Cartesian Poetics: The Art of Thinking

By Andrea Gadberry

What is thinking? What does it feel like? What is it good for? Andrea Gadberry looks for answers to these questions in the philosophy of René Descartes and finds them in the philosopher’s implicit poetics. Gadberry argues that Descartes’s thought was crucially enabled by poetry and shows how markers of poetic genres from love lyric and elegy to the puzzling forms of the riddle and the anagram betray an impassioned negotiation with the difficulties of thought and its limits. Where others have seen Cartesian philosophy as a triumph of reason, Gadberry reveals that the philosopher accused of having “slashed poetry’s throat” instead enlisted poetic form to contain thought’s frustrations.

Gadberry’s approach to seventeenth-century writings poses questions urgent for the twenty-first. Bringing literature and philosophy into rich dialogue, Gadberry centers close reading as a method uniquely equipped to manage skepticism, tolerate critical ambivalence, and detect feeling in philosophy. Helping us read classic moments of philosophical argumentation in a new light, this elegant study also expands outward to redefine thinking in light of its poetic formations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9780226723167

Book preview

CARTESIAN POETICS

THINKING LITERATURE

A series edited by Nan Z. Da and Anahid Nersessian

Cartesian Poetics

THE ART OF THINKING

Andrea Gadberry

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2020 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-72297-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-72302-0 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-72316-7 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226723167.001.0001

The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Center for the Humanities at New York University toward the publication of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gadberry, Andrea, author.

Title: Cartesian poetics : the art of thinking / Andrea Gadberry.

Other titles: Thinking literature.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Series: Thinking literature | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020004032 | ISBN 9780226722979 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226723020 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226723167 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Descartes, René, 1596-1650. | Poetics—History—17th century.

Classification: LCC B1875 .G2334 2020 | DDC 194—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004032

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

FOR ALF

Contents

INTRODUCTION • Resultless Enterprises

ONE • Common-Sense Envy

TWO • Lyric Disposition

THREE • Bitter Satisfactions

FOUR • After Thoughts

EPILOGUE • A Painful Feeling of Strangeness

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTE

INDEX

[ INTRODUCTION ]

Resultless Enterprises

How can anything relevant for the world we live in arise out of so resultless an enterprise?

HANNAH ARENDT¹

René Descartes was not a poet. Of course he read poems, wrote many in school, quoted them in correspondence, possibly dreamt about them,² maybe even wrote verses for a ballet, and knew friends of the censored poet Théophile de Viau.³ But proximity does not a poet make. That was fine; he had plenty of other things to do: finding a reliable method toward truth, taking down Aristotelians, developing a theory of optics, explaining rainbows.⁴ Yet poetry matters to Descartes and how we read his work nonetheless, and it matters because it makes some of his thinking happen.

Cartesian Poetics investigates the relationship between thinking and poetry in Descartes. It asks what thinking is good for, what it feels like, and what it defers, conceals, and exploits thanks to the abundant resources of poetic form. Locating in Descartes’s philosophy the incidental effects of his poetic education, centering the importance of literary-critical interpretation with both its hazards and possibilities, this book understands thought to be vulnerable rather than impenetrable. In my readings of Descartes’s Meditations, the Discourse on Method, the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, and The Passions of the Soul, the task of arriving at thought—and asking what thinking even is—rewrites the biography of the Cartesian subject into a bildungsroman of vulnerabilities and formal ingenuities. The resultant subject is still the one we have come to shorthand as the Cartesian subject or to mark as the cogito, but I will argue that understanding its heroism or its offense is even more urgent alongside the ambiguous forms it needs to summon in order to think or to speak or to be.

