Abstract
Coming out of an investigation of the fable, where it is shown to hold a crucial pedagogical role both in terms of how the world is to be interpreted and how the self can construct itself, it is now possible to examine what effect this fabular structure has on our understanding of the Cartesian method in general. The traditional understanding of the method is, roughly, an intellectual reduction of the complexities of the way things of the world present themselves to the simple essences of those things, whether they be oneself, god, or a piece of wax. Of the material objects of the world, in their materiality, a reduction to their geometric essences, especially expressed in algebraic notation, is the clearest and most distinct expression of their truths, and will be an expression of eternal truths.
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Notes
- 1.
For Cicero (2006), the character of invention always revolves around a constitutio (an issue), which can be of a conjectural, definitional, qualitative, or translative sort. The terms of a conjectural constitutio laid out by inventa concern facts (see Cicero 2006, 1.8.10). This would mean that the conjecture of the evil genius lays out not just the facts of the case concerning the existence of the self , but also the foundational fact of facts, the fact from which all other facts, all other arguments or inventa , can be made.
- 2.
See also The Port-Royal Logic (1861), pp. 308–316.
- 3.
As Marion (1977b) points out, then, there are some public displays of what would be considered Descartes’ analytic reductive method that should condition the Cartesian assessment of ancient secrecy, displays that Descartes himself knew (Marion 1977b, p. 152). However, for Pappus (1986) analysis was not considered a general or perhaps generalizable approach to mathematics , but was “a special resource that was prepared … for those who want to acquire a power in geometry that is capable of solving problems set to them; and it is useful for this alone” (Pappus 1986, p. 82). Moreover, this publicity of analysis would not address the boredom of reading synthesis , nor synthesis’ failure to demonstrate how it arrived at its definitions . Gilson (1947) observes, however, that Pappus and Diophantus “only codified the results” of analysis in its earliest stages of development, results which were “obscured” by their commentators (Gilson 1947, p. 188; my trans.).
- 4.
That synthesis is boring and does not show how it makes its discoveries would lend credence to what Nancy (1978b) says about Cartesian mathematics : “beginning with the Regulae, the truth of Cartesian science is precisely such that it requires a covering [vêtement] (that of ‘common mathematics’ ) in order to show itself [se montrer]” (Nancy 1978b, p. 639; 1979, p. 102). Again, showing (docere) is distinct from teaching , so “There is no ‘hidden instruction’ here …. Here authority , truth as authority , withdraws itself. It is thus that fabula docet” (Nancy 1978b, p. 643; 1979, p. 108). The covering of mathematics that allows the truth of Cartesian science to show itself is then the showing of the withdrawal of authority , of the authority in the hidden truths of the hidden methods. In addition, to give the truth of Cartesian science the covering, veil, patina, or vestment of analytic mathematics for the common because it is not boring is to show to those who would not otherwise authorize themselves that they need no authority , that authority withdraws in the face of the vestments enrobing Cartesian truth, that they are hereby authorized to authorize themselves not to be bored, thanks to analysis .
- 5.
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However, in a certain way, it does appear as though Mahoney (1980) is discounting some of Descartes’ fears of boring his readers . This fear often leads Descartes to leave certain portions of his texts or proofs incomplete, which is not something Mahoney (1980) notes about the Cartesian expression of analytic method in general. Descartes’ pedagogical interest extended beyond a simplistic analytic rivalry with synthesis , it seems. He was concerned that even analysis could be boring, and wanted to allow even that method to demonstrate its rigor precisely through not explaining every step or every problem of an analysis , so that these attentive students could take up the method on their own even in the very learning of his method.
- 7.
Garber (2001) denies that the Principles is a synthetic approach to the same issues brought up analytically in the Meditations . Indeed, he finds that “the distinction between analysis and synthesis may be entirely irrelevant to understanding the true relations between the metaphysical arguments of the Meditations and the Principles” (Garber 2001, p. 62). He suggests that the differences between the two books might be reconciled by thinking of the metaphysics in the Principles as conceived as prefatory (see Garber 2001, p. 62n. 11), or that Descartes’ interest in having the Principles used as a textbook might have driven him to write in a more typical fashion for that approach, or even that Descartes initially thought that what we have of the Principles would be a portion of a larger work (see Garber 2001, p. 63). However, it seems to me that accepting Garber’s position on the matter and following his suggestions for what the metaphysical arguments of the Principles are only lends credence to my own claims about the fable-structure or -logic to the Principles, once the appeal to its novelistic status has been taken seriously. Let it be any of Garber’s suggestions, and the Principles, especially its metaphysical arguments , can still be understood as operating on the theme of setting the reader’s mind into motion, of unlearning what he or she has already learned in order to teach him- or herself. Whether that unlearning and learning begins in a prefatory, textbook , or partial manner would not affect the structure at hand.
