Descartes's Fusion

Moving progressively through the dream argument to the idea of a deceiving God and finally an evil demon, Descartes harnesses the power of doubt to explore the conditions that might distort our apprehension of the world. In doing so, he measures the problem of conceiving the whole through its parts, of knowing the universe through the partial lens of the thinking self. The question he confronts is this: if we must only rely on partial information, how can we capture the underlying unity of the whole?

It is in response to this conundrum that Descartes effects a fusion between poetry and philosophy. The philosopher Stanley Rosen argues that the idea of the unity of the whole itself forms the basis of a fundamental kinship between poetry and philosophy despite the ancient terms of their quarrel. He asks, “What follows from the impossibility of an analytical or conceptual explanation of the unity of the whole? Either there is no whole, which is to say that the wholeness or unity of our experience is a perspective, that is, a poem. Or, at a somewhat deeper level of this response, it is we who must supply a cosmological myth of the whole with an accordingly rhetorical justification.” Writing of Plato here, Rosen locates the source of philosophic discomfort with poetic imagining in its paradoxical reliance on the latter. To articulate the unity of the whole is either to take Montaigne’s perspectivist position (that we can only know the world through our individual experience of it) or to push even more deeply into poetic territory to “supply” a “myth of the whole.” This latter response is Descartes’s choice in Le monde.

It would be inaccurate to describe Le monde as a myth or a poem. But Rosen’s astute distinction also explains why it has been so difficult to see worldmaking as central to the Cartesian philosophical project. Either we must accept that any attempt to describe the world is doomed to perspectivism (associated with poetry and individual subjectivity) or we must recognize cosmological narratives (myths of origin) as necessary and effective, if contingent, products of human artifice. It is almost commonplace now to relegate Descartes to the perspectival position and to assert that the modern subject first finds voice in his work. In a widely influential interpretation, Jean-Luc Nancy argues that “le sujet, c’est celui qui a un monde: quelque chose qui est à sa disposition, quelque chose de prêt pour son usage.… Aujourd’hui, depuis Descartes, le sujet c’est le monde, et réciproquement” (The subject is one who has a world: something that is available to him, something ready for his use.… Today, after Descartes, the subject is the world, and vice versa). But while this phenomenological perspective emphasizes the power of individual consciousness to shape a particular perception of the world, it does a disservice to the immensity of Descartes’s vision. For his response is the latter, more deeply humanistic one. Descartes’s project consists in purposefully rebuilding a torn philosophical edifice with the recognition that the edifice itself may be a contingent artifact. To understand Descartes’s imagined world in these terms is to take his emphasis on its fictionality seriously—to recognize that the world’s unity may finally be best known through the intellectual imagination.

(from Ayesha Ramachandran, The Worldmakers)