Descartes: A Biography

c CUNYB/Clarke     December, :

 Descartes: A Biography

Having lain awake for a while, Descartes fell asleep again and almost

immediately had a second dream in which he heard a sharp, explosive

noise that sounded like thunder. This caused him to reawaken, and he saw

sparks from the stove fire flying about the room. He remembered having

had this experience before, while awake, and he was therefore able to make

sense of it and to return calmly to sleep. Within a short time, however, he

had a third dream that was not frightening like the first two. He dreamt

that he found a book open on his table, without knowing who had put it

there. He opened it and, seeing that it was a dictionary, he was happy in

anticipating that it could be useful for his studies. At the same time, he

noticed another book under his hand that was just as unfamiliar, and he

did not know where this one came from either.

On further inspection he found that it was a collection entitledAn

Anthology of All the Ancient Latin Poets, and he was curious to read some-

thing from it. He opened it at random and his eyes fell on a verse entitled

‘Quod vitae sectabor iter?’ (What path shall I follow in life?).At the same

time someone whom he did not recognize presented him with a verse that

he recommended highly, and which began with the words: ‘Est & Non’

(It is, and it is not). Descartes told the stranger that he recognized that

line as the opening of a poem by Ausonius, which was included in the

anthology on the table. On leafing through the large book, he failed to

find it. However, he told the stranger that he knew another poem by the

same author with the opening line ‘Quod vitae sectabor iter?’ This was a

different edition from the one that he was familiar with, and at that point

the stranger disappeared. The two lines that occurred in the third dream

are indeed the opening lines of two different poems by the French poet

Ausonius, and they are found on facing pages in a very large anthology of

poets (an edition that had the dimensions of a dictionary) that was available

to students at La Fl`eche.

If one assumes that Descartes actually had dreams to which he attributed

great significance onNovember, they raise the question of who is

best placed to interpret them. Freud famously declined to offer a confident

interpretation, although he alluded to the symbolism of the first dream as

suggesting deep anxiety, on the part of the dreamer, about possible devi-

ations from his own strongly held rules of sexual morality, possibly with

homosexual connotations.With appropriate reservations about diagno-

sis at such a distance, he also conceded that the third dream could be

understood as expressing unconscious concerns about how to live one’s