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This chapter addresses the poetics of performance that emerges from Descartes's epistolary dialogue with Elisabeth of Bohemia. Elisabeth had pressed Descartes on the inadequacies of dualism, pushing him to the refined positions he takes in Passions of the Soul. Meanwhile, its theoretical ideas find expression in The Birth of Peace, the ballet whose libretto Descartes is said to have written and whose 1649 performance at the court of Queen Christina of Sweden the chapter analyzes. Like Descartes's correspondence with Elisabeth, the ballet restores the body to a place of prominence by demonstrating how it serves as the repository of experience and memory. And if experience (especially emotional experience) reshapes the body, as Descartes showed as early as his mechanistic Treatise on Man, theater like ballet could encourage salutary physical effects by providing joyful experience and building joyful memories.

What does the mind–body union consist in for Descartes? At a minimum, causal interaction between mind and body. But also in a certain experience of the body with which we’re united, which inclines us to locate bodily sensations as occurring in it, not in the mind. Hence, we mistakenly identify ourselves with that body. The phenomenology of mind–body interaction, also manifested in the mind’s control of the body, explains Descartes’ doctrine that the whole of the mind is united with the whole body. The chapter takes the principal alternative interpretation to be the view developed by Paul Hoffman that Descartes accepted the scholastic theory that the soul is the substantial form of the body. It argues that Hoffman’s view misunderstands the texts, and fails to appreciate how untenable Pomoponnazi’s treatise On the Immortality of the Soul had made an Aristotelian interpretation of the mind–body relation.

The chapter suggests that the historical antipathy between philosophy and theater as disciplines has obscured the theater's unexamined importance to Cartesian philosophy and Descartes's unexamined impact on theater history: on playwriting and dramatic theory, on acting theory, on theater architecture. Philosophers since at least Plato have suspected the alleged falseness of theater, preferring an immaterial realm; meanwhile, theater historians have tended to subordinate philosophical questions to material research concerns. Thus, the two disciplines have mimicked the split between mind and body putatively authored by Descartes. By helping us to better understand Descartes's doctrine of mind-body union, the chapter helps too to reconcile the methodological schism between the two disciplines. Specifically, it promotes an epistemology of performance, reliant on the repertory of lived action as a supplement to the historical archive of material artifacts.

This chapter explains Descartes confusion on sensations, size, shape, position, and motion. Descartes in detail explains that we perceive particular figures or actual bodies affecting our senses much more distinctly than their colours. Descartes construe the perception of position, distance, size, and shape as involving strong intellectual elements and he holds that they differ in this fundamental respect from ordinary perceptions of color, sound, heat and cold, taste, and the like, which are said to consist just in having “sensations” that “arise from the mind-body union.” This position leaves room for uncertainty about what he means when he speaks elsewhere of the near-uselessness of sense perceptions in informing us of particular qualities of bodies, in so far as it opens the possibility of a quite restricted understanding of “sense perception” in these contexts.

This chapter begins with an analysis of the National Theatre's 2010 “live re-broadcast” of Racine's Phèdre, starring Helen Mirren. The spectators' experience in the contemporary Cineplex suggests something of what is wrong with contemporary stagings of Racine and contemporary understandings of Cartesian mind-body union: the potential for intersubjective contact, so central to both playwright and philosopher, is eliminated. Too often, philosophy and theater mimic the view of Phèdre's 2010 spectators, sitting aloof in the amphitheater and objectifying a foreign image. The chapter argues that we should instead leverage the epistemological benefits of live performance. These benefits are in fact promoted by Descartes himself, in his posthumously published dialogue La recherce de la vérité par la lumière naturelle.

This chapter looks at Elisabeth’s arguments in the framework of Descartes’ program to collect valuable objections from members of the Republic of Letters. The analysis of Elisabeth’s first letters reveals astonishing resemblances between Elisabeth’s position and the one Gassendi had expressed in his Fifth Objections. In order to explain this fact, the chapter proposes that Samuel Sorbière, present in the Low Countries since 1642, was an agent of Gassendi’s who worked his way into Queen of Bohemia’s court at the Hague and who, during several encounters with Princess Elisabeth, explained to her Gassendi’s views and worked with her on a Gassendist interpretation of Meditation Six. The chapter also shows that later on, Sorbière was to depart from a number of Gassendist positions and that Descartes’ ideas eventually permeated his philosophical writings.

Chapter 1 investigates Descartes’s account of the union of body and mind and the confusion that he takes to characterize our understanding of what we are when reflecting on the roles body and mind perform in our lives as human beings. To clarify this confusion, this chapter argues, a specific form of experience is needed, one that enables us to self-determine our thinking and acting. This experience is delivered by the Meditations, as this work’s confronting nature stirs us into action and thereby enables us to explore in a performative exercise what it means to guide one’s thinking by willful determination. Through this new experience, we can better comprehend what the mind is and what it enables us to do, thereby learning to put into practice the conduct of virtuous agents.