the moving that characterizes the act of thinking, connecting it to the link between rational and sensual love. He also compares this reciprocal relation of thoughts provoking emotions in the body and the body provoking thoughts to how we, learning a language, connect letters or the pronunciation of certain words, the material side of language, with their meanings, with thoughts, and this connection is such that when we later hear the same words, we conceive the same things.¹⁰

Descartes pursues his thoughts on love as the love of body and soul, proposing a theory of the birth of love from the first moment of life. Astonishingly, the first moment of life for Descartes is not the moment of “birth” but the embryonic moment of life in pregnancy. Descartes proceeds from this first moment of life before birth, unborn life. It is in this embryonic stage that he encounters the first moment of the union of body and soul, which is according to him a moment of joy.¹¹ The first—embryonic and pregnant—passion of this union is joy, and love arises from joy, what does not exclude that from this first joy, also hatred and sadness arise. “I think that the soul’s first passion was joy, because it is not credible that the soul was put into the body at a time when the body was not in a good condition; and a good condition of the body naturally gives us joy.”¹² These four passions: joy, love, hatred, and sadness are the only passions “we had before our birth.”¹³ It is quite interesting to follow how Descartes describes the “birth of love,” so to speak, in unborn or pregnant life. He reveals his thinking, “I say that love followed because the matter of our body is in a perpetual flux like water in a stream, and there is always need for new matter to take its place.”¹⁴ Because in pregnant embryonic life (i.e., in the invisibility of the inner body) life is first of all nourishing, where the soul unites itself willingly to a new matter, Descartes identifies love already in the most elementary stage of life as confused sensations provoking heats in the body: “sensations of our childhood, which remain joined with the rational thoughts by which we love what we judge worthy of love.” In these letters, love is connected to an extension of life that goes beyond life, currently experienced as the interval between birth and death. As Cecilia Sjöholm discussed in the previous chapter, Descartes connects love to the pregnancy of life but also to how probable it is that there is life on other planets, as soon as the indefinite extension of the world is accepted.¹⁵ Love extends the unity of body and soul to before birth and to life beyond the earth. But what is important to keep in mind here for the sake of our discussion, is how love is linked to a perpetual flux “like the water in a stream,” to a movement in motion that stretches back and forth, before and beyond oneself. This explains how Descartes finds an answer to the second question posed by Christina—namely, if natural light by itself can teach us to love God. Love of God poses the problem of how to argue for the intimate connection between the rational and sensuous, or sensual, in relation to God, if God cannot be an object or something that can be encountered as we encounter things and beings to love. Thus, to say that one loves God as one loves someone is to make of God an idolatry, an action akin to Ixion in the passage from the Satires by Horace,¹⁶ as Descartes recalls, who embraced a cloud mistaking it for the Queen of the Gods.¹⁷ Descartes considers that “the way to reach the love of God is to consider that he is a mind or a thing that thinks.”¹⁸ Instead of trying to imagine or figure God as something, the absolute spiritual essence of God must be accepted, and, indeed, that God is a thing that thinks, “une chose qui pense,” the thinking act in its infinite movement and force. To love God is to love he who cannot be imagined and thereby sensuously experienced, but who, to be loved, must be sensed or experienced—thus love, as Descartes insists, is the connection between rational and sensuous love—“we can imagine our love itself, which consists in our wanting to unite ourselves to some object.”¹⁹ Love of God is a certain love of love in which we experience ourselves as a “minute part of all the immensity of the created universe,”²⁰ as “earth is smaller than the whole sky and a grain of sand in regard to a mountain.”²¹ It is in the experience of the infinity of God and the immensity of the created universe, and further, in the corresponding experience of the human being as a “minute part of all immensity,” that love as desire to joining willingly to another, indeed to the other, using a more contemporaneous expression, shows its rational-sensuous nature. Thus, the rational dimension of love becomes itself sensuous as much as the sensuous becomes rational—that is, insofar as the confused thought that sensual love becomes clear and transparent of its own confusion. The question about loving God is therefore not a question of loving what is invisible or unimaginable but of loving what is much bigger than us, what is unequal in relation to who is in love since love makes everything equal, for love is reciprocity, an action that is acted by its action, hence at once action and passion, indeed, the very meaning of passion for Descartes.

