Abstract:

René Descartes’s texts reveal substantial engagement with ancient Greek thinkers who belong to the ethical tradition of eudaimonism, which considers happiness or flourishing (eudaimonia) the highest good (Ayers 2007; D'Angers 1954; Gueroult 1985; Pereboom 1994; Rutherford 2004; 2013). For example, he (1) shares with the Stoics a form of psychotherapy grounded in both a distinction between what is and is not in our power and a providential conception of reality that grants us the capacity to achieve contentment through harmonizing ourselves with divine will (L&S §65; HB §§1–5; DL VII.134–143; CSM I.383ff.; III 265) and (2) explicitly describes himself as reconciling the Epicurean view of happiness as contentment (LM §131; DL X.136) with the Stoic view of the supreme good as virtue (DL VII.89, 127) by treating both as interconnected ends (CSM.III 261–2, 325).

With these examples in mind, how should we characterize Descartes’s engagement with eudaimonism? Is he a non-eudaimonist merely drawing on certain isolated ideas from ancient thinkers in developing his philosophical framework or an eudaimonist substantively contributing to this ethical tradition as either an innovator of a prior account or original thinker?

Youpa (2005) argues that Descartes is an eudaimonist because he is ethically concerned with happiness and the highest good and is committed to moral perfectionism: the view that the highest good consists in virtue as the cultivation of one’s rational nature (see also Gueroult 1985; Marshall 1998; Nadler 2023: 172–7, 232–236). Other scholars, however, offer reasons to doubt this eudaimonistic reading. In seeming opposition to eudaimonism, Descartes conceives of happiness as a mere affective state instead of a well-lived life (Rutherford 2013), he explicitly denies that happiness is the supreme good (Rutherford 2004; 2013; Shapiro 2011; Svensson 2015), and he does not subscribe to perfectionism insofar as he does not think we need to fully realize our rational capabilities in the form of flawless judgment in order to be virtuous and happy (Shapiro 2011).

In this paper I defend an eudaimonistic reading of Descartes by demonstrating that, through his views on virtue and happiness, he shares with eudaimonists the foundational commitment to a good which is (a) partly objectively grounded in facts about nature; (b) partly subjectively grounded in the beliefs/feelings of a subject; (c) structurally stable; and (d) exclusively intrinsically valuable. I argue that Rutherford, Shapiro, Svensson, and Youpa fail to clearly distinguish between the general form of eudaimonism, (a)–(d), and the particular contents that each eudaimonist offers to this form (cf. Annas 1993; Cooper 2012; Miller 2010). This error leads them to oversimplify eudaimonism as an ethical theory and to consider certain features foundational, namely, perfectionism and the use of the term ‘happiness’ (la beatitude), which are in fact merely content-based. I also argue that Descartes’s distinctive contributions to the eudaimonistic tradition lie in (i) his assertion that happiness only requires acting based on one’s best reasoning but not being free of error and (ii) his position that virtue and contentment are equally constitutive of living well.