Descartes' Devil

DESCARTES’ DEVIL THREE MEDITATIONS ALSO AVAILABLE FROM UPPER WEST SIDE PHILOSOPHERS , I NC .: November Rose: A Speech on Death by Kathrin Stengel (Independent Publisher Book Award 2008 ) November Rose: Eine Rede über den Tod by Kathrin Stengel Philosophical Fragments of a Contemporary Life by Julien David 17 Vorurteile, die wir Deutschen gegen Amerika und die Amerikaner haben und die so nicht ganz stimmen können by Misha Waiman The DNA of Prejudice: On the One and the Many by Michael Eskin ~ ALSO BY DURS GRÜNBEIN Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems , (translated by Michael Hofmann; Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2003 ) The Bars of Atlantis: Selected Essays (translated by Michael Hofmann et al., edited by Michael Eskin; Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2010 ) Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc., provides a publication venue for original philosophical thinking steeped in lived life, in line with our motto: philosophical living & lived philosophy. PRAISE for DURS GRÜNBEIN * “An inspired poet, brilliant essayist and erudite explicator, Durs Grünbein, in his profound engagement with another genius, Descartes, has much to say in this book about poetry, history, science, philosophy and the human soul. An entirely remarkable work.” —C. K. W ILLIAMS , winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and author of The Singing , Repair , and Flesh and Blood * “Descartes’ Devil is a moving and beautifully constructed book that opens our eyes to the fantasy, humor, and imagina - tion of Descartes. Grünbein’s thought-provoking reflections on the poetry and modernity of the philosopher —this man ‘chosen to set the course for all of us’ —are heightened and made whole by his own playful poems, which conclude each meditation.” —HEATHER EWING , author of The Lost World of James Smithson: Science, Revolution, and the Birth of the Smithsonian and A Guide to Smithsonian Architecture: An Architectural History of the Smithsonian * “This book is nothing less than a rewriting —and a su- pre mely convincing one at that —of the history of ideas of the last four hundred years. Durs Grünbein forces us not only to rethink how we view ourselves as rational, thinking human beings, but he also compels us to reimagine the task of phi - losophy in the modern era.” —CHRISTOPHER YOUNG , University of Cambridge, author of The Munich Olympics 1972 and the Making of Modern Germany * “I ... couldn’t help but stay awake all night reading Grün - bein’s severe work ... absolutely unignorable ...” —HELEN VENDLER , The New Republic , author of Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats * “Grünbein’s … work has a depth that deserves our atten - tion.” —DAVID HELLMAN , San Francisco Chronicle * “With Descartes’ Devil , Durs Grünbein, one of the leading figures in contemporary European poetry, joins the company of such great European poet-thinkers as Leopardi, Valéry and Unamuno. By locating the origin of the modern poetic ‘I’ in Descartes’ provocations, he challenges contemporary as - sumptions about the kind of work poetry should do , and then proposes what it might be capable of doing. Through a boldly unfashionable reappraisal of Cartesian ideas, he invokes an almost pre-Socratic ideal: that poetry and philosophy are as - pects of the same imaginative mode. But where Wittgenstein proposed it, Grünbein is in the process of realizing it. His own writing has now converged on a remarkable style, one capable of conducting powerful and original thought with no loss of lyric intensity. This book offers a timely corrective to much twenty-first-century Anglophone poetry and its petti - fogging, idea-free tendencies: ‘poetry’, as Grünbein reminds us, ‘is a guardian of the non-trivial’, and the poet ‘someone who puts language into a state of exception’. In this astonish - ing book Grünbein has richly honored his own definitions.” —DON PATERSON , winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Whitbread Poetry Award, and author of Nil Nil , God’s Gift to Women , and Landing Light ABOUT THIS BOOK In three beautifully wrought meditations on the import of René Descartes’ legacy from a poet’s perspective, Durs Grünbein presents us with a Descartes whom we haven’t met before: not the notorious perpetrator of the mind- body-dualism, the arch-villain of Rationalism but the in - spired and courageous dreamer, explorer, and fabulist. Reading Descartes against the grain of the widely accepted view of the philosopher as the proponent of a cut-and- dried, disembodied, and, hence, misguided view of hu - manity, Grünbein discloses the profoundly humane and poetic underpinnings of the legacy of this “modern man par excellence ,” and, by extension, of modernity as a whole. Un - covering the poetic foundations of Descartes’ rationalism and, concomitantly, the poetic lining of the mantle of rea - son, Durs Grünbein, one of the world’s greatest living poets and essayists, shows us that