Abstract
This chapter explicates the opening sections of Le Monde. It is particularly concerned with their non-Scholastic rhetoric and organization, given their having been written in the vernacular, in honnête hommestyle. It also explores why some core elements of the system are presented in the form of a fable. This chapter clears the ground for our further analysis of Le Monde, so that we can appreciate both the systematicity it displays, and the genealogy of some of its key concepts in Descartes’ earlier physico-mathematical strivings and results. To that end, special attention is paid to Descartes’ curious cosmogonical fable, his matter theory cumtheory of elements, and the initial delineation of the vortex theory. A number of these topics in Le Mondeare revisited in Chap. 12, which examines their alteration and articulation in the Principia philosophiae, as part of the daring, new systematizing strategy of that mature natural philosophical text.
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- 1.
Le Mondeis termed ‘more original than any of [Descartes’] other works’ by no less an expert than Theo Verbeek (Verbeek, 2000, 149).
- 2.
Ranea (2000) As the Editors comment (Gaukroger et al., 2000, 12) in their Introduction: Ranea ‘shows that Descartes treated experience and experiment as something problematic that had to be regulated, thus demonstrating the existence of an earlier and continental variant of the English controversy over how one defines the ‘experimental life’, studied by Shapin and Schaffer. Ranea focuses on Descartes’ dialogue, La recherche de la vérité par la lumière naturelle, in which one of the interlocutors, Poliandre, is cast as the honnête homme, relying on his natural faculties and not on scholastic training. In addressing himself to the honnête homme, Descartes is identifying an audience of practical gentlemen whom believes he can educate to adjudicate (in his favor) in natural philosophical controversies. Ranea therefore argues that Descartes intended his natural philosophy as something that might close controversies stirred by the endemic variability and unreliability of factual reports.’
- 3.
We should recall that this strategy was not forced upon Descartes by the lack of a metaphysical framework—a common if often unstated premise, explicitly articulated with considerable force years ago by James Collins (1971). (Cf. above Chap. 8Note 32). The claim that Descartes did not possess a metaphysical doctrine equal to the task until 1637 or later cannot be sustained by the evidence and argument we have advanced earlier in Chap. 8. By extension, there is no need to grant that Descartes constructed Le Mondeas a didactic work because he could do no better. He freely chose his format. In fact Descartes’ letter of 25 November. 1630 to Mersenne makes explicit his strategy: ‘J’éprouveray en la Dioptriquesi je suis capable d’expliquer mes conceptions, et de persuader aux autres une verité, après que je me la suis persuadée: ce que je ne pense nullement. Mais si je trouvais par expérience que cela fût, je ne dis pas que quelque jour je n’achevasse un petit Traitté de Métaphysique, lequel j’ay commencé éstant en Frize et dont les principaux points sont de prouver l’existence de Dieu, et celle de nos ames, lors qu’elles sont separées du cors, d’ou suit leur immortalité. Car je suis en colère quand je voy qu’il y a des gens au monde si audacieux et si impudens que de combattre contre Dieu.’ (AT. I. 182)
- 4.
AT XI 698–700.
- 5.
Ibid., p. 701.
- 6.
AT I 243, see also above Sect. 8.4.8. The Discours, 5ie partie, also contains a summary of Le Mondewhich mentions topics absent from the extant text, but which appear in the Météoresand Principia Philosophiae.
- 7.
AT I 698.
- 8.
AT XI 3; MSM 1; SG 3.
- 9.
AT XI 4; MSM 3; SG 4.
- 10.
AT XI 5–6; MSM 5; SG 5.
- 11.
Although we might grant that touch is the least misleading sense.
- 12.
AT XI 6; MSM 7; SG 5–6.
- 13.
AT XI 7–8; MSM 7–9; SG 6–7.
- 14.
AT XI 8; MSM 9; SG 7.
- 15.
- 16.
AT XI 9; MSM 11; SG 8.
- 17.
AT XI 9–10; MSM 13; SG 8.
- 18.
AT XI 10; MSM 13; SG 8 has ‘… this view.’ rather than ‘opinion’.
- 19.
This intuition appears later, of course, as an aspect of the first law of nature.
- 20.
AT XI 12–13; MSM. 17; SG 10.
- 21.
AT XI 13–14; MSM 17–19; SG 10–11.
- 22.
AT XI 13–14; MSM 19; SG 10–11.
- 23.
Mouy (1934, p. 59).
- 24.