- 8.
Such an understanding of the relationship between Cartesian analysis and synthesis could very well go a long way to answering Garber’s dilemma described in the previous note while still allowing for the fable-structure or -logic to operate and initiate motions as necessary, whether in the minds of francophone craftspeople or in those of university students.
- 9.
From this perspective, at least elements of Aristotelian rhetoric seem to be at work within Descartes. Descartes of course was educated in the Rhetoric , as indicated by The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum of 1599 (1970, pp. 72–79, esp. pp. 72–73), which was the official guideline at La Flèche . Indeed, perhaps this link with rhetoric could even be seen as a missing chapter of Le Bossu (1674).
- 10.
This may very well be an explanation to a consequence Brann (1991) lays out of the “great baring of bones of reason ” (Brann 1991, p. 69). She does not make a broad claim as to the modern move from a paring down of logic and metaphysics to “metaphysical systems every bit as abstruse and as deep as were the classical philosophical developments,” but if the paring down of logic by Descartes is done in the interest of maintaining readers’ interests, this would indicate that there is necessarily a link or an enmeshing between logic and rhetoric which itself betrays the appeal to simplicity as a metaphysical and logical premise to begin with (Brann 1991, p. 69).
- 11.
Husserl (1999) appears to assume that the Cartesian analytic reduction that operates through the algebraicization of logic is in fact the simple procedure that Descartes himself assumes it is, claiming that Descartes fell into an inconsistency concerning the claims of clear and distinct ideas as being anything “more than a characteristic of consciousness within me.” As a result, Descartes “missed the genuine sense of his reduction to the indubitable” (Husserl 1999, p. 83). In its place, Husserl (1999) would substitute the transcendental reduction of the epoché that would come to terms with the fact that, even if what is external to the world of sense for the transcendental subject is nonsense, “even nonsense is always a mode of sense and has its nonsensicalness within the sphere of possible insight” such that the ego can explain itself as both self-constituting and “constitutes in himself something ‘other’” (Husserl 1999, pp. 84 and 85). Fink (1988) continues this critique in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation when he criticizes possible misunderstandings of the epoché as having “a ‘simple straightforward aim,’ namely, that it is nothing but a method of confirmation, an ‘exaggerated methodism’” such that phenomenology would presume to operate from a position without presuppositions , “a fateful prejudice to demand for the beginning of philosophy —since Descartes” (Fink 1988, pp. 45 and 46). These objections are irrelevant because the epoché “puts into question what all ‘existential’ philosophies of this kind presuppose: human being itself (the natural attitude)” (Fink 1988, p. 46). Even more, because the phenomenological reduction “interrogates [the antecedent consciousness as well as man in the world and makes] them the theme of a transcendental clarification,” without turning an apodeictic inner experience into “‘absolute being’” (Fink 1988, pp. 47–48).
However, because both Husserl (1999) and Fink (1988) ignore the fable-structure or -logic that is always at hand in Cartesian analytic reduction , especially insofar as that structure or logic, qua fabular, can be aligned with syllogism and synthesis , they would thereby seem to begin their critiques from what may itself be a misunderstanding of Cartesian logic and method. If analysis and synthesis are, in Descartes, in a strophe–antistrophe relationship thanks to the fable-structure or -logic which inaugurates the movement down the path of the method, such that it is difficult if not impossible to specify at which point the analysis ends and the synthesis begins, if the common notion that would serve as a ‘premise’ -maxim for the analytic method is established thanks to a fable, an invented example , a whole new potential world of sense, then the Cartesian relationship between analysis and synthesis would seem much closer to the relationship between passive and active synthesis that Husserl (1999) describes, without the presupposition that activity “necessarily” makes concerning passivity (Husserl 1999, p. 78). And perhaps the fable-structure or -logic that sets this relationship to work is more fundamental, without being transcendental because not simply a condition for the possibility of the method but interwoven within it even while it grounds the method, than Fink’s understanding of science as the synthetic unity of antithetic demonstrations which is the “working within the phenomenological concept of truth” (Fink 1988, p. 134).
- 12.
The deconstructive sense of supplementation emerges from the dual meaning of the word ‘supplement’ as that which completes something which has a lack and that which is an unnecessary addition to what is already complete (see Derrida 1997, pp. 141–164). Here, I am claiming that Rule Six may appear as if it supplements Rule Five in that the former completes what is lacking in the latter, but simultaneously, Rule Six adds more onto Rule Five than would appear necessary in terms of the wholeness of Rule Five.
