Abstract
Following from the complication of the method that attending to the fable makes seen, the next concern is the faculty psychology of that self that generates and obeys the rules of the method. Attending to the fable also has an effect on this concept, not only on the concept of the faculty psychology of the self, but on the concept of a faculty psychology as it pertains to Descartes at all. Even though the self, as that which is constituted by a psychology, is the thing which applies a method, the effect of the fable on the method exposes something about this self and its psychology which attending to the fable’s effects without having attended to its effects on the method would be unable to expose. In particular, because the fable affects the concept of the method such that it becomes self-supplemental, knotted, and interwoven with what it would exclude, the self that both applies and is discovered by the method now comes into question as to its psychological constitution.
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- 1.
There is some use of it in the treatises he wrote for Beekman in 1618, the Physico-mathematica and the Compendium musicae, but Descartes there by and large limits himself to noting what is imaginable and in asking Beekman to imagine certain physical activities.
- 2.
In commenting on this same passage , Fóti (1986) points out the connection to another note in the Early Writings, on Lambert Schenkel’s De memoria. There, Descartes writes that the “good-for-nothing” Schenkel “does not depend on the right order … [, which is] that images be determined by mutual dependence” (AT X, p. 230; my trans.). As she describes it, Descartes wants to replace Schenkel’s art with “the institution of intellectual order among series of memory images” (Fóti 1986, p. 632). As a result , the intellect still depends here on the imagination. For her, however, this early relationship between the imagination and the intellect is later dropped because Descartes worries about the unruliness of the imagination and its capacity to generate illusions, which is why he eventually “relegate [s] it to the body ” (Fóti 1986, p. 641).
- 3.
For Bergoffen (1976), this moment represents “the ultimate hypothesis of the reflective imagination ” (Bergoffen 1976, p. 193). As such, again, it does not give a ground for positive philosophical thinking , but it does mark the distinction , in its methodological aspect, between reflective and non-reflective imagination. It still seems worth pointing out, against this tacitly biplanar understanding of the imagination that Bergoffen (1976) presents , that this limit to reflective imagination is not rational, is a kind of madness , and so the distinction between what Descartes calls the imaginary freedom, which remains rational, of accepting the world as it presents itself and what Bergoffen (1976) calls “The rational limit of imaginative freedom” in the evil genius becomes blurrier (Bergoffen 1976, p. 194).
- 4.
For Rosen (1969), wax is actually a bad example because it is not “a fair and sufficient basis for the conclusion which Descartes draws” (Rosen 1969, p. 26). He explains that many other physical objects —apples, trees, and cats are his examples —would not be recognizable given the same experiments. He writes, “we need merely ask ourselves …,” but here he seems to be missing a crucial point (Rosen 1969, p. 26; my emph.). Descartes, in asking us to ask ourselves what would happen given these experiments with wax , is asking us to imagine for ourselves. It is for this reason that Rosen (1969) finds the dilemma of intuitions to be that they are dependent on either the imagination or on god and that, “If the former, then intuition is always of bodies,” while, “If the latter, then, since God is primarily free will, natural order … is an arbitrary divine creation , subject to equally arbitrary change ” (Rosen 1969, pp. 26–27). However, it only needs to be the case that the intuition would always be of bodies insofar as it depends on the will if the imagination itself is limited to the body , which it is not. Following Cavaillé (1991, p. 216), the imagination exceeds the limits imposed upon it, as the imagining of the evil genius attests.
- 5.
Daniel (1976) and Prendergast (1975) try to take account of the instantaneity of motion in different, though related ways. The former argues for a wave-particle theory of motion in Descartes to account for his different analogies and to make sense of the different speeds of light while it remains instantaneous (see Daniel 1976, pp. 324–326). For the latter, the tendency of bodies to move rectilinearly is only modally distinct from those bodies, which means light as an action is distinct from bodily motion, thus allowing transmission of motion from sensory organs to mind to happen instantly qua the transmission of a mode of the tendency to move (Prendergast 1975, pp. 454–461). However, both seem to forget that light is itself an element, and thereby a body . Light is action, light is a medium, light is matter . Thus, it is not merely both action and tendency, but also one of the things that acts and tends to move. In a certain way, this does not disqualify Prendergast’s thesis completely, no more than it disqualifies Daniel’s , though it does complicate both. Insofar as light is a body , it would be a mode of itself to the extent that, when motion is transmitted from light to light , it transfers its own tendency and modality to itself instantaneously. To whatever degree, this situation would appear to make light’s action more than a mode , even if not quite an attribute , of light.
