Elizabeth of Bohemia

German philosopher

• Born: December 26, 1618
• Birthplace: Heidelberg, Lower Palatinate (now in Germany)
• Died: February 8, 1680
• Place of death: Herford, Brandenburg (now in Brandenburg, Germany)

Elizabeth of Bohemia is best known for her correspondence with the French philosopher Descartes, in which she challenged his dualist interactionism. She is an example of a seventeenth century woman who succeeded in overcoming the barriers that prevented women from engaging in rational discourse.

Early Life

Elizabeth of Bohemia was born into an illustrious family. Her parents were Elizabeth Stuart , the daughter of King James I of England, and Frederick V , elector of the Palatinate. Her father’s mother was a member of the Dutch House of Orange. Frederick was king of Bohemia, briefly, but was ousted in 1620 by the same Protestant rebels who had installed him. The dethronement of Frederick and the confiscation of his lands resulted in one of the early campaigns of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), which brought death and destruction to many German principalities.

Elizabeth’s parents and her older brother escaped to The Hague (now in the Netherlands), under the protection of the prince of Orange, while she and her younger brother remained with their grandmother and aunt. In 1628, the two children joined their parents in Holland and were sent to Leyden to be educated by royal tutors and professors at the university there. Elizabeth excelled in her studies, which included ancient and modern languages, logic, history, and mathematics.

In 1632, Elizabeth’s father died while involved in attempts to regain his kingdom. Thereafter, her mother, who showed little interest in her daughters, became a champion of the Protestant cause. At the age of sixteen, Elizabeth received a marriage proposal from King Władysław IV Vasa of Poland, but she refused because she would have had to convert to Catholicism. Elizabeth and, later, her much younger sister Sophie, both of whom were fascinated by philosophy, participated in the intellectual circle hosted by her mother in their home. Guests included poet and government official Constantijn Huygens (1596-1648), philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650), and philosopher Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont (1614?-1699).

Life’s Work

Descartes included six sets of objections and his replies in Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641; Meditations on First Philosophy , 1680). A mutual acquaintance informed Descartes that the intelligent, well-educated princess was interested in metaphysics, and the two met in 1642 or 1643. Their correspondence lasted from June of 1643 until 1649 and covered a number of philosophical topics, including the nature and relationship of the mind and body, ethics, free will and moral responsibility, God’s existence and nature, and the emotions. Elizabeth’s initial letters concerned Descartes’s exposition of interactionist dualism in the Meditations on First Philosophy. In particular, she wrote that she could not understand how nonextended, nonphysical substance—the mind or soul—and physical, extended substance—body or matter—could causally affect each other. Descartes’s answers did not satisfy her, so in July, 1643, she proposed her own solution: that the mind had some kind of extension and therefore could cause motion in material bodies. Descartes made no response to her idea.

In 1643, Elizabeth solved a difficult geometrical problem posed by Descartes. During the next year, Descartes traveled and oversaw the publication of Principia philosophiae (1644; Principles of Philosophy , 1983), which he dedicated to Princess Elizabeth. Elizabeth wrote one letter only during this period, but in characteristic fashion, she asked him for explanations of several points she found inconsistent. Although Descartes did not like criticism, their correspondence was quite friendly. It has been suggested that Descartes was in love with Elizabeth, but the differences in their ages, social class, and religion would have made a romantic relationship impossible.

Elizabeth’s susceptibility to repeated illness concerned Descartes, concerns he expressed in his letters. Though not a physician, he attributed her fever of 1644 to sadness, that is, to depression, and he advocated the neo-Stoical view that a superior soul could overcome and control the passions (and thus her depression). Consistent with his dualism, Descartes recommended that Elizabeth separate rational thought from the corporeal functions of imagination and emotions and advised her to view her problems with rational detachment, perform her duties, and then seek enjoyments. She was preoccupied, however, because some of her family members were embroiled in both Continental wars and English politics. She also had to maintain her household and act as mother to her numerous siblings. So Elizabeth found it impossible to comply with Descartes’s recommendations.

These issues led to another phase of their correspondence, which focused on the emotions and morality. For Elizabeth, in stark contrast to Descartes, the soul and body were the same, and one could not so easily detach reason from passion. Moreover, she was concerned with the relationships between the self and others, topics she believed were not adequately treated by Descartes. Elizabeth did convince Descartes that his ethics required a theory of emotion to support it. He brought her a manuscript in March, 1646, which elaborated on the viewpoints he expressed in his letters to her. Elizabeth then asked him to clarify obscure points. In particular, she noted that passions do not occur in isolation, as Descartes seemed to think, but instead were connected with other passions, as love is associated with desire and either joy or sadness. One passion, in other words, led to another passion, and so forth. Furthermore, she inquired how Descartes came to believe that the general movements of the blood could account specifically for the five basic passions he identified.

