1Descartes’s Visceral Aesthetics

The Violence of the Beautiful and the Ugly

Cecilia Sjöholm

The Beautiful, the Sound, and the Music

One of the most basic doctrines in philosophical aesthetics is that modern aesthetics is born with the discovery of taste. Taste makes beauty into a pleasurable, subjective experience, rather than the property of an object. From Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement to contemporary neuroaesthetics, aesthetic experience is considered in terms of pleasure, enjoyment, and gratification in this tradition. It is also considered in terms that make it universal and ahistorical.¹ To Kant, disinterestedness guides the basic definition of aesthetic judgment.² Pleasure and beauty, in turn, are qualities that explain how and why humans “fit” into the world.³ Contemporary neuroaesthetics, also, for which the experience of beauty can be associated with certain features of the brain, assumes that beauty arouses a feeling of pleasure that is independent of its source. It may connect to cognitive functions and to the intellect.⁴ Still, although it can be attached to capacities beyond aesthetic experience—such as a cognitive value, for instance⁵—aesthetic experience is best explained as a kind of harmonization of a state of consciousness: free and playful.

A Cartesian aesthetics, however, is at odds with such an idea of harmonization. Pleasure and beauty are at the forefront of aesthetic inquiries—together with the introduction of taste. However, in exploring experiences of poetry, images, and music, Descartes also shows how bodies are gripped by affects and desires that lie beyond rational control. Reading Descartes, we move in a pre-Kantian universe where relations between bodies create an order of nature that affects the mind (as in, e.g., G. W. Leibniz, Thomas Hobbes, and Baruch Spinoza).⁶ But Descartes’s writings are not only exploring affects; they are also exploring aesthetic experiences. They explore the subject of aesthetics as a baroque organism with many layers, as a thinking and sensing subject endowed with an enigmatic physicality that surpasses the certainty of reason. The open reflections on and of such an embodied subject of affects are layered “as in a picture” and “as a fable.”⁷

Descartes was actively involved in the ordering, and sometimes the sketching, of images that followed his natural philosophy. Some sketches have been retained. Descartes’s images of human anatomy, in text and sketches, are not formed to understand the body as an object. They are construed to understand human affects, emotions, and thoughts. The body, Descartes says in De L’Homme, is a “statue ou machine de terre,” a statue or a machine of the earth.⁸ But Descartes’s man-machine is not a self-regulating organism—it is an aesthetic machine, energizing the interaction between bodies, objects, and phenomena, as well as between the senses, affects, and thought. In the explorations of such an aesthetic machine, Descartes shows how what we usually describe as aesthetic phenomena emerging from sound, vision, and touch may give rise to experiences that in turn are intrinsically related to imaginative explorations of anatomy and physical experiences. In works such as The Passions of the Soul, Descartes describes both a warm experience of beauty and a physical abhorrence of the ugly—and an ambiguous mixture of both. In Descartes’s writings overall, such as the Meditations, experiences of this kind may become subject to reflection. In Passions of the Soul, however, they are reflected in thought and intrinsically intertwined with drives that originate in a corporeal inside, described through an anatomical imagery. They also determine the character of Descartes’s aesthetic machine, which allows for the contour of a subject to emerge, but it is a subject to be understood as something wholly other than a subject of reflective judgment. Descartes construes an aesthetic subject otherwise than in eighteenth-century thought. Rather than focus on experiences of the beautiful, this “other” subject/aesthetic machine gives prominence to phenomena that appeal less to taste and judgment and more to drives and corporeal affects: evoking the fascinated gaze, corporeal attraction, and revulsion; undoing the limits between physics and metaphysics, inside and outside. These are the typical features of a baroque design of thought—the aesthetic machine is a “body-thought,” which is not to say it allows for a coherent theory. It is rather the result of a dualism that sometimes grasps itself beyond the borders of separation, sometimes morphs into new categories. The aesthetic machine can be observed throughout many of Descartes’s writings, in various guises. Traversing Descartes’s mechanistic, rationalistic, and metaphysical universe in its various stages of development, it opens a visceral dimension of aesthetic experience where the encounter with sensual objects is colored by physical sensations. The visceral, in this context, can be understood in a literal sense: bearing on a gut-like sensation that appears as an instinctual apprehension of the world, through attraction and repulsion.

A philosophical history of aesthetics that sticks only to the discovery of taste and judgment and the philosophy of beauty and pleasure as its origin risks overwriting a long and powerful tradition that attaches aesthetic experiences to powerful, corporeal affects. Therefore, it is important to discuss Descartes’s writings on the physical sensations that can be offered by the beautiful and the ugly, or by phenomena and artifacts that we consider as art, as exercises in a pre-Kantian aesthetics. This chapter endeavors to demonstrate that Descartes’s writings, although they may well in certain places reflect on taste, pleasure, and beauty in a more contained manner, belong rather to a tradition that uses the body’s whole capacity in order to explain the nature of perception and affect.

Descartes is the well-known progenitor of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s much commented struggle to understand the nature of modern painting as the undoing of “scientific” perspectives, bringing painting back to a body where the senses interact in an open intertwinement with the world. However, Merleau-Ponty’s attention to Descartes’s theory of perception has in many ways overshadowed the physical, visceral theory of the body of the latter. In the arts, Descartes can rather be counted into a corporeal tradition where embodiment and art are intrinsi-cally enmeshed, an aesthetic tradition counting writers such as Charles Baudelaire and Georges Bataille, artists such as the surrealists, and psychoanalytic critics such as Julia Kristeva among its modern proponents. This is a tradition when the sheer corporality of aesthetic experiences overtakes what we talk about as judgment, when the abhorrence and fascination with corporeal phenomena such as ugliness, death, putrification, and so on is forwarded as the “other” side of pleasure and beauty, but equally relevant to art. Throughout history, this “other” aesthetics of the drives has been forwarded as major components in and of a history of the arts, talked about in terms of sublimity, the formless or abjection. In the case of Descartes, it comes to the fore as visceral components, through which a complex, corporeal “inside” with a hidden pattern of tubes, connections, and fluids connect with the sensual and emotional experiences that art gives rise to. In this way, the aesthetic machine of Descartes has given rise to a visceral aesthetics.

