Descartes' Devil: Three Meditations

By Durs Grünbein

In three beautifully wrought meditations on the import of René Descartes’ legacy from a poet’s perspective, Durs Grünbein presents us with a Descartes whom we haven’t met before: not the notorious perpetrator of the mind-body-dualism, the arch-villain of Rationalism but the inspired and courageous dreamer, explorer, and fabulist. Reading Descartes against the grain of the widely accepted view of the philosopher as the proponent of a cut-and-dried, disembodied, and, hence, misguided view of humanity, Grünbein discloses the profoundly humane and poetic underpinnings of the legacy of this “modern man par excellence,” and, by extension, of modernity as a whole. Uncovering the poetic foundations of Descartes’ rationalism and, concomitantly, the poetic lining of the mantle of reason, Durs Grünbein, one of the world’s greatest living poets and essayists, shows us that reason is never more alive than when it is most poetic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 2, 2012
• ISBN: 9781935830177

Durs Grünbein

Durs Grünbein is the author of eight previous volumes of poetry. His work has been awarded many major German literary prizes, including the highest, the Georg-Büchner-Preis, and the 2004 Friedrich-Nietzsche-Preis. He has lived in Berlin since 1985.

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Durs Grünbein

DESCARTES’ DEVIL

Three Meditations

Translated from the German by Anthea Bell

Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc.

New York 2010

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Originally published as Der cartesische Taucher: Drei Meditationen

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Illustrations: ‘Cartesian Devil’ (p. 4), etching, in: Johann Heinrich Moritz von Poppe, Der physikalische Jugendfreund oder faßliche und unterhaltende Darstellung der Naturlehre, mit der genauesten Beschreibung aller anzustellenden Experimente, der dazu nöthigen Instrumente, und selbst mit Beyfügung vieler belustigenden physikalischen Kunststücke. Erster Theil. Mit sechs Kupfertafeln (1811); ‘Rainbow Watcher’ (p. 34), engraving from the Eighth Discourse (Of the Rainbow) of Descartes’ Les Météores (1637); Caduca Fluxa Vanitas (p. 72), etching by Wolfgang Kilian, in: Jakob Balde, Poema de Vanitate Mundi (1638), courtesy of the Bavarian State Library, Munich, Germany.

The colophon is a registered trademark of Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc.

This book is also available in print:

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009933721

ISBN-13: 978-0-9795829-4-3 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-9795829-4-6 (cloth)

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Contents

First Meditation: No Pure ‘I’

Second Meditation: School of Autopsy

Third Meditation: Theme for a Well-Ordered Brain

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Notes

Select Bibliography

Chronological Table

About the Author

First Meditation: No Pure ‘I’

In a letter to Elizabeth of Bohemia, Countess of the Palatinate, dated 22 February 1649, René Descartes makes a comment on the art of poetry that electrified me when I first read it: And I think that the humor for making verses proceeds from a strong agitation of the animal spirits, which cannot but entirely confuse the imagination of those who do not possess a well-ordered brain, while merely slightly exciting those who are strong and disposing them toward poetry.¹ Remarkable words from a philosopher. It’s worth looking at them separately and lingering on this passage, which, as usual in Descartes, contains an entire train of thought. But first, a comment on what you are about to read: The following reflections should be regarded as loosely connected meditations. I shall allow myself the liberty of setting them out like a montage, as a kind of mosaic of ideas. Or they could be said to wind about like a labyrinth—not so much the labyrinth of my own isolated self as that of every conscious modern mind.

My question is how the poetry of modernity has concealed itself in that mind for almost half a millennium. I must add here that my use of the term ‘modern’ entirely ignores accepted divisions into periods. I reserve the right to a different perspective. ‘Modernity’, in my view, is a phenomenon bespeaking the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous, a point of intersection of many disconnected historical progressions and evolutionary leaps that have nothing in common but the one effect of shooting beyond the events that occasioned them into a supra-temporal sphere. In this sphere, people like Archimedes and Einstein are contemporaries, or, to remain in the latitudes of the arts, so are poets like Ovid and Apollinaire, and painters like Vermeer and Kandinsky. As a rule, ‘modernity’ is the billboard on which achievements that have been around for a long time are posted.

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And so to Descartes and his relation to poetry. To come straight to my point: I see him as paving the way for an anthropologically based poetics. To be sure, the notion that the appearance of Cartesian philosophy revived poetry may be obsolete—already Ernst Cassirer considered and rejected it in his comparative study on Descartes’ The Passions of the Soul and Pierre Corneille’s psychology of drama. Yet, there are striking parallels between the philosopher and the tragedian. Both subscribe to the idea of the human being as a clockwork of emotions kept going by passions that are relatively static, almost ready-made, but guided and corrected by the weight of moral reflection. From an anthropological viewpoint, such a mechanistic approach was radically novel. What started out as a mere ‘technical drawing’ of the human psyche was to have unforeseeable consequences for our view of humanity as a whole and, thus, for what occupies the poets. We are still a long way from any kind of genuine psycholinguistics or neurological language theory. Four hundred years separate us from such concepts as the neocortex or mirror neurons; yet, with a radical mid-seventeenth-century conjecture, a beginning was made. As philosopher Karl Popper puts it: When we speak of an (electric) nerve impulse, Descartes speaks of the flow of animal spirits. When we speak of a synapse or a synaptic knob, Descartes speaks of pores through which the vital spirits can flow. But what has all this got to do with poetry, and does it change our understanding of what a poem is?

