The concept of order in Descartes' Regulae ad directionem ingenii

PONTIFICIA UNIVERSITÀ GREGORIANA FACOLTÀ DI FILOSOFIA The concept of order in Descartes’ Regulae ad directionem ingenii Tesi di Licenza Autore: Alan El Haj Matricola: 159197 Moderatore: Prof. Simone D’Agostino Anno Accademico 2014-2015 ROMA 2015 Ordo est quem si tenuerimus in vita, perducet ad Deum. St. Augustine, De ordine, I.ix.27 2 INTRODUCTION René Descartes’ youthful project to establish a universal method for the attainment of certain knowledge in any and all sciences has been universally considered an ambitious failure. The onward progression of the practice of science has amply demonstrated that a conjectural, probabilistic, model of doing science, such as espoused by his near contemporary John Locke, is far more accurate a reading of the actuality of scientific endeavor. Why then undertake a study of the Regulae? Beyond the historical interest involved there seems little point in trying to breathe life into a dead horse, useless to the practice of the natural sciences. It is doubtful that Descartes ever had this goal exclusively in mind when he set out to articulate his rules. Rather, the idea that the Regulae’s exclusive usefulness resides in the attempt to develop a procedural ‘scientific method’ is immediately negated in his commentary to the very first rule in which Descartes’ stated aim is to elaborate a universal method for the procuration of certainty in all science, that is, all knowledge. The aim of the method therefore is not so much the development of a procedure applicable to all fields of science on the basis of the particularities or universalities lying within those fields; it is, rather, the conditioning of the instrument of scientific discovery itself: the human mind/intellect/spirit, to which Descartes designates the term ‘ingenium’. Equipped with this key of interpretation the entire work can be read as the elaboration of exercises for the conditioning of the mind. Descartes’ method, consequently, is directed above all to the conditioning of the instrument of science more than at the individual sciences themselves; the accent is on making the mind capable of scientific knowledge, as we read in the concluding paragraph of the commentary to Regula I: If therefore anyone wishes seriously to investigate the truth of things, he should not choose any single science; for they are all interconnected and reciprocally dependent. He should rather think only of increasing the natural light of reason, not in order to resolve this or that problem of the School, but in order that in every particular situation of his life his intellect may show his will what choice to make. Soon he will be amazed to find that he has made much greater progress than those who study particular things, and that he has attained not only what others desire, but also higher things which they could not expect to reach [361]1. 1 The translation used unless otherwise indicated is DESCARTES, R., Philosophical Essays and Correspondence, tr. Greene M. – Ariew R., Cambridge, 2000 (see my footnote no.7). My italics. 3 The question concerning the Regulae however is not resolved once we identify the beneficiary of the rules and, therefore, the method. The question remains as to what exactly the method consists in. The answer, again, is found in the text itself, in Regula V: «Tota methodus consistit in ordine et dispositione [379]». The entirety of the method then consists in order and disposition. We will see that disposition is subsumed into the category of order, as one of its expressions, leaving us with a simple relationship of identity between method and order. While this identification of method with order answers the question as to the essence of Descartes’ method in the Regulae – method is order – it begs the question: what is order? Once we grasp Descartes’ concept of order in the Regulae we will grasp the meaning of his ‘method’ and possess a (perhaps the?) key to the interpretation of this collection of rules. This thesis therefore proposes to examine the concept of order in Descartes’ Regulae ad directionem ingenii. What is the status of order in the Regulae? What is its role? How does it manifest itself? What is its importance? The question in a sense proposes itself on account of the ambiguous behaviour of the term order in Descartes’ text. Considered synoptically, the term’s ambiguous presence first arises in the commentary to the fourth rule before being duly instituted as the central principle of the method in the formulation of Regula V, in which order and method are virtually identified. The ambiguity is comprised first of all by the double valence of order’s presence in the method as gleaned from the Regulae: is order something I follow or is order something I institute? Consideration of the ambiguous comportment of this term gives rise to a hypothesis: what if order is neither one nor the other, nor both, but a third party, a thing, a subject, consisting of an ontology of some kind? Under this hypothesis order cannot be considered exclusively as the form of rapports and relations instituted by the mind upon things, nor the form of rapports and relations present antecedently within reality external to the subject’s determination of it, but rather as a third party, active in reality, in the mind and in the world, acting upon and interacting with these realities. Where does the hypothesis take us? We examine the Regulae, beginning with Regula V, in which order is explicitly given its axial prominence in the definition of the method. Given its central status in the Regulae we have decided to begin our study from this rule which Jean-Luc Marion has termed the «geometric centre» of the Regulae. But this means that we have also to read the first four rules retrospectively, as it were, in the light of this geometric centre; we have read them therefore as a 4 preamble to Regula V and to the rules constituting the rest of the first book, Regulae I-XII, which we have viewed as corollaries to Regula V. Because of this geometric nature, we’ve considered the first twelve rules as a systematic whole. Each one is related to the others and finds its place in the system, completes the system, whose cornerstone and key to interpretation is Regula V. Having returned to our centre, Regula V, from the previous four, we take a look at the three rules that constitute the central – and, according to Descartes, inseparable – triadic nucleus of the text: Regulae V, VI, and VII. The first of the two chapters dedicated to the unfolding of this nucleus does so by looking at the dynamism of order in the Regulae through the prism of five syntagms involving the term ordo, three of which are found as such in the text of the Regulae (ordine persequendas; ordine et/vel mensura; and ordine et dispositione), one which we have extrapolated from the dynamism of order as it is deployed in Regula VIII and that we have named ordine et terminus, and one which seeks to illumine Descartes’ concept of order by juxtaposing some extracts of St. Augustine’s De ordine (Ordo and De ordine). The tension borne within the specific rapport between order and each partner in the respective syntagms discloses aspects of the character of order as it emerges in the Regulae. Chapter three deals with the process of enumeration as delineated in Regula VII and the neoplatonic notion of epistrophé, two manifestations or deployments of the dynamism of order, the first textual and the second extrapolated from the mechanics of the first. We come to identify the two: the apparently banal task of enumeration in series is thus transfigured into an activity structurally identical to the neoplatonic model of cosmic reconciliation, traditionally categorized in the dynamics of proodosepistrophé, or exitus-reditus in Latin. Although the case can be made that Descartes was familiar with and positively inclined to contemporary renaissance Neo-Platonism, the juxtaposition we make does not rely on this external recognition, found in notes, letters, historical contextual studies and the like, but rather emerges through an analysis of the structure of the interior dynamism of the activity of the mind upon reality as considered in both the Regulae and in certain neoplatonic, specifically Plotinian, texts. The fourth and last chapter deals with the decidedly anthropological inflection of Regulae IX-XIIa – the seeds of which are already present in the triad of Regula V, VI, and VII – and the Cartesian category of the simple natures expounded on in Regula XIIb. We discuss the dynamism of order as seen from its activity in and through the human subject that follows and/or employs order. This discussion considers the question of human freedom, the will, and their role in the mediation of order. We 5 consider the will’s fundamental activity the decision to cooperate with the dynamism of order. This cooperation, manifested in the exercise of the faculties of perspicacity and sagacity, makes the mind capable of science, and this to the extent to which it becomes accustomed to the light of order. The simple natures – those natures considered the most elemental quoad nos and not in themselves – represent order in their quality as pedagogues of the mind. They engage with the mind in the mode of an encounter and conduce it, by means of this encounter, to its conformation to the dynamic