The freezing of water would be one good example, provided one overlooks the expansion of volume involved. In 1612 in his Bodies That Stay Atop Water or Move in ItGalileo had challenged the previously widely accepted natural philosophical topos according to which ice results from the condensing of fluid water, a ‘fact’ whose natural philosophical causes were in turn the subject of increasing dispute in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century amongst Scholastics and their challengers. (Cf. Boschiero, 2007, Chapter 6, which goes on to document the experiments on expansion of freezing water, the force of this expansion and artificial freezing conducted later in the century by the Accademia del Cimento.)
- 25.
AT XI 14; MSM 19; SG 11.
- 26.
Alquié (1963) t.I. p. 328, Note 1.
- 27.
AT XI 14–15; MSM 21; SG 11.
- 28.
AT XI 16–17; MSM 25; SG 13.
- 29.
AT XI 17; MSM 25; SG 13.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
AT XI 18; MSM 27; SG 14.
- 32.
See above, Sect. 8.2.3.3.
- 33.
Cf. Alquié (1963) t.I, p. 332
- 34.
AT XI 19; MSM 27–29; SG 14.
- 35.
AT XI 19–20; MSM 29; SG 14–15.
- 36.
AT XI 20; MSM 29–31; SG 15 Note that at this stage in the exposition Descartes is ignoring the possible role of an interstitial aether filling all the spaces between the grosser air particles, and hence the possibility that particles of this aether could enter the closed cask and drive out an equal volume of the wine. Descartes only introduces the types of interstitial aether—first and second element filling all spaces between air particles of third element—in subsequent passages. Recall that in the letter to Reneri about aerostatics discussed in Sect 8.2.3.3, Descartes already allowed for the possibility of aether particles entering the closed top of the inverted, mercury filled tube. To prevent this he invoked what we called his ‘cosmic injunction’: if any aether were to enter the tube, an equivalent volume of the aether would have to be recruited from above the atmosphere, requiring a long and weighty column of atmospheric air to be lifted to that height.
- 37.
AT XI 20–21; MSM 31; SG 15.
- 38.
AT XI 22; MSM 33; SG 15–16.
- 39.
AT XI 23; MSM 35; SG 16.
- 40.
AT XI 23; MSM 35; SG 16.
- 41.
AT XI 23; MSM 35; SG 16.
- 42.
AT XI 24–26; MSM 37–39; SG 17–18. What shall later term the cosmographical overtones of this passage will be taken up in due course in Sect. 12.2 at Note 10.
- 43.
Although, to be sure, the behavior of the first element is quite inexplicable. How can it continually change shape and adapt itself to the ever shifting interstices of the second element without experiencing a change in density?
- 44.
AT XI 29–30; MSM 45–47; SG 19–20.
- 45.
AT XI 31; MSM 49; SG 21.
- 46.
It is worth noting that Alquié (1950) made an even stronger claim, to wit, that the doctrines of creation of the eternal truths and continuous creation had so ‘de-realized’ the world that human science must take something like this fabular form (p. 125). This is one element in his grandiose attempt to read Kantian problems and themes into Descartes’ work after 1629–1630. Alquié’s approach in this instance led to a rather ahistorical account, in which, for example, Descartes’ grounding of physics in metaphysics in the Principiais seen as a ‘retrograde’ step (p. 115). Indeed it was for Kant, but not for Descartes, who was and remained a seeker of ontological truth in natural philosophy, or at least for the upper conceptual reaches of his natural philosophy. The entire issue of Descartes’ ongoing struggle to ground an increasingly hypothetical science in metaphysics (and Descartes’ long term relation to Kant) was then much more convincingly treated in Buchdahl (1969).
- 47.
James Collins (1971) agreed with this (p. 8) but curiously went on to say that Descartes used a fable ‘lest his own theory of the world suffer the same fate as befell that of Galileo.’ But the trial of Galileo only took place in 1633, by the time Le Mondewas virtually complete. Descartes’ putative earlier caution would have been in relation to the condemnation of realist Copernicanism in 1616.
- 48.
Jacques Roger (1973) contended with respect to the cosmogonical passages in the Principiaabout element and vortex formation, taken together with the detailed Earth history in Book IV of the Principia,that we are dealing primarily with a logical rather than genealogical-historical exposition—a movement from principles to effects, more than a seriously intended history to rival Scriptures. On Peter Harrison’s brilliant sequel to this sort of line of argument, see Chap. 12, Note 83 below. The role of Descartes’ cosmogonical claims and Earth history in the Principiaare discussed in detail in Chap. 12, with regard to his systematizing goals for that text and the ways they surpass those he had set for Le Monde.
- 49.
AT XI 36; MSM.57; SG 24.
- 50.
Ibid.
- 51.