I shall return to this later. For now, suffice it to note that this was a radical break with such classical ideas as the doctrine of temperaments and Stoic psycho-dietetics. Relying on psychological abstraction in his analysis of psychodynamics, Descartes overshot any conceivable goal. Neoclassical aesthetics, Boileau’s L’art poétique in particular, would only try to contain what we begin to glimpse here. The metaphor of the animal spirits turns writing poetry into playing with fire—an inner fire that pushes the limits of the imagination while keeping its cool. A surrealist could not have expressed it more daringly. The ‘I’ itself becomes the observer of the play of emotions, approaching them like the rim of a volcano and peering down into the crater.

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The letter to the Countess Palatine is a nod to us from the Early Modern period. It already contains the seed of a whole theory of the imagination based on the physiology of the brain. The lady to whom it is addressed needed consolation, and Descartes writes to her as a sympathetic adviser. For this was not just any noble lady but a staunch supporter of his philosophy and one of the cleverest women of her time. One of his major works, Principles of Philosophy (1644), is dedicated to her. She was the eldest daughter of the luckless ‘Winter King’, Frederick V of Bohemia, and after her father lost his throne in 1620 she lived in exile in the Netherlands. From the time of their first meeting in The Hague—when she was twenty-four and the philosopher was almost fifty—she was one of Descartes’ most important interlocutors. Her judgment mattered to him; her virginal skepticism put his reasoning to the test. Their correspondence is a fine testament to the new relationship between the sexes in the Free Republic of Minds, if only because it shows the thinker in the role of nobleman. A courtesy that brings us closer in human terms to the arch-theoretician Descartes shines through the armor of logic. The compliment he pays her on the dedication page of his Principles of Philosophy is almost risqué: … to a youthful princess who reminds us, in her person and her age, not of the learned Minerva or one of the Muses, but rather of the Graces.

As we learn from Descartes’ letter, the princess had been ill and, while confined to her bed, had felt an inclination to write verse to distract herself. The philosopher, a true gentleman, assures her that such activity is entirely natural in circumstances like these, invoking Socrates, who had done exactly the same during his confinement in an Athenian prison. And here, in the context of speaking of verse, a word lights up, inclination—meaning a certain basic disposition or leaning — which opens up a whole spectrum of scientific associations: from the geometry of conic sections, to the planetary orbits of the astronomers, to the geometer’s art of measurement made possible by the earth’s magnetism and the deviations of the quivering compass needle from the horizontal, in a word: inclination. This implies that the mind as well must stand at a particular angle of inclination to the course of everyday life, be it due to sudden exaltation or racking illness, euphoria or dejection. Whether elated or depressed, the mind must be in a certain mood (the body slightly bent, perhaps, as in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving of the brooding angel), only then will the organism be jogged into creativity.

For lines of verse to begin to flow, the tedium of a life numbed by habit must be interrupted—by some sudden event, however small, that shakes it up. Poetry cannot be written to order. When Descartes speaks of humor in connection with poetry, he doesn’t mean the capricious ideas of a whimsical mind but humeur, which to a French speaker means ‘disposition’ or a specific ‘cast of mind’—not to be confused with humour, that kindly and playful state of mind. As always, Descartes makes a precise distinction, and to distinguish, to make conceptual divisions in good Aristotelian fashion, was this thinker’s principal daily occupation.

In Les passions de l’âme, he lists six original passions of the soul: love, hate, desire, joy, sadness, and, heading them all, admiration (to Descartes the noblest of the emotions)—we might think of it as closely related to the Kantian notion of the sublime. Multiplied and divided, these passions give rise to dozens of subspecies. Thus he works out, crossing and combining them with each other in progressive analysis, the drives and virtues: envy and shame, disgust, remorse, and the overarching virtue of generosity. He defines joy as a pleasant emotion of the soul consisting in the enjoyment of what is good, and we are reminded of Friedrich Schiller’s schöner Götterfunken from Beethoven’s Ninth. He also recognizes intellectual grief. He asks himself why the envious have faces of a leaden color and explains the origin of tears: Vapors are shed from the eyes just as sweat emerges from the pores of the skin. Of trembling he says that it has two causes, the one is that sometimes too few vital spirits reach the nerves from the brain, the other that sometimes there are too many of them for the small passages in the muscles to close properly.

At a single stroke, he outstrips the psychology of his day and crowns it with a dynamic theory of the emotions. Once again, it is physics that provides a solid foundation, and this, as we may notice, in the age of Metaphysical Poetry. In England, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, and John Donne are writing intellectual meditations in poetic form, while on the