- 6.
These few ways are the simple natures, in this context shape , but also “‘form , extent, movement, and other such things’ ” that Foucault (1994) identifies as the mark of Descartes’ moving away from resemblance in favor of comparison (Foucault 1994, p. 52). The order which will emerge from comparison, specifically in the guise of algebraic symbols , establishes knowledge as “based on identity and difference” which in turn ruptures the Renaissance system of resemblance and interpretation : “On the one hand, the general theory of signs , divisions, and classifications; on the other, the problem of immediate resemblances , of the spontaneous movement of the imagination, of nature’s repetitions. And between the two, the new forms of knowledge that occupy the area opened by this new split” (Foucault 1994, pp. 57–58). In particular , because algebraic symbols are no longer “bound to what [they mark] by the solid and secret bonds of resemblance ,” “resemblance … can be manifested only by virtue of the imagination, and imagination, in turn, can be exercised only with the aid of resemblance” (Foucault 1994, pp. 58 and 68). The result is an analytic of imagination and an analytic of nature emerging from this relationship between imagination and resemblance . The analytic of imagination and the analytic of nature are united in a negative and positive fashion. The negative fashion claims that “if [the imagination] is able to restore order solely by duplicating representation, it is able to do so only in so far as it would prevent us from perceiving directly, and in their analytic truth, the identities and differences of things . The power [pouvoir] of the imagination is only the inverse, the other side, of its defect ” (Foucault 1994, p. 70; 1966, p. 84). The positive fashion claims that “It is the disorder of nature due to its own history, to its catastrophes, or perhaps merely to its jumbled plurality, which is no longer capable of providing representation with anything but things that resemble one another. So that representing, perpetually bound to contents so very close to one another, repeats itself, recalls itself, duplicates itself quite naturally, causes almost identical impressions to arise again and again, and engenders imagination” (Foucault 1994, p. 70). According to Foucault (1994), Descartes considers the imagination in the negative fashion, such that it takes on “the stigma of finitude, whether as the sign of a fall outside the area of intelligibility or as the mark of a limited nature” (Foucault 1994, p. 70). He may be assuming more than he realizes when he identifies the power of the imagination as a pouvoir. Indeed , if the imagination were a pouvoir, it would be easily considered simply the stigma of finitude both as what is outside intelligibility and as a mark of a limited nature, but since it is not clear that the imagination’s power is a pouvoir, that stigma of finitude could take on a meaning distinct from the one Foucault (1994) lays at Descartes’ feet. If the imagination’s power is rather a puissance, a potentia, then the stigma of finitude may not be quite a stigma nor perhaps limited by the finitude that stigmatizes it. What Foucault (1994) seems to miss, in short, is that the algebraic symbolization which ruptures resemblance and establishes knowledge as comparative for identity and difference is itself the result of an imaginative moment, or at least is possibly comprehended by readers in the wake of an imaginative moment, in particular that moment in the Discourse where Descartes begins discussing the discovery of the method according to which the algebraic truths of the Geometry , Optics, and Meteorology will be revealed, that is, the moment where Descartes presents his histoire or fable. In other words, this positive fashion to unite the analytic of the imagination and the analytic of nature, which Foucault (1994) does not identify with Descartes, is already at work within the negative fashion of uniting these analytics, which he does identify with Descartes. The stigma of finitude, the outside of intelligibility and the mark of a limited nature, which Foucault’s Descartes considers the unity of the analytic of imagination and the analytic of nature may perhaps not be so stigmatic and the finitude marked out here may not be simply finite . That the imagination, even negatively, is outside intelligibility is a sign of this potentiality.
- 7.
