Koval' O.A. Anthropological value of passions in rationalistic metaphysics of René Descartes

Abstract: The most complicated problem in Descartes’s metaphysics is the problem of combination of two diverse substances – thinking and extension – in one and indivisible person’s constitution. A solution of this problem proposed by Descartes was not satisfied his contemporaries and even became the main argument in favour of disclaimer all Cartesian system. The article attempts to show that Descartes’ interpretation of passions as the unity of mind and body turns out reasonable and very actual interpretation for modern philosophy, especially in connection with widely debated discussions which take place around the problem of body. To carry out the declared task, it was required to reconstruct an anthropology of Descartes which was positioned by him as the leading philosophical discipline. That is why a complex historico-philosophical and culturological methodology – including along with standard approaches of scientific research hermeneutics and structuralistic techniques of textual analysis – is applied in the article. The concept of passion considered as the principal moment of the Descartes’ anthropology allows us to supplement his traditional idealistic understanding of the person as the thinking substance and – connecting together body and consciousness which were divorced in ego cogito – to return to initial psychophysical unity of human being. Cartesian tactics of substantial division anthropologically appears not as the fundamental metaphysical principle, but as the supplementary methodological way of logical and discursive projecting of reality.

Keywords: