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 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, * “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 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. A surrealist could not have expressed it more daringly. The ‘I’ itself becomes the observer of the play of emotions, approaching them like the rim of a volcano and peering down into the crater.

- 16 - First Meditation  No Pure ‘I’ ~ The letter to the Countess Palatine is a nod to us from the Early Modern period. It already contains the seed of a whole theory of the imagination based on the physiology of the brain. The lady to whom it is addressed needed con - solation, and Descartes writes to her as a sympathetic ad - viser. For this was not just any noble lady but a staunch supporter of his philosophy and one of the cleverest wom- en of her time. One of his major works, Principles of Philos - ophy (1644) , is dedicated to her. She was the eldest daughter of the luckless ‘Winter King’, Frederick V of Bohemia, and after her father lost his throne in 1620 she lived in exile in the Netherlands. From the time of their first meeting in The Hague —when she was twenty-four and the philoso - pher was almost fifty —she was one of Descartes’ most im - portant interlocutors. Her judgment mattered to him; her virginal skepticism put his reasoning to the test. Their cor - respondence is a fine testament to the new relationship between the sexes in the Free Republic of Minds, if only because it shows the thinker in the role of nobleman. A courtesy that brings us closer in human terms to the arch- theoretician Descartes shines through the armor of logic. The compliment he pays her on the dedication page of his Principles of Philosophy is almost risqué: “… to a youthful princess who reminds us, in her person and her age, not of the learned Minerva or one of the Muses, but rather of the Graces.” As we learn from Descartes’ letter, the princess had been ill and, while confined to her bed, had “felt an incli - nation to write verse” to distract herself. The philosopher, a true gentleman, assures her that such activity is entirely natural in circumstances like these, invoking Socrates, who had done exactly the same during his confinement in an Athenian prison. And here, in the context of speaking of verse, a word lights up, inclination —meaning a certain basic disposition or leaning —which opens up a whole spectrum of scientific associations: from the geometry of conic sec - tions, to the planetary orbits of the astronomers, to the

- 17 - Durs Grünbein  Descartes’ Devil geometer’s art of measurement made possible by the earth’s magnetism and the deviations of the quivering compass needle from the horizontal, in a word: inclination . This implies that the mind as well must stand at a partic - ular angle of inclination to the course of everyday life, be it due to sudden exaltation or racking illness, euphoria or dejection. Whether elated or depressed, the mind must be in a certain mood (the body slightly bent, perhaps, as in Al - brecht ’s engraving of the brooding angel), only then will the organism be jogged into creativity. For lines of verse to begin to flow, the tedium of a life numbed by habit must be interrupted —by some sudden event, however small, that shakes it up. Poetry cannot be written to order. When Descartes speaks of “humor” in connection with poetry, he doesn’t mean the capricious ideas of a whimsical mind but humeur , which to a French speaker means ‘disposition’ or a specific ‘cast of mind’ — not to be confused with humour , that kindly and playful state of mind. As always, Descartes makes a precise dis - tinction, and to distinguish, to make conceptual divisions in good Aristotelian fashion, was this thinker’s principal daily occupation. In Les passions de l’âme , he lists six original passions of the soul : love, hate, desire, joy, sadness, and, heading them all, admiration (to Descartes the noblest of the emotions) — we might think of it as closely related to the Kantian notion of the sublime. Multiplied and divided, these passions give rise to dozens of subspecies. Thus he works out, crossing and combining them with each other in progressive analy - sis, the drives and virtues: envy and shame, disgust, re - morse, and the overarching virtue of generosity. He de- fines joy as “a pleasant emotion of the soul consisting in the enjoyment of what is good,” and we are reminded of Friedrich Schiller’s schöner Götterfunken from ’s Ninth. He also recognizes intellectual grief. He asks him - self why the envious have faces of a leaden color and ex - plains the origin of tears: Vapors are shed from the eyes just as sweat emerges from the pores of the skin. Of trem -