of order, thus enabling the mind in its capacity as mediator of order. We interpret the entirety of the mind’s encounter with the simple natures - from their introduction in the intuitus to their enumerated disposition in ordered series - in the light of the eschatological dynamism of order dealt with in chapter three, in which the simple natures, as manifestations of order, represent the dynamism of the good in abbreviated form. Concordances of ordo in Descartes’ opus Prior to undertaking an examination of Descartes’ use of ordo in the Regulae, it is useful to situate the term in the context of its appearance in his entire body of work. According to the Equipe Descartes 2 , the term ordo and its derivatives (ordinem, ordine, ordines) appears 20 times and the term ordino appears twice in two derivatives (ordinari, ordinandi) in the Compendium musicae (AT X), written in 1618, probably prior to his work on the Regulae. In the Discourse on the Method (A-T VI), published in French in 1637, the term ordre appears 12 times, ordres appears once, ordinaire appears 7 times, ordinairement appears 4 times, ordonnance appears once, and ordonner appears twice. In the Dioptrique (AT VI), published in 1637, ordre appears 5 times. In Météores (AT VI), published in 1637, ordre appears 7 times. In the Géométrie (AT VI), published in 1637, ordre appears 22 times. In the French version of the Méditations Métaphysiques (AT IX), published in 1647, ordre appears 6 times, while in the Responsiones (AT VII), published in 1641 (along with the original Latin version of the 2 EQUIPE DESCARTES, ‘Contribution à la sémantèse d’ordre – ordo chez Descartes’, in Ordo: Colloquio internazionale del Lessico Intelletuale Europeo, a cura di Fattori, M. – Bianchi, M., 2 voll., Roma, 1979, I, 279-327. 6 Meditationes) with an addendum in 1650, ordo appears 9 times (as ordo, ordinem and ordine). In the Principia (VIII), published in 1644, and its French version, Principes (AT IX), published in 1647, ordo appears 16 times and ordre appears 19 times. In Les Passions de l’Ame (AT XI), published in the year prior to Descartes’ death, 1649, ordre appears 8 times. A cursory glance at this brief inventory reveals a relatively constant use of the term throughout, with perhaps a relatively clear drop in recurrences of the term between his earlier works (up to 1637), and his later works (from 1641 onwards), the one exception in his later works being the Principia/ Principes. This contrast is clearer when we take into account the Regulae, which I will deal with subsequently, in which the term appears almost 50 times, counting derivatives. Ordo/ordre also appears numerous times in Descartes’ Correspondance (AT I-V; VII-IX) but as far as I know a complete enumeration has not been carried out. L’Equipe Descartes cites 30 noteworthy mentions of ordo/ordre in the correspondence beginning in 1628, although we can find the term, and indeed the concept, of ordre in the letters at least as early as Descartes’ Letter to Beeckman, 26 March 1619 (AT X 156), in which he mentions the term in the context of his project to completely re-found science: Another thing I am investigating at present is the extraction of roots consisting of many different terms. If I find out how to do this, as I hope I shall, I shall really put this science in order… What I want to produce is…a completely new science, which would provide a general solution of all possible equations involving any sort of quantity, whether continuous or discrete, each according to its nature.3 Finally, in the Regulae (AT X), according to the Equipe Descartes, Descartes employs the term ordo or its derivatives (“ordino, “in-ordinatus” etc.) 47 times. Ordo appears 42 times (ordo: 7 times; ordinem: 10 times; ordinis: 2 times; ordine: 26 times; ordines: 1 time), and the term ordino appears 3 times (ordinata, ordinatas, esse ordinatam, once each), and inordinate and inordinatus appear once each. This would make a total of 47 occurrences in its different semantic forms.4 Thus it appears in Regula 3 DESCARTES, R., The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, tr. Cottingham, J. et al., 3 voll., Cambridge, 1991, III, 2. My italics. 4 Cf. EQUIPE DESCARTES, ‘Contribution à la sémantèse d’ordre – ordo’, 287-290, where the occurrences are quoted along with the page and line numbers in the Adam & Tannery edition, in the context of their appearance, i.e. «378.01: illa…tantum, in quibus (aliquis) /ordo/ vel mensura examinatur, ad Mathesim referri». 7 IV (5 times), Regula V (3 times, once in the rule itself), Regula VI (4 times, once in the rule itself), Regula VII (8 times, once in the rule itself), Regula VIII (4 times), Regula X (5 times, once in the rule itself), Regula XII (1 time) Regula XIII (2 times), Regula XIV (8 times), Regula XVI (2 times), Regula XVII (3 times), Regula XVIII (1 time), and Regula XXI (1 time, in the rule itself). There is one more occurrence not cited by the Equipe Descartes’ study, appearing in Regula XVII (AT X 459): «magnitudines ignotae sibi invicem omnes subordinentur». Notwithstanding its exclusion from the study, the fact that the term subordinentur (translated in Cottingham et al. as «arranged in a serial order»5) occurs in the latter rules (in the projected second part of the triad of twelve) likely presupposes the development of the notion of order throughout the previous rules, particularly concerning its methodological application in Regula XVII. A mere detail perhaps, but for the sake of accuracy we can say that Descartes employs ordo and its semantic forms 48 times in the Regulae. Distribution of the term ordo in the Regulae The hierarchical ordering of the individual rules themselves does not proceed according to their numerical ordering, from I-XII (or I-XXI if we take the work as an – incomplete – whole) in descending or ascending importance, but rather appears weighted centrifugally. Of all the rules, Regulae V, VI, and VII are, respectively, the «most essential [379]», the most «useful [381]» and the most «required for the completion of our knowledge [388]». Although, as Marion notes, Regula V is the «geometrical centre»6 of the entire work, Regulae V, VI, and VII «are not to be separated, because for the most part we must think of them at the same time, and because all concur equally in the perfection of our method. It did not make much difference which was given first [392]». This three-fold nucleus is enunciated in twelve pages of austere prose that draw up the mental image of a prism, each of whose three aspects hinge on the other two, each a screen concealing and a window revealing the key enclosed inside it. The entirety of Descartes’ text can be read as an attempt to comprehensively expound this nucleus. 5 DESCARTES, R., The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, tr. Cottingham, J. et al., 3 voll., I, 70. 6 MARION, J.-L., Sur l’ontologie grise de Descartes. Science cartésienne et savoir aristotélicien dans les Regulae, Paris, 1975, 72. 8 Our aim in what follows is not to explain each rule but to comment upon the use of the term ordo and its derivatives in the individual rules in order to obtain a topographic view of it’s various uses and to bring to light its function within the Regulae. This entails relatively lengthy commentary on other aspects of the individual rules when necessary to outline the context in which the concept of ordo fulfils it’s function. In addition the thread of the analysis will, like the geometrical structure of the Regulae, follow a sequence that does not correspond to the numerical sequence of the rules but rather to the determination of certain themes in their relation to Regula V, with which our study begins. 9 CHAPTER I Order in the context of Regulae I-V 10 1.1 Order in Regula V In the geometrical centre of the rules, Regula V, Descartes categorizes the ensemble of the rules as a method, and delineates the constituents of this method, two in number: The method entirely consists in (Tota methodus consistit in) the order and disposition (ordine et dispositione) of those things on which the eye of the mind must be directed (eorum, ad quae mentis acies est convertenda) if we are to discover some truth (ut aliquam veritatem inveniamus). And we follow this method exactly if we reduce involved and obscure propositions step by step to simpler ones, and then attempt to ascend by the same steps from the intuition of all those that are entirely simple to the cognition of all the others [379]7. Order appears as one pole of the constitutive binary of the method, along with disposition, and relative to «those things toward which the eye of the mind must be directed if we are to discover any truth». The syntax of the elements here is revealing. Where does order intervene in the scope of the method? It is the arrangement or status, and one should say the act of arranging or putting into state – otherwise it would not constitute the method –, of those things to which the method is to be applied if the method is to aid us in our discovery of any truth. It is the disposition of 7 DESCARTES, R., Philosophical Essays and Correspondence, tr. Greene M. – Ariew R., Cambridge, 2000. I have preferred Green and Ariew’s translation to the more well known version by Cottingham et al. which I find doesn’t stick close enough to the original even if it reads more fluently. Compare the translation of Regula V below to that I have used in the main text: «The whole method consists entirely in (Tota methodus consistit in) the ordering and arranging (ordine et dispositione [AT X 379.15]) of the objects on which we must concentrate our mind’s eye (eorum, ad quae mentis acies est convertenda) if we are to discover some truth (ut aliquam veritatem inveniamus) [379]». The substantives ordine et dispositione are translated as verbs, ‘ordering and arranging’, eorum as ‘objects’, involutas as ‘complicated’, and convertenda as ‘concentrate’, the impreciseness of which, semantic correctness not withstanding, I think loses touch of some particularities that may prove helpful in understanding Descartes’ imagery and, consequently, his meaning. Where necessary I have also used Belgioso’s Italian translation (cf. DESCARTES, R., Regole per la direzione dell’ingegno, in ID., Opere postume, a cura di G. Belgioioso, Milano, 2009) as a reference and aid in tweaking Green and Ariew’s translation when it seemed to me not to correspond as precisely to the original. 