That Descartes’s own formation, that an education in and around poetry, could matter to him and his thought is not a scandalous proposition. It is a simple fact that the rich environment of Renaissance literature meant that his philosophy could draw freely from the wealth of rhetorical and poetic resources available to early modern writers as a consequence of their education. Less simple, however, is the detection of poetic form and the interpretation of its meaning. Adopting a method more akin to lyric reading than the historicism still central to early modern studies, I examine less overt allusions and structures (riddle, love lyric, elegy, and anagram), forms more seldom discussed or never noticed at all because they are not named outright with the fanfare of Descartes’s more famous invitation to consider his Discourse as a fable, a painting, or a history.⁵ Deploying the resources of kind of early modern poetry and rhetoric, to borrow Rosalie Colie’s still essential formulation,⁶ Descartes’s philosophy struggles with risks to the pursuit of the truth from within and without, risks that might legitimately motivate a retreat into the most rigid reason. But far from dead-ending in the cliché of the cold cogito, the kind of thinking I discuss here is often an ambivalent institution: thinking is deeply felt and responsive to feeling, to passions and virtues like envy, repulsion, bitterness, and hope—and even boldness.

It is not altogether surprising that such interpretive possibilities have often been overlooked, a distinguished tradition of feminist and literary-critical works reading Descartes otherwise notwithstanding.⁷ For the outsized impact of Descartes’s prose has worked to estrange Descartes from his own language; his claims to certitude have repressed his entanglements in contingency. At times, they have also stymied his readers; as John Lyons has remarked, there remains a striking tendency to read the works of Descartes as if they were a content without a form, a purely transparent and innocent language without a voice.⁸ Cartesian Poetics recenters the speculative promise of reading, at once sensitive to historically specific, recognizable early modern forms and committed to literary criticism’s powers of interpretation.

In finding as the basis for my inquiry terms as abstract and debated as, on the one hand, poetry and poetics, and, on the other, thinking, I show how we have underestimated the role of poetry and poetics in philosophy and, in so doing, lost sight of a way of thinking sensitive to the contingencies of form and formation.⁹ Reading Descartes from this position of renewed curiosity makes such familiar characters as the cogito and the evil genius all the more revelatory as sites where self-transparency fails to render the self transparent; instead, locating thinking’s fragility and limitations shows how thought’s frailty is coterminous with its power, intertwined even with feelings we more typically imagine thinking as having exiled or conquered. In this light, Descartes abandons the role of archvillain responsible for all of modernity’s worst impulses. He is instead an ally in making the case for why thinking still matters not in spite of but because of our feelings, flaws, and even occasional pettinesses.

As the famous point of antagonism for Derrida and Foucault when it came to madness, as the object of fascination for psychoanalytic thinkers from Freud to Lacan to Bion, the generative potential of Descartes’s philosophy has surfaced in wildly different quarters and schools of thought in the twentieth century, which this book engages in its inquiry into thinking and poetry alike. Borrowing freely from the insights of these thinkers means rejecting that which Lacan named the approach of dentists—as dentists are very confident about the order of the universe because they think that Mr. Descartes made manifest the laws and the procedures of limpid reason.¹⁰ Agnostic as to the real-life imaginative capacity of dentists, this book adopts a commitment nonetheless to throwing off dentist’s glasses in reading Descartes that would limit becom[ing] aware of certain puzzles he shows us.¹¹ While in some cases, removing dentist’s glasses has required detaching Descartes from historical context or moving away from textual detail in pursuit of larger concepts, my approach here looks to historically informed close readings to reach speculative conclusions no less exciting for their genesis in early modern contexts.

