Abstract
The question of how to begin, how to inaugurate a new form, style, or path of thinking opened Descartes onto the fable. Because so much concerning his metaphysical and epistemological claims hinge on methodological problems in the very inauguration of the how and why of what is learned, a defense of his new form or style of thinking cannot itself develop through that methodology. As a result, Descartes deviates from the course of thinking not precisely by defending his new form, style, or path, but by setting it to work it such that it may defend itself in its operation. This change in course occurs through Descartes’ telling us that a given text is a fable, a literary form associated with pedagogical goals.
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- 1.
The terms ‘geometrized world’ and ‘algebraicized geometry’ are taken from Maull (1978), Macbeth (2004), and Ribe (1997), though the last two do not use ‘algebraicized geometry’. These phrases are my shorthand for the two stages of the mathematico-physical revolution Descartes inaugurated, most clearly in the Optics and the Geometry. The first stage occurs when he demonstrates that algebra, with its symbols, notations, and formulae, is capable of calculating geometric relationships more accurately than the pre-Cartesian reliance on figures. This demonstration constitutes the algebraicization of geometry. The second stage occurs when he demonstrates that geometry is applicable to an engagement with physical phenomena, for example through an explanation of measuring distance as operating according to a method of triangulation, where the eyes serve as the endpoints of the base of a triangle and the object in question as the third point. This demonstration constitutes the geometrization of nature or of the world. Through these stages, the application of algebra to the physical operations of the world becomes conceptually possible.
- 2.
Nancy (1978, 1979) understands this non-elemental matter , to which I refer as ‘pre-motive’, as the “primary matter [matière primitive]” that is the model for the “fiction ” of The World’s fable as distinct from thought insofar as that fiction includes the material of thought within its chaotic, non-elemental, and pre-motive structure or status (Nancy 1978, p. 650, 1979, pp. 118–119). Nancy’s alignment between the primitive material of the fable (or fiction ) and that of chaos leads him to claim, further, that the thinking self which emerges from the fable both is and is impossible to conceive (conçu) via thought (see Nancy 1978, p. 651, 1979, p. 119). While there is much with which I agree in “Mundus Est Fabula,” this alignment is, on my reading, incorrect because chaos is aligned with poetry in The World, not fable. The alignment between chaos and poetry , I argue, hinges on the unworldly disordered quality of chaos and the inconceivability of poetry in the modeling relationship between them, and the consequent relationship to rules that fable and light have. That Nancy’s misreading of this seemingly minor point leads him to consider the thinking self as emerging from a fabular, inconceivable chaos that is already the self (see especially his use of the second person in Nancy 1978, 1979) leads me to conclude that he begins from an assumption of the self as such, which I contest as possible in the Cartesian world and The World, and so as to at least wonder if Nancy’s ontology does in fact come from a consideration that “the extra is the place of differentiation,” or if the extra has not already been incorporated within a pre-formed and/or transcendental self , thereby disrupting its ‘extra-neity’ and capacity to differentiate (Morin 2012, p. 129).
- 3.
Garber (1992) actually finds a fourth, hidden law here, “the principle of conservation of quantity of motion” (Garber 1992, p . 199), when Descartes writes, “supposing [supposant] that [god] placed a certain quantity of motions in all matter in general at the first instant He created it, one must either avow that He always conserves as many of them there or not believe that He always acts in the same way” (W, p. 14; AT XI, p. 43). Garber also finds “clear differences” between the three laws of motion and the conservation principle (Garber 1992, p. 201).
In addition , Garber (1992) recommends against referencing Newton in connection with these Cartesian laws because of the difference in the meaning of the term ‘interia’ for their respective eras (see Garber 1992, p. 203). In Descartes’ era, ‘inertia’ was most commonly associated with its etymological source as ‘laziness’ (objects have an innate laziness as shown in their resistance to motion), though Descartes rejects this position and comes to understand inertia “as a kind of ‘imaginary’ force; while bodies behave as if there were some kind of internal resistance to being set into motion” (Garber 1992, p . 254). Although this understanding of what will be called inertia is similar to Newton’s in that it involves the claim that “motion persists in and of itself” (Garber 1992, p. 228), because Newton is generally credited with articulating this understanding of inertia as a real rather than an imaginary force or no force at all, maintaining the difference between their inertias is important for Garber (1992) (see Newton 1846, p. 73).