- 13.
Cavaillé (1991) points out that “Simple corporeal natures form the a priori frame for sensible perception , not as things of the world, but inasmuch as they constitute the look that we bring to [portons sur] the world. The great book of the world is legible only because the mind furnishes its reading principles which allow for bringing its grammar and glossary to light” (Cavaillé 1991, p. 104; my trans.). For Cavaillé (1991), though, this situation, insofar as it turns the mind toward decoding the book of the world, which is a task the arbitrariness of which could only be mediated by “leaving it to the arbitration of the Author ,” which would seem to undermine the primacy of the decoding, thinking subject (Cavaillé 1991, p. 104; my trans.). What he does not emphasize here is the doubly supplemental relationship between the method of decoding and the relationality of simple and complex natures at hand in Rules Five and Six. That is, these simple corporeal natures may very well form an a priori frame for perception , but such corporeal natures are simple only to the extent that they are not complex natures to be decoded, and the complexity of complex natures remains such only in relation to the simplicity of the natures which will be brought to light in the decoding. In this way, the appeal to the great author of the great book of the world as an appeal to arbitrate the decoding of the book would seem to be an appeal to the grammar and glossary of reading itself, not necessarily to its author —by which we could refer to either the author of the book or the author of the grammar and glossary. The grammar and the glossary of the book of the world are coherent insofar as they expose and explain the frame for a comprehension of the book, but the book itself requires the frame of a glossary and grammar in order to be coherent and comprehensible. We are not discussing just any book, after all. We are discussing the book of the world, the world as something that can be comprehended and/or decoded, and the grammar and glossary of such a book can never be fully external to the content therein because they are themselves already involved in that content. However, the impossibility of externality between the grammar and glossary and the content of the book of the world does not indicate that there is a wholeness to the ‘bound’ book at hand. Rather, this book’s ‘supplementary’ material becomes, by turns, more central than the content, even while its content establishes the grammar and glossary itself.
Daniel (1985) may offer a response both to this issue in Cavaillé (1991), perhaps unwittingly, and to Nancy’s claim that the truth of Cartesian science requires a vestment of mathematics . In describing Descartes’ response to Baconian claims that “True invention … brings into our experience new objects , meanings, or ways of viewing the world in order to attain the truth by means of expanding our comprehension of the world,” Daniel (1985) explains that Cartesian invention has “need of a prior criterion for determining true inventive insights” (Daniel 1985, pp. 160 and 161). Thus, according to him, “The value of mathematics does not lie in its use of figures to provide an imaginary covering (integumentum) of objects or truths inaccessible to sensible description. Its value lies in its procedures which accustom ingenium to distinguish valid arguments and truths known with certainty from those which are unsound, false or only probable” (Daniel 1985, p. 161). Daniel’s claim that mathematics establishes the frame for decoding the book of the world is fair enough, and it could seem that this would give credence to Cavaillé’s claim that this frame is a priori. However, Daniel (1985) goes on to explain that “the activity of ingenium is simply that of attending to ideas which are already formed in order to detect the correctness of their interconnectedness,” which is why, “at the very outset of the description of his physics …, Descartes acknowledges in The World … that he is sensitive to the imaginative or poetic character of such a description” (Daniel 1985, pp. 161 and 162). The precedent interconnectedness of ideas is the frame or glossary and grammar of the book of the world, but, as Daniel (1985) points out here, that very interconnectedness is itself the result of an imaginative and/or poetic moment, a moment not established by the great author of the great book of the world, but by the reader of that book. In this way, the glossary and grammar and the content of the book, the interconnectedness of the ideas and the methodical description of that interconnectedness, are never separate from each other. Rule Five and Rule Six involve, complicate, and supplement each other. The rules are generated by what would follow them, and rule-obedience is the generation of the rules themselves.
- 14.