To be clear, there have been many thinkers and many poets, and this is hardly intended as the last word on either subject.¹² But Descartes remains an exceptionally rich figure, even in the good company of thinkers and poets assembled across the intervening centuries. For one, he has succeeded in being as much at home in the seventeenth century as in the twenty-first. Each epoch, it seems, measures itself against a Descartes at once a product of his times and an index of later ones.¹³ As a transhistorical figure and the namesake of modernity’s most vexing subjection, that is, the Cartesian one, Descartes is thus a temporal marker of a transition to modernity, and he is likewise the author of the antagonism, central to disciplines that might seem to have little in common, shorthanded as the mind-body split. In spite of the rifts he is said to have created—between mind and body and between a before and an after he holds apart—Descartes is responsible for multiplication as much as for fracture: the case of his continued relevance rests on his historical influence but also on the way in which he is reinvented.¹⁴ Given his extraordinary influence, it would be worthwhile enough simply to return to the writings of the author of the cogito and the apparent parent of Enlightenment reason to ask again what is called thinking.¹⁵

Asking what poetry has to do with thought in Descartes brings together two notoriously resultless . . . enterprise[s]. If thinking fails to produce results, to borrow Hannah Arendt’s formulation, poetry, so the oft-repeated Auden goes, makes nothing happen.¹⁶ This book assumes the skepticism of its subject when it asks what thinking is and what it has to do with poetry. To be clear, like the Rorschach of so many brain scans, it does not resolve the dilemma of thinking’s definition (or poetry’s!). As I indicate below, thinking for Descartes sometimes looks like a logic without definition while poetry is one of several gifts of the mind. So much for clear and distinct definitions. This book likewise does not pretend that there is a historically pure, single Descartes, as if the reduplications and reinventions of Descartes never occurred. But it nonetheless shows how the concept of thinking in Descartes is made possible by poetic interventions made possible, in turn, by the specific poetic and rhetorical forms surrounding the historical Descartes.

Reading anew for form and voice recovers what was already known to many ancients and early moderns: poetry speaks to and in philosophy. Without hassling Aristotle to repeat his old insight that, perhaps, poetry is more philosophical and more serious than history in showing all things that are possible,¹⁷ it is easy to locate early modern poets who knew about fractured subjectivities, alienated bodies, and the fine line between truth and fiction. They had already shattered the search for truth in making poetry a friend to doubt, as Sir Philip Sidney demonstrated in writing that the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.¹⁸ And poets could also make the fractured subject talk and ask for sympathy, as Sidney showed long ago: I am not I; pity the tale of me.¹⁹ This book assumes that philosophers could, and did, learn from the wisdom and technique of poets, whether they intended to or not. Following Sidney’s cue in taking thinking and its story in Descartes as objects of empathy rather than contempt, it becomes possible to read his philosophy not to verify its truths but to acknowledge its poetic license.

Poetry’s Throat

The history of the concept of destiny in classical metaphysics still remains to be studied. As does that of the role of poetry in the metaphysics of Descartes.

JEAN-LUC MARION²⁰

In the long and infamous quarrel between poetry and philosophy, Descartes is hardly the most important or even a major player.²¹ Though he counts poetry among those past pastimes that led to his miseducation, he has no interest in banning poets or their poetry from the polis. Nor does he insinuate himself into the literary-critical moment of his day as Galileo had when he delivered his criticism of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Deliverata.²² So when, a little more than half a century after Descartes’s death, the famed critic and poet Nicolas Boileau was rumored to have declared Descartes responsible for poetry’s violent end, there were certainly better, more motivated suspects for poetry’s apparent demise. Nonetheless, Jean-Baptiste Rousseau reported that

I have often heard [Boileau] say that the philosophy of Descartes had cut poetry’s throat; and it is certain that what poetry has borrowed from mathematics has desiccated its spirit and accustomed it to a concrete or material precision (une justesse materielle) that has nothing to do with what might be called the properly metaphysical precision (la justesse métaphysique) of poets and orators. Geometry and poetry have their separate and distinct rules, and those who wish to judge Homer by Euclid are no less impertinent than those who wish to judge Euclid by Homer.²³

Here Rousseau reboots the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry and lays the blame for the apparent success of the geometers at Descartes’s feet. As Rousseau portrays it, Boileau’s characterization of Descartes’s philosophy as verse’s butcher casts the crime scene as weirdly wet and dry: poetry’s blood may have been spilt, but the real crime is its dessicat[ion]. In this indictment, however, philosophy seems to harm poetry with little risk to itself. Rousseau proves how unsettling it is to judge Homer by Euclid by intimating the absurdity of its opposite in those who wish to judge Euclid by Homer, where the impertinence of such a maneuver is assumed to be self-evident.