This minimized resemblance indicates for Sepper (1996) a new concept of the imagination, where the imagination “takes on figures chiefly in two ways, through sensation and through the act of imagining” (Sepper 1996, p. 244). This new concept of the imagination for Descartes in turn gives rise, from the Meditations on, to a new concept, a new idea of idea , which “refers to the look of things in consciousness, to the form of thoughts” and which is distinct from corporeal forms (Sepper 1996, p. 245). However , for Sepper (1996), the new concept of ideas , insofar as it is analogous to corporeal forms (and corporeal ideas ), “the workings of pure intellect are understood as analogous to those of imagination, although those workings in the most proper sense exclude the imagination” (Sepper 1996, p. 146).
- 8.
Descartes writes to Mersenne, in June or July 1635, “As for the eyepieces, I must say that after Galileo’s condemnation I revised and completed the treatise I had begun some time ago. I have detached it completely from The World, and am planning on having it published on its own before long” (CSM-K, p. 49; AT I, p. 322). Murdoch indicates that “the treatise” refers to the Optics (see CSM-K, p. 49n. 4).
- 9.
Merleau-Ponty (1968) critiques Descartes for the search for what is always a homunculus, even if it is ultimately reduced to “a metaphysical point,” which perhaps could be a critique of this search for the status of the Cartesian imagination (Merleau-Ponty 1968, p. 210). He claims instead, somewhat contra Husserl (1999), that being will disclose itself “before a transcendence, and not before an intentionality” since this disclosure will be in the return of “engulfed brute being” to itself and the sensible’s hollowing itself out (Merleau-Ponty 1968, p. 210). He distinguishes a hollow from a void insofar as the former is “not absolute non-being with respect to a Being that would be plenitude and hard core,” but rather in relation to the “vault” which forms the hollow (Merleau-Ponty 1968, pp. 233–232). This is why “the soul is the hollow of the body” and why it is not a homunculus but the hollow of the mutual sensibility of bodies articulating each other (Merleau-Ponty 1968, p. 233). Such an understanding of the soul is at least a step toward “returning to the perceptual faith” which will help overcome Cartesian psycho-physiology where soul and physics are distinct from each other and which will help ruin “every distinction between the true and the false, between methodic knowledge and phantasms, between science and imagination” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, p. 26). On this last note, I believe this focus on the status of the Cartesian imagination, especially as it shows itself not to be the passive faculty of a pre-formed psychology, a showing which results from attending to the fable and the fable-structure or -logic of the Cartesian method, can contribute to the ruining of the psycho-physiology that is associated with Descartes but may in fact be more the result of Cartesians, or at least those who merely take Descartes at his word, as though he were incapable of deceit, even to himself.
- 10.
To be more careful with Cartesian language, animals do not have a will, at least in the human sense, because they do not have understanding. As Garber (1992) points out, the two ways reason displays itself externally in humans are language and “our ability to respond appropriately in an infinite variety of circumstances,” as opposed to animals’ machine-like reactions (Garber 1992, p. 113). Even the automotivity of animals is really just evidence of, in the Discourse, “the disposition of their organs” (CSM I, p. 141; AT VI, p. 59). However, Descartes does claim, in The Passions, that “all the movements of the spirits and of the gland which produce passions in us are nevertheless present in [animals] too, though in them they serve to maintain and strengthen only the movements of the nerves and the muscles which usually accompany the passions and not, as in us, the passions themselves” (CSM I, p. 348; AT XI, pp. 369–370; pt. 1, art. 50). Thus, a well-trained dog can resist the impulse to chase after a partridge or to run away from the sound of a gun firing. This distinction in the movement of the spirits and the pineal gland between humans and animals leads Garber (1992) to conclude that animals “lack all feelings and passions in the sense in which we have them, strictly speaking” (Garber 1992, p. 114). It is difficult to disagree with this position on Descartes, strictly speaking, but what is important about this moment in The Passions for me is that Descartes recognizes, if not volition and will in animals, a passion -like movement of the pineal gland which cannot be purely accounted for as passive, if passions in the soul can be understood as actions in the body . Thus, to be more precise, it may not be will that animals have, but it also seems impossible to consider them absolutely machines in this context if habituation has anything to do with pedagogy . For more on this issue, Derrida (2008, esp. pp. 75–76 and 82–83, and 2009, pp. 56–57), may be helpful.