11 things such that the mind’s eye might be able to direct itself upon them in order to discover truth. Between the mind and order it is the mind that appears more passive. Between order and things it is the thing or the things that appear more passive. The discovery of truth happens to the mind insofar as the things it needs to direct itself towards are ordered and disposed conveniently for it. The truth of things is discovered by the mind insofar as the things are ordered and disposed such that the mind’s gaze might fall upon them in a convenient manner. Order here is neither identified with the mind nor with the things but is common to both, acts upon both, is participated in by both (since the mind follows an order of looking), and is the result sought (metaphorically, in the case of things) by both. The method consists in order and disposition, applying the method consists in ordering and disposing, and the result of the method is the discovery of the truth of things as presented by their order and disposition. Another valence of the notion of order and disposition here is that of facilitating light: facilitating the communication of light, and facilitating the mind’s permanence within that light. By means of the reduction of involved (in-volved: turned inwards, enclosed) and obscure (dark) propositions to simpler ones, things are illumined, or brought into the light, and this same light is followed by the eye of the mind that wants to see more clearly. Thus the communication of light is facilitated. On the other hand the mind is guided, through order, to remain within that light and continue to see, even when confronting the same propositions that prior to their reduction to the simple were involved and obscure. Therefore the method, which consists in order and disposition, guides the mind step by step from simple – illumined or luminous – propositions to more obscure or less luminous propositions, always following the trajectory of the simple light. In this way the mind, once having attained the clear vision of the simple, is able to remain within that light as it proceeds in its investigation of hitherto more obscure things. In his commentary on this rule Descartes has no qualms in stating the importance of his method and the magnitude of the failure of human endeavour without it: «in this alone lies the sum total of human endeavour, and this must be followed no less carefully by one who would arrive at a knowledge of things than the thread of Theseus by him who would penetrate the labyrinth» [380]. But the figure of the labyrinth also touches upon the positively convoluted nature of our ignorance of things. Things have made themselves more difficult to penetrate and we have compounded this difficulty by finding ourselves in the labyrinth in the first place. His judgment («they frequently examine difficult problems in a very 12 disorderly manner [inordinata (380)], behaving in my view as if they were trying to get from the bottom to the top of a building at one bound, spurning or failing to notice the stairs designed for that purpose») is sweeping, but interestingly fleshes out the metaphor of the labyrinth a little more: «many people either do not reflect on what this precept teaches, or are completely ignorant of it, or suppose that they do not need it [380]»8. Complete ignorance is ambiguous as to the imputation of culpability, but not reflecting and supposing self-sufficiency certainly are not. Ignorance, superficiality/laziness, and pride are three intellectual vices that Descartes holds responsible for the haphazard confusion that is scientific investigation without order, perhaps above all the third, pride, or lack of humility. These intellectual vices, like any other, are imputable more to the will than to the intellect, and this is not the only time that Descartes accords the will a status of significance with regard to the activity of knowing. This judgment finds an echo from the very beginning of the Regulae, in the first Regula, but before turning to it we will look at Regula IV and examine in greater detail how Descartes conceives of disorder in order to throw further light on what he means by order in Regula V. 1.2 Order in Regula IV Regula IV, which introduces the absolute necessity of a method for the investigation of the truth of things («Necessaria est methodus ad rerum veritatem investigandam [371]», also serves as a direct preamble to the introduction and meaning of ordo in Regula V. Ordo appears five times in Regula IV. In its first appearance it is employed with the negative prefix:- «certissimum enim est, per ejusmodi studia inordinata, et meditationes obscuras, naturale lumen confundi atque ingenia excaecari…[371]». The effect of disordered studies and obscure reflections – reflections in the dark, without the aid of light – on the mind is confusion and blindness. Furthermore, after having become so accustomed to them the mind no longer is able to bear the light of day («et quicumque ita in tenebris ambulare assuescunt, adeo debilitant oculorum aciem, ut postea lucem apertam ferre non possint [371]»), and it would be better had the undertaking of learning never been set upon in the first place since experience alone provides us with a capacity for sounder judgments upon things than does obscure and disordered learning. The opening sentence of the commentary to this rule, «Tam caeca Mortales curiositate tenentur [371]», can be understood more clearly from this moral perspective. It is 8 My italics. 13 intemperate curiosity that leads to the haphazard, unfounded, scurrying down hopeless paths for happenstance knowledge that leads us to only greater ignorance [371]. Curiositas9, in the scholastic tradition10, is the vice of a certain incontinence of mind, the inability to focus on one thing long enough for the understanding to penetrate it with any depth, and is juxtaposed to the virtue of studiositas11, the resoluteness of mind, so to speak, that allows the understanding to grasp the truth of a proposition or thing through patient, thorough and undivided attention. At this point therefore the guidance of the mind to making right and true judgments requires a method, that is, reliable rules which are easy to apply (regulas certas et faciles), and such that if one follows them exactly, one will never take what is false to be true or fruitlessly expend one’s mental efforts, but will gradually and constantly increase one’s knowledge until one arrives at a true understanding of everything within one’s capacity (semper augendo scientiam, perveniet ad veram cognitionem eorum omnium quorum erit capax) [372]. We can discern by this point some interconnected binaries: A) obscurity B) disorder - light order A) ignorance B) blindness - knowledge sight A) vice (curiositas) B) chance - virtue (studiositas) method Line B in each grouping serves as the conditions of possibility of line A; thus obscurity is caused by disorder, ignorance by blindness, vice by chance (or a-methodicality, for lack of a better phrase), while order makes way for light, sight for understanding, and method for virtue. The poles are interconnected; on the one hand obscurity, disorder, ignorance, blindness, vice and chance are interdependent and mutually reinforcing, and the same applies on the other hand for light, order, understanding, sight, virtue and method. Reading further through this rule’s commentary sheds more light 9 THOMAS AQUINAS, Summa Theologica, II-II, 167. Descartes’ debts to the scholastic tradition are now widely acknowledged. Cf. GILSON, E., Index Scholastico-cartesienne, Paris, 1913. 11 THOMAS AQUINAS, Summa Theologica, II-II, 166. 