The Princess and the Soul
Elisabeth of Bohemia and Rene Descartes
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The princess and her teacher
After less than a year of his reign, Elisabeth’s father was exiled from his kingdom and this is what gave him the nickname “The Winter King”: a king for one winter, that is. The rest of their lives, the family spent travelling around Europe: first to Heidelberg, where Elisabeth was born, then to the Hague, in the Netherlands, where they set up an exile government of Bohemia.
Despite her father’s continuing attempts to return as a ruler to his country, this dream never came true, and they had to live in relatively limited material circumstances in their exile. What money they had to spend came to them from donations and support from their relations all over Europe, particularly from the British throne – Elisabeth was sister of Charles I, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
Despite living their lives in exile, Elisabeth managed to attract many of the great minds of her time to her court. She corresponded with churchmen like Edward Reynolds, thinkers and artists like Anna Maria van Schurman, Nicholas Malebranche and Leibniz, and Quakers like Robert Barclay and William Penn, whom she helped escape persecution.
We know nothing of her work as a thinker but what she writes in her letters to Rene Descartes, perhaps the most influential philosopher of modern times. All her thought is contained in the twenty-six letters she sent him, and it is telling that the famous man wrote her thirty-two in return. They always went out of their way to be polite to each other, she seeing herself as the famous man’s student, but Descartes, at the same time, recognising her as royalty, even if her kingdom had ceased to exist by the time they first met.
In her letters, despite her admiring words for the famous man, she is a clear-sighted critic of Descartes’ work. Her criticism predated and foreshadowed what many generations of philosophers would since have to say about the weakest points of Cartesian dualism.
It has often been asked what exactly the relationship between the two might have been. Elisabeth never married, although once she was lined up to. But it turned out that her prospective husband, Władysław IV Vasa, King of Poland, was a Catholic. The protestant Elisabeth, always the philosopher and true to her principles, refused to change her religion for the benefit of her marriage, and nothing came of it. She died a nun, married only to God.
Still, it is tempting to ask what really went on between the two. Was there more behind this intellectual attraction that lasted seven years, until Descartes’ death? Elisabeth’s father, King of Bohemia for only one winter, had died when she was 13. Descartes’ own daughter had died at the age of six. Was this relationship a replacement for the family members they had lost? Or was it more?
The letters don’t tell us anything more, but it is interesting that Elisabeth never gave permission for her letters to be published. It was only after her death that a packet of her letters was found by an antiquarian bookseller and finally published alongside Descartes’ side of the exchange. But these letters were copies, not from her own hand, and nobody knows whether the copies are complete and accurate, or who made them. Was there perhaps more in the letters that Elisabeth refused to publish, and were these copies redacted excerpts? We will likely never know.
This short primer explores René Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, his contribution to rationalism, and his impact on early modern philosophy.
The clockwork universe
Elisabeth had always been interested in learning. Her siblings, 12 of them in total, called her “La Grecque,” because of her skill in the ancient language. She studied philosophy, history, law, astronomy, and, with particular interest, mathematics. She was said to be an excellent mathematician, and when Descartes attempted to give her a classic problem in mathematics to solve (the Problem of Apollonius), she surprised him with a solution that was simpler and easier to understand than his own.
The great man wrote in reply:
The outstanding and incomparable sharpness of your intelligence is obvious from the penetrating examination you have made of all the secrets of these sciences, and from the fact that you have acquired an exact knowledge of them in so short a time. I have even greater evidence of your powers — and this is special to myself — in the fact that you are the only person I have so far found who has completely understood all my previously published works. Many other people, even those of the utmost acumen and learning, find them very obscure; and it generally happens with almost everyone else that if they are accomplished in metaphysics they hate geometry, while if they have mastered geometry they do not grasp what I have written on first philosophy. Your intellect is, to my knowledge, unique in finding everything equally clear; and this is why my use of the term “incomparable” is quite deserved. [2]
But what is more important to philosophy is her criticism of Descartes’ mind/body dualism. If you are interested in an overview of the whole problem, here is a good introduction on Daily Philosophy:
The mind-body problem concerns the relationship between the mind and the body (or the brain). Two major philosophical views on this problem are monism and dualism.
At the time of Descartes, Newton’s physics was the newest and hottest of sciences. As opposed to the ancient and church “science,” Newton’s approach was purely mechanistic: every effect had a cause that preceded it, and even the most diverse phenomena, like gravity, the movements of celestial bodies, and the throw of a ball, could be shown to follow exact mathematical rules. Understanding these rules gave human beings, for the first time in history, the feeling that they are looking behind the veil of God’s creation and unravelling some of the structure that kept the universe going. And it was all understandable to human minds using mathematics.