It is here that at least an aspect of Marion’s understanding of a Cartesian gray ontology can perhaps become clear. As Marion (1999) explains it, “Being known always conveys a way, exactly, of Being. The way of Being that leads beings back to their status as pure beings is put forth in what Descartes inaugurated—Being in the mode of objectum” (Marion 1999, p. 91). As a result, Descartes can be distinguished from Aristotle in that “physics does not reach the ens” since beings are not defined through their relationship to physics , “but uniquely and sufficiently according to objectivity” such that the objects of mathematics , that is, the things of the world as these objects , are beings, have their ways of being in a mathematical, objectively known being which remains at a distance from the physics of the world of these things (Marion 1999, p. 92). Objects , then, are “led back” to their being as beings known in mathesis , which is why “The mind is known better than and before the body , the mathematical essence of material things … before these same things ” (Marion 1999, p. 92). This leading back to the being of things as being known is what Marion (1999) calls Descartes’ gray ontology , and it “would remain impossible without the intervention of another authority ,” that authority being that of the self , which knows beings as beings which have a way of being in being known (Marion 1999, p. 92). In terms of the self , the operation of this gray ontology shows that the cogitatio “comes back to itself. It comes down to coming back to itself, to the point of knowing itself first (… me cogitare), to the point of constituting itself as a being (ego), because, more originally, it bends back over itself” (Marion 1999, p. 93). In this bending or leading back to itself, the cogitatio makes itself an object which is insofar as it is known, and this “implies a reflecting appropriation, the ultimate implication of which is named—ego,” making the operation of the cogitatio which leads objects back to their gray ontological status as known beings a “curve of thought” that can be called “the ‘logic’ in Cartesian thought” (Marion 1999, p. 94). This curve of thought of a gray ontology might also be called the fable-logic or -structure whereby a new world is imagined or a self establishes itself in a hyperbolic logic of doubt and self-deception .
Marion (1999) anticipates two objections to this position, the first that it is in contradiction with “the Cartesian way of thinking ” whereby “analysis arrives at the existence of the ego without passing through doubt, or … admitting that a new operation of thought … is required for this effect,” and the second that it “leads one to identify the being par excellence with the ego, thus with a finite being and not with God” (Marion 1999, pp. 95 and 96). Marion’s response to the first point is that the analysis of the piece of wax “extracts the ego (cogitans) directly from the cogitatum, or rather from the interpretation of the objectum as a cogitatum,” meaning that the analysis of the piece of wax involves a “reduction … to the actually operative cogitatio” just as much as the self’s proving of its own existence to itself (Marion 1999, pp. 97 and 98). To the second point, he replies that “The cogitatio sui offers too little to be able to designate God. A finite res cogitans is enough to accomplish the gaze focused on objectness” (Marion 1999, p. 102). I would contest only this last reply, and only to the extent that the res cogitans is precisely finite , but this contestation emerges from the question of what allows, in Marion’s language , the cogitatio to lead itself back to itself as a known being known to itself called the ego, to begin this operation at all. Fabulation accomplishes this, and accomplishes it thanks to what I will call the transfinite status of the imagination as distinct from other faculties.
- 15.
Rickless (2005) argues against the charge that Descartes committed the fallacy of circularity by focusing on what he calls the Natural Light Strategy (NL-Strategy). This strategy claims that “Descartes considered indubitable ab initio all and only those principles that he perceived clearly and distinctly (and non-demonstratively) by means of the natural light ” (Rickless 2005, p. 330). The natural light being equated with the understanding, it is distinct from clear and distinct perception , with the result that, “although everything that is known by the natural light is clearly and distinctly perceived, not everything that is clearly and distinctly perceived is known by the natural light ” (Rickless 2005, p. 310). As a result, to appeal to the natural light avoids the reasons for the hyperbolic doubt because the reasons for doubting come from perceptions , “whether clear or obscure, distinct or confused, that derive from the senses or from the imagination,” and the senses, imagination, and understanding are distinct faculties with distinct perceptions (Rickless 2005, p. 310). Thus, “all that is required to validate these doubtful perceptions is an argument for the Truth Rule [i.e., the Fourth Meditation’s claim that all clear and distinct perceptions are true] the validity and premises of which are distinctly perceived by the understanding (i.e., known by the natural light ). Descartes takes himself to have provided exactly such an argument in the Third and Fourth Meditations ” (Rickless 2005, p. 318). The advantage of the NL-Strategy is that it does not suffer from two critiques: (1) It does not relativize “the epistemic status of a principle (as doubtful or certain) to the particular reasons for doubt offered in the First Meditation ” because “what the natural light (i.e., the understanding) perceives clearly and distinctly does not depend on the kinds of reasons offered for doubting the perceptions of the senses and the imagination” (Rickless 2005, p. 331). (2) It can explain “why Descartes grounds the indubitability of the 3 M–Premises [i.e., the Third Meditation’s argument for god’s existence and truthfulness] in the fact that they are perceived by means of a special faculty (to which he gives the name ‘natural light’ )” (Rickless 2005, p. 331). I am, to an extent, sympathetic to this interpretation , if only because the charge of circularity is worth arguing against. However, it seems both suffer from flaws which perhaps find their source in an assumption that all circles are vicious (“It is one of the most devastating of philosophical criticisms to be told that one has argued in a circle” [Rickless 2005, p. 331]), an assumption itself made possible by looking at the Meditations too late, by not attending to the structure that allows the text to emerge in the way it does. First, the NL-Strategy grounds its arguments in the belief that the faculties are established prior to the engagement with method. If this is an inappropriate belief, then what it takes as fundamental may be derived from something else. Second, this something else can perhaps be seen by focusing on the other name for the supposedly pre-established faculty of understanding: the natural light . If light , whether physical or mental, is the element that generates the rules which all elements obey and emerges from out of the potentia set into motion, then the natural light , and the methodo-logical rules which it obeys are also generated by it from out of the potentia of even the densest minds. This relationship to rules , to method and to logic, on the part of the natural light might be circular, but such a circle is only vicious to the extent that one assumes that all circles are vicious. The NL-Strategy engages the Meditations too late in that it does not attend to the fabular structure that sets the potential method and logic for minds into motion. If that movement appears circular, it is not a vicious circularity for the very reasons that the NL-Strategy lays out. Indeed, the better geometric metaphor for the movement of the argument that the natural light generates and obeys its own rules is the one Descartes himself uses: hyperbole , the double arc that throws the line of doubt beyond itself.