10 14 upon the precise relationships between these terms, particularly upon the introduction of the terms intuition and deduction, «intuitum vel deductionem [372]». These two intellectual operations cannot be taught by the method because they are the «simplest and first (simplicissimae et primae) [372]» of all intellectual operations and therefore innate. If our intellect were not able to perform them, says Descartes, we would be incapable of understanding any of the rules at all. At this point we might expect that with the method that Descartes proposes these innate operations will function as the building blocks of more complex intellectual operations. Except that Descartes takes the opposite tack: As for other mental operations which [scholastic] dialectic claims to direct with the help of those already mentioned, they are of no use here, or rather should be reckoned a positive hindrance, for nothing can be added to the pure12 light of reason which does not in some way dim it (quia nihil puro rationis lumini superaddi potest, quod illud aliquod modo non obscuret) [373]. Nothing can be added to the pure light of reason which does not in some way dim it. Once intuition and deduction are reintroduced (after Regula III) the relationship of order and light takes on more concrete form as the anthropological aspect of the binaries comes into play. The role of order is to clear the path between the light and the human mind so that the fundamental operations of the human mind, intuition and deduction, have a clear view of things, so that nothing comes between them and the pure light. We might say here that order mediates between light, on the one hand, and the mind and its operations on the other. Descartes further on says that formal studies «stifle [373]» and «impede [373]» the development of that «divine je ne sais quoi (nescio quid divini) [373]» in which the first useful seeds of thinking are sown and which often «bear spontaneous fruit [373]» regardless. What this innate nescio quid divini has to do with intuition, deduction, light, and order we will understand as we turn to the Regula III before returning to embark upon the second half of our exposition of Regula IV. 12 Cottingham et al.’s version says “clear”, and I have preferred the more literal “pure”. 15 1.3 Intuition and light in Regula III Concerning the objects presented to us we should investigate, not what others have thought nor what we ourselves conjecture, but what we can intuit clearly and evidently or deduce with certainty, for knowledge (scientia) is acquired by no other means [366]. The only effective means for the acquisition of knowledge are clear and evident intuition as well as certain deduction and therefore anything added to these two operations only serves to stifle this acquisition. We need to have an experience of the certainty of things first-hand in order for them to be justifiably held as clear and evident. This criterion eliminates our conjectural experience, that is, our experience that is not clearly discernible as evident and therefore certain, and also eliminates the vicarious experience of certainty, ruling out reference to the testimony of another. This elimination of two of the three «primordial types of experientia»13 leaves us with direct experience as the only trustworthy kind. The sense privileged by this criteria is clearly sight, or at least sight and its metaphorical derivatives (seeing with the mind’s eye, etc.). That intuition should be the means of this experience further underscores this metaphorical leaning. But we err if by this seeming privilege we understand intuitus as in any way dependent or proceeding from the senses or even the imagination, both of which Descartes considers as interposing between the mind and the object, and serving at worst as deceptive, and at best as unnecessary middlemen obstructing the mind’s clear view of the object, the «immediacy of certain experience»14. These middlemen are rather swept away by the definition Descartes offers in his commentary on the rule: By intuition I understand neither the fleeting testimony of the senses nor the deceptive judgment of the imagination with its false constructions, but a conception of a pure and attentive mind (mentis purae et attentae), so easy and so distinct, that no doubt at all remains about what we understand. Or, what comes to the same thing, intuition is the indubitable conception of a pure and attentive mind arising from the light of reason alone (qui a sola rationis luce nascitur); it is more certain even than deduction, because it is simpler (simplicior), and deduction is not something a man can perform wrongly [368]. 13 14 MARION, Ontologie grise, 43. MARION, Ontologie grise, 47. 16 Intuition, then, described in terms of seeing, is not a sense- (or imagination-) based experience. Descartes calls it «a conception of a pure and attentive mind», a mind that is uncluttered by darkness and undistracted by false constructions. The conception of this mind is «so easy, so distinct», unconfused, and effortless, a form well-delineated, a proposition neither excessive nor lacking; the transparency and absence of any impediment makes for a frictionless communication of the thing conceived and the mind conceiving it. «No doubt at all remains» since intuition is an «indubitable conception of a pure and attentive mind»; a mind that is pure and attentive intuits infallibly15 and it does so because when the mind is pure and attentive it’s intuition arises from a single, infallible source, «from the light of reason alone». There is less possibility (because essentially there is no possibility) of an error in judgment when proceeding this way than there is in the scholastic dialectic or Aristotelian logic he had been nurtured on at La Flèche. In The search for truth, an early and posthumously published work geared towards the rectification of the errors of education16 and written in dialogue form, he has his mouthpiece Eudoxus say the following: «When this light operates on its own, it is less liable to go wrong than when it anxiously strives to follow the numerous different rules, the inventions of human ingenuity and idleness, which serve more to corrupt it than render it more perfect [AT-X 521]»17. This at least would be the prosaic reading. The notion of this light of reason arising and giving forth an intuition seems anything but prosaic however. In intuition the conception is not presented to the pure mind as if by another but rather arises within that mind seemingly emanating from the pure light of reason itself. Intuition is a conception that is always already there, or rather here, within the attentive and pure mind. It can only understand by means of the pure light of reason and only sees what the light of reason presents before it, but this light of reason is both within and without the mind, and though Descartes treats it as distinct he seems not to separate it. To further emphasize this already discernible structure, comparing it to deduction (which we will come to later) he stresses that the seal of the conception’s certainty lies in its simplicity («certior… quia simplicior»). This light that both conceives and makes conception possible is the same infallible, indubitable light 15 Cf. MARION, Ontologie grise, 46. Cf. DESCARTES, Regole per la direzione dell’ingegno, 819-823. 17 Cited in GARBER, D., Descartes Embodied: reading cartesian philosophy through cartesian science, Cambridge, 2001, 287. 16 17 because it is indivisible, simple. Returning to the term intuitus, it indeed appears validly interchangeable with the term experientia, a term which is simultaneously ambiguous and yet more precise in that it categorizes the all-encompassing nature of the moment of intuition. Marion makes note of this interchangeability of the two terms: «L’intuitus constitue à la fois un des noms possibles de l’experientia, et son plus haut achèvement, éliminant les precedents ébauches, parce qu’il les achève»18. Discernable here perhaps is Descartes’ insertion in the platonic and, perhaps more so, neo-platonic and Augustinian tradition that conceives knowledge in terms of vision and reason in terms of light, with both arising from the same source. Take for example Plato: Well, then, think that the soul is also characterized in this way. When it fixes itself on that which is illumined by truth and that which is, it intellects, knows, and appears to possess intelligence. But when it fixes itself on that which is mixed with darkness, on coming into being and passing away, it opines and is dimmed, changing opinions up and down, and seems at such times not to possess intelligence [Resp., 508d]19. When deprived of light, or when fixed on that which is mixed with darkness the soul itself darkens and no longer possesses intelligence. Plato’s allegory of the cave20 builds upon this light/darkness binary in laying out a vision of intellectual ascent from darkness to light that involves a clearing away or breaking free from the shadows created by things placed between the sun’s light and the men in the cave, and out into direct, unobstructed sunlight. We read in St. Augustine that «the mind, when directed towards intelligible things in the natural order, according to the disposition of the Creator, sees them in a certain incorporeal light which is sui generis, just as the physical eye sees nearby objects in corporeal light»21 and recognize Descartes. But Descartes’ affirmation that «intuition is the indubitable conception of a pure and attentive mind arising from the light of reason alone (a sola rationis luce nascitur) [368]» seems to imply something a little more ambiguous since the distinction between the operation of intuition and the thing intuited are both born from this same mind arising 18 MARION, Ontologie grise, 48. PLATO, Republic, tr. A. Bloom, New York, 1991, 189. 20 Resp., 514b-520a. 21 AUGUSTIN, De Trinitate, XII, xv, 24. 