reason is never more alive than when it is most poetic. DESCARTES’ DEVIL THREE MEDITATIONS DURS GRÜNBEIN Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc. New York • 2010 Translated from the German by Anthea Bell Edited by Michael Eskin Original Publication: Der cartesische Taucher. Drei Meditationen © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2008 First English Edition CONTENTS First Meditation: No Pure ‘I’ / 13 Second Meditation: School of Autopsy / 43 Third Meditation: Theme for a Well-Ordered Brain / 81 ~ Notes / 127 Select Bibliography / 133 Chronological Table / 135 About the Author / 137 DESCARTES’ DEVIL ~ THREE MEDITATIONS “I knew … that the wealth of ideas in poetry awakens the mind.” René Descartes Discourse on the Method for Conducting One’s Reason Well and for Seeking Truth in the Sciences (1637) FIRST MEDITATION NO PURE ‘I’ n a letter to Elizabeth of Bohemia, Countess of the Palat- inate, dated 22 February 1649 , René Descartes makes a cIomment on the art of poetry that electrified me when I first read it: “And I think that the humor for making verses proceeds from a strong agitation of the animal spirits, which cannot but entirely confuse the imagination of those who do not possess a well-ordered brain, while merely slightly exciting those who are strong and disposing them toward poetry.” 1 Remarkable words from a philosopher. It’s worth looking at them separately and lingering on this passage, which, as usual in Descartes, contains an entire train of thought. But first, a comment on what you are about to read: The following reflections should be re - garded as loosely connected meditations. I shall allow my - self the liberty of setting them out like a montage, as a kind of mosaic of ideas. Or they could be said to wind about like a labyrinth —not so much the labyrinth of my own isolated self as that of every conscious modern mind. My question is how the poetry of modernity has con - cealed itself in that mind for almost half a millennium. I must add here that my use of the term ‘modern’ entirely ignores accepted divisions into periods. I reserve the right to a different perspective. ‘Modernity’, in my view, is a phenomenon bespeaking the contemporaneity of the non- contemporaneous, a point of intersection of many discon- nected historical progressions and evolutionary leaps that have nothing in common but the one effect of shooting be - yond the events that occasioned them into a supra-tempo - ral sphere. In this sphere, people like Archimedes and Einstein are contemporaries, or, to remain in the latitudes of the arts, so are poets like Ovid and Apollinaire, and painters like Vermeer and Kandinsky. As a rule, ‘moder - nity’ is the billboard on which achievements that have been around for a long time are posted. ~ And so to Descartes and his relation to poetry. To come straight to my point: I see him as paving the way for an an - thropologically based poetics. To be sure, the notion that - 15 - Durs Grünbein Descartes’ Devil the appearance of Cartesian philosophy revived poetry may be obsolete —already Ernst Cassirer considered and rejected it in his comparative study on Descartes’ The Pas - sions of the Soul and Pierre Corneille’s psychology of drama. Yet, there are striking parallels between the philosopher and the tragedian. Both subscribe to the idea of the human being as a clockwork of emotions kept going by passions that are relatively static, almost ready-made, but guided and corrected by the weight of moral reflection. From an anthropological viewpoint, such a mechanistic approach was radically novel. What started out as a mere ‘technical drawing’ of the human psyche was to have unforeseeable consequences for our view of humanity as a whole and, thus, for what occupies the poets. We are still a long way from any kind of genuine psycholinguistics or neurological language theory. Four hundred years separate us from such concepts as the neocortex or mirror neurons; yet, with a radical mid-seventeenth-century conjecture, a beginning was made. As philosopher Karl Popper puts it: “When we speak of an (electric) nerve impulse, Descartes speaks of the flow of animal spirits. When we speak of a synapse or a synaptic knob, Descartes speaks of pores through which the vital spirits can flow.” But what has all this got to do with poetry, and does it change our understanding of what a poem is? I shall return to this later. For now, suffice it to note that this was a radical break with such classical ideas as the doctrine of temperaments and Stoic psycho-dietetics. Re - lying on psychological abstraction in his analysis of psy - chodynamics, Descartes overshot any conceivable goal. Neoclassical aesthetics, Boileau’s L’art poétique in particular, would only try to contain what we begin to glimpse here. The metaphor of the animal spirits turns writing poetry into playing with fire —an inner fire that pushes the limits of the imagination while keeping its cool.

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