Descartes scholars have pointed to the fact that he may be considered a progenitor of a notion of the aesthetic.⁹ But the extent to which such a visceral aesthetics develops as a baroque fantasy of hidden connections, between his early writings and the anatomy assumed in Passions of the Soul, remains to be explored. It manifests itself between imagery and writing, between different states of consciousness, between body and mind, even between the unborn fetus and the child. The numerous states of in-between are an intrinsic feature of Descartes’s thought. Through a complex map where the internal is externalized and even metaphorized, Descartes’s writings construe a body that is not only physical, sensual, and affective but also thinking and memorializing. The body is an object for empirical observation in studies such as Optics and Description of the Human Body. It is also used to understand the experiences offered with encounters of beauty and ugliness, pleasure, wonder, and shock. These experiences are situated in a domain in-between, or even turn dualisms inside and out: in these writings, we can detect a visceral aesthetics that surpasses any intellectual concept of judgment.

Affects and emotions are the key to Descartes’s baroque aesthetics: belonging to the zone of the in-between, they are both body and mind, both outer and inner. They belong to the makeup of an internal world in the same way that memories, dreams, and fantasies do, but they also belong to the world of the senses and the apprehension of the body. Emotions are described as “internal sensations” that can be stored in corporeal memory. But they are also “confused thoughts.”¹⁰ Emotions, internal images, fantasies, and dreams are all forms of thought. In the exploration of this aesthetic universe, one can attend to one’s own emotions as a corporeal form of thinking, both subjective and universal. Emotions and affects, after all, are an area in which everyone, and no one, is an expert. One does not need to be a philosopher to know what an affect feels like, and everyone may reflect on the quality of an emotional experience.

Therefore, rather than wishing to alleviate the burden of affects from the understanding of subjective life, Descartes welcomes the stirring of emotions. Affects may change our perceptions of the world and our thoughts about it. The agitation of the body is not detrimental to thought. The arts that produce emotions and affects do not so much teach us something specific as allow for new sensations and thoughts. In the so-called Olympian dreams of 1619, a recount of a dream that has been preserved as manuscript, Descartes praised poetry for being “full of sayings, more serious, more sensible, and better expressed than those found in the writings of the philosophers.”¹¹ Poetry helps distill one’s judgment, not by controlling emotions or preventing affects but by evoking them.¹² In this way, the universe of thought is also expanded through aesthetic convulsions.

The visceral dimensions in Descartes’s writings assume the aesthetic domain to be very powerful—perhaps this is also what brings it beyond judgment. The encounter with the beautiful and the ugly in Descartes’s writings can be highly conflictual, possibly even devastating. Described in terms of desire/love or devastation/repulsion, Descartes’s visceral aesthetics has its origin in the desire of a subject exploring affects that lie beyond the control of the subject. Such desire derives from an unknown origin that can be traced back to an archaic prehistory of the body. This archaic prehistory has the potentiality of coloring all aesthetic experience with a certain ambiguity, even with a certain potentiality of violence. It can make the beautiful appear as miraculous, but also haunting. It can make the ugly be experienced not only as the opposite of the beautiful but also as a direct threat to mind and body.

Descartes’s first philosophical treatise was, indeed, on an aesthetic topic—namely, on music: Compendium Musicae, Abregé de Musique, written in 1618. In many ways, the treatise offers a square and simple conception of aesthetics, such as it was picked up later in the field by thinkers such as Alexander Baumgarten and Immanuel Kant—it has to do with the judgment and understanding of sensory phenomena, producing a particular kind of knowledge. Descartes’s treatise begins by establishing that “all senses are capable of producing pleasure.” Music is the producer of sounds, made to “please and to arouse various emotions in us.”¹³ In a famous letter to Marin Mersenne from 1630, where he returns to the arguments of his old essay, concepts of judgment and taste are introduced even more clearly than in the essay itself: “What makes some people want to dance may make others want to cry.” In other words, we do not experience aesthetic phenomena in the same way.¹⁴ Concepts such as “beautiful” and “pleasing,” Descartes writes, signify a relation between our judgment and an object. But because men’s judgments are so various, there cannot be any definite standard of beauty or “pleasingness.”¹⁵ From this perspective, Descartes is forwarding an aesthetics of judgment, taste, and pleasure, such as was later developed by eighteenth-century philosophers.

However, what distinguishes Descartes from the tradition of aesthetics that developed later, and offers a vision of baroque complexity, is the way in which he describes the judgment of sensual phenomena to be situated in a body whose needs and drives are not always disclosed. In the early work of Compendium Musicae, this derives from the fact that the body is inscribed into a worldview that is seemingly both Pythagorean and mechanistic, where mathematic figures can be used to determine the outcome of sound and to predict the way in which bodies are affected by music. Unlike the ancient school of Pythagoreans, however, Descartes refers to arithmetic rather than geometrics as the tool of understanding when it comes to how sounds are produced and experienced: lines and numbers help us conceive of the spatial and temporal proportionality that determines the outcome of rhythms and chords. Through figures and lines, Descartes refers to aesthetic experiences not to confirm but rather to refute a mechanistic worldview, undoing, as in the famous letter to Mersenne, afforded ideas that the impact of sound and rhythm is automatic. The use of figures in the treatise may well throw light on the way in which aesthetic experience became an increasingly complex issue to Descartes. He repeatedly returned to the idea that the craft of art was crucial for the transmittance of his ideas. The experience of artists (artisans) and musicians, combined with a grasp of mathematics, he argues, provides us with better knowledge of cosmological shapes and “consonances” in music than the senses alone, or the “imagination of a hermit.”¹⁶ The particular combination of mathematics and imagery is superior to scholastic reasoning: it is better to insert nature in philosophy than philosophy in nature. This is done through the image: “I believe that nothing can be imagined that cannot be solved by a line,” he writes to friend and mathematician Isaac Beeckman, to whom the treatise on music is also dedicated.¹⁷ The lines of imaginative solutions are arithmetic images—used to explain phenomena of light, colors, atmospheric movements, natural formations, sound and music, and so on.¹⁸ In this way, the analysis of string diversion, voices, bass sound, and more are the result of an analysis of proportion and difference that attempts to grasp the domain of the in-between through figures—music not only strikes the soul but also enwraps the body.