- 16.
Thus, here I mostly agree with Marion (2007a) that “the ‘I’ does not become worthy of being put into question until it pretends to attain or to posit [itself as] a foundation. … Yet in coming about, by the same gesture this pretension exposes the ‘I,’ which henceforth is inasmuch as it thinks, to two aporias—a scission and a closure” (Marion 2007a, p. 4). I am not entirely convinced, however, that the self ever closes even in the loose sense he seems to mean here, if only because I am not convinced that the self is ever transcendental , and this would be because I am not convinced the method that would allow the self to emerge can be considered the straightforward method that the transcendental closure of the self would require. For Marion (2007a), the scission occurs because, insofar as the self is the transcendental condition for the possibility of experience , it is excluded from experience in a strict sense only by objectifying itself. Thus, the scission is between “a first transcendental (hence abstract) ‘I’ and an empirical (real , but second) ‘me.’” (Marion 2007a, p. 4). The closure occurs because the transcendental ‘I’ remains transcendental and treats all other egos as objects so that “the ego is hence closed in on itself, without door or window, in the aporia of solipsism ” (Marion 2007a, p. 5). As a result of this movement between scission and solipsism , Marion (2007a) claims, correctly in my opinion, that “Transcendental idealism does nothing but simplify and ask this originary dialogical intrigue” (Marion 2007a, p. 27). He then asks if there might be “a figure of subjectivity other than the transcendental one” that could render the division between the scission and solipsism ‘joined’ such that there could be “a primacy instituted by the event itself of experiencing itself originarily thought,” suggesting that “Descartes also—and throughout—[might] have anticipated without knowing it, or at least without having signified it explicitly to us, that which comes after the [transcendental ] subject and which we have not ceased to sketch and to await” (Marion 2007a, pp. 28–29).
Marion (2007a) seems correct that Descartes anticipates without necessarily realizing it, something beyond or other than what the tradition has thought him to have claimed in that the Cartesian subject is never the atomized figure of solipsism it is frequently taken to be. However, where he slips is in the source of what he calls the originary dialogical intrigue that transcendental idealism simplifies. For him, the originary dialogue occurs when the ego qua transcendental emerges through “the interlocution whereby an other than itself establishes it prior to every self-positing,” which occurs through, first, an omnipotent god and, second, through the confusion and anonymity of the evil genius (Marion 2007a, p. 26). Some originary otherness does occur in the interlocution with god. However, with god I am not convinced that it occurs in the way, along the methodology Marion (2007a) claims. For him, naming god as infinite establishes “an unconditional otherness that precedes the ego of the cogito first chronologically and finally right to the point where this ego reveals itself first as a cogitatum, persuaded, deceived, brought about” (Marion 2007a, p. 26). This reading assumes the chronology of the precedent infinite god over and above the logic that allows that chronology to present itself. This logic allows the self to present itself to the self , then supplements this self with the presentation of god, a presentation which repeats the presentation of the self in its logical form . The infinity of god can only be logically prior to the self if the logic of chronology were the primary logic of the Meditations , which it is not. The primary logic of the Meditations is fabular, which allows Descartes the freedom to analytically present himself to himself before presenting god, a logic that shows the self in excess of itself via its repetition of its proof of itself in the proof of god. Marion (2007a) seems to be working on the assumption that the primary method of the Meditations is a straight path , but this does not take the scission of the self seriously enough. The method is schismatic, especially so in the Meditations , and moves in more than one direction simultaneously, through an analysis that depends on synthesis , and vice-versa, through a whole method that is never fully whole, and through a presentational logic where what would appear to be chronologically second is presented first, and vice-versa. Marion’s solipsistic transcendental ego can never fully close for the very reasons he gives for its closure: the interlocution between self and god.