- 11.
Kirkeboen (1998) makes an intriguing argument that twentieth-century cognitive science “can be seen as a rediscovery of Descartes’ psychology” insofar as “Descartes never studies mind in its essence, as pure thought,” but as an embodied consciousness (Kirkeboen 1998, pp. 171–172). He is here making a strong distinction between Descartes and Malebranche’s “decisive step backwards” in his adaptation of Cartesian optics (Kirkeboen 1998, p. 172). This embodied mind “legitimates his [i.e., Descartes’] combined logical (functionalistic) and physical (mechanistic) approach to all kinds of psychological phenomena,” which is perfectly in line with cognitive science’s approach to an “information processing psychology” (Kirkeboen 1998, p. 174).
If Cartesian psychology is not incompatible with cognitive science, then, and if the way to ‘see’ thinking is to imagine it embodied in the fable of a mechanistic body, a further question would be what to make of the advances in cognitive science since 1982 or 1998. Here is where Noë (2009) is important. As he explains brain scans, the most localized they get, at least currently, still encompasses “regions in which there are hundreds of thousands of cells” (Noë 2009, p. 23). One aspect of this issue is that, just as Descartes “realizes that his limited knowledge of the nervous system does not allow him to give explanations of phenomena he predicts will be explained in the future” (Kirkeboen 1998, p. 171), the possible “specialization or differentiation among these cells, won’t show up in the picture” (Noë 2009, p. 23). In addition, there is a necessary delay between the phenomenon of neural-hematic activity and its reportage via PET and fMRI scans (even assuming that neural activity and blood flow are equivalent). More to the point here, however, is the methodological approach cognitive scientists have taken to making sense of the scans, which already are not detailed enough nor enough in ‘real time’ to explicitly claim clear and distinct ideas of brain phenomena. In particular, “Typically, data from different subjects is averaged,” and this average is then projected “onto an idealized, stock brain” (Noë 2009, p. 23). Such a brain does not exist. It is an ideal, an eidos, or even a fabular brain . In this way, it could appear as though contemporary cognitive science not only rediscovers Cartesian psychology, but, to whatever extent it forgets or covers over the ideality of the averaged brain, is even engaging in a Malebranchian corruption of that psychology , a psychology that can only project from out of a hypothesized ideal, from out of a fable, what thinking ‘looks like’. Attending to these technical, temporal, but especially the methodological limitations on the possibility of cognitive science, then, would suggest a kind of fabularity to this science’s scientificity.
- 12.
On this reading, the imagination in Descartes begins to appear significantly closer to the eidos in Husserl (1999) than an idea would be: “The eidos itself is a beheld or beholdable universal, one that is pure , ‘unconditioned’ … It is prior to all ‘concepts’” (Husserl 1999, p. 71). That is, since ideas are concepts or at least conceptual ideas of things , and since ideas are the condition for the possibility of seeing thinking, the imagination is beginning to appear as though it is what brings about the conditioning that ideas perform. This activity on the imagination’s part is not, however, fully unconditioned in the Husserlian sense insofar as the imagination is not precisely pure or unconditioned . It is in a state of flux between being unconditioned and conditioned , which is what prevents it from operating as a transcendental . It is clear that the imagination, even if it does bring forth the ideas which are the condition for the possibility of seeing thinking, is not itself unconditioned because, following Ariew and Grene (1995), the Cartesian idea is (possibly) influenced by Goclenius’ account of the distinction between formal and objective concepts and dianoetic species, distinguished “perhaps because the ‘species,’ the form without the matter, is what is taken up in perception and lingers as an image in the mind” (Ariew and Grene 1995, p. 101).
- 13.
See also Brewer (1983) where, in the context of The Search, he writes that, “To say that Descartes sub-poses fiction, placing it beneath the discourse of truth, suggests that it is upon the discursive act of producing a fiction that the Cartesian discourse of truth rests. Such a supposition implies that in Descartes, the stating of truth (le vrai) is inextricably bound up with the staging of an imaginary scene (le vraisemblable)” (Brewer 1983, p. 1237).
- 14.