What Rousseau inadvertently gets right with his accusation, however, is the possibility of poetry influencing people who are not poets. That is, rather than dismissing poetry as a thing indifferent for everyone other than the poets themselves, who evidently risk being dried out by geometry anyway, Rousseau’s appeal to the absurdity of judging Euclid by Homer becomes useful when treated in earnest. If Homer had something to say to Euclid, perhaps there were poetic techniques or even poets whose work might matter to Descartes. If Descartes slashed poetry’s throat, perhaps he had unlikely accomplices. For the task of dismantling his philosophical forebears, Descartes could borrow—or merely become accustomed to—poetry’s strategies. After all, though he might be accused of killing poetry, he would conveniently never be held to poetry’s rules.

While poets might be preoccupied with their poetic forebears, for Descartes, poetry could be an influence without anxiety,²⁴ a method to be applied not so much methodically as incidentally—the form through which a given thought might take shape. Descartes had no need to be especially nervous about an influence that was rarely itself the object of his inquiries. In contrast to Rousseau, who seems to fear the encounter between Euclid and Homer, Descartes embraces the intermingling of kinds. Various forms contain and structure his work, sometimes explicitly so, without the zealous exclusion of others. When it seemed useful to lay claim to a given structure, as in the meditations or the invitation to read the Discourse as fable or history, form comes to the fore. But otherwise it could be attended to only occasionally, with form giving thought its shape without any special declaration. This is a felicitous twist: clarity and distinction are central tenets of Descartes’s philosophical program, but they are, it turns out, not the exclusive method at play when it comes to the liberties of prose form. Literary influences permit Descartes to take advantage of a wealth of early modern genres, among them those examined here, from the dizzying paradoxes embedded into emblem, riddle, and anagram to forms associated with love and loss, as in the blazon of love lyric and the lamentations of elegy.

In this way, Descartes might be thought of as transforming some of the logical conclusions to which early modern poetry could naturally lead. As Colie argued, literary form anticipated philosophical inventions as they repurposed older literary forms to new use, even arriving before philosophy. Literary forms could impart grounds of inquiry for philosophical innovations through form, including for philosophical revolutions of the most profound variety: "In a way, the concept of ‘self’ was a novum repertum, as was its Gargantuan child, the epistemological revolution in seventeenth-century philosophy; in literary forms, we can find the bases for exploration before the theory was provided by Descartes," among others.²⁵ If poetic forms could structure or take on philosophical propositions before the theory, this need not be especially anguishing for philosophy, especially with Platonic worries at a remove. The genre-policing in Rousseau’s complaint was not portrayed as philosophy’s problem because the fear that geometric Descartes could desiccate poetry casts the relationship between poetry and philosophy as one-sided. Not asking what poetry could do to or for philosophy (or mathematics) emboldened philosophy to take literary liberties that could be conceptually useful. Without fear of form, at least of the poetic variety, Descartes could enjoy poetic strategy either purposefully or carelessly, without worry about generic disobedience of the literary sort.²⁶ He could benefit from the continual state of transformation²⁷ of poetic kinds, that is, while lending to form a less anxious attention.