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The materialism of Newton’s physics has been an inspiration to philosophers ever since, and particularly in those first decades of the modern age. Spinoza (video) created his Ethics “in the geometric mode,” proving all his conclusions from axioms, definitions, propositions and corollaries. Leibniz was impressed by the cells he saw in the first microscopes and envisioned a world populated by the smallest units imaginable, which he called “monads,” and which would forever keep the universe running after being set in motion by God at the beginning of time, just like a giant clockwork. And the British empiricists, Locke and Hume, both saw their work as a kind of “physics of the mind,” an attempt to state laws and regularities for how perception worked, how the outside world put ideas into our minds, and how these ideas would combine, just like atoms in a chemical reaction, to form more complex ideas and concepts.
The steampunk soul
Descartes, too, was impressed by the promise of a lawful mechanical explanation of the universe, including a physics of the human soul. He was comfortable with seeing the human being as a machine, albeit one that was steered and controlled by immaterial spirits within, what we usually call a soul.
The world, according to Descartes, is made up of two different substances: matter and mind. Matter has extension, that means, size and weight; mind has no extension, but it is characterised by thought as its defining attribute. This proves, so Descartes, that they cannot be the same thing. They are fundamentally different substances. This is what is called “Cartesian dualism” (because it assumes that two different substances exist).
But then a problem appears: how is the immaterial soul to move the heavy, material body? When I lift my arm, how does it work that my immaterial thoughts can move my muscles and my bones? This is the basic problem of the interaction of mind and body that has been plaguing dualism since the time Descartes first stated it. Because we generally think that the world is causally closed: that every material effect must have a material cause. When a ball rolls, something must have pushed it. When a glass breaks, something must have crushed it. When a hand moves, then something material must be the reason for that too.
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Every historical period describes new concepts with the vocabulary of its time. When we talk of consciousness and intelligence, we use computers as metaphors. When the ancient Greeks thought of robots, they saw iron spheres moved by air and fire. For Descartes, the world was a machine with tubes, pipes, pressurised air, fibres, levers and valves: an endlessly intricate steampunk contraption, but one driven, at its core, by immaterial spirits.
In Descartes’ description of the role of the pineal gland, the pattern in which the animal spirits flow from the pineal gland was the crucial notion. He explained perception as follows. The nerves are hollow tubes filled with animal spirits. They also contain certain small fibers or threads which stretch from one end to the other. These fibers connect the sense organs with certain small valves in the walls of the ventricles of the brain. When the sensory organs are stimulated, parts of them are set in motion. These parts then begin to pull on the small fibers in the nerves, with the result that the valves with which these fibers are connected are pulled open, some of the animal spirits in the pressurized ventricles of the brain escape, and (because nature abhors a vacuum) a low-pressure image of the sensory stimulus appears on the surface of the pineal gland. It is this image which then “causes sensory perception” of whiteness, tickling, pain, and so on. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Descartes and the Pineal Gland).
At the core of Descartes’ concept is a little part of the brain that was called the pineal gland. At Descartes’ time, it was not understood what the pineal gland did, and so Descartes gave it the job of interfacing between the spirits and the body. The pineal gland is, according to him, how the immaterial soul communicates its commands to the body. The whole description of fibres and ventricles and pipes has no other purpose than to obscure the basic issue, which still remains unsolved: how the immaterial spirits can move material things.
“It is not [the figures] imprinted on the external sense organs, or on the internal surface of the brain, which should be taken to be ideas — but only those which are traced in the spirits on the surface of the gland (where the seat of the imagination and the ‘common’ sense is located). That is to say, it is only the latter figures which should be taken to be the forms or images which the rational soul united to this machine will consider directly when it imagines some object or perceives it by the senses” (AT XI:176, CSM I:106).
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The critical student
Many have later made fun of Descartes, without necessarily having any better solutions to the problem of the mind/body interaction. Spinoza, for example, wrote in the preface to Part V of his Ethics:
The soul (i.e. the mind) is united in a special way to a certain part of the brain called the pineal gland. The gland is suspended in the middle of the brain in such a way that it can be moved by the least motion of the animal spirits. Each of the mind’s acts of the will is united by nature to a certain fixed motion of this gland. … As far as I can gather from his words, that is what the distinguished Descartes believed. If it hadn’t been so clever I would hardly have credited that it came from so great a man. … Here he is adopting a hypothesis that is more occult than any occult quality! I am astonished at this performance by a philosopher of his calibre. Again, I would love to know how fast the mind can make the pineal gland move, and how much force is needed to keep the gland suspended!