19 18 out of the light of reason alone. He sounds at this point more like Plotinus: «the Intellectual-Principle is a seeing, and a seeing which itself sees; therefore it is a potentiality which has become effective [Enneads, III, viii, 11]»22. The seeing and the seer are both the same principle, at once a thing and an action, a noun which is always at the same time a verb. The seeing is made possible by its own seeing, the potentiality becomes effective of its own accord. Even further along the same ascetical lines of Descartes’ program we read the following in the fifth Ennead, worth citing at length: All our effort may well skim over every truth, and through all the verities in which we have part, and yet the reality escape us when we hope to affirm, to understand: for the understanding, in order to it’s affirmation, must possess itself of item after item; only so does it traverse all the field: but how can there be any such peregrination of that in which there is no variety? ... All the need is met by a contact purely intellective. At the moment of touch there is no power whatever to make any affirmation; there is no leisure; reasoning upon the vision is for afterwards. We may know we have had the vision when the Soul has suddenly taken light. This light is from the Supreme and is the Supreme; we may believe in the Presence when, like that other God on the call of a certain man, He comes bringing light: the light is the proof of the advent. Thus the Soul unlit remains without that vision; lit, it possesses what it sought. And this is the true end set before the Soul, to take that light, to see the Supreme by the Supreme and not by the light of any other principle – to see the Supreme which is also the means to the vision; for that which illumines the Soul is that which it is to see, just as it is by the sun’s own light that we see the sun. But how is this to be accomplished? Cut away everything! [Enneads, V, iii, 17]23. Plotinus seems to have posited the same question, not necessarily because Descartes has read or studied Plotinus (although Cassirer suggests that he has24 and Descartes knowledge of texts of the hermetic tradition of neo-platonic inspiration has been well documented25), but most probably because of a similar experience of the aporias and ambiguities at the limits of rational thought. How indeed can the intellect completely possess (know 22 PLOTINUS, The Enneads, tr. MacKenna, S., London, 1957, 249. PLOTINUS, Enneads, 399-400. My italics. 24 Cassirer notes that Descartes appropriates Plotinus’ simile of human wisdom and the sun, presumably from the passage here cited. Cf. CASSIRER, E., Storia della filosofia moderna, 5 voll., Torino, 1952, I, 487. 25 Cf. KEEFER, M., ‘The dreamers path: Descartes and the Sixteenth century’, in Renaissance Quarterly 49 (1996), 30-76; GARIN, E., Vita e opera di Cartesio, Bari, 1999. 23 19 totally, indubitably, with certitude) that which it has to travel to know? That is, how can it know with certainty that which requires discursive fatigue, with the temporality, particularity and approximativity that discourse itself entails? His answer is that it cannot; knowledge comes to us in a moment of «contact purely intellective», a «moment of touch» during which nothing can be said, nothing affirmed, since the conditions for speech and thought, rather specifically for discursivity, are removed. At this contact the soul-intellect is suddenly illumined. We hear echoes in Plato’s description of this moment of intellection which «does not at all admit of verbal expression like other studies, but, as a result of continued application to the subject itself and communion therewith, it is brought to birth in the soul on a sudden, as light that is kindled»26. Returning to Plotinus’ account, when the soul is illumined upon contact it knows it is illumined because it experiences this contact as presence, and this presence conversely is known and assured when the soul-intellect suddenly takes light. Both the knowing and experiencing of the light is simultaneous as is both the knowing and the experiencing of the presence. Furthermore, this taking on light is «proof of the advent»; the moment of knowing is an event, and more precisely the event of an encounter with a presence that has become present, simultaneously announced by the moment of light. The experience described by Plotinus is simple in every respect, simple because whole, the multiple aspects he draws out united in their simplicity because united in their source: illumination/knowing, advent, and presence, all aspects of contact with the One. «This light is from the Supreme and is the Supreme» and «that which illumines the Soul is that which it is to see, just as it is by the sun’s own light that we see the sun [Enneads, V, iii, 17]». This supreme light is indivisible, simple, one; supreme and therefore infallible, «certior… quia simplicior [368]» Descartes might say. Plotinus’ description of the moment is further enriched by his almost fervent redundancy: «contact purely intellectual» and «moment of touch»; this event of knowing, light and presence is at the same time affective, 26 PLATO, Letter VII, in Plato in Twelve Volumes, tr. by Bury, R.G, London, 1966, VII. My italics. We also paradigmatically see it represented in Diotima’s advice to Socrates in the Symposium: «give me the very best of your attention: when a man has been thus far tutored in the lore of love, passing from view to view of beautiful things, in the right and regular ascent, suddenly he will have revealed to him, as he draws to the close of his dealings in love, a wondrous vision, beautiful in its nature; and this, Socrates, is the final object of all those previous toils» [PLATO, The Symposium, in Plato in Twelve Volumes, tr. H. Fowler, London, 1925, IX]. 20 which makes it simultaneously the event of a fourfold union of the knower, the light, the thing known and the presence. But what it says of Plotinus doesn’t interest us unless it also speaks of Descartes. The parallel is evident: «By intuition I understand neither the fleeting testimony of the senses nor the deceptive judgment of the imagination with its false constructions [368]», but can we draw out another, hidden, parallel besides? In the arid lines of Descartes definition of the intuitus can we not also intuit a hidden experience? Is the «pure and attentive mind» merely a clinically anti-septic mind or is it pure and attentive because it is a listening mind, pure because it wills only one thing (as Kierkegaard would later say) and attentive because it is receiving something? Is this light which habilitates science a distant star or are we permitted to conjecture upon its essential affectivity and Descartes’ affective experience of it? In Regula XII, on describing the simple natures (which we will come to later) he depicts the act of intuition in tactile terms, «intuemur, sive quod attingimus cogitando [420]» – «what we intuit or touch by thinking» and «quid mente attingamus [420]» – «that our mind can touch»; as he does in Regula VIII, when ruling that we should turn to only those things that the intellect is able to reach: «Veniendum deinde ad res ipsas, quae tantum spectandae sunt prout ab intellectu attinguntur [399]» – «those things our intellect is able to touch»27. Would Michel Henry’s thematic sentence from his L’essence de la manifestation be out of place in this light? «Ce qui se sent sans que ce soit par l’intermediaire d’un sens est dans son essence affectivité»28. Marion evidences the parallel with Aristotle’s nous which Descartes’ intuitus is both similar and dissimilar to, and which Aristotle also paints in tactile terms: «[nous] becomes intelligible by touching and understanding, since the nous and the intelligible are the same» 29 . The dissimilarity between nous and intuitus can be seen in their radical structural asymmetry, or even inverse structural symmetry, depending on how we look at them. To begin with, Descartes’ intuitus is an easy and effortless conception, «so easy and so distinct [368]» whereas the activity of nous is work, movement, energeia. Furthermore, when the nous knows a thing that has no material, that is, when it knows an intelligible, it is still knowing a thing. When «thought thinks itself (noesis noeseos noesis)»30 it is not a question of a delineation of the conditions of possibility of thought but rather 27 Cf. MARION, Ontologie grise, 48. HENRY, M., L’essence de la manifestation, Paris, 1963, 577. 29 ARISTOTLE, Metaphysics, 1072b 21, cited in MARION, Ontologie grise, 48. 30 ARISTOTLE, Metaphysics, 1074b 34. 