Political Effects of a Material Soul. Passions and Reason in Elizabeth of Bohemia
Keywords:
materialism, soul, body, passions, summum bonumCopyright (c) 2022 Julián A. Ramírez Beltrán
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
The epistolary relationship that emerges
between Elizabeth of Bohemia and René
Descartes, in the past, used to be visited and
examined as a reading strategy that would
seek to clarify and explain the premises of
Cartesian and mechanical philosophy. Despite
this, the princess palatine stated a critical
vision on how the soul of the human being
can be determined by the corporeal spirits
to execute voluntary actions. Such criticisms
about the determination of the movements
between the soul and the body will have repercussions
on what can be called a materialist
and interactionist account. Some effects of
this material consideration of the soul can be
considered to imply: i. a cognitive qualification
on the relationship between reason and
passions; ii. the assessment of the strength of
passions in the search for a summum bonum;
and, finally, iii. the identification of a central
problem in modernity, the unpredictability
and impossibility to establish a summum bonum
(i.e. sovereign good) resulting from the
hostile relation between arrogant and modest
individuals. The effects of Elizabeth of Bohemia’s
preference for the materiality of the
soul then demonstrate central reading keys to
thinking about the formulation of political
theory in early modernity in connection with
Hobbes, Gassendi, and Machiavelli.
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