Figuring the dead Descartes: Claude Clerselier's Homme de RenéDescartes (1664)

Representations

Volumn 83, Issue , 2003, Pages 38-66

  Wilkin, Rebecca M ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33745139919     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.2003.83.1.38     Document Type: Article

References (86)

1. Pierre Gassendi, Disquisitio Metaphysica, ed. and trans. Bernard Rochot (Paris, 1962), 125
2. Francisque Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, (Hildesheim, N.Y., 1972), 2:576-77
3. Cited in François Azouvi, "Descartes," in Lieux de Mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris, 1984), 3, part 3:735
4. Azouvi, "Descartes," 740, 761, 764, 775
5. For a concise history of constructivism, see Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (Cambridge, 1998), 13-46
6. The collection of essays edited by Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene in Descartes and his Contemporaries: Meditations, Objections, Replies (Chicago, 1995) signals a turning point in this regard
7. Each essayist in the collection addresses an aspect of Descartes's Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641) - the very core of Descartes's opus, to judge by current philosophy and literature curricula - in relation to one or all of the following objections by contemporary philosophers and theologians. Far from modeling Descartes's ideal of a science founded by one subject, these scholars suggest that the Meditationes are fundamentally a collective work, insofar as the objections are integral to the work as a whole. The broader implication of the volume - namely that accurate interpretations of Descartes's works depend upon an understanding of the cultural environment that fostered them - has been carried out on a much larger scale by Stephen Gaukroger in Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford, 1995)
8. and Theo Verbeek in Descartes and the Dutch: Early Reactions to Cartesian Philosophy, 1637-1650 (Carbondale, Ill., 1992). Along the same lines, new researches on the fortunes of Cartesianism conceive the subject in more local - and arguably more ambitious - ways than traditional history-of-ideas scholarship. Where Francisque Bouillier claimed to provide an exhaustive genealogy of Cartesians in his massive Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne (1868), for instance, Erica Harth analyzes the reception of Descartes's ideal of scientific objectivity among women in Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Ithaca, 1992)
9. The bodiless "I" distilling its thoughts in the warmth of a well-stoked stove is Descartes's famous self-portrait in the autobiographical Discours de la méthode (1637)
10. See Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 11 vols. (Paris, 1969), 6:11
11. All subsequent references to Descartes's works will be taken from Adam and Tannery with the indication AT, except for the work in question here, which I will take from the two original editions, Renatus Des Cartes de homine; figuris et latinitate donatus a Florentio Schuyl, ed. Florent Schuyl (Lyon, 1662)
12. and L'Homme de René Descartes et un traitté sur la formation du foetus, ed. Claude Clerselier (Paris, 1664). All translations from French to English are mine
13. See, for instance, Michel Foucault, "Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?" Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie 44 (1969): 73-104
14. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, ed. Alexandre Micha, 3 vols. (Paris, 1979), 1:127
15. Louis de La Forge, "Epistre," Traité de l'esprit de l'homme, de ses facultez & fonctions, & de son union avec le corps, suivant les principes de René Descartes (Amsterdam, 1666), [vii]. This work is unpaginated; the numbers in brackets represent what the pages would be were the first page numbered i
16. On the censorship of Descartes's philosophy in the 1660s, see Desmond Clarke, Occult Powers and Hypotheses: Cartesian Natural Philosophy Under Louis XIV (Oxford, 1989), 11
17. and Tad Schmaltz, Radical Cartesianism: The French Reception of Descartes (Cambridge, 2002), 29-32
18. Montaigne, Essais, 1:132
19. Descartes, AT, 6:62
20. Descartes, AT, 2:480, 552
21. Descartes, Entretien avec Burman, ed. Charles Adam (Paris, 1975), 127-28
22. Cited in G. A. Lindeboom, Descartes and Medicine (Amsterdam, 1978), 94
23. see also Gaukroger, Descartes, xx
24. This, in contrast to the scholastic view of death. The scholastics held that death results when the soul ceases to breathe life into the body Since they viewed the soul as the very form of the body, death for them represented rupture. See Descartes, AT, 11:330; Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, L'Anthropologie cartésienne (Paris, 1990), 23
25. Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: Biographie (Paris, 1995), 281-284
26. Gaukroger, Descartes, 416-17
27. "I have no more made my book than my book has made me, a book consubstantial with its author, ... a member of my life"; Montaigne, Essais, 2:326
28. He does allow that "often things that had seemed true to me when I first began to think about them, seemed false to me when I went to put them on paper" in the Discours; Descartes, AT, 6:66
29. Adrien Baillet, La Vie de Monsieur Descartes (1691; reprint, Geneva, 1970), 2:428
30. Florent Schuyl, "Version de la preface que Monsieur Schuyl a mise au devant de la version latine qu'il a faite du Traitté de l'Homme de René Descartes," in L'Homme de René Descartes, 447
31. Pierre Bayle, Oeuvres de Mr. Pierre Bayle, professeur en philosophie et en histoire, a Rotterdam, Contenant tout ce que cet Auteur a publié sur des matieres de Theologie, de Philosophie, de Critique, d'Histoire, & de Litterature; excepté son Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (La Haye, 1731), 4:110
32. Baillet, La Vie, 2:241
33. e siècle (Paris, 1978), 49
34. Perhaps in the hopes of assuring a Cartesian lineage, Clerselier married his daughter to Jacques Rohault (1618-1672), a prominent Cartesian, whose weekly conferences throughout the 1660s comprised one of the principle forums for the discussion of Descartes's physics. In his eulogy for Rohault, the eighteenth-century philosopher and mathematician, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), had this to say about the match: "despite the disproportion in birth and fortune, [Clerselier] chose Rohault for his son-in-law, amidst the cries of an indignant family, who could not understand that talent and virtue might be preferable in one's son-in-law to ancestors and gold, and who accused him of sacrificing his daughter"
35. cited in Albert Balz, Cartesian Studies (New York, 1951), 28
36. Lettres de M. Descartes, où sont traittées les plus belles questions de la morale, physique, médecine et des mathématiques (1657)
37. Lettres de Descartes où sont expliquées plusieurs belles difficultés touchant ses autres ouvrages (1659)
38. Lettres de M. Descartes, où il répond à plusieurs difficultés qui lui ont été proposées sur la Dioptrique, la Géométrie, et sur plusieurs autres sujets (1667)
39. In the second edition of L'Homme (1677), Clerselier added yet another of one of the texts he had gotten from Chanut: Le Monde, ou traité de la lumière. Le Monde de Monsieur Descartes ou le Traité de lumière had already been published separately in 1664 by a parisian libraire, Jacques Le Gras
40. Louis de La Forge, "Remarques de Louis de La Forge, Docteur en médecine, sur le Traitté de l'homme, de René Descartes; et sur les figures par luy inventées," in L'Homme de René Descartes, 335
41. Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: Biographie, 281
42. Baillet provides an engraving of this edifice complete with inscriptions in La Vie, 2:430-31
43. Antoine Furetière, Le Dictionnaire universel (1690; reprint, Paris, 1978), s.v. "tombeau."
44. A certain Fancan sought to eradicate an epidemic of immorality spawned by novels by means of a Tombeau du Roman (1626), and the anonymous author of a Tombeau de la paulette (1618) fantasized the demise of an increasingly onerous tax on royal offices. On the text as tomb, see Leonard Hinds, Narrative Transformations from L'Astrée to Le Berger Extravagant (West Lafayette, Ind., 2002), 127-28
45. Concino Concini was prematurely interred in the anonymous Le tombeau du marquis d'Ancre (Paris, 1617)
46. Descartes, L'Homme, 72
47. Clerselier, "Préface," L'Homme, [xl-xli]. This preface is unpaginated; the numbers in brackets represent what the pages would be were the first page of the preface numbered i
48. "L'Homme de René Descartes," Le Journal des Sç.avans, 5 January 1665, 9-11
49. Clerselier, "Préface," [i]
50. Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope (Princeton, 1995), 113
51. John D. Lyons, "Camera Obscura: Image and Imagination in Descartes's Meditations," Convergences: Rhetoric and Poetic in Seventeenth-Century France, eds. David Lee Rubin and Mary B. McKinley (Columbus, Oh., 1989), 179-95, 181
52. On the figures in the 1637 treatises and in the Principia, see Brian Baigrie, "Descartes's Scientific Illustrations and 'la grande méchanique de la nature,'" in Picturing Knowledge: Historical and Philosophical Problems Concerning the Use of Art in Science, ed. Brian Baigrie (Toronto, 1996), 86-134
53. Clerselier, "Préface," [xxv]
54. Baigrie, "Descartes's Scientific Illustrations," 88
55. Descartes, Renatus Des Cartes de homine, 118