28 21 thought achieving its object auto-reflexively. There is still a distance travelled by the energeia of thought when it thinks an intelligible, above all itself, in the same way that there is a movement, dynamism, energeia, when thought thinks an apple, for example. The latter is a materialized essence whereas the former is a pure essence, an intelligible. Nous in this case knows itself as another; this is so even when nous in knowing itself becomes itself, because the way in which it becomes itself is the way in which it becomes an apple or any other thing, «since the nous and the intelligible are the same»31. There is no distance travelled by the Cartesian intuitus – one reason it is so easy – since the objects in question are «such simple matters [368]» and are so much «more numerous than people realize [368]». But they are also easy because they are in the mind as conditions and not as achievements of thought. That they are not achievements is underlined by the fact that not perceiving them is not due to a lack of intellectual effort as much as to a lack of intellectual humility. The reason most people do not realize these things is their «disdaining … to turn their minds to such simple matters [368]». The moral tone here belies Descartes’ passive conception of the capacities of the mind – passive not in terms of non-activity but in terms of a primordial recognition of what the mind has received as a pure given and taking stock of it’s capabilities. The real work involved is at base a work of recognition of the conditions of possibility of knowing, conditions which the mind already possesses necessarily and which, when taken as objects, fulfil the condition of ease of conception32 – no travelling down lengthy dialectical paths, just a simple indubitable knowing, a certainty reached by not trying to reach the essences of things so much as by recognizing the conditions of knowing and turning only to those objects that can be known with certainty, indifferent to the things in themselves. The narrowed field of investigation for the sake of certainty is exemplified by the enunciation of Regula II: «We should only attend to those objects of which our minds seem capable of having certain and indubitable cognition [362]». It is an exercise that can be legitimately understood as an exhortation to humility, along the lines of the Psalm: «Domine non est exaltatum cor meum neque elati sunt oculi mei et non ambulavi in magnis et in mirabilibus super me»33. 31 ARISTOTLE, Metaphysics, 1072b 21. Cf. MARION, Ontologie grise, 50. 33 Psalm 130, Biblia Sacra Vulgata, vetus. Descartes would probably have frequented this Psalm, at least since, as attested by his Letter to Mersenne of 25 December 1639, he had the habit of always having a Bible at hand. 32 22 Awareness of the limits of the objects the intellect can know can be understood as a growth in the humility of the intellect. But this awareness of limits is accompanied by a similar awareness of possibilities, and this self-knowledge – andar en verdad, as St. Teresa of Avila defined it – is a condition of human freedom and flourishing. Thus, freeing the mind from the exigency of knowing and becoming the things themselves, the operation of the intuitus, concerned only with knowing with certainty, is thus validated and flourishes in a field tailored to it measurements34. The three types of objects that Descartes’ definition of intuitus covers («thus everyone can mentally intuit that he exists, that he is thinking, that a triangle is bounded by just three lines, and a sphere by a single surface, and the like [368]») have to correspond to the requirement laid out in Regula II when discussing the disciplines of arithmetic and geometry that «alone are concerned with an object so pure and simple that they make no assumptions that experience might render uncertain; they consist entirely in deducing conclusions by means of rational arguments. They are therefore the easiest and clearest of all the sciences and have just the sort of object we are looking for [365]». The objects specified in Regula III however are more wide-ranging than those in Regula II. These are: doubt and its overcoming by positing itself as a fundament 35 – I doubt, I think, I exist; mathematical and geometrical abstractions of figures, and the first principles, but not in the Aristotelian sense as ultimate conditions of thought, reached in the exercise (energeia) of thought, such as the principle of non-contradiction which can be indicated in the act of its energeia or performance, but first principles insofar as they are evident to the intuition with certainty36. To sum up, with Marion, l’intention qui, profonde, commande les déplacements conceptuels du nous à l’intuitus: établir l’experientia certaine suppose à la fois l’immédiat contact antépredicatif du nous, mais aussi son application, la plus comprehensive qu’il se pourra; il faut donc à la fois garder les caractéristiques de l’opération noétique, tout en la soustrayant aux limites que lui imposent les imperfections des choses … l’intuitus n’étend le champ de sa validité, qu’aussi loin que l’abstraction élimine en chaque chose tout ce qu’il ne s’y pourrait comprendre comme son objet;… A ce prix seulement, se déploie l’experientia certaine37. 34 Cf. MARION, Ontologie grise, 52. Cf. MARION, Ontologie grise, 50. 36 Cf. MARION, Ontologie grise, 52. 37 Cf. MARION, Ontologie grise, 53. 35 23 Aristotle’s nous reaches and touches knowledge of things with the force of energeia38 this nous is deployed in its fullness. Descartes’ intuitus, however, touches certain knowledge by subtraction39 and recognition of it’s own condition as the condition of knowing and the condition that any object be constituted as knowable; Descartes’ intuition flourishes in the absence of movement. Aristotle’s delineation of the structure of nous and description of the experience of the nous knowing would have been shared by Plotinus – who considered himself a student of the stagyrite as much as of Plato – short of Plotinus’ own superation of that fundamental description of nous knowing itself by positing the problem of the multiplicity in that first principle, a kind of division and an indication of potency (as opposed to pure act) within the first principle which takes away from it’s simplicity. Though Descartes’ intuitus may be diversely structured, the description of the experience – attingere, touching, reaching, «seeing clearly»40– afforded by that structure betrays a fundamental likeness to Aristotle’s, but even more so perhaps to Plotinus. As an addendum to our discussion of the role and nature of the intuitus – in yet another parallel with the ancients – we might note that Descartes’ «pure and attentive mind» is not the product of total passivity but the result of an accompanying exercise or ascesis – and naturally so since it is presupposed by the very raison d’etre of the Regulae. The Regulae are an invitation to the exercise of the will at least as much as to the exercise of the intellect. The decision to do without the excesses of intellectual activity in order that the intuitus might be freed to know according to its capacity is simultaneously an intellectual and a volitional ascesis whose antecedents in the neo-platonic tradition are curtly formulated by Plotinus, who, at the end of the lengthy passage on illumination previously cited above, answers his own question laconically: «But how is this to be accomplished? Cut away everything! [Enneads, V, iii, 17]». Descartes reintroduces the term deductio in Regula III but he uses it in a different acceptation to the relatively routine one he employs in Regula II. We will turn to this use in Regula III and analyse it’s meaning in relation to the intuitus, but before that we must grasp the larger context of universal wisdom of which and out of which the intuitus serves as an 38 Cf. MARION, Ontologie grise, 51. Cf. MARION, Ontologie grise, 51. 40 ARISTOTLE, Metaphysics, 980a 21. 39 24 operator in the very first of the Regulae41. 41 On a contextual note, the question arises as to how these teachings might have influenced Descartes? Descartes’ Augustinian influence has been argued for recently by Menn [cf. MENN, S. Descartes and Augustine, Cambridge, 1998] and others, and his scholastic inheritance has been argued beyond doubt firstly Gilson [GILSON, Index scolastico-cartesién], then Marion [MARION, Ontologie grise], and others. Recently, however, Descartes’ agustinianism has been attributed to the particular form of scholasticism he was exposed to. Roger Ariew [ARIEW, R., Descartes and the last scholastics, London, 1999] has argued that for Gilson Descartes’ scholastic influence was specifically a thomistic influence [ARIEW, Descartes, 41] and that he missed the distinction – because he did not look for it [ARIEW, Descartes, 57] – that most of Descartes’ teachers in the Paris of the first half of the seventeenth century would have leaned more towards the positions of Duns Scotus than towards thomistic positions on certain key arguments in which Scotus can be described as expounding a «moderate Augustinianism [ARIEW, Descartes, 46]». For example: the proper object of the intellect as quidditas rei materialis (Thomas) vs. ens in quantum est (Scotus); the question of the analogical predication between God and creatures (Thomas) vs. the univocity of the concept of being (Scotus); the question of man as a unity of single form (Thomas) vs. man as a composite of a plurality of forms (Scotus); the question of the status of prime matter as pure potency (Thomas) vs. susbsisting independently of form by God’s omnipotence; the question of the principle of individuation as materia signata quantitate (Thomas) vs. haecceitas (Scotus); the question of the immobility of the universe as the frame of reference for motion (Thomas) vs. the radical relativity of space that leaves no absolute frame of reference for motion; the question of time as dependent on motion (Thomas) or independent of motion (Scotus) [Ariew, R., Descartes, 45-46]. «Descartes – writes Ariew – leans towards scotism for every one of the Scotist theses, as long as they are at all relevant to his philosophy. It can be argued that Descartes agrees that the proper object of the human intellect is being in general; that the concept of being may hold univocally between God and creatures; that extension subsists independently of any form; that the principle of individuation is soul, that is, form; that space is radically relative; and that time is independent of motion» [ARIEW, Descartes, 55]. The most relevant debate for our purposes was an epistemological one and a contentious one between seventeenth century scholastics, summarized by Abra de Raconis and later Eustachius a Sancto Paulo in their respective treatises: the question of the status of the objective concept. [ARIEW, Descartes, 42] The issue is «whether the objective concept collapses into the formal concept, in which case objective being is only a being of reason, or whether it is a third reality between the formal concept and the thing, in which case objective being is more than a being of reason» [ARIEW, Descartes, 42]. Why this is relevant is that the position taken by Descartes, or rather most akin to Descartes’ understanding allows us to infer whether or not his conception of intuition – Augustinian or neo-platonic that it may be – is also a consequence of a scotist understanding of the status of the concept and would go some way to explaining the mechanics of intuition understood as «the conception of a pure and attentive mind arising from the light of reason alone» [368]. 