Studies In Descartes' Moral Philosophy

For a long time,the study of Descartes' moral philosophy has been ignored,mainly because people have paid great attention to the metaphysics and epistemology in his philosophy,thus ignoring the moral philosophy.In fact,in Descartes' case,the epistemology of rationalism and its metaphysics not only constituted the main content of his philosophy,but also became the construction basis of his moral philosophy.Metaphysically,Descartes divided mind and body into distinct beings,which resulted in separation and unification of mind and body.It was on the basis of unique "mind-body dualism" that Descartes began to discuss the problem of human passion.It was through thinking about the problem of passion that Descartes showed his deep thinking on moral issues.In Cartesian view,passion is the soul of our resulting from external objects of perception,it ultimately embodies human body all sorts of perception and cognition,but only the perception and cognition associated with soul can be called the passion of soul,so,this depends on the natural relationship between body and mind,the interaction of body and mind,which produce mutual movement makes passion and to maintain and strengthen,at the same time,the role of passion in the body is shown as:drive and motivate a soul to desire things physically prepared,namely the nature,the theory of relative to the body,the role of passion in the soul of activities related to the will of the body,this will make us connected to what you need passion,refused to passion you don't need,at this time,people can produce conflict between natural desire and the will and even contradictory,at this time,Descartes advocated that we should strengthen the inherent power of the soul by relying on the firm judgement of things in our hearts and the judgement of the knowledge of good and evil of things,so that our soul would not be tortured by various emotions and desires,and conflict between desire and will would be solved.Because of generation of passion is kind of physiological condition on the mechanical response,therefore,it itself is not good and bad,not only if they produce specific utility to us,in this context,the role of passion is to make the soul to intend the natural look that is useful for us,and to insist on his own the will.Further,Descartes on the passion of this effect,divided into six basic passion,in order to correctly play the passion of correct use,Descartes thought soul should have its own rational knowledge of things and the passion of his own free will to control,although the Cartesian to attribute the moral sources for the soul itself,but as the rationality in the Cartesian epistemology,namely heart treat things in tooling the sense,we should also be in this soul tools based on the principle of rational control of passion,in this way,our action is moral,as a result,in Descartes' moral philosophy,passion as mitigation activities under the guidance of the will,it is the purpose of is to save and improve ourselves,at the same time,the Cartesian this passion will be enlarged as a highest virtue,in this kind of passion,under the domination of our moral comes from the correct understanding and determined to use their own free will,it makes us no longer value or contempt of others,and generous constitutes the understanding of their own value,caused the people a kind of identity,on the basis of self-identity,however,the source of morality is in danger of being disintegrated,Therefore,Descartes' moral philosophy contain a crisis of lacking moral sense.Therefore,this paper mainly starts from Descartes' mind-body dualism to introduce his theory of passion,thus revealing the main contents and thoughts of his philosophy.