The third question, whether love or hatred is worse if immoderate, Descartes answers more conclusively, admitting that “if I am asked which of the two passions carries us to greater excesses, and makes us capable of doing more harm to other people, I think I must say that it is love.”²² Because love, for Descartes, has more force and strength than hatred. Relating again to the “origin” of both love and hatred from pregnant life, which discovers love when the purest blood flows in the veins toward the heart and sends a great quantity of animal spirits to the brain, love gives then much more force, strength, and courage, whereas hatred produces bitterness of the gall and sourness of the spleen.²³ But the main argument for considering love more dangerous than hatred is the degree of attachment to its object, for it can give rise to hatred for many others.²⁴ For it seems that the greatest evils of love are produced or permitted “by the sole pleasure of the loved object or for oneself,”²⁵ something Descartes finds exemplified in Paris’s love for Helen, and he continues to quote several lines of verse from the contemporaneous French baroque poet and dramaturge Théophile de Viau, who wrote in his Stances pour Mademoiselle de M. the following:

How fine, ye Gods, the deed of his desire,

How fair his victim’s fame,

When noble Paris put all Troy to fire

To quench his own heart’s flame.²⁶

Despite these serious dangers of love, Descartes does not fail to recognize that “the greatest and most tragic disasters can be . . . seasoning for an immoderate love [it] makes it more delicious the more they raise its price.”²⁷

Finally, it is important to reemphasize that in Descartes’s thoughts on love, he always connects love to a heat felt in the heart. In Passions, Descartes accounts for how thoughts are embodied, how they are connected to physical, bodily sensations and movements. It is a treatise on how the soul and the body act on each other, how one moves the other, how they are in love with each other. Descartes reverses a series of beliefs on this relation. He asserts that it is not the soul that gives movement and heat to the body, but the body that can give movement and heat to the soul, so that when the body dies and becomes incapable of movement and heat, the soul moves to leave the body.²⁸ He also denies the common belief that the heart is the seat of passions, showing what really happens—namely, that the passions make us feel some change in the heart²⁹—indeed, a heat in the heart. However, love is always described as connected to the heart, to a certain strong movement of the blood and the spirits, which warms the heart in such an intensity that “the spirits sent by the heart to the brain have parts that are coarser and more agitated than usual; and as they strengthen the impressions formed by the first thought of the loved object, these spirits compel the soul to dwell upon this thought. This is what the passion of love consists in.”³⁰

Love is not something that happens in the heart, but it burns the heart. Though Descartes spoke rarely on love and mostly did so in his letters, the heart is for him a subject of passionate interest and intellectual inquiry in several works. From the most physiological to the most metaphysical inquiries, Treatise of Man and Passions, we see evidence of Descartes’s wonder for the heart. It is through the beating of the heart that Descartes becomes aware both of the circulating winds he called “animal spirits” and of the blood’s circulation. He is, moreover, surprised and moved to inquire how the heartbeat is an involuntary movement, something close to what today is called “reflex,” distinct from other bodily movements produced voluntarily.³¹ The heart beats when it “wants,” so to speak, revealing a self-motion within the moving body, a very strange “thing” between the animal and the machine. The physiology of the body astonishes Descartes, and he remains convinced that if the heart is “le grand resort,”³² upon which the movement of the muscles depend, its movement is of another sort than the movements that can be described as displacement; the movement of the heart is a heat. In Treatise of Man, the Cartesian heart is treated as the “seat of a continuous fire.” The Cartesian heart is moreover described as a “fire without light.”³³