25 1.4 The «end of all studies» in Regula I Descartes begins his Regulae with the following programmatic enunciation: «The end of all studies should be to direct the mind toward the enunciation of solid and true judgments on all things presented to it [359]». Relatively straightforward and unremarkable on a first reading, but closer analysis reveals a deeper undercurrent and perhaps the guiding horizon of the entire work. Descartes begins his commentary with the elucidation and resolution of a confusion of the common conception of the sciences and the arts as proceeding similarly [cf. 359]. He notes that since the perfection of the poietical arts suffer from the physical limitation of only being capably carried out one at a time, men transpose this model to the theoretical sciences arguing the same, thus a biologist must specialize in biology and a chemist in chemistry and so on and a generalist, on this account, knows next to nothing. But scientia – knowledge – is not limited spatially and temporally by matter and it is one and the same everywhere, argues Descartes. And since the goal of knowing is truth and truth is a unity, truth in one field necessarily assists in the attainment of truth in other fields. That which what should remain heterogeneous is homogenized (that is, the poietical and the theoretical sciences) and what can indeed be homogenized – or unified – is heterogenized (the theoretical sciences among themselves). Knowledge of things is not to be valued in itself but in what it contributes to the attainment of universal knowledge. Specialization in the theoretical sciences, rather than bringing us closer to truth, often serves to distract us from its attainment because the focus on the particular can obviate our recognition of the unity that inheres in all knowledge, the principle of which, once known, increases the progress in the particular sciences themselves, as well as «higher things which they could not expect to reach [361]». The first rule, according to Marion, determines the ultimate goal of all the following rules, which are corollary to this first rule, developments of its thesis. The proposal of the first rule is «inverser le centre de gravité de la relation du savoir à ce qu’il sait – la chose meme»42. Knowledge, therefore, depends more on the knower than on the things to be known43, consequent to which the theoretical sciences should all be redirected and begin from a unity that subsists in the knowing subject, a unity whose 42 MARION, Ontologie grise, 25. MARION, Ontologie grise, 15: «le savoir dépende de l’esprit qui sait, plus que des choses qui le suscitent». 43 26 pervasiveness becomes more apparent the more the objects of knowledge diversify. Aristotle says that «hexis (scholastic: habitus)» means in one sense an activity, as it were, of the haver and the thing had, or as in the case of an action or motion; for when one thing makes and another is made, there is between them an act of making44. This principle applies for him also in theoretical science; knowledge is a movement from potency to act. Since, crucially for our purposes, the habitus/hexis is ordered to the object, it diversifies in proportion to the diversity of objects45, and it’s operations are distinguished according to the distinction of the objects46. For Aristotle and St. Thomas the centre of gravity is thus irreversibly in the thing to be known.47 Angels, for example, notes Marion, need no habitus – they grasp the essence or universal immediately, as it were, ante rem48. He further says that in order to suppress the notion of habitus from the sciences man should be equipped with an angelic intelligence and Descartes affirms that this is so, «in a certain sense» 49 . The point of the allusion to the angelic intelligence as far as we are concerned underscores above all the direction of the movement of knowledge between knower and known. Since angels know things ante rem they know things directly by their causes, a priori, and literally prior to the thing’s physical existence because they know it as the idea that is then replicated in the particular thing. The direction of angelic knowledge, and of human theoretical knowledge for Descartes, is thus from the knower to the known: «The sciences as a whole are nothing other than human wisdom, which always remains one and the same, however different the subjects to which it is applied, it being no more altered by them than sunlight is by the variety of the things it shines on [360]». Marion explains that rather than the direction implied by Aristotle’s dictum that the soul is in some way all things, it is all things, that is, all intelligibles that in some way become a part of the mind. How so? By being translated into a sort of intelligibility to the intellect 50 . An intelligibility which corresponds to the causes of the things prior to the things themselves, such that the translation of the thing into intelligibility to 44 Cf. ARISTOTLE, Metaphysics, 1022b 4-8. Cf. MARION, Ontologie grise, 27. 46 Cf. THOMAS AQUINAS, Summa contra gentiles, I, 48; and Summa Theologica, I-II, q.65, a.1, ad.3 (cited in MARION, Ontologie grise, 27). 47 Cf. MARION, Ontologie grise, 28. 48 Cf. MARION, Ontologie grise, 28. 49 MARION, Ontologie grise, 28. 50 Cf. MARION, Ontologie grise, 29. 45 27 the mind is effectively a decodification of the thing into its fundamental ideal configuration. «Hence – continues Descartes – there is no need to impose restrictions on our mental powers; for the knowledge of one truth does not, like skill in one art, hinder us from discovering another; on the contrary it helps us [360]». Turning to Aristotle, again, in reference to the heterogeneity of the theoretical sciences, it is clear that for him there is an incommunicable fundament to every science – a genos – that assures the incommensurability of each science with the other. But this irreducible distinction between the sciences is precisely what Descartes wants to reverse by homogenizing the sciences by means of a prior unifying principle. The multiplicity of sciences, rather than distinguishing the sciences among themselves, shows the formal unifying power of the human intellect, the universalis sapientia51. Aristotelian ousia as the principle of science is replaced by Descartes’ ego, it is the knowing of the thing that primes over the thing to be known and, Marion argues, the elimination of the genos that founds the irreducible distinction of each science «provokes rather than tempers»52 anarchy. Yet one more step is needed to bring order to this anarchy, which evidently cannot be an external order, or unity, imposed on the different sciences but a certain connexio scientiarum in which each science is intrinsically ‘chained’ to the next. He points out the fact that there is no possibility in a scholastico-aristotelian scheme for a theoretical or scientific organ of unity in the mind. Where this unity does exist it is in the moral sphere, precisely the virtue of prudence (prudentia in St. Thomas, phronesis in Aristotle), which unifies the different moral virtues by being that capacity that can apply the principle of wisdom in practical circumstances, judgment in the sphere of moral action53. To resolve this Descartes employs a theoretical principle that serves as a first principle upon which the principle of connexio scientiarum is dependent: humana sapientia, or human wisdom itself. Everything is referred to this new, universal principle, and theoretical science is thus subordinated to it. Descartes has already referred to this principle otherwise as the natural light of reason [360] and the growth of this light is the cause of the growth and expansion of scientific knowledge, and we quote it here again because of its importance: «He should rather think only of increasing the natural light of reason, not in order to resolve this or that problem of the 51 Cf. MARION, Ontologie grise, 31. MARION, Ontologie grise, 32. 53 Cf. MARION, Ontologie grise, 33-34. 