- 17.
- 18.
- 19.
It is in this faith that Cavaillé (1991) finds Descartes’ argument against skepticism. However, Descartes also argues against Scholasticism because “he turns away from the problem of being in the service of the establishment of a truth which is no longer adequatio rei et intellectus” (Cavaillé 1991, p. 44; my trans.). Such turning away from truth as adequatio places “the problem of truth above that of being” and is thereby nihilistic for Cavaillé (1991), a nihilism confirmed by the bias or angle of Descartes’ fable insofar as it “lays claim to the truth” (Cavaillé 1991, p. 44; my trans.). It is unclear to me exactly why Cavaillé (1991) would consider this turning from adequatio on Descartes’ part to be nihilistic. Descartes’ arguments against such understandings of truth are grounded in the idea that the methods of inquiry have skipped over the sciences themselves in favor of inquiry into being, to which things and the study of them must adequate themselves. It would certainly seem, from a Cartesian perspective, that adequatio is more nihilistic than he is because adequatio encourages a disregard for the world as such, the things of the world insofar as they are things . It does so because the methodology of its approach to the world sees the sciences not as interrelated, which in turn encourages moving ‘past’ the sciences to what unites or rules over them. The fable, in its bias or angle, would not be nihilistic from a Cartesian perspective, but would be restoring a respect for things that was lost in both Scholasticism and skepticism.
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As Foucault (1994) lays it out, this is the fifth consequence of Descartes’ shift of the fundamental categories of knowledge away from resemblance to measure and order , and follows from the fourth consequence, that the activity of the mind is no longer in synthesis , but “in discriminating, that is, in establishing their identities, then the inevitability of the connections with all the successive degrees of a series” (Foucault 1994, p. 55). History becomes an erudite awareness of authors’ opinions that can “possess an indicative value, not so much because of the agreement it produces as because of the disagreement” because only a few will have grasped the truth in such cases (Foucault 1994 p. 56). However, “intuition and their serial connection [enchaînement]” can give us truth (Foucault 1994, p. 55; 1966, p. 70). The final result of all of this is, then, for Foucault , that “the written word ceases to be included among the signs and forms of truth” (Foucault 1994, p. 56). At best, the written word translates the truth. Foucault does not mention here, however, the written words that allow for the shift from resemblance to measure and order in the first place.
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This would seem to be at least implied in Ricoeur’s point about Descartes, where he writes that there is a methodical forgetting through the doubt that rejects the pedagogy of memorization, or the ars memoriae. What follows from this strategic forgetting is “a methodical use of memory , but of a natural memory freed from mnemotechnics” (Ricoeur 2004, p. 68). If this forgetting and remembering is put into the language of method (and Ricoeur (2004) understands the age of method inaugurated by Bacon and Descartes to be that which closes the age of memory (see Ricoeur 2004, p. 65)), it would perhaps be as follows: Doubt allows for the analytic reduction to simples , to what cannot be denied, against what we have been told by and remember from our masters. Using memory from out of the analytic reduction thanks to doubt, using what cannot be denied, we can synthetically deduce other truths.
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It is probably important to bear in mind that “from 1640 on there was a gradual substitution of the Cartesian and atomistic philosophies of nature for the traditional natural philosophy taught in the school” (Reif 1969, p. 18). However, “the textbook as we know it” started to become an important pedagogical tool in the sixteenth century (Reif 1969, p. 18). To whatever extent that the Principles, published in 1644, would have been considered a textbook in Descartes’ time, the form it does take and its approach to history gives it the appearance of the textbook tradition that follows it. Following Kuhn (1996), modern (and contemporary) textbooks “begin by truncating the scientist’s sense of his discipline’s history and then proceed to supply a substitute for what they have eliminated ” (Kuhn 1996, p. 137). That these textbooks “have to be rewritten after each scientific revolution” places them in a similar position as the Principles, though not precisely (Kuhn 1996, p. 138). The difference emerges in the gap between normal science and the scientific and conceptual revolution begun by Descartes in his text. That is, because Part One, article 1, begins with an appeal to doubting “semel in vita,” the histoire of that life is incorporated into the structure of the text (AT VIII-A, p. 5). Even more, the experience of that life is understood as ruptured and rupturable because of the deceptions that lead to doubt. Such a pedagogical approach could not be much more different than the one that, following each rupture, seeks to make “science once again seem largely cumulative” (Kuhn 1996, p. 138). In other words , even while Descartes may have a disregard for history , he is attuned to its breakages, at least on the personal level, in a way that the more contemporary textbook tradition Kuhn (1996) describes is interested in covering over. The strangeness of reading an old textbook of the contemporary sort is one of wondering how one’s predecessors could have made so many of what are now considered errors , a strangeness that normalizes the contemporary engagement with the world. The strangeness of reading Descartes is the unsettling, possibly even unheimlich position of being criticized by an author for taking his text seriously simultaneous to recognizing that disruptions of the normal engagement with the world is the serious task which this same author wants to instill in the reader .