- 4.
In English, “a motion is [defined as] the actuality of the potentially existing qua existing potentially” (Aristotle 1980, 201a).
- 5.
If it is the case that conceiving the world as other than what is given can combine with the separation of things and words as leading to the fabulation of the world, this is perhaps a modification or questioning of the Husserlian epoché or parenthesizing that leads to the transcendental ego. For Husserl (1999), the deceptions and possible dream-ness of the world leads to the conclusion that “a non-being of the world is conceivable,” leading to the affirmation that there is a transcendental ego that “practices abstention with respect to what he intuits” (Husserl 1999, pp. 17 and 20). This abstention is a parenthesizing of existential positions concerning objects of the world, which also serves to prove the ego as a self-apprehending ego because “Anything belonging to the world, any spatiotemporal being, exists for me—that is to say, is accepted by me—in that I experience it, perceive it, remember it …” (Husserl 1999, p. 21). Thus, even if no world exists, the transcendental ego exists insofar as it has experiences, perceptions, and so on of a world, and the continual reproof of this ego’s existence can thereby become the transcendental foundation of experience. Yet, if the world is conceived as other than what is given while words can fabulate a new world distinct from the words that create it, it appears that there is not merely a parenthesizing of the world but also a generation of the rules for the world, and for worldliness itself. The non-being of the world is conceivable in this way just as much as the operations of an old and new world. That the world is other than what is given requires, for Descartes, a world as fabulated, whether old or new, and its fabulation will generate the rules which these worlds may obey, even while the fabulation itself follows rules of generation in the telling of its fable. Such generation would be the fabulation of worldliness as well as the fabulation of the world, and doing so is neither specifically nor necessarily transcendental through the Husserlian ego because the otherness of or within the given world is always already at hand, always already informing the ‘fabulatibility’ of the supposedly transcendental ego, even while that fable of the new world generates the rules obeyed by that world, both as a fable and as a world.
- 6.
In discussing La Fontaine’s “The Wolf and the Lamb,” Derrida (2009) points out that the irrationality and cruelty of the wolf’s devouring the lamb is given reason and morality ahead of the showing of the irrational and cruel act, thanks to the moral at the beginning of the fable that “‘The reason of the strongest is always the best’” (Derrida 2009, p. 34). This moral thereby functions like a prosthetic on or supplement to the body of the text such that what the reader will be made to know (faire savoir) is how the fable proper is determined in the moral (see Derrida 2009, pp. 34–35). Leaving aside, for now, Derrida’s drawing out of the ethico-political implications to this traditional structure of fables (though this structure of moral to fable is not precisely traditional from Aesop, but from later collections of Aesopian fables [see Temple 1998, p. xv]), the structure of the Cartesian fable, at the very least as it appears in The World, is not that of a fable without moral . Insofar as this fable generates its own signifieds , it brings to light its own meaning. In bringing to light its own meaning, this fable is its own moral or meaning. The Cartesian fable is not, then, in a strict sense, subject to the same deconstruction between moral and fable proper to which Derrida (2009) subjects La Fontaine . Not that the Cartesian fable is undeconstructible, but that the deconstruction must find a different externality to bring inside the system.
- 7.
