Passions of the Soul
Passions of the Soul is Descartes’ last work and was motivated by his correspondence with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia . In this passage Descartes describes how he thinks mind and body interact. The crucial portal of the bodymind, he says, is a “small gland,” the pineal gland, which was discovered to excrete melatonin three centuries later. If there is a mental podium, surgical removal of the pineal gland, a pinealectomy, does not seem to interrupt it.
In “Passions of the Soul,” Descartes says that the soul is not physical. Although the soul is not physical, it is believed to cause the body. Elisabeth challenged him by asking him how a nonphysical object can casually influence a physical object. I will explain Descartes’s position with Elizabeth’s skepticism about soul-body interactions. Descartes is dualistic and believes that mind and body are different. He believes that physical objects have form, position, extent and mobility. Since the mind has no such qualities, it cannot be physical. Although they are separate, he believes that there is a causal interaction between the two. This union of mind and body leads to the conviction of descending and ascending causality.
The cause occurs when a mental event creates a physical event. The bottom-up cause occurs when a physical event creates a mental event. For example, if the mind is anxious, the hands will shake. The mind moves the pineal gland directly and produces animal spirits by hand. This illustrates Descartes’s process of descending causality. Elizabeth opposed the idea that causality could occur without contact. You do not agree that a thinking object such as the mind can perform voluntary actions. Use the contact model to explain that something that is not physical cannot randomly affect something physical. He thinks that feelings of fear cannot cause tremors because there is no physical contact. Elisabeth discredits Discard’s explanation with this idea. The cause cannot occur without contact. According to Descartes, the virtue of generosity is a habit of the soul. It can only be created by the soul or the passions of the soul. The virtue produced by one’s soul is not equal to the noble and strong of all men, and no one can improve it because it is an inherent quality. Descartes, however, states that the virtue of generosity, which is one of the passions of the soul, can be corrected by education. Descartes also defines the passions of the soul: “perceptions, sensations, or emotions.” It is important to remember that passions inspire people to act. However, to improve generosity and similar virtues, man must align his passions with the use of reason in the virtuous.
Humes Argument
One of Hume’s shorter and lesser-known religious pieces is also one of the most satisfying. There is a clear and concise view of the idea in the title on the immortality of the soul, as you can imagine. Hume considers three types of arguments for the immortality of the soul. First, there are metaphysical arguments that reason must be different from matter and that this “spiritual substance” is indivisible and indestructible. According to Hume, this does not mean that their survival guarantees the survival of the people who encourage them, even if souls are immortal. Just as the physical substance that makes up our body continues to exist after we die, so does the spiritual substance that integrates us after we depart. “So if the soul was immortal, it existed before our birth, and if the first existence does not affect us at all, not even the second.”