56. The vista opened by the microscope to mechanistic thought of the 1630s was more conceptual than anything else, since it only magnified things up to twelve or thirteen times their actual size; see Marian Fournier, The Fabric of Life: Microscopy in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore, 1996), 11
57. On the clockwork universe, see Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery (Baltimore, 1986), 62-64
58. Schuyl, "Version," 412-19; Clerselier, "Préface, " [liii]
59. Julian Jaynes, "The Problem of Animate Motion in the Seventeenth Century," Journal of the History of Ideas 31 (1970):219
60. Schuyl, "Version," 414
61. Annie Bitbol-Hespériès, Le Principe de Vie chez Descartes (Paris, 1990), 43-45
62. Descartes, AT, 11:331. In Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery, Mayr notes, "Descartes offered a direct account of the workings of the human body which was so rigorously mechanical that, in overall effect, it was equivalent to a description of a complex automaton," 64
63. Descartes, AT, 11:331
64. Schuyl, "Version," 432-33
65. Descartes's lifeless account of life is exacerbated by the structure of the treatise, which he organizes around systems of organs instead of the development of the human body. As he later admitted in the Discours, he avoided the question of generation altogether by beginning L'Homme in media res with a fully formed man; AT, 6:45-46
66. Aram Vartanian comments, "the mechanistic emphasis of Descartes' physiology threatened to undermine his metaphysics by inviting a transformation of the beast-machine into the man-machine," in "Man-Machine from the Greeks to the Computer," in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York, 1973-74), 3:131-46, 136
67. Bert S. Hall, Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe: Gunpowder, Technology, and Tactics (Baltimore, 1997), 21
68. Cited in Philippe Ariès, L'Homme devant la mort (Paris, 1977), 359
69. Descartes, AT, 2:525
70. See Ariès's L'Homme devant la mort for more detailed descriptions of vanitates, 322-26
71. This famous frontispiece can be seen in Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford, 1997), 101
72. Clerselier, "Préface," [xv]
73. Thierry Gontier, De l'Homme à l'animal: Paradoxes sur la nature des animaux, Montaigne et Descartes (Paris, 1998), 183
74. La Forge, Traité, 1
75. Nicolas Malebranche was a member of the Oratory a religious order whose founding father in France, Pierre Bérulle (1575-1629), had encouraged the young Descartes to pursue his philosophical course
76. Nicolas Malebranche, Oeuvres, ed. Geneviève Rodis-Lewis (Paris, 1979), 1:40. The title recalls that of an unpublished work by Descartes
77. See Ferdinand Alquié, Le Cartésianisme de Malebranche (Paris, 1979), 265-72
78. Yves Marie André, La Vie du R. P. Malebranche, prêtre de l'Oratoire avec l'histoire de ses ouvrages (Geneva, 1970)
79. Another Oratorian, J. Lelong (1665-1721), similarly relates that "[Malebranche] found it sometimes necessary to interrupt his reading because of the palpitations that seized him." Cited in Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, "Introduction générale"
80. Malebranche, Oeuvres, l:xi. Malebranche's symptoms - acute joy and debilitating palpitations - correspond to a passion that Descartes likens to death in the Passions de l'âme. When a person swoons, the fire in the heart is momentarily extinguished by an overwhelming influx of blood, and so "swooning is not far removed from death, for we die when the fire that is in the heart is completely extinguished; and we swoon when it is smothered in such a way that some remnants of heat remain, that can reignite afterwards"; AT, 11:418
81. André, La Vie du R. P. Malebranche, 11-12
82. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, "Introduction," Descartes, De L'Homme, AT, 11:vi
83. Baigrie, "Descartes's Scientific Illustrations," 113
84. Clerselier, "Preface," [xv]
85. Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Entretiens sur la pluraalité des mondes. Digression sur les anciens et les modernes, ed. Robert Shackleton (Oxford, 1955), 167
86. "I implore my successors never to believe those things which are said to have originated with me, if I haven't expressed them myself"; Descartes, AT, 6:69-70. According to Baillet, Descartes had intended the trunk he took with him to Sweden to be its final resting place. "Although these two little treatises are considered today as masterpieces of physic and anatomy [sic]," writes Baillet of L'Homme and the Traitté de la formation du foetus in 1693, "there was nothing more imperfect in the eyes of Mr. Descartes, who condemned them for that reason to eternal suppression"; La Vie, 2:398