Cavaillé (1991) takes the structural similarity between god and Descartes as indicative of a Diocletian-esque, isolated sovereignty of the philosophic, or at least Cartesian , ‘I’. Much of his evidence for this position comes from Descartes’ April 15, 1630, letter to Mersenne , comparing the known but impossible to grasp “greatness of God” to the majesty of a king, saying that “a king has more majesty when he is less familiarly known by his subjects, provided of course that they do not get the idea that they have no king” (CSM-K, p. 23; AT I, p. 145). From this point , Cavaillé (1991) claims that Descartes’ use of Mersenne to distribute his work anonymously means Descartes has “with his public a relationship similar to that which God holds with his creatures” by “exploiting Mersenne’s zeal, in order to be made known while jealously defending his studious solitude from public intrusions” (Cavaillé 1991, p. 297; my trans.). Marion (2007) disagrees. For him, the fact that Descartes consistently solicited responses to his writings, especially in the Discourse and Meditations , indicates that he is not “anything like a solitary, or even autistic, thinker” (Marion 2007, p. 33). Instead, “Cartesian reason is communicative, precisely because truth manifests itself as a display of evidence; indissolubly, at one and the same time, it is to one’s own reason and to the community of those looking on that the thing appears” (Marion 2007, p. 33). Dunn (1991) finds himself somewhere between these positions, claiming that Descartes’ claims to isolation are “figurative,” even “‘fictional’ ” (Dunn 1991, p. 94). What Descartes does is distinguish his audience “neatly between different tracts,” one formally educated and the other undereducated, as found in the audiences for the Meditations and Discourse, respectively, with the effect that he “[offers] only a partial version of his researches, a partial version of his self ,” even if “he has … pointed the way to a new rhetoric in which the author is figured as a public judge, a spokesman for a shared discourse, rather than a private advocate arguing for the relevance and legitimacy of his words vis-à-vis an authoritative tradition to which he can make reference but not ever fully represent” (Dunn 1991, pp . 102 and 107). Thus, for Dunn (1991), there is something of an anonymous fiction at work that affects different readers in different ways but does not appear to place Descartes in the position of a sovereign , divine or mortal. Rather, the anonymity and the fiction preserves the capacity for the generation of the thing which his evidence and demonstration would prove in dialog with others.
- 8.
Marion (1999), however, wants to call potentia one of the divine names, the one under which “the attributes … creation and supreme power ” fall (Marion 1999, p. 244). Human life is, for him, relegated to possibility , though possibility is the one mode of human existence that “exceeds necessary presence” (Marion 1999, p. 203). Possibility gives to humans our temporality in that necessity is distinct from the past and the future since “representation necessarily produces what is in presence,” while the future is linked to possibility through freedom (and thus Descartes is linked to Kant), the past linked to it through “inattentive memory ” (Marion 1999, p. 203). Because we must abandon the cogitatio in order to think the possibilities of the past or future , these temporal modes “confirm … the primacy of presence in the present ” in Descartes (Marion 1999, p. 203). I do not want to contest Marion’s argument on temporality, but I am concerned that he defines too strongly the futural mode of possibility while also isolating potentia to a divine name. In discussing freedom, he says “Freedom is not represented, since representation implies the presence of an object to the cogitatio” (Marion 1999, p. 201). This much is undoubtedly true, but that does not necessarily mean that the future remains purely a possibility in the human sphere. If possibility , pouvoir , for Descartes is the power exerted once motion has already begun, then it is unclear that the future would necessarily be precisely possible for Descartes when linked with setting the faculty of thinking into motion. In terms of an already determined, Scholastic set of resources for this faculty , as a faculty of an already developed mind, the future would remain ‘merely’ possible. However, in terms of the project of setting the faculty of thinking into motion where ‘faculty’ is associated with puissance and potentia , this setting into motion looks to open onto a freedom perhaps wider, more indeterminate than the freedom of a possible future . I would claim that such a future is the potentia being engaged in the Cartesian fabular project, even from out of minds already set into motion, insofar as the very conceptualization of that mental motion by Scholasticism is already problematic.
- 9.