- 18 - First Meditation  No Pure ‘I’ bling he says that it has two causes, “the one is that some - times too few vital spirits reach the nerves from the brain, the other that sometimes there are too many of them for the small passages in the muscles to close properly.” At a single stroke, he outstrips the psychology of his day and crowns it with a dynamic theory of the emotions. Once again, it is physics that provides a solid foundation, and this, as we may notice, in the age of Metaphysical Po - etry. In England, John , Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, and John are writing intellectual medita - tions in poetic form, while on the continent body and mind are being linked by a system of communicating tubes that no longer have anything in common with the glass flasks and cooling coils in the alchemist’s lab. The new dis - tillation device made of flesh and blood is fed by the emo - tions. Anyone wishing to understand Descartes’ bold the- ory of the writing of verse must start with them. The force that activates the process is the arousal of what Descartes calls esprits animaux , animal spirits. These wonderfully ghostly vital spirits are an invention of the physicians of the period, useful in any kind of diagnosis, from an insidious fever to a fit of sensual lust to insom nia. In this —their original —form, as subversively diabolical particles that obsessively course through the body, we first encounter them again in the works of the late Romantics with their fantasies of magnetism and their spiritistic prac - tices. By ‘animal spirits’ Descartes means a gaseous secre - tion of the blood, setting out from the heart, circulating in the blood, and, like all gases and vapors, rising upwards. On reaching the pineal gland, a small specialized organ sit - uated directly under the base of the skull and functioning as an atomizer, they are sprayed into all the chambers of the brain. Before we all start chuckling, let’s keep in mind that Descartes, himself an industrious anatomist, had dis - sected the organ with his own hands. All this won’t seem so curious at all if, instead of the pineal gland, we think of the hypophysis of the diencephalon, that drop-shaped structure about the size of an avocado stone. Then the droll

- 19 - Durs Grünbein  Descartes’ Devil bulb, the only organ in the entire cranium that is not one of a pair, becomes the familiar hormonal gland that is part of the limbic system and responsible for memory, learning, and the management of our emotions. To Descartes, this gland was the seat of the soul. ~ “Gentlemen, rather than promising that I can satisfy your curiosity about the anatomy of the brain, I now admit that it is a subject about which I know absolutely nothing.” These words by Danish anatomist Nicolas Steno ( 1638– 1686 ) Descartes, too, ought to have spoken. However, he believed that he had a perfect command of the subject when, in his Treatise On Man , he explained the mechanism of the brain, and of the pineal gland in particular. Animal spirits are the subtler parts of the blood, tiny particles of matter —“like the parts of a flame spraying from a torch,” he writes —some of which make their way into the inter - stices of the brain, others into the nerves, others into the muscles, thus setting off reflection, reaction, and move - ment, albeit in reverse order. The farsighted Leibniz was subsequently to snuff out this very idea by replacing it with his theory of monads, which doesn’t accommodate dynamic entities of this kind. He was to rout the animal spirits as something dangerously irrational —willful goblins that would only wreak havoc in the well-ordered structure of the best of all worlds. The question of how the soul sets the vital spirits to work, he explains, is invalid because there is no relationship of any kind between body and mind. Undoubtedly, he did suc - ceed in exorcising the lively sparks from the Baroque body machine . Something that exists only when items clump to - gether, in the same way as platelets form thromboses, doesn’t therefore, he argues, have to be present as a real entity. Leibniz goes so far as to declare all sensation im - material in an attempt to restore the unity of body and mind. With his infinitesimal exorcisms, he finally puts to flight the esprits animaux , those light-shunning ghosts in the brain’s ventricles. He ... - 20 - Published by Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc. P. O. Box 250645, New York, NY 10025, USA www.westside-philosophers.com

Translation copyright © 2009 by Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, me - chanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. For all inquiries concerning permission to reuse material from any of our titles, please contact the publisher in writing, or contact the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA (www.copyright.com). Illustrations: ‘Cartesian Devil’ (p. 4), etching, in: Johann Heinrich Moritz von Poppe, Der physikalische Jugendfreund oder faßliche und unterhaltende Darstellung der Naturlehre, mit der genauesten Beschreibung aller anzustellenden Experimente, der dazu nöthigen Instrumente, und selbst mit Beyfügung vieler belustigenden physikalischen Kunst - stücke. Erster Theil. Mit sechs Kupfertafeln (1811); ‘Rainbow Watcher’ (p. 34), en - graving from the “Eighth Discourse (Of the Rainbow)” of Descartes’ Les Météores (1637); “Caduca Fluxa Vanitas” (p. 72), etching by Wolfgang Kilian, in: Jakob Balde, Poema de Vanitate Mundi (1638), courtesy of the Bavarian State Library, Munich, Germany. Our special thanks to Joseph Biel for the original artwork on p. 6 (frontispiece: “Durs Grünbein with Mask of René Descartes in Snow”) and p. 126 (“Skull à la Descartes”). Both images copyright © 2009 by Joseph Biel The colophon is a registered trademark of Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc. Library of Congress Control Number: 2009933721 ISBN-13: 978-0-9795829-4-3 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-9795829-4-6 (cloth) Typesetting and Design: Michael Eskin Printed by Offset Impressions, Inc., Reading, PA Printed in the United States of America