respect the courage of one’s convictions among the highest of human qualities.
But in association with power, fervent ideals mean polarizing conflicts, leading
to destructiveness and, in the eyes of an increasing number, cruelty and injus-
tice. In this context opportunism starts to become a virtue. Whether we see it
as cynicism or as tolerance, these are alternative gestalts for the same configu-
ration. Whether we think Pascal and Descartes are calculating or sincere, they
became great because they embodied the historical moment when such ques-
tions could now be raised.
Reemergence of the Metaphysical Field
The Cartesian circle at Paris in the last third of the century was something of
a bringdown from the excitement of the previous generation. Its very routini-
zation indicates a crucial feature of the reconstituted intellectual world. Phi-
losophy had survived; it had not been replaced by science, nor faded away as
a mere residue of religion. Descartes’s grand ambition failed, but left a set
of problems and concepts distinctively defining philosophical turf. In fact,
Descartes was not as philosophically radical as he pretended, drawing heav-
ily on scholastic cultural capital; and the Jesuit scholasticism of Molina and
Suarez was prominent in many universities. But now metaphysics was practiced
openly among the modernists who were in the center of the intellectual atten-
tion space. Creativity proceeds by dividing that space according to the law of
small numbers. The Cartesians party was so victorious in setting the focus of
attention for the avant-garde network that its majority began to split into
factions, even disputing with Descartes himself.
Descartes’s chief followers suffered the fate of epigones, being insuffi-
ciently distinctive to have major reputations of their own. Rohault deduced
the existence of the self from eight self-evident axioms. Régis as systematically
extended the consequences of the cogito, deriving from it 14 further irrefutable
principles. The major religious conservatives also made their reputations on
Cartesian capital. The extreme fideist Huet used skeptical arguments against
the cogito: since it consists of statements uttered in time, there is no guarantee
that the “ergo sum” is still true when it is uttered in a following moment. “I
think therefore I am” means no more than “I thought therefore perhaps I was”
(Popkin, 1979: 200). Foucher revived the skeptical Platonic Academy’s criti-
cism of sense perception, eliminating Cartesian extended substance. These
efforts to tighten up Descartes’s arguments, or to repudiate them entirely,
attracted less attention than the more radical moves to divide up the revitalized
territory of metaphysics.
The Cartesian loyalists occupied the center of attention which everyone
attacked; their dualism of mental and material substance was the puzzle on
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