AT XI 33; MSM 53–55; SG 22–23.
- 52.
AT XI 34; MSM 53–55; SG 23.
- 53.
AT XI 35; MSM 55–57; SG 23–24.
- 54.
AT XI 34–35; SG 23; MSM 55.
- 55.
Sects. 4.2; 4.8.1; 8.2.2.2.
- 56.
As has been observed by several commentators, Descartes’ notion of inertial motion or tendency has strong overtones of an impetus theory and centrally involves the idea of a real force or power of motion present in the body. For example, Cohen (1964), Gabbey (1980) and Westfall (1972) Note that all these claims attach at the level of a physical, or natural philosophical, understanding of Descartes’ dynamics and laws of motion. On the theological plane, the moment to moment causal efficacy of a body in motion or tending to motion is to be attributed directly to the immediate action of God, without which neither the body nor its force of motion (and ‘determinations’ thereof) could exist or subsist. (Cf. Chap. 8, Note 46).
- 57.
AT XI 37; SG 25; MSM 59.
- 58.
- 59.
AT XI 49; SG 32–33; MSM 79–81. Notice that the first paragraph of this passage, contrasted to the one cited above in Note 52, seems to presume that there is some time interval between God’s creation of matter extension and his injection into it of particle-producing motion. Alternatively, to preserve a unified and total creation by God, one might suggest that the gap between creation of matter-extension and insertion of motion to shatter it is merely logical, there being no temporality in God’s creative act. The consequences for the matter-theoretical cosmogonical narrative, as considered by us here, are irrelevant; but the consequences for articulating Descartes’ natural philosophy to one theological position or another might be considerable.
- 60.
Ibid., p. 49; SG 33; MSM 81.
- 61.
- 62.
AT XI 49–50; SG 33; MSM 81.
- 63.
Obviously, the dynamical conceptions in play here are precisely those whose origins and use in Le Mondewe have traced through our findings earlier in this study: most notably Sects. 4.2; 4.8.1; 3.3.2, 3.3.3, 3.4 and 8.2.2.2. Force of motion is a function of size (quantity of matter) and speed (or instantaneous tendency to motion), so, as the size of particles in a vortex decreases, their speed must increase in order for the ‘stability condition’ to be maintained.
- 64.
AT XI 50–51; SG 33; MSM 81–83.
- 65.
Remembering that Descartes has already introduced his element theory in Chapter 5 in a ‘non-cosmogonical’ context, shaped by his didactic strategy at that point.
- 66.
AT XI 52–53; SG 34; MSM 85.
- 67.
AT XI 56–57; SG 37; MSM 93: ‘In order for me to begin to tell you about the planets and comets, consider that, given the diversity in the parts of matter that I have supposed [at the creation] even though most of them have—through breaking up and dividing as a result of collision with one another—taken the form of the first and second element, there nevertheless remains to be found among them two kinds [as described in the text above] that had to retain the form of the third element.’ And, two pages later (AT XI 60; SG 39; MSM 99), describing the formation of comets and planets out of third matter, he opens with ‘… no matter where the parts of matter that could not take the form of the second or the first elementmay have been initially …’ (emphasis added) Thus Descartes reiterates the existence of third matter particles before the initial formation of the first and second element.
- 68.
AT XI 53; SG 34–35; MSM 85.
- 69.
Chapter 14, on the properties of light, might be taken to begin a shift to the ‘matching of appearances’, which is then formally commenced in the final extant chapter, Chapter 15 where the appearance of the fabular world to its inhabitants completely matches the appearance of our world to us.
References
Works of Descartes and Their Abbreviations
AT = Oeuvres de Descartes(revised edition, 12 vols.), edited by C. Adam and P. Tannery (Paris, 1964–76). References are by volume number (in roman) and page number (in Arabic).
CSM(K) = The Philosophical Writings Of Descartes, 3 vols., translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, and (for vol. 3) Anthony Kenny, (Cambridge, 1988) References are by volume number (in roman) and page number (in arabic).
HR = The Philosophical Works of Descartes, vol I translated by E.S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross (Cambridge, 1968 [1st ed. 1911]).
MM = René Descartes, The Principles of Philosophy, translated by V. R. Miller and R. P. Miller (Dordrecht, 1991).
MSM = Rene Descartes, Le Monde, ou Traité de la lumière, translated by Michael S. Mahoney (New York, 1979).
SG = The World and Other Writings, edited and translated by Stephen Gaukroger (Cambridge, 1998).
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Schuster, J. (2012). Reading Le Monde as Pedagogy and Fable. In: Descartes-Agonistes. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 27. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4746-3_9
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