Figure 1.1. Musicae compendium, Trajecti ad Renum, 1650, Royal library Stockholm.

Figure 1.2. Musicae compendium, Trajecti ad Renum, 1650, Royal Library Stockholm.

Already in his treatise on music, Descartes introduces figures as a key to understanding worldly phenomena: figures capture the physical identities of shape, size, and motion. The line of a figure can capture the motion of music, implicating music’s impact on a body through invisible discretions. Distinct rhythms are used in dance, where the motion of our bodies is “naturally impelled by the music”—we are stricken by “sounds on all sides.”¹⁹ This immersion carries its own moods: a faster rhythm creates joy; a slower rhythm invokes fear, sadness, and so on. In addition, rhythm (time) creates a sense of pleasure in itself: a wish to dance, to enjoy. Music affects the body. This is also why music—particularly rhythmic music—can be used in military training.²⁰ The idea of how to use music to produce a certain corporeal affectation can be put to the test—Descartes himself likely wrote the Ballet for the Birth of Peace under the requisition of Queen Christina when he arrived in Stockholm in 1649. The intention was to glorify a powerful regime—the music was to encompass the immobile presence of Christina herself in the middle of the scene at its staging. In this way, the rhythm, movements, and sounds were to fuse a sense of passion and power.²¹

But whereas music can be used to evoke certain moods, its effects are also individual, as Descartes writes to Mersenne. The experience of pleasure that derives from music has to do with a complex interaction between ideas and sensibility. The way in which tones and rhythms are perceived is associated with ideas. This has most often been interpreted as having to do with taste. But whether we enjoy dancing depends not so much on a free-floating imagination as on traces inscribed in the body—memories evoked by music.²² Music attaches to the visceral domain of the body, to its inside. The joy, pleasure, sublimity, or memory of music has nothing to do with any transcendental emotive sphere beyond language. The passions evoked by music are aroused through a complex system of tubes and traces that attaches body and brain to one another.

In other early texts, such as Treatise on Man, this is made visible through a model of the body as an aesthetic machine.²³ Descartes compares the body to musical instruments played near fountains or in the church. The machine of the body-instrument is made to facilitate the flow of spirits—which in Descartes’s imagery corresponds to the sounding of the pipes. Three distinct entities are used in the consideration of the aesthetic machine: bodily organs, fluids, and animal spirits—the latter causing internal sensations in us through the way air is moved around in cavities and inner tubes by the pressure caused by internal “bellows” or “wind chests” and distributed in different pipes by the way in which an internal organist “moves his finger on the keyboards,” distributing the air in different keys. This causes a mixture of affects, such as desire and diligence, but also malice and ruthlessness.²⁴ The internal activity of the aesthetic machine is always alive, through dreams and sleep as well as intense daytime pursuits. It is, however, distinguishing the states of sleep and wake, through the way in which these states affect the brain in different ways. The most important activity in the state of wake is “how ideas of objects are formed in the place assigned to the imagination and to the common sense, how these ideas are retained in the memory, and how they cause the movement of all the bodily parts.”²⁵ The difference between the states of sleep and wake is also distinctly drawn as the difference between a machine with “open” pipes of perception and a closed system.

Figure 1.3. L’Homme: Et un traitté de la formation du foetus, Paris, 1664, Royal Library Stockholm.

The aesthetic machine is integrating the perception of objects with ideas so that the soul may experience movement, size, distance, colors, sounds, smells, and other aesthetic qualities, linking them to physical sensations as well as emotions. In this aesthetic machine, the sensation of colors is distributed through the same channels as physical sensations of the body, such as pleasure and pain. This is done primarily through the imagination, or the complex machinery of the apprehension of objects, and not through the direct imprint in the brain of traces of perception.²⁶ Objects, and our perception of objects in the world, may act in radically different ways: they may impinge on us and enwrap our beings entirely, or they may be perceived as distant and less important; they may cause rage or joy, sadness or laughter. Moods and affects are closely intertwined with perception. In this way, we are, as aesthetic machines, not self-enclosed systems. Instead, we are, through our emotions and affects, wholly with the world. The subject is never just perceiving or sensing in a neutral manner; it is perceiving and sensing through moods and affects, and through the capacities of imagination and memory. Our bodies are permeated by the “pipes” that play us with and through every perception, to the extent that we were affected even as infants in our mothers’ wombs. It is in this way that Descartes’s body is aesthetic: open to the world, even unshielded from its affective impacts. As it acts on us, we are brought to states of emotions and affects that may even play violently with us. This does not mean, however, that the machine can be described to act causally on sensations or perceptions—we are played also in our dreams, where the very ideas of objects may change, and the mood, the affect, and the physical impression are juxtaposed in a new way.

Figure 1.4. L’Homme: Et un traitté de la formation du foetus, Paris, 1664, Royal Library Stockholm.

