Advances in mathematics and natural philosophy owe a great deal to conversation, whether
in person or via correspondence, contrary to the misapprehension that such work emerges
in isolation. Descartes ’ s interest in music could have remained undeveloped, had not his
dialogue with Beeckman initially stimulated him to assemble his thoughts on the subject.
During the critical years from 1629 to 1634 and thereafter, Mersenne ’ s questioning sus-
tained Descartes ’ s continuing response.
So far, Mersenne himself has remained in the background, as if he were merely a sound-
ing board for Descartes. To some extent, this reflects the disparity in what remains of their
correspondence: only five letters from Mersenne, compared to 146 from Descartes.^1
Whether Mersenne ’ s letters have simply been lost over time or Descartes just discarded
them, we tend to read their dialogue through the one-sided perspective of Descartes ’ s
responses. But any answer must be judged in light of the precise inquiry that prompted it
and, as Blaise Pascal observed, Mersenne “ had a very special talent for posing beautiful
questions, for which there was no one else comparable. ”^2 To understand the implications
of any scientific theory, of any answer , we need always to ask: but what was the question?
A beautiful question tends to go beyond any response it provokes, which does not close
or end it but gives it further life.
In the case of Mersenne, this inquiry will lead us to further aspects of their dialogue
(and of the significance of music) than were apparent in Descartes ’ s side of the correspon-
dence. Though for Descartes music was one among many interests, for Mersenne music
was at the very center of his work, especially before 1637. He was, if anything, even more
of a polymath than Descartes, as befitted his special role as the self-appointed (but uni-
versally recognized) secretary of the Republic of Letters, that cosmopolitan and self-
organized network of scholars so important for the development of learning in their time.
Often writing in Latin, the international language shared by the learned, these savants
exchanged and transmitted enormous amounts not just of information (in the contempo-
rary, neutral sense of “ data ” ) but of thought, observation, and (above all) salient questions.^3
Among them, no one was more prominent or more important than Mersenne in shaping
the intense discourse that formed the new natural philosophy.
barré
(Barré)
#1