In a careful reading of Descartes, it is possible to discover what Cartesian love would mean—namely, the love between the body and the soul, that warms the heart, which is itself a seat of continuous fire, a fire without light, a heat-warming fire. It is also possible to discover that the separation of body and soul, of that which is an extensive and external thing and what is an interior and intensive thing, indeed shows what Nancy’s reading of Descartes showed with such clarity—that the Cartesian body is an extension of the soul, pure exposition, an inside that is entirely outside.³⁴ However, Descartes was, without question, Monsieur Descartes, a man of écarts, and the Cartesian philosophical gesture is a gesture of écartements, of distancing. He does not leave the world behind or deny it; but he is constantly departing from his worlds: traveling, moving ever forward to Germany, Holland, Sweden. He also distances himself existentially, going into a room by himself, his oven-heated room, his poêle. Rather than a philosopher denying the world, Descartes’s distancing, or écartement, is that of a writer. His solitude is that of a writer, a writer alone in a room. For some writers, such as Descartes and Proust, the room is a bed. For others, such as Marguerite Duras, the room is something of a window.³⁵ But in both cases, the room is also, without question, a pen and ink. Descartes’s distancing is the solitude required for a writer, “a way of thinking, of reasoning.”³⁶ Descartes is the “father” of modern philosophy, the inventor of the modern philosophical novel or fable, for he is the philosopher who scrutinized what it means to think through writing, the relation between thinking and writing, the love of thinking and writing, the love of body and soul. He thinks as one writes. He must cast away the books, ancient opinions, and quotes; thus, as a writer who sits in a room of his own, he must begin with the “blank sheet.” A brief poem by Paul Valéry could have been written by Descartes as well, when saying,

In truth, a blank sheet

Declares by the void

That there is nothing as beautiful

As that which does not exist.

On the magic mirror of its white space,

The soul sees before her the place of the miracles

That we would bring to life with signs and lines.

This presence of absence over-excites

And at the same time paralyses the definitive act of the pen.

There is in all beauty a forbiddance to touch,

From which emanates I don’t know what of sacred

That stops the movement and puts the man

On the point of acting in fear of himself.³⁷

To distance from the world as a writer means to come as close to the world as the one who creates a world: mundus est fabula, “read this book as a fable.” In the French spoken during Descartes’s time, carte was the word used for “page.” Descartes was his name: écartes des cartes, the distancing of a thinking that thinks in and through writing.

This brief digression may complement our discussion about Descartes’s love letters and letters on love. For there is also a certain love—that also links rational and sensuous love—which is the love of letters, the love of literature. Not literature as the collection of written texts but as the action of hands writing the event of thinking with pen and ink. There is a profound connection between the heat of love and love epistolography. Should we say that this “fire without light,” which Descartes called heart, is the primal scene of writing? Is that scene what the old Greek narrative about the birth of drawing aims to rend visible? Boutade, the ceramist, suffering when seeing his daughter’s suffering after bidding farewell to her beloved, fixed in the wall of his working room the shadow of her beloved while departing. These lines drawn upon a blank wall tell of the birth of a love letter as the graphic mark of the shadow of a departing movement. One could recognize in this narrative the graphic mark of an anamorphic drawing, the drawing of a line in movement, the departing lines of a body. Indeed, why do lovers write love letters so passionately? Why does love want to write itself, to say itself in words, if love is the most intensive experience of an act that has no need for words to enact, if love raptures the words and language from words and language? This old narrative is perhaps indicative that lovers write, and writing is so tightly linked to love, not because the lovers cannot stand a separation but because they want to keep, in the “fire without light” of the heart, the loving as such: its presence and absence, the becoming absent and becoming present that follows every time the beloved arrives and departs. Indeed, what love wants to hold onto is the loving—“I love you” indeed says I am loving, what in Latin languages is calling the beloved both the “loving,” l’aimant, and the loved, l’aimé, reserving the meaning of the beloved in a sensuous way, the first one, the loving, l’aimant. Love aims more to preserve the loving, the act of being in love than the (be)loved. It aims to maintain the loving, which is between the lover and the beloved, which shows itself as a comma uttering itself in loud voice, through whisperings, screams, murmurings, loud breath movements, respirations. And as sounds escape from the mouth, writing escapes from the body through the hands. As Descartes writes to Elisabeth,³⁸

The honour your Highness does me in sending her commandments in writing is greater than I ever dared hope; and it is more consoling to my unworthiness than the other favour which I had hoped for passionately, which was to receive them by word of mouth, had I been permitted to pay homage to you and offer you my very humble services when I was last at the Hague. For then I would have had too many wonders to admire at the same time; and seeing superhuman sentiments flowing from a body such as painters give to angels, I would have been overwhelmed with delights like those I think a man coming fresh from earth to heaven must feel. Thus, I would hardly have been able to reply to your Highness as she doubtless noticed when once before I had the honour of speaking with her. In your kindness you have tried to redress this fault of mine by committing the traces of your thoughts to paper, so that I can read them many times, and grow accustomed to considering them. Thus, I am less overwhelmed, but no less full of wonder, observing that it is not only at first sight that they seem perceptive, but that the more they are examined, the more judicious and solid they appear.³⁹