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For Prendergast (1975), this makes modes different from Scholastic real qualities or accidents because, for Descartes, real qualities or accidents are contradictions since accidents and qualities have no reality or “cannot exist separately from substance even by the power of God” (Prendergast 1975, p. 460). However, that the distinction between substance and attribute is a conceptual one for Descartes indicates for Prendergast (1975) a Suárezian root to Descartes’ thinking here (see Prendergast 1975, p. 461). On this last question, see Suárez (2007, pp. 18–21, 30–32, 36–37, 44–46, and 60–61).
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In recognizing only real, modal, and conceptual distinctions, Descartes is similar to Suárez (2007), though the latter considers formal distinctions to be types of mental distinctions, and mental distinctions also distinguish between a substance and the attributes we consider to be of the substances qua ideas (see Suárez 2007, pp. 32–33 and 18). For more discussion of Descartes’ relationship to Suárez on the question of substance, see Marion (2007b, pp. 80–99).
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On the relationship between mathesis and mathematics , in particular the reduction of the former to the latter in neo-Platonism as regrettable for Aristotle , which informs Descartes’ understanding of the question and its responses, see Marion (1977a, pp. 302–309).
- 26.
Kennington (1987) finds the tree simile to be deceptive because the more overarching simile for Cartesian political and moral thinking is architecture. He implies, but does not explicitly state, that Descartes thus lays the groundwork for the technocratic ideal of an anti-political liberalism in a Schmittian sense, whereby discoveries could reform civil society without violence, all the more so in that, “By a scientific ‘fable of the world,’ or by what purported to be a scientific account of the genesis of the heavens and the earth , of the visible universe and all its phenomena, he established the belief that science is master of the whole” (Kennington 1987, p. 437).
- 27.
For Cavaillé (1987), politics for Descartes is not foreign to morality, but “resists and becomes a problem” within morality ( Cavaillé 1987, p. 120). This is because science seeks to “supplant politics ” to the extent that politics is necessarily “destined … to an unmitigated indetermination, both ontological and epistemological” since it is embedded in the world of the inexact science of history and depends on an assessment of contingencies (Cavaillé 1987, pp. 123 and 126). Thus, for Cavaillé (1987), Descartes does not try to change the world, but one’s own desires , leading to “a moralization of politics ” (Cavaillé 1987, p. 130). What Cavaillé (1987) does not notice, in his assessment of Descartes’ refusal to try to change the world, is that the very changing of one’s desires depends on the individual fabulation of what and how the world is, how the world is to be interpreted and taken up. Insofar as this fabulation accomplishes its task, the world is changed, it is a new and fabular world, one where morality can find itself displacing politics . However, insofar as the changing of the self and the world begins from out of a proto- or pre-rule imitative of political rule , the changing of one’s own desires is a making of oneself a political agent or subject, even if only of oneself. Such a task is, of course, not merely moral any more than it is merely political, and it is a moralization of politics to the same extent that it is a politicization of morality. Such may be the technocratic utopia of an apolitical liberalism, but it does not supplant politics and it does not “subordinate [politics ] to moral ends” (ibid., p. 138). It is a politics and an imitation of the political, the ordering of oneself as a political act. Hence, perhaps, the disavowal at work in Cavaillé’s title, though this would seem to be a disavowal on the part of Cartesians more than on that of Descartes himself.
- 28.
Bergoffen (1976) focuses on moral rule 2’s delimiting quality on the “the scope of doubt” (Bergoffen 1976, p. 187). For her, reading Descartes as he would appear to prefer to be read, this moral rule indicates the difference between thought and action, the difference between metaphysical and moral certainty . In turn, the extravagance or madness of hyperbolic doubt places a limit on the philosophical freedom of the imagination, and further marks the difference between reflective and non-reflective imagination. However, she never again returns to the Discourse and, like Descartes, never seems to acknowledge the pre- or proto-rule of having few rules, least of all the moral certainty and politico-experiential source for this rule . This elision implies that Bergoffen (1976) believes Descartes fails in the pursuit of a philosophy that has not been founded on experience . But if the pre-or proto-rule that demands few rules is in fact a rule for lists of both metaphysical and moral rules , then there would seem to be an experiential background to these lists, especially insofar as the paucity of the number of rules within them coincides with the metaphysical background that would inform analytic reduction to simples . Here is a small number of simple rules by which to live in both epistemologically and morally, their simplicity and smallness being in agreement with the three of the epistemological rules themselves and also being grounded in a moral and/or political conclusion drawn from practical experience . The range of the reflective imagination’s freedom in developing this pre- or proto-rule thus seems, at the least, more open to discussion than the question of its range in the operation of what follows from the epistemological rules .