But Spinoza was not the first to find the concept of the pineal gland absurd. In her first letter to Descartes (May 16, 1643), Elisabeth already asks him to explain how the body and the soul can interact:
For it seems every determination of movement happens from the impulsion of a thing moved, according to the manner in which it is pushed by that which moves it, or else, depends on the qualification and figures of the superficies of the latter. Contact is required for the first two conditions, extension is required for the third. You entirely exclude extension from your notion of the soul, and contact seems to me incompatible with an immaterial thing. [1]
Descartes then tries to confuse matters by making an analogy with weight:
For example, in supposing weight (to be) a real quality, of which we possess no other knowledge save that it has the force of moving the body in which it exists toward the center of the earth, we have no difficulty conceiving how it moves this body, nor how it is joined to it; and we do not think that happens by means of an actual touching of one surface against the other…” (Blom 1978, 109; Descartes 1971, 3:667).[1]
In a sense, it’s an understandable reply. Before Einstein connected gravity with the geometry of space, it was indeed somewhat mysterious how the immaterial force of gravity would pull material bodies down. Perhaps this is what Descartes is trying to say here: if gravity can do it, why not a soul?
But Elisabeth is not convinced. She comes up with another argument: If the soul is immaterial, then why does the body sometimes affect the soul? If the soul can exist without the body, why is it, for example, that when we get drunk or drugged our soul seems to lose its ability to reason rationally? [1]
And so they go, back and forth. If you are interested in the further details of their arguments, there is an excellent article by Deborah Tollefsen in Hypatia, from which I have quoted the passages above. You can read it for free online at the link given below [1].
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Their further conversation goes into ethics since Elisabeth is concerned with how the spirits (or the soul) can actually drive the body to act in particular ways. Because this is the condition for human moral responsibility. If our actions were not driven by our rational soul, how could we be responsible for them? They also discuss mental health at some point, and Elisabeth seems unconvinced that the soul can entirely control the body with rationality only. She argues that for some, their physical constitution can make it impossible for them to overcome melancholic thoughts, what we would today call depression.
And thus, as yet, I am unable to extricate myself from doubting that one can arrive at the beatitude of which you speak without assistance of what does not depend absolutely upon the will; for there are maladies that completely deprive one of the power of reasoning, and consequently of enjoying a reasonable satisfaction; others diminish the force of reasoning and prevent one from following the maxims that good sense would institute…” (Blom 1978, 135; Descartes 1972, 4:269). [1]
In 1649, Queen Christina of Sweden invited Descartes to come to the Swedish court and teach her. Descartes, perhaps hoping for another friendship like that with Elisabeth, moved to the cold country in the north. But they soon found out that they disliked each other, and they met only a handful of times for lessons, which the queen usually scheduled for 5 in the morning. The Frenchman Descartes, not used to the harsh climate and the draughty palace, died a few months later from a kind of pneumonia – but there have always also been rumours that he might have been poisoned by those who objected to his religious views.
Elisabeth lived on for another thirty years. She used the exile court in The Hague to bring female scholars together, and thinkers like Anna Maria van Schurman, Marie de Gournay, and Lady Ranelagh were members of a circle that regularly corresponded about philosophical issues. Ten years after Descartes’ death, she became abbess in a convent, but this role included ruling an area with around 7,000 inhabitants, the equivalent of a small city. She continued to work, and, presumably, to do philosophy, but we have no works of her from that time.
Elisabeth’s epitaph reads: “Most Serene Princess and Abbess of Herford, born of Palatine Electors and Kings of Great Britain, unconquered and in all fortune full of constancy and fortitude, singularly capable and prudent in affairs and of an erudition worthy of wonder, celebrated beyond the condition of her sex, friend of learned men and of princes.”
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Andreas Matthias on Daily Philosophy:
[1] Deborah Tollefsen (1999). Princess Elisabeth and the Problem of Mind-Body Interaction. Hypatia, Volume 14, Number 3, Summer 1999.
[2] Lisa Shapiro (ed.) (2007). Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes. Edited and Translated by Lisa Shapiro. Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press.
All images in the public domain or created with Midjourney (where indicated). The factual information comes mostly from Wikipedia and other articles on the web.