Garber (2001a) makes a similar claim when he argues that experiments are always regulated affairs for Descartes. As he points out, however, “neither do experimental phenomena have a role assigned to them in standard hypothetico-deductive conceptions of scientific method, as the touchstone of theory, the a-theoretical facts to which we can appeal to adjudicate between alternative theories” (Garber 2001a, p. 110). This non-standard role would appear to exist because of the importance of the imagination in allowing for the hypothetico-deductive methodology to develop in the first place. For Garber (2001a), “His [i.e., Descartes’] genius was in seeing how experience and experiment might play a role in acquiring knowledge without undermining the commitment to a picture of knowledge” (Garber 2001a, p. 110), but what he seems to elide in this context is the role the imagination has in developing that picture.
- 15.
In this way, Cavaillé (1991) is exactly correct when he argues that “Space is neither conceived nor conceivable in itself, but as the ‘essence’ of ‘material substance’ . The notion of space, first notion of the imagination, is inseparable from material exteriority, from the matter of which the real world is composed. … Representation is an autoreferential presentation of the imagination only within the measurement where it simultaneously returns, as representation of a material space, to what is beyond and to that beyond itself, to the exteriority of which it is always also the image” (Cavaillé 1991, p. 223; my trans. and emph.). Cavaillé (1991) is of course emphasizing matter and its enfolded relationship to the imagination, whereas I am emphasizing the imagination in its self-excessive relationship to the external world.
- 16.
Thus, “Descartes does not reject the syllogism for reasons of logic, but only for decisions on Being and beings” (Marion 1977, p. 218; my trans.).
- 17.
Marion (1977) finds Descartes’ position here “strange” because it appears that he fails to understand “the importance of the laws of conversion of syllogisms , and so on, which precisely assure to an isolated, vague, and insignificant piece of information its rational coherence within a theoretical set” (Marion 1977, pp. 217 and 218; my trans.). He concludes that Descartes does so because “the formally determinant element … coincides with the ontically determinant term …; the form and the genre thus play the formal role of the middle term” (Marion 1977, p. 218; my trans.).
- 18.
As Sepper describes it, ancient analysis is distinct from the Cartesian version. While ancient analysis was complex, involved multiple simultaneous considerations, and demanded “a sophisticated geometrical insight,” Cartesian analysis simplified the method “to a progressive linear sequence requiring attention to no more than two things at once,” thereby making it more accessible to all human ingenium (Sepper 1996, p. 190 ). For Sepper (1996), this leads to a state, even in the early work of the Rules, where the imagination is active in a way it does not appear to be later, “imagination is a necessary and sufficient cognitive tool when a quite restricted, local analysis is needed,” but in more general analyses, the intellect is the necessary faculty because the imagination cannot take up the original synthesis, the simples of which must be found through analytic reduction (Sepper 1996, p. 228). As a result, he will claim that “the intellect is serving not just as a cognitive power but also as a lawgiver or, better, a rule giver” (Sepper 1996, p. 229). However , it is not clear that the imagination is precisely limited to local analyses, even if the intellect is required to take up the character and necessity of synthesis as such, or even if the intellect is a rule giver. If the givens of the world are synthetic, and if the imagination can analyze their syntheses on a local level, it would appear the initial foray into analysis is possible because of the imagination, whether passive or otherwise. The givens appear as synthetic, as having parts. The world does not appear undifferentiated—that would be the pre-motive solid of The World. Thus, the possibility of engaging in a more ‘global’ analysis or in synthesis as such, the work of the intellect, finds its origin in the imagination, even in its most passive state. That the intellect, in generating the rules for analysis and synthesis, lays out the limitations of the imagination does not mean that the imagination does not exceed those limitations . Indeed, this excess or exceeding is precisely what occurs, for instance, in the Meditations, when the fiction of ‘six days, six meditations’ establishes the grounds on which the analysis will play out—an analysis that sets precise limits to the imagination. It is also what occurs in The World, where the synthesis of the given world, the world as it appears, is re-synthesized in the fabular creation story that begins with a pre-motive, undifferentiated, solid world, a re-synthesis that is itself an imaginary and global analysis of synthetic givens back to their original (even pre-original) state. In both cases, it would seem that the imagination is exceeding the limits that the intellect would set for it in such a way that the very possibility of the intellect giving rules for the imagination to obey has been made by the imagination. Sepper’s contrast of “realities” and “fictions made up by cogitation” (Sepper 1996, p. 252) does not precisely apply here because the context is one aspect of essences and/or corporeal reality, while the imaginative moments to which I am appealing are more foundational to the method as such, to the methodology of the method (analytic or synthetic). Thus, it would seem as though Sepper’s appeal to the biplanar quality of the imagination, while clearly true to a certain extent, still enters the question of the imagination too late in the Cartesian corpus because it assumes a pre-formed faculty psychology where, though the imagination may exist in two different realms, those realms are separated and static and because it assumes that the analysis and synthesis are applied without context, save the context of a given synthesis of the world. To attend to the fundamental status of fabular moments should not only call into question the assumption that the method can be so simply understood as a global analysis, but also undermine the notion of a pre-formed faculty psychology.