The Anatomy of Affects

The seventeenth century can be characterized as a visual culture.²⁷ Physiology’s birth was copresent with its graphic description and the visual figuring of structures and processes inside the body. In the seventeenth century, there was no clear-cut distinction between a philosopher and a scientist—and in a way, an artist. The categorization of disciplines did not resemble those of today. But Descartes is the only philosopher to have explicitly philosophized not only with but through physical images. These are not for decoration: Descartes is producing a visceral aesthetic where the relation between affect and perception is a production of image as much as of thought. Descartes was himself involved in the production of graphic forms from the early 1630s, in works such as Le Monde (published posthumously in 1664) and L’Homme (published posthumously in 1662). Sketches and engravings were not typically made by Descartes but by artists in close collaboration with him and his editor. Many of the images pertained to the relation between perception and the inside of the human body: the brain, the eye globe, and nerves were revealed in detail. This pictorial imagination of inside/outside returns in Passions, even if the images there come as textual constructions rather than sketches by Descartes’s hand.

As Merleau-Ponty has shown in his essay on Paul Cézanne’s painting, modern art has helped capture the difference between the “prescientific” conditioning of our perception and the renaissance scientific perspective that opened with the use of geometry, for instance. Cézanne, as a pioneer of modern painting, did not try to use color to suggest the tactile sensations that would give shape and depth. These “distinctions between sight and touch are unknown in primordial perception. It is only as a result of a science of the human body that we finally learn to distinguish between our senses.”²⁸ In this way, we may experience depth, surfaces, smoothness, or hardness through vision, vision contributing to a grasp of the world in which all the senses interact. Showing in his text on “Cézanne’s Doubt” how modern art offers not only the suggestion of a world but also an actual opening of and into a world, Merleau-Ponty distinguishes such a world from reason’s science. Modern painting, in this way, offers a world through a prescientific grasp of perception. However, in Descartes’s anatomy, where perception is construed in pictorial manners in the form of a scientific imagination, as joined to the pipes inside organs, for instance, not only do the senses interact in the construction of this very picture but their affective capacity meets the eye of the reader and beholder. The visceral is seen, felt, and understood through this conjunction of sensual, affective, and imaginative experience, indicating that the scientific imagination of Descartes cannot do without its prescientific suggestion of corporeal anatomy and its suggestion of shapes, sizes, and motion.

Modern art’s prescientific vision, as evoked by Merleau-Ponty, is colored by its opening toward a world in which nature demands to be thought through color, form, density, and depth, seen by and intertwined with the body and vision of the painter. From such a point of view, the pictorial universe of Cartesian anatomy can easily be discarded as reason’s grappling with an objectified body. But Descartes’s images of human anatomy, in text and pictorial outlays, are not construed to be understood merely as models of the sciences, observable and objectifiable. The inside of the body is, as we have shown, construed as an aesthetic machine. It orchestrates the intrinsic interaction between the shape and movement of the particles of the world and that of the sensorial and affective capacity of the human body. In opening the dwindling effects that emerge when the light and motion of vision meet the pressure of internal juices speeding through the “pipes” of our bodies’ internal organs, the pictorial imagination is construing the shape and movement through which senses and affect intertwine. In the anatomical images, we encounter not reason so much as an opening to the world that Descartes’s pictorial eyes, so poignantly shown to be sometimes open to the world and sometimes attentive to the body’s own inside, attempt to capture. Phenomenology’s transcendental understanding of what it means to “see” the world may be more sophisticated in explaining the way in which embodiment both limits and makes possible such a vision. But Descartes’s pictorial imagination, though perhaps claiming a certain universal hypothesis of how the eye captures the object of vision, is still, through its metaphors, its descriptions, and its dwindling use of figures of motions and shapes, producing what phenomenology calls a lived body, experiencing the magic of its own inside.

Figure 1.5. L’Homme: Et un traitté de la formation du foetus, Paris, 1664, Royal Library Stockholm.

In more recent developments of the phenomenological notion that art can produce a world in which the senses interact, affects are also introduced. Vivian Sobchack has shown how cinematic perception involves us in aesthetic forms of experience that are multisensorial. In film, affect becomes a thematizing tool of the narration; we are affected not just at the level of consciousness but at a sensorial level where the senses interact with the quality and nature of our affects.²⁹ In this way, the corporeal rootedness of perception is shown to be intrinsically intertwined with physical affects. Not only do we feel sad, happy, etcetera when we go to the movies: as our eyes “touch” the screen, the cinematic experience makes us fear and enjoy at a physical level.

Again, although not recognizing the limits of a subject’s sensual experience or production of the world, it is precisely this corporeal intertwinement between figure, passion, and perception that Descartes is seeking to produce. His anatomical images offer the keyholes through which we may perceive the conjunction between perceptive and affective capacities, while producing these capacities through his pictorial imagination. The explanations of what occurs inside the body when external stimuli affect skin and nerves are long and detailed. With the visceral material and his detailed description and imagery of viscerality, we are given an account of how feelings are produced. As readers, we look and assess and are caught in a logic where the internal affects may also be felt in the reading process—in the early copies of Descartes’s pictorial work with The Treatise on Man, for instance, the same image of a fire burning a human being could be repeated over several pages in order to amplify the physical sensation of pain. Fire is here a sign of pain that the reader turns to affect, a sign that becomes what Brian Massumi has described as a kind of command, a sign transformed into experience that bustles over into other affects: fear, a sense of threat, nervosity, and so on, a semiosis through which the subjective and the communal intertwine.³⁰

Passions of the Soul, published in 1649, is pursuing the ambition to sketch the aesthetic machine of a sensing human body of affects. It does not itself hold images but is a direct consequence of the earlier anatomical work—and its aesthetic components. It is also a direct consequence of Descartes’s own interest in and involvement with the arts. His theory of affects and emotions was widely used and interpreted by the musicians and performers of the Cartesian afterworld.

