Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

della Porta or Lull, rather than the sobriety or self-composure of an applied

mathematician.The fragments that survive from his early writings often

describe the effectiveness of poetic imagery in providing access to other-

wise inconceivable realities and, in contrast, the relative sluggishness of

philosophical thought in coping with what is not available to the senses.

It may seem surprising that there are significant judgments in the writings of poets

rather than philosophers. The reason for this is that the poets write with the enthusiasm

and strength of the imagination. We have within us the seeds of knowledge, as in a flint;

philosophers extract them by using reason, but poets do so by using the imagination,

so that they shine more brightly. (x.)

Taking a cue from the success of poets, Descartes suggests that ‘things

that are perceivable by the senses help us to conceive of Olympian matters.

The wind signifies spirit; temporal movement signifies life; light signifies

knowledge; heat signifies love; and instantaneous activity signifies creation’

(x.).

These early notebook jottings are also redolent of the kind of thinking

that Descartes would have found in the mystical writers who were preva-

lent at the time and whose writings were widely reported in Bohemia.

Forexample, he writes in a one-line paragraph: ‘There is a single active

power in things: love, charity, harmony’ (x.). Together with brief,

allusive reflections on God and creation, these suggest a young man who

is concerned about his religious convictions, unsure about the future, and

perhaps even overwhelmed by the uncertainty and ambiguity with which

he is trying to cope.

Almost eighteen years later, Descartes reinterprets the events of

as an invitation to look inward for the reliable foundations of knowledge

that he had been thinking about for some years previously. He writes in the

Discourse on Methodthat, as a result of his dreams, he began to compare

buildings designed by a single architect to those that are cobbled together,

over time, with contributions from many different hands. This contrast

applies equally well to a whole town or a single building.

Thus I thought that the sciences found in books – at least those which are only probable

and do not contain any demonstrations, since they were composed and developed

gradually from the views of many different people – do not come as close to the truth

as the simple reasoning that a person with common sense can perform naturally about

things that they observe. I also thought that, since we were all infants before we became

adults, and since we were necessarily governed for a long time by our appetites and

our teachers, which were often at odds with each other and of which, perhaps, neither