Le partage de nos inclinations. La raison de l’amitié, de Montaigne à Descartes

Starting from a page of Montaigne, we try to show how the question of the particularization of love resists, in some way, the eviction of sympathy as a conceptual tool. In this respect, we emphasize that this question is all the more topical precisely in the case of the philosopher who has been credited with freeing natural philosophy from all reference to occult links and mysterious actions at a distance between objects bound together by secret affinities. Descartes, precisely by his definitive rejection of sympathy in physics, unleashed a new –and difficult– question that he consigned to later authors: that “concerning the causes that often induce us to love one person rather than another, before we know their merit.”