A copy of the book held in the Royal Library in Stockholm, the city where Descartes passed away in 1650, bears witness to his involvement in the arts. The copy is said to have been presented to a famous Dutch painter, David Beck, who also painted a portrait of Descartes. The copy bears witness to the kind of environment in which Descartes was situated, depicting a court of painters and scientists surrounding Queen Christina. Descartes was called to Christina’s court to start an academy of the sciences, something he subtly refused by authoring statutes that forbade foreign members. Descartes had ideas that border on what would be considered artistic research today, wanting to educate artists in different mediums and techniques with professors who were knowledgeable not only in the arts but also mathematics and physics. In a treatise ascribed to Descartes depicting a possible project for a school of the arts, mixing artists and scientists, professors would be able “to answer all the artists’ questions, to give them a reason for things” so that the artists could “give birth to new discoveries in the arts.”³¹ Even if Descartes may never have held a possible project for himself in that vein, his own writings clearly demonstrate that the work of the artist is closely related to the work of the natural philosopher—the physicien.

Figure 1.6. L’Homme: Et un traitté de la formation du foetus, Paris, 1664, Royal Library Stockholm.

In the original print of Les Passions de l´âme, as offered to the painter David Beck at Queen Christina’s court by Descartes himself, the introduction is written as a fictive exchange of letters. Here Descartes declares that his book is intended for a wider audience—not expert philosophers. He is exploring the passions not “en orateur” or as “philosophe moral” but as a “physicien.”³² He is not writing as a rhetorician or a Stoic, which was the moral philosophy prevalent at the time. Detaching himself from the school of Stoicism, he wishes to ground the understanding of affects in natural philosophy. The self-definition of the physicien, or natural philosopher, must be read in conjunction with the gaze that permeates the whole book; Descartes “reads” affects from inside the body, through a pictorial imagination transmitted by the text, in terms of their visceral impact. In fact, one cannot underestimate the impact of anatomical drawings from other works. Passions is not a book of images—but older works such as L’Homme were, and the images of such works form a distinct background to the text of Passions. The body’s inside, the relation between organs, is visualized to understand the affective relation of the human body to an outside.

The visceral aesthetics of Treatise on Music is, as we have seen, conceived through figures. The visceral aesthetics of Passions of the Soul, in turn, is primarily construed after such an anatomy. Mostly, Descartes adheres to the most typical motives in seventeenth-century medical imagery. His descriptions of organs and tubes belong to a visual literature based not only on evidence and observation but also on a tradition of imagination and aesthetic pedagogy. Descartes took inspiration from, most notably, William Harvey’s work on the circulation of the blood, echoing precedents such as Harvey’s De Motu Cordis, from 1628. Harvey’s work, in turn, echoes that of slightly posterior publications of contemporaries, such as Olof Rudbeck’s Disputatio anatomica, de circulatione sangvinis, from 1652.³³ In this way, images were an integrated aspect of what it meant for Descartes to work “like a physicien”: the images of the human body wholly permeated his ideas of perception, emotions, and affects. When Descartes writes that he wants to examine the emotions like a physicien, his role as a physicien is already mediated by visual imagery.

This graphic intertwinement between images and thought also had repercussions in the heated debate on the relation between body and soul, or mind.³⁴ Famously, Passions of the Soul was written as the result of an exchange with Elisabeth of Bohemia, who was unsatisfied with Descartes’s material dualism, asking for a clarification on how a possible union between the two could be conceived.³⁵ This was in itself a motive for exploring the human body and the mind, from the inside in graphic detail. In Meditations, Descartes presented the “I” of the cogito as a “thing that thinks: that is, a thing that doubts, affirms, denies, understands a few things, that is ignorant of many [that loves, that hates], is willing, is unwilling, and also which imagines and has sensory perceptions.”³⁶ The subject of Passions does the same: it reflects on the relation between its sensibility and its emotions, and in doing so, its visceral language points to the kind of causality accounted for in the early images of the internal body.

Produced both in text and image in works such as Treatise on Man, Optics, and Description of the Human Body, the anatomical studies establish a link between the somatic and the psychic, between body and gaze. The speculation on the inside of the human body lays open the nervous system and the tubes of transport that run between brain and eyes, blood vessels and heart. In Passions of the Soul, the ideas and images of transport are iterated—but also further qualified. Speaking of emotions that are, so to speak, internally raised but still felt in the body, the book is distinguishing passions of the soul proper, or what we would perhaps rather call emotions—joy, love, sadness, and so on—and affects such as fear, that have a more physical side. For that reason, Passions may, ironically, appear to be even more caught in the very dualistic system that Descartes himself wishes to overcome. We must learn to distinguish, separate, and reflect on what feelings do to us through the nervous system and through the brain. And what Descartes presents us with is how such distinctions and reflections can be made. The aesthetic machine is a dual system that is reflective of itself; feelings have a passive side, as passions, and an active side, which makes us act on what they do to us.

The problem of how the reflective system can be formed, distinguishing emotions and affects and yet showing their production as aspects of the aesthetic machine, is not altogether new to Descartes. As early as 1642 in his Principles of Philosophy, Descartes proposes a link, although a conflictual one, between body and soul as we are hit by passions. Here he presents a difference between affects that are mere bodily affectations and passions of the soul, that are “the feelings of love, hate, fear, anger, etc.” They are, he argues, “confused thoughts which the mind has not from itself alone, but from its being closely joined to the body, from which it receives impressions.” These are very different from our knowledge of “what is to be embraced, or desired or shunned,” or what we today would call affects that have a physical cause of stimulation.³⁷ In other words, affects have a cognitive side—we learn what to avoid and what to search for.

But in Passions, Descartes also describes how we may learn something from what we today would consider emotions, that have no obvious causal relation to a stimuli. This is also what may explain its tremendous impact over the centuries within the arts—emotions are what the arts produce. In times largely dominated by poetic regulations and rules—even in the performative arts, which was itself involved in exploring the passions—Descartes affirmed their emotional dimension. Its tremendous impact over the centuries was enforced with it being taken up by Charles Le Brun in Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner les passions (1698), produced with famous engravings of the expression of love, anger, wonder, and horror. Descartes’s text and Le Brun’s images were consequently much used in the visual and performing arts.

