Géraud De Cordemoy Six Discourses on the Distinction Between the Body and the Soul and Treatises on Metaphysics

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 19/3/2015, SPi Six Discourses on the Distinction between the Body and the Soul and Treatises on Metaphysics OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 19/3/2015, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 19/3/2015, SPi Géraud de Cordemoy Six Discourses on the Distinction between the Body and the Soul and Treatises on Metaphysics translated with an introduction by Steven Nadler 1 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 19/3/2015, SPi 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries # Steven Nadler 2015 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2015 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. 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Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 19/3/2015, SPi Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction: Géraud de Cordemoy and Le Discernement du Corps et de l’Ame 1 Géraud de Cordemoy: Life and Works 3 A Cartesian Decade 10 Le Discernement du Corps et de l’Ame en Six Discours 14 Cordemoy’sInfluence 45 Texts and Translations 49 References 50 Six Discourses on the Distinction between the Body and the Soul To Your Majesty 54 Preface 56 First Discourse: On Bodies and Matter 60 Second Discourse: On the Motion and Rest of Bodies 70 Third Discourse: On Natural and Artificial Machines 81 Fourth Discourse: On the First Cause of Motion 93 Fifth Discourse: On the Union of Mind and Body 102 Sixth Discourse: On the Distinction Between Body and Soul 108 Treatises on Metaphysics I. What Constitutes the Happiness or Misery of Minds 145 II. That God Does Everything That is Real in Our Actions, Without Depriving Us of Freedom 150 Index of Names 155 Index of Topics 156 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 19/3/2015, SPi Acknowledgements My thanks to Ullrich Langer and Sandrine Roux for their help on some finer points of French translation, and to Peter Momtchiloff at Oxford University Press for his support of this project. I am also very grateful to the two anonymous readers for Oxford University Press for their extensive comments on an early draft of this translation; I very much appreciate the time and effort they generously put into helping make the translation more accurate and a better read. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 27/3/2015, SPi Introduction Géraud de Cordemoy and Le Discernement du Corps et de l’Ame It was not long after the death of the great René Descartes in 1650 that his philosophy was well on its way to becoming the dominant philosophical and scientific paradigm in Europe. There were, of course, competing intellectual traditions in this period, including materialism (represented most prominently in its Epicurean form by Pierre Gassendi, and in a non-Epicurean form by Thomas Hobbes)1 and skepticism, in both libertine (Pierre Charon, La Mothe Le Vayer) and religious (Blaise Pascal, Pierre Bayle) guises.2 Moreover, Cartesianism was still a conten- tious philosophy with plenty of powerful opponents. It was regarded as a radical break with philosophical, scientific, and even religious tradition, and came in for a good deal of censure from French ecclesiastic and civil authorities. It was also attacked by the more conservative elements in the academic faculties, which had long been wedded to Aristotelian philosophy.3 And yet, despite these difficulties, the principles of Cartesian epistemology, metaphysics, and natural philosophy informed much of intellectual life in the academies, conférences, and salons of Paris and elsewhere (and eventually the colleges and universities as well) until their eclipse by Newtonian science in the eighteenth century. Even the sessions of the official Académie des Sciences, founded by Louis XIV at the instigation of his finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, were dominated by discussions of Cartesian physics and mathematics. As Francisque 1 For the contrast between Cartesian philosophy and 17th-cent. Epicureanism (both its Gassendist form and more generally), see Lennon 1993 and Wilson 2008. 2 See Popkin 2003. 3 On the censure of Cartesianism in the 17th cent., see Cousin 1841. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 27/3/2015, SPi INTRODUCTION Bouillier, the nineteenth-century author of a magisterial history of Car- tesian philosophy, puts it (albeit with not a little exaggeration), “during more than a half-century, there did not appear in France a single book of philosophy, there was not a single philosophical discussion, that did not have Descartes as its object, that was neither for nor against his system.”4 1666 was a watershed year in the fortunes of Cartesian philosophy in France. Barely three years after Descartes’s works were placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books (donec corrigantur—“until they are corrected”), two of the most important treatises in that philosophical camp were published. Both works were written by members of the professional class who found time to pursue philosophy in a serious way, both dealt with the same general metaphysical themes, and both offered novel and creative solutions to some residual problems bequeathed by their intellectual mentor. Louis de La Forge (1632–66) was a physician in Saumur who had recently participated in the posthumous publication of Descartes’s treatise on the human body (the Treatise on Man [Traité de l’homme], 1664) by supplying illustrations and extensive editorial and a philosophical commentary. In January 1666,5 he published his own Treatise on the Human Mind (Traité de l’esprit de l’homme). Completed sometime in late 1665 but based on ideas La Forge had been entertaining for several years, this was a relatively faithful but nonetheless innovative and influential continuation of Descartes’s project of investigating human nature, and especially the problematic relationship between mind and body. Then, in the same month that La Forge’s book appeared, the Parisian publisher Florentin Lambert, housed on the rue Saint Jacques, brought out a 230-page treatise (in-12) with the title Le Discernement du Corps et de l’Ame en six discours pour servir à l’éclaircissement de la physique (The Distinction Between the Body and the Soul in Six Discourses, to serve for the elucidation of physics—I will henceforth refer to this as Six Dis- courses). Its author, a 40-year-old lawyer named Géraud (alternatively spelled Gerauld) de Cordemoy, was already well-known within Parisian Cartesian circles; the publication of the Six Discourses marked the 4 Bouillier 1868, i. 430. 5 The 1st edn bore a 1666 publication date, although the work was apparently printed in Dec. 1665. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 27/3/2015, SPi GÉRAUD DE CORDEMOY: LE DISCERNEMENT DU CORPS ET DE L’AME beginning of a short period in which he took a leading role in the public defense of this still relatively new philosophy. Cordemoy’s relatively concise treatise (at least by early modern stand- ards) represents one of the most important and influential, if unortho- dox, works in the history of Cartesianism. The Six Discourses is among the original seventeenth-century sources of the famous causal doctrine of occasionalism, which it presented years before that doctrine’s more extensive and celebrated appearance in Malebranche’s works. Cordemoy also argued, contrary to some of the foundational principles of Cartesian metaphysics, for an atomistic conception of matter. While his views were harshly criticized by fellow Cartesians, no less a thinker than Leibniz found him to be one of the more perspicacious members of that move- ment and found much to admire in the Six Discourses. Géraud de Cordemoy: Life and Works Cordemoy was born in Paris in October 1626.6 He was one of four children, and the only son, of Géraud de Cordemoy (b. 1591) and his wife Nicole Bucé. The family was well-off, and descended from nobility in Auvergne. Géraud père was, for a time, Professor of Human Lan- guages at the Université de Paris, and subsequently was appointed controller of tithes in Langres. By 1667, he was a lawyer at the Parlement of Paris. Géraud fils would follow his father into a Parisian legal career, although his real passion lay elsewhere. We know next to nothing about Cordemoy’s life until his marriage to Marie de Chazelles, which must have taken place sometime before December 1651, when Louis-Géraud, the first of their five children, was born. Nor do we have much information about his legal career, although he reportedly served the Parlement with some distinction (if not great eloquence).7 However, Cordemoy seems to have been constitutionally unsuited for the life of a Parisian lawyer—he apparently had little taste for the 6 October 6 was the date either of his birth or of his baptism; there seems to be some disagreement on this.

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