In light of Descartes’s apparent freedom from one variety of genre troubles, Boileau’s allegation looks somewhat less sinister. Rousseau’s gloss of Boileau seems a sign of its times,²⁸ a gatekeeper against generic admixture more than an engagement with poetry’s death or its spirit. Boileau might be seen, then, as a force standing in the way of recognizing what Roland Greene has called the lyric moment in prose²⁹ emerging in early modern prose forms that borrow freely from a poetic storehouse. With attunement to forms that would have been familiar to early modern ears, a negative poetics stops looking like a cross-generic menace or contamination and becomes a more ordinary, if no less forceful, capacity, available to writers of many stripes. In this unthreatening guise, prose forms can borrow from the techniques of poetry, and literary-critical reading can illuminate instances of poetic force in philosophy, enriching interpretive possibilities by attending to a context often taken for granted.³⁰ Rousseau’s criticism of Descartes for sullying the purity of geometry and poetry, then, doubles down on a fear of desiccation in enforcing classicism’s attachment to clarity, an orientation, intriguingly, that Bakhtin deemed outright the Cartesian poetics of neoclassicism.³¹ In Bakhtin’s sidelong glance at Cartesian fallout, the problem is that Cartesian clarity stands in the way of an exuberant heteroglossia, which he frames, intriguingly, as the life’s blood of the novel. That is, Descartes is suddenly guilty of another offense to literature. Descartes’s ill effects on poetry and novel alike seem more familiar when understood through a post-Romantic lens, the kind that would read the split of mind and body, for instance, as an attack on lyric feeling or as an assault on exuberance for the sake of cold reason.³² Boileau’s accusation, then, works as well for a stickler for classicism as it does for a post-Romantic reader committed to sensuous lyricism and wary of the alienation of mind from body. What changes in this story, however, is not Descartes’s apparent villainy but what constitutes poetry in the first place.

What Is Poetry for (Descartes)?

Descartes’s definition of poetry stresses its power more than its purpose. It effaces the labor of poetry while marking poetry’s distance from mere instrumentality. In the Discourse, Descartes defines it with an evasive generosity. Like rhetoric, poetry is a gift of the mind, un don de l’esprit. Neither the outcome of work nor the object of diligent attention—those things Descartes calls fruits of study—poetry relies on a still more arbitrary source for its production: the gift. Erased from this formula, to be sure, are the rules poets learn and attend to with intensity and effort, among them such strictures as meter and genre that make it possible to identify the various poetic kinds. Before he arrives at his working definition of poetry, Descartes reveals that poetry is drenched in affect: poetry has quite ravishing delicacy and sweetness.³³ Before he dismisses it as mere gift, he confesses that he once "loved poetry": j’étais amoureux de la poésie.³⁴ Following Descartes’s own definition requires that we recognize how poetry can exercise a power, cognitive and emotional, over its reader or writer. It exposes the pleasures with which one might receive the mind’s gifts, the sensual reception of sometimes-saccharine delicatesses and douceurs. It means that we can fall in love with the products of a mind—including those of our own.

In showing poetry at once as accident and as object of desire, Descartes sets up a false idol to reject as an obstacle to truth and method, all the while making use of its generic and figural resources. In the Discourse, this don de l’esprit is no sacrament; it is, rather, an accident that befalls the mind. From the Discourse on Method to the Meditations, with their debt to Loyolan method, however, Descartes shows an interest in the literary forms his philosophy could assume. That is perhaps why, in his letter to his longtime interlocutor Marin Mersenne, he defends his choice of form for the Meditations. He could have written the work as a geometric proof, but the lessons of philosophy were better served in a decidedly more literary form. It would be worthwhile, Mersenne’s objections read, if you set out the entire argument in geometrical fashion starting from a number of definitions, postulates and axioms. You are highly experienced in employing this method, and it would enable you to fill the mind of each reader so that he could see everything as it were at a single glance, and be permeated with awareness of the divine power.³⁵ Mersenne makes it possible to imagine a view of the universe that sees everything at one time, a view that collapses the temporal sequence of the Meditations and its plodding movement from one idea to the next. But Descartes scorns Mersenne’s ambition and, for a moment, the medium becomes the message: each meditation must be read in sequence so that if the reader is willing to follow . . . and give sufficient attention to all points, he will make the thing his own and understand it just as perfectly as if he had discovered it for himself.³⁶