- 19.
On this point, I agree with Rickless (2005) that “not everything that is clearly and distinctly perceived is known by the natural light” insofar as the natural light would be separate from the faculty of the understanding (Rickless 2005, p. 310). However, his appeal to the NL-Strategy as a way of coming to terms with how the natural light can avoid doubt as applying only to “perceptions, whether clear or obscure, that derive from the senses or from the imagination” appears to me an over-hasty understanding of the imagination as necessarily and always passive, all the more so considering his appeal at this moment in the essay is to the First Meditation, where the passivity of the imagination is not at all a clear and distinct position on Descartes’ part (Rickless 2005, p. 310).
- 20.
In this way, there could be a reconciliation between two sentences that could appear contradictory in Garber (2001b). He writes that the story he gives of divine motion “will not be complete until we see how the way in which Descartes’ immutable God causes motion leads him to the concept of motion (and its associated forces and laws ) which underlies his program in natural philosophy” (Garber 2001b, p. 202). However, he also distinguishes Descartes’ motion from followers such as Louis de la Forge on the ground that divine causation does not exclude the possibility of finite causation, if only because we are the model for understanding all non-divine causation as finite, such that “Mind, indeed, can remain as direct a cause of motion for Descartes as God Himself” (Garber 2001b, p. 202). Garber (2001b), and perhaps Descartes himself, would most likely reconcile these two statements by claiming that the divine causation still leads to the concept of motion in such a way that mind cannot because, at the moment of the divine initiation of motion, no finite cause was available to do so. However, if the natural light would have already been malformed by witnessing finite causes and motions and if mind can cause motion, then the reconciliation between the statements may not necessarily be found in divine infinitude, but in something else, something neither finite nor infinite, or moving between them.
- 21.
For Sepper (1996), Descartes develops a new concept of the imagination from the Meditations on, one that relates to a new concept of ‘idea’ as articulated in the Objections and Replies and that “refers to the look of things in consciousness, to the forms of thought,” as opposed to the image of a corporeal thing (Sepper 1996, p. 245). In particular in reference to the Third Set of Objections with Replies, to Hobbes , he finds this new concept of ‘idea’ to indicate that “the workings of pure intellect are understood as analogical to those of the imagination, although those workings in the most proper sense exclude the imagination” (Sepper 1996, p. 246). This analogy to the imagination whereby the imagination is excluded indicates a transcendent power to the intellect, which is why “The proper objects of intellect are the things that it can perceive even in sensibles and imaginables that do not belong per se to those sensibles and imaginables: the ideas of the essences of things (like the waxness of the wax )” (Sepper 1996, p. 248). He is able to build on this claim to show a biplanarity to the imagination, but it seems odd that he would ‘reduce’ the imagination to biplanarity while giving the intellect the ability to transcend, especially given his claim that the Meditations is dependent on the imagination (see Sepper 1996, p. 255). If the Meditations is dependent on the imagination, especially in its imagining a madman’s thought processes, as Sepper (1996) claims, then why is the imagination not transcending itself, or its own limitations such that the intellect can take up its proper role, function in its proper fashion as a faculty?
- 22.