Finally, she judged as inadequate the morality he espoused, in which reason must be used to control the passions, She argued that since life was unpredictable—and that some desires, such as the desire to live, were not grounded in free will—some passions therefore could not be easily controlled.

Elizabeth’s troubles with her family multiplied during this period. Her mother was deeply in debt and still trying to regain the Palatine lands. In October, 1645, Elizabeth received the shocking news that her brother Edward had married the sister of the queen of Poland and had converted to Catholicism. In June of 1646, another brother, Philip, and several of his men killed a French captain who had boasted of successful dalliances with another sister, Louise, and with their mother. Threatened with arrest, Philip fled Holland and Elizabeth was banished to Berlin by her enraged mother, who believed that she had encouraged Philip to revenge the captain’s insults and, thus, had brought infamy to the family.

The Thirty Years’ War ended in 1648, and Elizabeth’s family recovered part of its lost land. Her brother Charles and his wife moved to Heidelberg, where he formed an illicit liaison with another woman. Her uncle, English and Scottish king Charles I , was beheaded in England in 1649. Also in 1649, Descartes traveled to Sweden to tutor Queen Christina in philosophy, but he died a year later.

Unwilling to live in the house of her brother Charles, Elizabeth made arrangements to enter the Protestant convent in Herford, a retreat for aristocratic women and one of the four female ecclesiastical principalities in Germany. During her years there, she corresponded with many notable individuals, including philosophers Nicolas de Malebranche, Henry More, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz , and Anne Conway , as well as the Quaker convert William Penn . She was abbess at the convent from 1667 until her death in 1680.

Significance

Elizabeth of Bohemia did not publish her writings and refused to allow her letters to be part of a publication of Descartes’s correspondence. Her letters were lost and did not resurface until the nineteenth century.

She is an important figure for several reasons. First, she raised objections to Descartes’s interactionism and his views on the passions, on what makes a happy life, and on morality, to which, according to some scholars, he had inadequate responses. Moreover, she formulated views alternative to Descartes’s interactionism and moral theories. In her own right she was a philosopher whose ideas require scholarly analysis. As the subject of much modern research, her life and ideas have been used to illustrate feminist ideologies that focus on the importance of subjectivity to thinking, in contrast to Descartes’s insistence on objectivity in thinking and on questions of morality.

She represents the life of an intellectual woman during the seventeenth century, burdened by domestic duties while wanting to participate in the life of the mind, outside the university setting. In this regard, she is an example of Descartes’s belief, unusual for the time perhaps, that reason is a human, and not an exclusively male, characteristic. Her responses to Descartes, however, were challenges to a tradition of philosophy that called for a life of reason separated from and unaffected by ordinary, daily life.

Bibliography

Broad, Jacqueline. Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Chapter 1 presents an overview and critique of modern scholarship on Elizabeth and argues that Elizabeth’s moral outlook was based not on her life experiences but on her metaphysics.

Findlen, Paula. “Ideas in the Mind: Gender and Knowledge in the Seventeenth Century.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 17, no. 1 (Winter, 2002). Using modern critical editions of the writings of women in the seventeenth century, the author analyzes the works to explore the connections between gender and knowledge.

Graukroger, Stephen. Descartes: An Intellectual Biography. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1995. A lengthy analysis of the development of Descartes’s philosophy. Chapter 10 examines his correspondence with Elizabeth and how it influenced his Les Passions de l’âme (1649; Passions of the Soul, 1650).

Harth, Erica. Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992. Chapter 2 discusses the relationship between Descartes and Elizabeth and explains how Elizabeth came to be recognized as cartésienne, attempting to break the gender barrier against women participating in rational discourse during the seventeenth century.

Nye, Andrea. The Princess and the Philosopher: Letters of Elisabeth of the Palatine to René Descartes. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. Includes a translation of the letters written by Elizabeth to Descartes, along with a somewhat novelistic commentary that places them within contemporary cultural and political contexts.

Tollefsen, Deborah. “Princess Elisabeth and the Problem of Mind-Body Interaction.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 14, no. 3 (1999): 59-77. A philosophical analysis of Elizabeth’s metaphysics and her critique of Descartes.