Providence and the Passions

Increasingly, Descartes returns to more practical questions about forms of attentiveness, premeditation, and industry. In his correspondence with the Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, in the 1647 Letter-preface to the French edition of the Principles of Philosophy, dedicated to Elisabeth, and finally in the Passions de l’âme of 1649, which he had commenced in 1646, Descartes develops his interest in the lived benefits that our philosophy may bring us. Descartes’s later work consistently uses the language of theatre to add an affective dimension to his discussion of the gulf between the human and the ungraspably divine. His use of the extended analogy of God as sovereign finds key expression in the correspondence with Elisabeth, with the renowned example of a king and two duelling gentlemen. This example is also considered for its dramatic resonance.

Introduction

When writing about Descartes, critics have tended to start with his own mission statements. Descartes is known for the strength of his philosophical self-assertion: for his determined statements of intent, and for his ambitious conclusions. He seeks to undermine the existing Aristotelian framework for knowledge, dismissing it as prejudice. Thus he wants to erase scholastic obscurity, and produce philosophy that is open to everyone....

Conclusion

In early modern poetic theory, readers and spectators are acknowledged, praised, and chastised for their responsiveness to the fictional experiences set out before them. Like the characters in the plays they watch and discuss, they are taken to be endowed to various degrees with the power of interpreting. The plot structures to which they are exposed grant varying degrees of evidence to heroism, magnanimity, and resolution. With prayers, prophecies, and curses, these structures show arcs of the past projecting into the present. Displaying tragic dilemmas, or tragicomic webs of romance or coincidence, they grapple with complex antecedents and show protagonists who are confused by their own futures. Throughout, vicious debates about the function of theatre are aired. The Descartes of the 1620s is surrounded by this dramatization of affective engagement and the acquisition of knowledge; and poetics gives us a set of ideas within which Descartes’s philosophy may be reconstructed....

Reading Rhetoric and Poetics

Chapter 1 looks in detail at how Aristotle’s Poetics, overlapping in various ways with his Rhetoric and his moral philosophy, uses tragedy to interrogate conditions for the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom. It moves on to the rediscovery and translation of these and other ancient texts on rhetoric, poetics, and ethics. Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and other ancient writers obtained a footing in France chiefly through the treatises of Italian and Dutch thinkers. As one starting point for how Descartes interacts with this body of work, this chapter considers the syllabi of Jesuit schools such as the one he attended.

Attentiveness and Indifference

This chapter argues that the project of contextualizing Descartes with reference to poetics can also impact our understanding of his mature writings, with a focus here on the common theme of attention. It commences with Descartes’s statements on attentiveness, indifference, judgement, and the problem of error. In the Meditations, Descartes comes up against various problems relating to human hubris, blindness, and bias. In Meditation Four, he pursues a theory of judgement, tackling the interaction of the will and the intellect as they work on the clear and distinct ideas on which his search for truth relies. Here, again, his philosophy resonates with the language of tragedy, as a renowned strand of secondary criticism has noted; the chapter therefore turns to the characterization of Descartes as a ‘tragic’ figure.

Order and Method

This chapter presents a reconsideration of Descartes’s prudential statement to the reader of the Discours de la méthode: ‘Je me formai une morale par provision, qui ne consistait qu’en trois ou quatre maximes’ (‘I formed a provisional moral code for myself consisting in only three or four maxims’). Analysing earlier occurrences of the term ‘par provision’ can also give us a more precise understanding of what Descartes seeks to communicate at this point, and of how the ‘morale par provision’ tries to supply the practical conditions for the search for truth. Descartes’s transitional morality invites us to think about process as well as content.

The Paris Context

This chapter considers Descartes’s connections with Guez de Balzac and his circle, and looks more closely at the language of contemporary poetic practice and theory. In his 1623 preface to Marino’s Adone, Jean Chapelain develops a critical vocabulary of novelty, generic hybridity, and verisimilitude. Meanwhile, Alexandre Hardy accuses modern dramatists of neglecting dispositio, or the coherent ordering of dramatic subject matter. The state of tragicomedy in France is exemplified in the 1628 tragicomic reworking of Schélandre’s 1608 tragedy Tyr et Sidon, prefaced by Balzac’s apologist François Ogier. At the crux of these debates, we find the question of how to balance the need for variety to dispel boredom with the need for structure to dispel distraction.

The Uses of Theatre

In this chapter, poetic categories—chance, imagination, wonder—are shown to be a vehicle for enquiry into our proper relationship to the passions. In the correspondence with Elisabeth and the Passions de l’âme, the transformations effected upon the body of the theatrical spectator yield particular insights. We arrive here at the crux of mind-body interaction. The experience of watching a tragedy allows us to perceive the operations of our soul, and to take pleasure in this alertness to its own activity. It constitutes a model of reactive processes that bring new forms of attentiveness with them, along with new dispositions of the will.

Balzac’s ‘Discours à Descartes’

This chapter gives a detailed analysis of Balzac’s ‘Discours à Descartes’, which Balzac sends on to Descartes in response to the Censura. These seem to have been very much neglected in the critical literature on Descartes. However, and along with the wider correspondence between Descartes and Balzac, they can be seen to anticipate the Discours de la méthode in important ways: they bring to the fore Balzac’s thinking on chance, custom, and practical reason; on his relationship to the Stoics; on themes of conversion and changing minds. These topics again resonate with contemporary literary debate; and may be seen to provide a stock of themes and images on which Descartes will draw.

Contemplating the Divine

This chapter focuses on Descartes’s more general articulation of our reliance on God, who alone, he says, can offer us continuing certainty. Descartes is struck by wonder at the beauty of God’s ‘immense light’, even if his own understanding is ‘shrouded in darkness’. In contemplating the divine, Descartes needs to come to terms with dramatic paradigms of necessity and contingency. Here, we consider Descartes’s statements about eternal truths. Like Virgil’s Jupiter, God simultaneously creates laws and sees them fulfilled. Contemporary debates about whether we can ‘univocally’ conceive of the divine and the human also return us, in this chapter, to themes of conversion, humility, and an attention that is strengthened even as it recognizes its own limits. Throughout, we observe cross-currents of association between philosophy, patristics, and poetics.