There is, then, something similar to the Husserlian horizon structure of intentional analysis in the Cartesian imagination. As Husserl (1999) explains it, the horizon structure “prescribes for phenomenological analysis and description methods of a totally new kind, which come into action wherever consciousness and object , wherever intending and sense, real and ideal actuality, possibility, necessity, illusion, truth, and, on the other hand, experience, judgment, evidence, and so forth, present themselves as names for transcendental problems, to be taken in hand as genuine problems concerning ‘subjective origins’” (Husserl 1999, pp. 48–49). For Husserl (1999), such horizons make possible a phenomenological engagement with the world. We have already seen how the fable opens onto the need for a new method in Descartes, but the fable is also only in service to the imagination’s imagining the unimaginable . It is that by which Descartes’ readers can begin, along with him, to imagine a whole new world or other people. The imagination, then, sets out the horizon structure within which the motions that the fable will inaugurate are made possible. Now, Husserl (1999) also claims that “Only an uncovering of the horizon of experience clarifies the ‘actuality’ and the ‘transcendency’ of the world, at the same time showing the world to be inseparable from transcendental subjectivity” and that the horizon of experience opens onto a world, which “is an infinite idea, related to infinities of harmoniously combinable experiences—an idea that is the correlate of a perfect experiential evidence, a complete synthesis of possible experiences” (Husserl 1999, p. 62). Descartes would probably disagree with at least the latter claim by Husserl (1999) insofar as there is a difference between infinitude and indefinition.
- 23.
In this way, the imagination can be understood as opposed to Foucault’s description of the beginning of madness where the movement in the passions set off by a strong emotion can set off madness such that “the movement can be checked by its own excess, bringing a form of immobility that sometimes goes as far as death. It is as though in the mechanics of madness rest is not the same thing as an absence of movement, but can also be a brutal rupture within the self” (Foucault 2009, p. 229). Where this understanding of madness brings about immobility and a rupture within the self, the imagination’s excesses inaugurate the motion that will generate the self . Thus, while “‘Madness is no more than a disordering of the imagination’” insofar as the unity of body and soul is uncoupled and “the rationality of the mechanical” is undercut by the movements in the soul that passionate madness or mad passions set off, the imagination which is disordered in this case is of a late sort, of that ‘purely’ passive faculty to the imagination which emerges after the self has carved itself into faculties (Foucault 2009, p. 231). The madness that disorders the imagination here would be related to the madness which Descartes wants to instill in his readers , at least in the Meditations, insofar as it would involve a disruption of what had appeared unified, but it is not an immobilizing movement as this description of madness entails.
- 24.
Marion (1999) claims that the infinite precedes the finite not merely as a matter of logic but also insofar as “it marks the priority of an a priori,” and so “as a transcendental condition for the possibility of the finite” (Marion 1999, p. 229). In being a transcendental condition for the finite , independence is an immediately deducible attribute of the infinite because “the idea of God implies independence as necessarily as it does noncreation and substantiality par excellence,” which means that independence determines “all that is not God as dependent” (Marion 1999, pp. 232 and 233). The human will and mathematical truths, then, remain dependent even though infinite, eternal, and/or immutable because, as Descartes puts it in the Fifth Set of Replies, “God willed and decreed that they should be so” (CSM II, p. 261; AT VII, p. 380). The mode of infinity that is the human will could be explained, then, following Marion, in that the will “experiences the infinite within the perspective of power [puissance] ” (Marion 1999, p. 250n. 67; see also CSM-K, p. 25; AT I, p. 150). At the very least, there is nothing in the context of Descartes that Marion (1999) cites to suggest that the modes of infinity need to be isolated to the divine and human wills and mathematical truths, and if the transfinitude of the imagination is a mode of infinity distinct from the human and divine wills, it is no less distinct from mathematical truths.
- 25.