Martin Joughin notes that, for Deleuze (1990), puissance is distinguished from pouvoir in that the former means “‘actual’ rather than merely ‘potential’ power: power ‘in action,’ implemented” (Martin Joughin, “Translator’s Notes,” in Deleuze 1990, p. 407n.b). However, he also notes that “this distinction remains merely implicit in the Latin potentia ” (Deleuze 1990, pp . 407–408n. b). Thus, Deleuze (1990) finds in Spinoza a correspondence between potestas and potentia in that “To potentia there corresponds an aptitudo or potestas; but there is no aptitude or capacity that remains ineffective, and so no power [ puissance ] that is not actual” (Deleuze 1990, p. 93). This position emerges from an identification of essence with puissance in Deleuze’s Spinoza since “existence, whether possible or necessary, is itself power [ puissance ]” (Deleuze 1990, p. 89). As a result, Spinoza can claim that god essentially exists as an actual, active power from which an infinity of things proceed. A similar distinction occurs in Descartes, though with a more explicit connection of puissance to potentia . That is, potentia and puissance both indicate a power which is potential , and not necessarily enacted, while possibility and pouvoir indicate a power at work in action. However, one distinction at work in Descartes that does not appear to be at work in Deleuze (1990) or Spinoza is that the potential of potentia and puissance is a power from out of which any action is at all made. There is no action in the pre-motive solid, though the potential for action within it is the potential for order as such. It may be that this distinction is why Spinoza has a difficult time imagining a world radically different from our own that still remains identical with ours, a world of a fable or fiction where what occurs is not so much the creation of a new order of the world but the imagining of the world anew. Instead, he isolates himself to the possibility of god’s creating a new world with a different order which would be understandable in terms of that new order (see Spinoza 1961, p. 160).
- 10.
On the complex relationship between authority and authorship, see Marion (1977), pp. 112–114.
- 11.
Gilson (1947) notes two different significations of the term bon sens. The first is “the natural faculty of distinguishing the true from the false,” while the second is the Stoic sense of wisdom (Gilson 1947, p. 81; my trans.). Between them, “bon sens is the instrument which, if we use it well, allows us to attain bona mens, or Wisdom; and, inversely, Wisdom is only good sense reached at the point of the highest perfection of which it may be able” (Gilson 1947, p . 82; my trans.). However, both meanings must be distinguished for Gilson to avoid attributing perfection to everyone. In the context being noted here, significantly more emphasis is thus placed on the first meaning of bon sens. In addition, Gilson considers puissance , potentia , and facultas to be equivalent terms (see Gilson 1947, p. 84).
- 12.
Vermeulen (2007), contests Baillet’s account of the translation. Beginning from Baillet’s general unreliability, she says that the translation began earlier than Baillet claims and that there is scant evidence that Courcelles had a personal relationship with Descartes, although it does appear that the translator would have been a friend (see Vermeulen 2007, pp. 10–12 and 27). In addition, it appears to her difficult to know whether Courcelles would in fact have translated the Disours et Essais since his student does not mention it at a eulogy for Courcelles and since Courcelles’ Latin was overall better than what appears in the Specimina, even suggesting that there may have been a second translator of at least the marginalia, summaries, and table of contents (see Vermeulen 2007, pp. 11, 14, and 31–33). However, in that Baillet is the only source for anyone’s claim to translating the Discours et Essais, and given that there is some mild evidence external to Baillet that Courcelles could have done the translation, she concludes that “I will on occasion refer to Courcelles as the translator” (Vermeulen 2007, p . 14). I see no reason to argue with her on this point.
- 13.
On the discrepancies and Descartes’ responsibility, and abdication of responsibility, for them, as well as other general issues concerning the discrepancies, see Vermeulen 2007, pp. 27–31. This particular discrepancy need not necessarily be laid at Descartes’ feet, but only because there are only three corrections he is known to have made (see Vermeulen 2007, pp. 61–63 ). Vermeulen (2007) does specifically attribute translating bon sens with bona mens as a Gallicization of a living seventeenth-century Latin , but she does not concern herself with the translation of puissance with vis , either in her introductory material, in her notes to the Specimina itself, or in her appendix on postclassical words in the text (see Vermeulen 2007, pp. 35, 43–61, 108, and 383–388).