In its later editions, books II and III of Passions of the Soul, where we find the famous catalog of emotions, Le Brun’s drawings established a much-used view of the relation between performativity and emotion. The idea that passions can be figured in and through the masks of the theater has a long history, originating with Xenophon. But Passions of the Soul formulated a “doctrine of emotions” that was at once philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic in its approach; therefore, it came to be widely used in baroque theater, music, and literature.³⁸ The translation between text (Descartes) and graphic work (Le Brun) contributed to the creation of a new point of reference in which affective and emotional physiology became aesthetic. What we see and experience in our mind is dependent on external forms of visualization of the soul: faces, movements, and gestures speak to us through sighs, tears, and laughter. Affects may be grounded in bodily movements, caused by stimuli, but it is the soul that speaks to the body proper. In the theater, body and mind are conjoined. This is also what makes the arts a venue for new forms of knowledge.

Figure 1.7. Charles Le Brun: Conférénce sur l´expréssion générale et particulière, Paris, 1698, Royal Library Stockholm.

As Stephen Gobert has noted, Descartes’s explorations of the passions allowed for emotions to be perceived not only as embodied but also as subjective and unique—in this capacity, they contributed to highlight the art of the actor, placing the spotlight on the capacity to create a physiology of the face that is revelatory of an actor’s inside. Cartesian theater, in this way, contributed to an era of the passions in French theater, both tragedy and comedy.³⁹ But opera, also, integrated the Cartesian passions in its musical representations—composers from Jean-Philippe Rameau to Friedrich Händel scoring the representation of wonder through voices, faces, and stage effects. In this way, the passions became not auxiliaries of the performing arts but their focus.

Desire and Beauty

Descartes inscribed the passions in the performing arts, in the visual and poetic arts, and in the complexity of the mood of music. All belong to the experience we call aesthetic. In this way, what distinguishes Descartes’s aesthetics from a phenomenological aisthesis is that it relies as much on the visceral drives of attraction as on the spark of the senses.

Desires and drives originate in a corporeal inside: the movement of bodily fluids, and the direct corporeal impact of experiences that attaches to traces of memories and to states of consciousness (the “soul”). Beauty attaches both to formal qualities—the beauty of a flower, for instance—and to desires and drives that originate in the body. Aesthetic experience is situated at the crossroads between body and mind. By consequence, the beauty of a loved person is not classified as something distinct from the beauty of an object. Both are experienced through a kind of desire, which Descartes describes both in spiritual and corporeal terms. Aesthetic experience—the joy of beauty, the grip of music experienced through a piece of music, and so on—may also link emotions, or what he calls passions of the soul, to corporeal forms of affects. As we have seen, it is also through this turning inside out between sensual experience and physiological impact that Passions was received by the visual and performing arts world of his own times. But it is the idea that aesthetic experience is situated at the crossroads between desires and drives, body and mind, the sensual and the physiological, that serves to reactualize and remobilize Descartes’s baroque aesthetics today. Using Descartes as a source of the field that we call aesthetics, we can see that it is produced by a reflection, an involvement, an intertwinement of kinds of emotions and kinds of sensation that covers much more than an experience of beauty.

In Passions of the Soul, the physiological explorations of embodiment are not merely a prephenomenological point of reference for the way in which perceptions are made. They imply the experience of a limit between an inside and an outside. To Descartes, the experience of this limit is mobilized in the confrontation with the beautiful as well as the ugly. Affects are not simply hitting us from the external world but also from the soul proper, among them wonder, love, desire, joy, hatred, and sadness. These cannot be produced at will. In this context, the experience of the beautiful is interesting on two accounts. First, it gives evidence of an overlapping of body and soul, which at times even appears antagonistic. Second, it points to the visceral dimension of the body, which is also what truly signifies a baroque aesthetic. Descartes describes two forms of beauty, the first being one of contemplation of beautiful forms. We experience the attraction of such beauty through our senses, primarily through our vision: “the beauty of flowers / . . . / incites us to look at them.”⁴⁰ We cannot know such beauty until we see it, and when we see it, our eyes do not want to turn away.

But Descartes also describes another kind of beauty that is directed not toward an object of contemplation but rather to an object of desire. In contrast to the object of beauty, which is luring and peaceful, the object of desire appears contingent, surprising, and sometimes even violent to the self. This beautiful object of desire may well be a person—there is not a qualitative distinction made by Descartes himself between a person and a flower. The fact that both are treated as beautiful objects gives rise to intricate problems formulated in terms that closely parallel contemporary psychoanalysis. How is it possible that I do not always desire—find beautiful—what is good for me? From this perspective, the desire of beauty gives witness to reason’s shortcomings. The fact that feelings such as love are confused thoughts—that is, emotions that are not altogether aligned with the intellect of what ought to be loved—creates an interesting complication with regard to the experience of beauty.⁴¹ There is a rich analysis of these phenomena in Descartes that applies not only to conscious reflection but also to the flow of the unconscious, in the form of memories unattained by consciousness, for instance. The beauty of music, as explained in Passions of the Soul, engages us not through its forms, but the desire it awakens in us has to do with the traces of memories.⁴² Affects and emotions can also be passed on from mother to child in the womb.⁴³

The contemplation of beauty and the contingent desire of the beautiful do not derive from the same origin. Whereas the pleasure taken in the contemplation of forms, whether in music or flowers, appears to derive from the soul, the desire of beauty is neither prepared in the soul nor contemplated by the senses; instead, it hits us in a moment split between recognition and devastation. What is perceived as beauty, by desire, derives from the impact on perception of visceral movements between memories, nerves, and affects, a baroque entanglement between inside and outside.