The non-contrariness of wonder and desire are different from the non-contrariness, or lack thereof, of the Greek logos mentioned by Foucault (2009), the mention of which is discussed by Derrida (1978). For Foucault (2009), logos contained both reason and unreason, the latter of which was silenced in the Freudian moment (see Foucault 2009, pp. xxix and 547). For Derrida (1978), this circumstance would demand that the history of Western philosophy “had already fallen outside and been exiled from this Greek logos that had no contrary,” and the attempt to write a history of such an originary exile or division between the non-contrary logos and Western philosophy “runs the risk of construing the division as an event or a structure subsequent to the unity of an original presence” (Derrida 1978, p. 40). Wonder and desire have no contrary in a manner distinct from this supposition on and/or discussion of the Greek logos because neither are originary. This non-originarity is meant in at least two ways. First, even if wonder is the first passion , it remains thereby passive as a reaction to the wonders of the world. Second, insofar as both wonder and desire are two among a list of six primitive passions, neither could be originary of the other four. Neither wonder nor desire produce love, hatred, joy, or sadness because these passions emerge of their own accord.
- 26.
Here I am contesting to some degree Ricoeur’s argument concerning the Cartesian cogito as opposed to the Lockean self . He claims that Locke’s self is the true invention of the modern subject insofar as “it is truly an invention,” while “the grammatical subject of the Cartesian cogito is not a self, but an exemplary ego whose gesture the reader is invited to repeat” (Ricoeur 2004, pp. 102 and 103). The Cartesian ego does not invent consciousness in the way that Locke’s self does since “Always thinking does not imply remembering having thought,” while Locke’s conscious self lays out “the diversity of the places and moments by means of which the Lockean self maintains its personal identity” (Ricoeur 2004, p. 103). One way to critique Ricoeur’s position is to say that his reading of Locke’s self disregards the fact that the “empty cabinet” of the mind precedes the memories that would give the self the consciousness Ricoeur (2004) desires , suggesting that the supposed construction of consciousness is established prior to experience, and thus prior to memory (Locke 1996, p. 23). Thus, the self is hardly invented here, but is a result of pulling memories from their appropriate drawers in the psyche. Another, related way to critique Ricoeur’s position is to ask him what he understands as happening in the course of the analytic reduction to the cogito. His claim that there is no memory in the cogito assumes that the “lightning flash of an instant” in which the cogito is discovered can only be understood within the flash, within some parameters of the event of discovery (Ricoeur 2004, p. 103). This claim fails to account for how the cogito is discovered, the habituating procedure of hyperbolic doubt which is always in necessary reference to the experience of having been both deceived and wrong. This is a critique that can be developed from Deleuze’s reading of Hume (see Deleuze 1991, esp . pp. 126–127). The Cartesian cogito is at least as much the result of memory as the Lockean self, it would seem, and may even be more inventive than Locke’s self if, borrowing from Deleuze (1991) on Hume , “the mind … transcends itself” when it deploys itself in the discovery of itself from out of the deceptions it has experienced through a deception of its own making (Deleuze 1991, p. 127).
- 27.
In this regulation of wonder against the risk of astonishment , some credence would appear to be given to Reiss’ claim that the Passions is connected to Descartes’ earliest work on music because both engage in a “search to balance rule against experience, to explain the effects of art, to understand how aesthetic pleasure operated, and what it was that one might call the beautiful, the good, or the true” (Reiss 1997, p. 196). The rules generated in the telling of the fable are interpretable then, qua rules , as rules that will habituate reason such that it seeks out the rules by which it will come to understand experience. Were experience astonishing and not wondrous, reason would not be cultivated, rules would remain undiscovered, aesthetic pleasure operative but merely dumbfounding, and therefore not cultivating the intellectual joy found in the habits of reason , all set to motion by the fable.
- 28.
For Sepper (1996), “The Sixth Meditation does not intend to investigate imagination for its own sake but tries to determine whether imagination as a faculty of mind is sufficient to establish the existence of something corporeal” (Sepper 1996, p. 248). His answer to the question how a chiliagon can be understood without an image is that “extension is imagined as such in this custom of cogitation [whereby I can represent a confused image to myself of what I could call a chiliagon or a myriagon], only it is not carefully articulated by the mind’s distinct attention to its parts” (Sepper 1996, p. 250). Extension as such already implies images and imagination for Sepper (1996), and so even the unimaginable chiliagon or myriagon must be imagined as existing ‘in’ space . This does not make the imagination sufficient to establish corporeal things , but it does allow for it to strongly suggest them.
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Griffith, J. (2018). Imagination. In: Fable, Method, and Imagination in Descartes. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70238-4_5
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