- 29.
For Cavaillé (1991), in the conclusion , subtitled “Le Je Souverain,”
The autobiographical feint, like the feint of science , the fable of the Discourse like that of The World are hatched by an I which exceeds or rather precedes the diverse statuses—narrative, rhetorical, psychological, epistemological—successively assumed within the text as so many avatars: subject of the récit (fabulist of ‘a new world,’ portraitist of his ‘life’ and of his ‘thoughts’); subject of the passions which, according to the author or despite him, appear within the text; subject finally of the science which comprehends all the others; audacious and chimerical hero of imaginary spaces , geometer and poet of the new world. (Cavaillé 1991, p. 304; my trans.)
For Nancy (1977), it is precisely the unusual anonymity of the Discourse that speaks to the sovereignty being exerted by Descartes. Whereas a normal anonymity hides or disguises its author , this anonymity
proclaims that the dissimulated name is the most proper of proper names: the name of the one who alone gave himself the method of certitude, and hence of the one who gives himself out as the method of certitude and the certitude of method. But the identity of this subject is valid only on the condition that it be identity itself, stripped entirely of the accidental, the empirical (the name René Descartes, for example ), and presented in its substance as subject. (Nancy 1977, p. 28)
- 30.
It is in the democratization of the power of good sense that perhaps Schmitt (1996) is somewhat off when he claims that “The protego ergo obligo is the cogito ergo sum of the state” (Schmitt 1996, p. 52). He claims this because all order depends on protection and obedience . He may very well be correct that the protego and the cogito run parallel to each other, but this is as much to say that the moral-political runs parallel to the epistemologico-metaphysical. Such a parallel would certainly explain Descartes’ specific political positions and consistent appeals to the authority of sovereigns to shape a moral and political order , as well as his praise for De Cive even while lambasting Hobbes’ metaphysics (see CSM-K, pp. 230–231; AT IV, p. 67). Yet these parallels for Descartes operate on the order of the pre- or proto-rule of few rules , which is an ordering principle that does not precisely follow the logic of protection and obedience insofar as it is the order from out of which that logic would emerge on both the epistemologico-metaphysical and on the moral-political planes. Such a relationship between the pre- or proto-rule and the epistemological and moral rules does not, however, make the pre- or proto-rule sovereign over the ordering principles of those eight simple rules for at least two reasons . One, the pre- or proto-rule is not separated from the eight simple rules but is formed by them in the difficult and knotty logic of comparative ordering at hand between the epistemological and the moral insofar as that comparison would operate through utility , which is also the justification of the pre- or proto-rule. Two, it is not sovereign even in the sense of a Hobbesian Leviathan born from the individuals formed qua individuals in the formulation of the Leviathan because there is no obligation on the part of the reader to become Descartes, let alone Cartesian . Descartes, because he does not teach, allows his readers to tell their own stories, without any forced obligation to repeat his own. The epistemological and moral rules , and even the pre- or proto-rule that opens up the possibility of formulating those rules , are part of Descartes’ own, individual, even if anonymous, histoire. It is his experience which had contributed to the formulation of the pre- or proto-rule, and his experience alone. In the telling of his exemplary and paradigmatic story, he is showing what came from that histoire, but readers must tell their own stories to themselves, even if this book of the past itself becomes part of the story of the reader . It may be a persuasive story, but it is neither a sovereign demand nor a command, even if all the more persuasive for it.
- 31.
Thus, again, this moral is unlike other morals for other fables. It is not separate from its story. When La Fontaine’s fable is introduced by the non-literary moral that proposes what the fable will show, it in fact demonstrates ahead of the demonstration (see La Fontaine 1997, p. 10). This is the logic of sovereignty , to attempt to show before the showing what will be shown, to speak in the future anterior such that what is is what will have been, and so on. None of that relationship between moral and fable is at hand in Descartes’ fables and histoires. The fable follows the logic of light , the method of being the rule that obeys and generates itself, and therefore does not show ahead of the showing because it is the showing. Such a logic may be political, but it does not appear to be sovereign .
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Griffith, J. (2018). Method. In: Fable, Method, and Imagination in Descartes. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70238-4_4
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