The complexity of such an experience of beauty by desire finds its physical counterpart in article 47 in Passions, where Descartes describes the way in which soul and body meet in the pineal gland. The pineal gland is a hypothesis of imagination, the invention of a bodily organ that Descartes needs in order to posit a mediation between the soul and the body. In the same article that poses this relationship, however, we encounter the kind of conflicts at the center of Descartes’s queries. The arousal of inner conflicts is explained in terms of two distinct causations. On the one hand, we may want things due to the way external stimuli act on us (arousal of animal spirits acting on the soul through movements in the body). On the other hand, the mind has its own inclinations. The conflicts that occur in us are caused by the encounter between two separate systems: on the one hand, the will, which is unable to cause passions; on the other, the passions that accompany the sentient being and that act on the soul, through “nerves, heart and blood.”⁴⁴ The passions of the soul, although they are fundamental to us, are thereby not “simple,” and they often appear conflictual in us. Desire is continuously in struggle with itself. Often the soul feels driven, almost at the very same time, “to desire and not to desire one and the same thing.”⁴⁵ This is desire: to be driven toward and yet to shun. Desire is not directed toward an object that is “good” for us, although that might be an imaginary expectation. Desire is a struggle, with itself and against itself, incapable of judgment. This is the nature of desire: it is both corporeal and mental, and the pineal gland is unable to stem the conflict.

It is this very detachment of desire from the reason, or intuition of what is “good” for us, that makes Descartes so interesting from a contemporary perspective; he produces a distinct boundary between moral knowledge and the experience of what we love and desire—which is often a beautiful object. There is, in other words, no moral dignity inherent in man that raises an intuition to desire the good and the beautiful. What we desire originates, instead, in a visceral form of embodiment. This notion is put forward in Descartes’s discussion of desire and love, which will be treated at length in the chapter on the thinking fetus—desire is sexual. It is not provoked by beauty but by a defect. Descartes remembers the cross-eyed girl who was his first love. Her memory remained as physical traces; for a long time, Descartes would desire cross-eyed girls.⁴⁶ In Passions of the Soul, he returns to this feeling of fixation on a unique feature of a person: “The inclination or desire that arises in this way from attraction is commonly called ‘love’; ‘it is this inclination or desire that provides poets and writers of romances with their principal subject matter.’”⁴⁷ Descartes differentiates between the attraction of love and the attraction of beauty. Both objects of love and objects of beauty can be represented to the soul by external and internal senses. When we judge things by our internal senses, we call them “good” or “bad.” When we speak of representations, we call things “beautiful” or “ugly.” The experience of the “beautiful” and the “ugly” is much more powerful than any other: it gives rise to sensations that we can neither control nor influence.

There is a decisive disparity between the “good” and the “beautiful.” To the beautiful, we feel an attraction—a desire—that is not a passion of the soul, and it is not good for us. Attraction is a base form of desire. This form of attraction or desire is, in the same way as revulsion, derivative.⁴⁸ We experience it through our senses, but we have no idea what its cause is.⁴⁹ We are exposed and vulnerable to the desire of the beautiful—there is, potentially, a force in what we see that threatens our beings.

Why and when does attraction hit us? It has nothing to do with perfection. It is something that simply hits us, such as the gaze of the squint eyes.⁵⁰ It seems to be contingent. But attraction as well as desire is connected to the gaze, and it is trapped in the eyes of the other. To Descartes, all emotions are revealed through the eyes. There is no passion that some particular action of the eyes does not reveal. This has to do with the “many changes taking place in the movement and shape of the eye.”⁵¹ Love is driven by a fascinated gaze. In love’s apprehension of beauty, Descartes inscribes in Passions not dualism proper but a breaking point, between a scopic drive of fascination that is driven by desire and a warm experience of beauty as something good that approaches pleasure.

We feel much more love for something beautiful than for something good. The desire that arises from beauty is much more powerful than any inclination toward the good: whereas the good is on the side of moral inclination, beauty may touch us at the core of what we are ourselves. The most heightened sense of beauty “comes from the perfections one imagines in a person who one thinks can become another oneself.”⁵² The most powerful and possibly devastating attraction is caused by the sight of beauty. To Descartes, this is also why love is an aesthetic matter, something that poets and writers of “romance” deal with.⁵³ Love is here derivative of the visceral experiences of desire for the beautiful, which is also the primary motive of art.

Beauty does not awaken any notion of the good. The desire of beauty is not connected to any kind of “will” that directs us toward the good. As he argues in Meditations: “for even if the things that I may desire are wicked or even nonexistent, that does not make it any less true that I desire them.”⁵⁴ The strongest and the most significant forms of desire are those that arise from attraction (agrément) and those that are opposed to revulsion (horreur)—and these are experiences that are inherently aesthetic. The objects we find attractive, and we desire, are not “good.” Instead, they act upon the senses in ways that may run counter to our willpower. The beautiful hits us through a desire we did not know we had in us. Aesthetic experiences cut between the sensual and the visceral—although experienced by the senses, their source is to be found in the drives that may run counter to willpower.

The Violence of Aesthetic Experience

The same kind of divide that runs through the “good” and the “beautiful” runs through the “bad” and the “ugly.” We feel revulsion when we encounter something ugly. But we do not judge that something is ugly through any inner inclination or through any judgment that we could make on moral grounds. If, in his letters on beauty and in the compendium on music, Descartes describes something that could be the equivalent of taste, he explains in Passions of the Soul that the ugly is wholly a product of repulsion. What is astonishing here is the truly violent nature that Descartes ascribes to certain aesthetic experiences. In fact, attraction and repulsion may be more violent than other passions and more violent than the good and the bad because “what comes to the soul represented by the senses affects it more forcibly than what is represented to it by its reason.”⁵⁵

In other words, we are much more violently repelled by something ugly than by something bad. This has to do with the way in which traces of abhorrence may be described in our bodies through associative paths. We are revulsed by the sight and smell of a certain food if we have been previously poisoned by it.⁵⁶ But the senses interact, also with the memory of phenomena. Moreover, imagination may create feelings or sensations as powerful as that of direct physical contact with things. Descartes provides this example: we feel revulsion when we are presented with “stories of death, the touch of an earthworm, the sound of a rustling leaf, or our own shadow”; in other words, by taking pains here to include a number of senses, as well as a number of forms of encounter with the ugly, Descartes describes aesthetic revulsion as an event outside of the ordinary. It truly hits us. We do not only feel revulsion as in “I really do not like the sound of that rustling leaf.” What is at stake here is something that strikes at the very core of our being: “one immediately feels as much excitation as if a very plain threat of death were being offered to the senses.”⁵⁷ Revulsion is wholly visceral; it strikes at our very sense of life. It destroys us.