- 14.
On the influence on academic philosophy of the Specimina as opposed to the Discours, see Vermeulen 2007, p. 29, esp. p. 29n. 8.
- 15.
In his reading of the Discourse , Vidricaire (1988) shows that, first of all, enseigner appears only ten times, while faire voir and variations on it (dire, parler, montrer, représenter) appear a total of a hundred times (see Vidricaire 1988, p. 97; my trans.). He finds that faire voir has two aspects that are “utilized in an equivalent manner,” which follow Emile Benveniste’s distinction between discourse and histoire , meaning that faire voir “cannot … have the meaning of ‘récit’,” or a simple (biographical) story (Vidricaire 1988, p. 103; my trans.). Dire and parler, however, “take the form of a récit and more precisely that of a history [ histoire ] of the discovery of metaphysical principles” while enseigner “is the attribution of an object from a sender [destinateur] to an addressee [destinataire ]” (Vidricaire 1988 p. 104; my trans.). Vidriciare’s primary interest is to show that “what is presented as an histoire or a fable is a discursive form in perfect concordance with philosophical theses” concerning the status of light and vision (Vidricaire 1988, p. 97; my trans.). However, if there is a problem with his reading, it would seem to be in the maintenance of the distinction between faire voir and dire, and their correlates, light and thought. Descartes recognizes the distinction between light and thought, of course, but Vidricaire (1988) does not seem to recognize that Descartes’ fable or histoire is an attempt to faire voir self-instruction , to set into motion the mind such that it is possible for light to be understood in an appropriate manner. That is, it is true that the fable of the Discourse is no simple récit, but that does not mean that its telling can be understood simply as a récit either. The telling of the fable or histoire of the Discourse sets the mind into motion such that the metaphysical principles, the histoire of their discovery, can be comprehended. It may not be that what is sent to the reader is an object , as an enseigner would accomplish, but that does not mean that light and thought can be so easily distinguished. As in the fable of The World, the fable or histoire of the Discourse tells a particular tale, this time of method, méthode over methodus, and that method intends to allow for the comprehension of both the histoire of the discovery of the metaphysical principles and for the method itself. As a fable or histoire that faire voir what would allow for the faire voir of self-instruction , a self-instruction toward a better comprehension of light , the telling of the fable or histoire cannot then be so easily distinguished from the speaking about the metaphysical principles it purports to faire voir.
- 16.
Thus, the Discourse does not fall under the categorization of what Derrida (2009) calls “the noblest tradition of the university institution, a seminar” and which he distinguishes from a fable (Derrida 2009, p. 34). What a seminar can do is “present itself as a discourse of knowledge on the subject of that law of genre that is called the fable,” but it cannot be a fable or fabular (Derrida 2009, p. 34). A seminar is only supposed to dispense knowledge while a fable makes something known (faire savoir) in the sense that knowledge is brought to another and in the sense of giving an impression or effect of knowing on one’s own part. However, the Discourse, even as a discourse, is not a “discourse of knowledge ,” but of method, and the method by which the method of the Discourse will be shown is through a story, not through a discourse proper, not through discussing the supposed subject at hand (method) but through faire voir what can be faire savoir should one follow Descartes on his path , but in one’s own way because there is no absolute know-how (savoir-faire) to the faire voir , save the telling of the story itself. The savoir-faire of the faire voir itself can only be determined and judged by those who have told their own stories, moved their own minds in the wake of Descartes’ fable, faire voir for and to themselves. Thus, what comes to be known in the Discourse is not dispensed in the manner of a discursive seminar, but is generated in the telling, is an effect of ‘knowing’ the story of knowing. This failure of the Discourse to operate as a discursive seminar and instead as a fable makes all the more sense when attention is called to Derrida’s description of the seminar. The Descartes of the Discourse is not concerned with nobles but lenscrafters, not with traditions but self-instruction , not with universities but with those with good sense. To the extent he is concerned