Yet Descartes dresses up his gift to his reader in the form of a hard-earned discovery. In doing so, he creates a condition of reading that will, in fact, become that of the poem in the centuries after Descartes was said to have killed it; as Virginia Jackson puts it: the poetry that comes to be understood as lyric after the eighteenth century is thought to require as its context only the occasion of its reading.³⁷ While Descartes disavows the gift of poetry, he has already received it: it provides him the ability to shape thought into form—or, as the case may be, to receive thought in the shape of, or in the shadow of, a poem. In the chapters that follow, I will appeal to poetry’s varied definitions, both contemporary to Descartes and further afield, to try to understand what is at stake when Descartes’s prose reveals poetic inflections. By appealing to early modern genres, to historically contingent forms, I aim to show how Descartes’s texts borrow from a poetic repertoire familiar to early modern ears and illuminative of his philosophical ends. In this light, what poets are for—or at least one thing they’re good for—is the production of a method that Descartes says we ought not to follow, one that readily solicits and traffics in desire and that, à la Aristotle, conjures the possible rather than the true.

That poetry’s definition will shift over time marks crucial historical difference, but it also indexes one of the challenges of talking about poetry or poetics, namely, the vast disagreement, within and across epochs, in constituting what those terms even mean. Whether or not it is in fact true that we use the word ‘poetry’ to cover all forms of innovative thought,³⁸ or that poetics might be a label for any formal or informal survey of the structures, devices, and norms that enable a discourse, genre, or cultural system to produce particular effects,³⁹ or, in harsher terms, that it has been applied to almost every human activity, so that often it seems to mean little more than ‘theory,’⁴⁰ the definitional fluidity of the concept of poetry poses a critical challenge in diagnosing its appearance or its death. For one, poetry seems to have survived its apparent assault, though its death would be announced and reannounced in subsequent epochs.⁴¹ Whatever the controversies of the geometric poetry that marked the decades following Descartes,⁴² poetry adapted and survived changes to the rules and so many ages of prose.⁴³ The debates in the early modern period about the character of poetry were no less contentious, even as poetry included more forms than it does now in colloquial formulations that tend to distinguish only lyric and, in doing so, overlook dramatic poetry, epic, and even short verse forms that are not lyric forms.⁴⁴

Descartes, I think, would not have been too surprised had he been told that someone might one day wager that his thought shows a debt to poetic form. More startling to him, perhaps, would have been the idea that he forbade all possibility of a serious consideration of poetry and art.⁴⁵ Attuned to the power of the imagination, Descartes openly admired its capacity and had already developed an account of how the most imaginative artist owed his apparent novelty to a skillful manipulation of form: For even when painters try to create sirens and satyrs with the most extraordinary bodies, they cannot give them natures which are new in all respects; they simply jumble up the limbs of different animals.⁴⁶ As Descartes seems both to place a hard limit on what art can do and to render it less desirable (simply jumble[d] up), he himself produces a disciplinary jumble in his own sentence, bringing painters into conversation with his philosophy. Fittingly, he brings poets along, too: reducing the famous chimera from Horace’s Ars Poetica to an appendicular menagerie, Descartes seems to make sirens and satyrs less extraordinary in indicating their component parts. But he does not entirely disenchant them. As the Meditations gets under way, Descartes shows how more casual shape-shifting is happening all the time. Attending to a banal piece of wax as it changes from liquid to solid, he muses on the mutability of substance. Imagination will have no part here as the nature of this piece of wax is in no way revealed by my imagination, but is perceived by the mind alone.⁴⁷ Descartes will rediscover the mind alone more than once in the Meditations as he reshapes the self into a thinking thing. In the Third Meditation, for instance, he’ll get to the mind by cutting off all his senses: I will now shut my eyes, stop my ears, and withdraw all my senses.⁴⁸ In gestures like these, which hold the mind apart, Descartes seems to embark on a novel skeptical path that proves his critics right—the imagination takes a back seat, and