The fearful sense of life’s tenuity is a quintessential baroque feature of the aesthetic. It may strike us through revulsion, at the sight of a certain quality of the ugly, or formless. It lies at the core, also, of the art of the tragic, pity and fear striking at the sense of life. It is also found in the sense of apprehension, which can be mixed with wonder at the sight of nature: such as pagans found the sight of forests, springs, or mountains. If Cézanne painted the “prescientific” condition of perception in his many renderings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, Descartes declares the pagan vision of nature to be tinted with a mixture of reverence and apprehension—not simply a source of religious sentiment but of an aesthetic experience that mixes wonder and apprehension.⁵⁸

This extraordinary and visceral power of baroque aesthetics returns in later-day modernism. To Kant, the flower was the least complicated example of “free” beauty. To Baudelaire, it was a symbol of decay and its beauty a vulnerable shield against the same kind of putrefaction and death that aroused such fascination in contemplating open animal cadavers (Flowers of Evil, 1857). To George Bataille, the flower’s pointy pistils were, in turn, a sign of its inherent perversion, a reminder of the connection between sex, fecundity, and excess. In the surrealist journal Documents, nature is rendered obscene in Bataille’s “The language of flowers” (1929), where he explores the violent force in aesthetic experience in his writings as well as in his speculations on the birth of art. Bataille, struck in awe in front of the cave paintings in Lascaux, witnessed not only an exuberant joy of life in the lavish depiction of hunting scenes but a strong fascination with death. This fascination is invisible, sheltered behind an unspoken prohibition: “the dead, at least the faces of the dead, fascinated, overawed the living who made haste to forbid that they be approached.”⁵⁹ Such enjoyment of art’s hidden sacredness identifies a visceral aesthetic as a moment of transgression. One sees here a pulverization of the self in an enjoying experience where the difference between the beautiful and the ugly is all but obliterated; this is what Julia Kristeva, in turn, calls abjection.⁶⁰ The abject is, in Kristeva’s analysis, a development of the “informe,” to use Bataille’s expression: an indeterminable phenomenon that is impossible to contain within categories of intentionality or understanding; it belongs to the field of the drives.⁶¹ The abject is not simply something that is outside us, that disgusts us; it charges our physiognomy, disgusting us at a physical level through phenomena that appear to be situated at the border of our bodies, such as blood, puss, semen, or hair. Abject is human baroque anatomy turned inside out. Represented also in art by bodies without life—Kristeva refers to Holbein’s paintings of the body of Christ—the abject is at the heart of baroque art through its capacity of striking at the limit between the sensual and the affective. In being neither “subject nor object”: the abject threatens the self, it is a “fallen object, which pulls me to the point where meaning collapses.”⁶² This is the aesthetic explored by multiple artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: from the surrealists to Andy Warhol, Andres Serrano, Cindy Sherman, or Teresa Margolles.

In a similar way, Descartes saw that the aesthetic experience has an extraordinary power over the self, to the point of its dislocation or even its devastation. Aesthetic experience has its cause almost literally inscribed in the traces connecting the eyes and brain, the body and the mind. The link between the somatic and the psychic in Descartes’s physical schema shows why we are drawn toward a point of fascinum that is the physical reality of our own being, and the way in which this physical reality conditions our sensual and intellectual experience of the world—the point of fascinum is that of an inside whose flows and tubes we can only imagine. It is a point of fascination in which we may ourselves vanish.

Descartes inscribes in Passions not a dualism proper in his description of the aesthetic but rather a breaking point between a scopic drive that may push us to the limits of our beings and the joyful warmth of sensual experiences. When Descartes negotiates the good and the beautiful, and the bad and the ugly, he shows that encounters with objects of beauty or grimness are conflictual by their very nature. Breaking points, in general, are inscribed in all Descartes writings. We find them straddling the line between passivity and activity,⁶³ in the rays of light of refraction, between the I that doubts and the I that exists, signifying itself through a shifter through which the subject will always break. We also see a distinct breaking point between the I that sees—reason—and the “eye” that sees, hit by affects that it cannot control. The aesthetic experience is beset by the effect of a trompe l’oeil: what I look at is not what I think I am seeing. The gaze is captured at a vanishing point, where the scopic drive is retracted toward itself.

Many have said, in the vein of Mario Perniola, that “the modern history of the appropriation of feeling by thinking” begins with Descartes.⁶⁴ But it is more fair to claim that Descartes gives witness to the conflicting emotions and affects that objects may claim, a conflict that much contemporary art negotiates today.⁶⁵ Descartes’s own interest in imagination and dreams, moreover, contributes to the creation of a complex, internal landscape of the subject. In this internal landscape, the arts also saw its own practice develop, by seizing the complex reality of the passions and the way in which the passions act on our sensual experience. Aesthetics is sensibility, inner or outer emotions, moods, humors, moral forms, and sometimes sheer physical sensation. The most important dualism in the schema of the aesthetic machine, then, is not established between body and mind—it derives from a mixture of somatic and psychic sources. The aesthetic machine, again, is not a self-enclosed system but a wide-open subject of perception.

It does not matter, then, if our desire to think and reflect on the world is awakened by a flower in the external world or in our imagination. In the same way, it does not matter if our abhorrence of the ugly comes from a repulsion that is internal—physical and incorporated—or from something in the external world. Aesthetics is not a simple response to sensible afflictions. It is also not what overcomes the mind-body dualism. It is quite distinctly what lies between mind and body, inner and outer, dream and wake. Through an understanding of this visceral model of baroque, aesthetic experience, Descartes can be brought into the twenty-first century.