Considering that the “cartes,” love letters, flow from the body of the lovers as sounds come from their mouths, as painters let flow as angels superhuman sentiments from a body, and that these letters and sounds are addressed to the loving—aimants—rather to the beloved, it may be possible to see more clearly why in love there is a profound need to write and speak of love while loving, and thereby to think the loving while loving. It seems that the entire reality has been embraced by the open arms of the loving, of being in loving. In this way, everything detours from itself to turn toward the loving. Love letters aim to preserve this detour, they aim to fix the unfixable being in love, the loving in its continuous present participle form, its moving e-moving and overwhelming everything. Love letters know that no word or letter, no image or expression would be capable of fixing this “fire without light,” this heat that warms the heat of the heart, this breath and vertiginous wind. But they write, they draw traits and lines on a blank sheet. And in the velocity of its traits and lines—love letters are written quickly for the sake of coming to the hands of the beloved as quickly as possible—love apostrophizes itself. It does not get tired of saying “my love.” But the apostrophe is not only the call that makes a detour from the addressee in order to turn to a third when writing “my love”; thus, in this turn, it speaks to the loving itself. It is not only the interpellation to someone or something that expresses an experienced emotion. The apostrophe is a diacritic sign, a typographic mark, a “high” comma, hochkomma, as it is called in German, the physical sign of an experienced emotion. It marks a respiration, a breath that accomplishes a contraction by means of an interruption, revealing thereby the action in the act of the loving while loving in the very act of writing—the apostrophe obliges readers a detour from its own reading that renders them attentive that what they are reading is being written while they are reading. The apostrophe realizes in the letter what the heart does in loving. It is the beating of the writing. Descartes makes a wonderful use of the apostrophe of the heart, so to speak, when, in the letters to Chanut, he employs the verb “s’entr’aimer,” literally between-love or interlove, an unusual verb likely only used before Descartes by Corneille.⁴⁰ Cartesian love is neither catastrophic nor epistrophic, the latter meaning a love through conversion. It is not even strophic—that is, poetic. Cartesian love is apostrophic. In the letters to Chanut, as we have seen, Descartes meditates about the distinction between rational and sensuous love, as well as about friendly love and concupiscent or erotic love; he meditates about love of a flower, a bird, a building, and God. But not exclusively. He also meditates on the love between two men. It is a reflection about the love of two men, having in mind Virgil’s narrative in the Aeneid (song IX, verse 427), the love between Nisus and Euryale, that Descartes describes with the verb “s’entr’aimer”: “Mais quand deux hommes s’entr’aiment.” ⁴¹ The French orthography of this reflexive verb is marked by two apostrophes s’entre et entr’aimer. Marked by this apostrophe, the verb entr’aimer that Descartes uses here puts the between-two in exergue, also reminiscent for French speaking ears of the verb entrainer, to carry along, to go on, and the present participle en train d’aimer, to be loving, the overwhelming presence that is more of a nerve, a pulsion in gerund. Descartes observes that in the act of s’entr’aimer, of between- or inter-loving, it is revealed that each of the lovers loves the other more than himself and affirms that “leur amities n’est point parfait, s’ils ne sont prêts de dire, en faveur l’un de l’autre: Meme adsum qui fecci, in me convertite ferrum.” The s’entr’aimer is only perfect if they are ready to say a word of love. These words written by Virgil say that the one who loves, who has done everything for the beloved, is not in the center but on the side, adsum, and compels l’ami aimant, the loving beloved to turn the iron against him. Here it is possible to find the direction of the detour made by the Cartesian cogito—I am thinking, therefore I am. When the cogito makes a detour from itself, it may encounter a loving cogito, the cogito of Cartesian love. Indeed, the loving Cartesian cogito that his friend, the poet and artist Constantjin Huygens, also a close friend of Princess Elisabeth, formulated in Latin in the verse, “At sic, Amice, ego cogito, ergo sum Tuus”: “But in this way, my friend, I am thinking therefore I am yours.”