with institutions, it is limited to what those with good sense properly applied can establish. It is not so much that the Discourse escapes the distinction between discursive seminar and fable that Derrida (2009) lays out here as much as it is that Descartes is engaged in something like an ironic, if not deconstructive, relationship to the language of that noble tradition and institution because the knowledge , the savoir, being dispensed is not being dispensed with any savoir-faire and therefore cannot faire savoir anything useful. To be clear, Descartes is not a deconstructive thinker, even in the Discourse, where he simultaneously tears down and rebuilds the house of knowledge, if only because he finds another place to live while doing so (see CSM I, p. 122; AT VI, p. 22), but the fable of the Discourse, insofar as it explicitly does not teach, cannot be held on either side of the distinction Derrida (2009) lays out between the discursive seminar and the fable. It is not a discursive seminar for the reasons laid out above, but it is not a fable in the way Derrida (2009) describes, either, precisely because it is a discourse. Because it is a discourse on méthode , because it is a discourse on how knowledge would be dispensed, a discourse on the savoir-faire of savoir, it cannot ever have been a simple repetition of dispensation, but must itself show how to know how to make known. Such a showing remains or involves a dispensation even while distinguishing itself from the noble traditions of university dispensation.
- 17.
Verene (2006) sees the importance of paying attention to the fact that Descartes presents the work wherein he criticizes fables as itself a fable. It is, of course, first of all ironic and intellectually interesting for that reason alone but is also interesting because it should open up a different way of teaching not only Descartes but philosophy in general since, even though “Most philosophical education directs the student immediately to look for the arguments in a text,” nonetheless “Argumentation without a larger context of thought is a dead end” (Verene 2006, p. 101). However , Verene (2006) does not focus on Descartes as teacher , as someone who is deploying the rhetoric of antirhetoric via a rhetorical trope (fable, histoire ). In focusing on the relationship between the fable or histoire of the book titled the Discourse on Method and that book’s argument against fable, histoire , and books of the past , Descartes as teacher may possibly emerge.
- 18.
Nancy (1978) sees the antirhetorical rhetoric and the rhetorical antirhetoric in the fable or histoire of the Discourse as arguing against “classic readings of Descartes,” even when those readings claim to read the Discourse as a fable or histoire, because they treat the fable or histoire “as a literary covering,” a rhetorical trope not to be taken seriously for the generation , the discursivity, of method (Nancy 1978, pp. 641–642). For Nancy (1978), in recognizing the non-ornamental status of the supposed ornament of the fable or histoire, “Our difficulty lies then in bringing to light the original of the Discours” because its original issue cannot be a frank storytelling of one’s own life insofar as the storytelling would be fabular (Nancy 1978, p. 644). This original would be in the frankness of the fabular storytelling, in calling attention to the fabulousness of the Discourse, which makes it “the original of all fables” (Nancy 1978, p. 646). One aspect of the list of things to be rejected and within which the Discourse can be said to participate—that is, books of the past —of which Nancy (1978) perhaps does not take account, however, is that the pleasures to be found in books is that they are like rehearsed conversations. In that sense, the fable of the Discourse would not be original, but a repetition of a conversation Descartes had with himself and with the reader , who will repeat this conversation anew, in an original and originary fashion, with him- or herself in the generation of his or her own fable or histoire, a new fable or histoire that would jettison fables and histoires . The originality of the Cartesian fable in Nancian terms, then, is in its non-originality, in placing and displacing its own origins onto a reader with whom Descartes has rehearsed as much as with himself.
- 19.
The dreams are described in VMD I, pp. 80–86; quoted in AT X, pp. 180–88; and described in CSM I, p. 4n. 1.
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Griffith, J. (2018). Fable in The World and the Discourse . In: Fable, Method, and Imagination in Descartes. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70238-4_2
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