52 28 School, but in order that in every particular situation of his life his intellect may show his will what choice to make [361]». What is striking here is that it seems that the method and reason itself become identified in and as the principle. Scientific advancement here resembles an explication (an explication, in the sense of a deployment) of the principle itself which penetrates all the different objects of the sciences with the universal principle of science itself – any new particularity is simply an explication of the universal principle. «La Régle I exige donc des suivantes de déployer une science, mais universelle, et qui transmette toutes se caractéristiques, surtout les plus exceptionelles, à toutes le sciences maintenant connexes»54. There remains an enigmatic reference at the end of the commentary to the «higher things [361]» that the thinker who focuses on increasing the natural light of reason «could not expect to reach [361]». What are these «higher things» that we attain upon deepening in the unifying principle of all knowledge? Cottingham places Descartes’ conception of truth, to which his method of science/knowledge was ultimately subservient, in line with St. Augustine and more proximately St. Bonaventure, particularly as regards the nature of the light of reason: «lux veritatis in facie nostrae mentis»55. In The search for truth by means of the natural light, Descartes follows the title with a short introductory comment: «This light alone, without any help from religion or philosophy, determines what opinions a good man should hold on any matter that may occupy his thoughts, and penetrates into the secrets of the most recondite sciences [AT-X 495]». The illumination-wisdom literature that Descartes was weaned on suggests his pertinence to this tradition56. From this perspective Regula I 54 MARION, Ontologie grise, 34. COTTINGHAM, J., ‘Descartes as Sage: Spiritual Askesis in Cartesian Philosophy’, in ID., Cartesian Reflections: Essays on Descartes’ Philosophy, Oxford, 2008, 281. 56 COTTINGHAM, ‘Descartes as Sage’, 281: «Like Bonaventure before him, whose own Itinerarium mentis in Deum was profoundly conditioned by the contemplative and immaterialist tradition of Plato and Augustine, Descartes has a conception of ultimate truth that required an aversio – a turning of the mind away from the world of the senses – in order to prepare it for glimpsing the reality that lies beyond the phenomenal world. Both Bonaventure and Descartes, following Augustine’s famous slogan ‘In interiore homine habitat veritas’ (the truth dwells within the inner man), undertake an interior journey. ‘Go back into yourself,’ says Augustine; ‘let us return to ourselves, into our mind’, says Bonaventure, ‘that we may search for the ‘‘lux veritatis in facie nostrae mentis’’– the light of truth shining in our minds, as through a glass, in which the image of the Blessed Trinity shines forth’(Itinerarium mentis in Deum, III.1.). ‘I turn my mind’s eye upon myself’, says Descartes, and find the idea of God stamped there, like the ‘mark the craftsman has set on his work». 55 29 can be read as programmatic for growth in humana sapientia, that is, the expansion of the light of reason whose source is God. With Cottingham, we can apply to Descartes the notion of «philosophy as spiritual exercise» famously articulated by Pierre Hadot57. Descartes’ project is a program of ascesis 58 , a notion entirely germane to one whose «true philosophical persona is already strongly prefigured in the verse from the book of Psalms that he chose to inscribe as his motto at the very front of that first notebook: ‘Initium sapientiae timor Domini’—’the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ [Psalm 110]» 59 . According to this reading the motivation of his philosophical project was above all a practical one, an ethic of human flourishing according to the natural capacities given to the human being: The key to discerning the persona of Descartes the philosopher has very often been understood in terms of his new vision of scientia. And that, of course, is a very important part of the story. But the full story discloses his even more important commitment to the ancient ideal of sapientia, with all the religious connotations that notion would have had for one brought up as he had been60. Thus Descartes has absorbed the practical virtue of phronesis or prudentia into the intellectual sphere, transforming it thus into the intellectual virtue par excellence which bears fruit in both scientia and sapientia. This virtue thus provides or animates the disposition of spirit that makes the method, understood thus far as order and disposition in response to the structure of certainty, anthropologically grounded in the intellectual operations of the intuitus and deductio. 1.5 Regula III revisited: deduction, memory and absence We can now turn back to Regula III and complete our analysis of the two operations of the intellect that Descartes considers «the most certain routes to knowledge that we have [370]», intuition and deduction. 57 Cf. HADOT, P., Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, Paris, 19872; tr. it., Esercizi spirituali e filosofia antica, a cura di Davidson, A.I., Torino 2005. 58 COTTINGHAM, ‘Descartes as Sage’, 290. 59 COTTINGHAM, ‘Descartes as Sage’, 291: Descartes’s ambition for his own philosophy was for it to match the goals set by his scholastic predecessor Eustachius: ‘the aim of a complete system of philosophy is human happiness’. 60 COTTINGHAM, ‘Descartes as Sage’, 291. 30 In Regula III deduction is related to intuition as a chain to one link [369-370]. While deduction is logically speaking the conclusion of a long series of intuitions [cf. 369] – each link in the chain being a clear and distinct intuition and therefore endowed with certainty – for Descartes deduction is less privileged than intuition61. Firstly because «we are aware of a movement or a sort of sequence (motus sive successio) [370]»62 in deduction that does not take place in intuition. This movement is evidence that the evidence of deduction is not the immediate self-evidence of intuition. This is because deduction is a «train of reasoning [369]» whose individual propositions, each clear and distinct in themselves, cannot be intuited in their immediate self-evidence all at once, and immediate selfevidence is the condition par excellence of certainty. We can still achieve certainty nonetheless in a manner similar to the way in which we know that the last link in a long chain is connected to the first: even if we cannot take in at once glance all the intermediate links on which the connection depends we can have knowledge of the connection provided we survey the links one after the other, and keep in mind that each link from first to last is attached to its neighbor [369-370]. But the certainty of deduction is still a secondary certainty and this is because the link that links the links together is memory: «deduction… in a sense borrows its certainty from memory (deductione… a memoria suam certitudinem quodammodo mutuatur [370])». Memory does not possess the certainty of direct intuition and is subject to error. This is why on addressing memory later in Regula VII he insists on the curious idea of «running through a chain of reasoning several times in a continuous movement… simultaneously intuiting one relation and passing on the next, until I have learnt to pass from the first to the last so swiftly that memory is left with practically no role to play [387-8]». The practice is important enough in his program that it is also constitutive of the enunciations of both Regula VII («continuo et nullibi interrupto cogitationis motu perlustrare [387]») and Regula XI («utile est easdem continuo et nullibi interrupto cogitationis motu percurrere [407]»). The appreciation of memory and time in Descartes and Aristotle are again fundamentally opposed; for Aristotle time, duration, is required for 61 «Descartes consistently regarded deduction as a second-best form of cognition. Intuition alone carries the self evident certainty that arises when the mind’s eye is directed towards a proposition whose content is entirely clear and manifest» COTTINGHAM, J., A Descartes Dictionary, Oxford, 1993, 46. 62 My italics. 31 the reflection upon a thing to come to it’s term and the ousia – substratum – to be distilled from what is accidental, and thus memory plays a fundamental and inalienable role in understanding; for Descartes, for whom certain knowledge corresponds to the intuitive immediate momentary grasp, deduction (what might correspond to the role of discourse in Aristotle) is not an inherently or organically unfolding process but rather a series of momentary immediate intuitions added or chained together. Duration is not intrinsic to the process of understanding. Memory, therefore, is merely a liability of our finite nature that potentially jeopardizes the process of deduction63. Descartes’ description of the process here is suggestive: if his idea is to simulate the experience of the certitude of intuition by bypassing memory the attempt to do so would seem almost comical were it not also faintly revelatory of an underlying programmatic that justifies the threefold postulation of this exercise in the Regulae. It may well be that the clear and distinct evidences of intuitions are always simple and easy but the way that they are joined together, precisely because of the limitations of the human mind which has to make do with memory instead of seeing everything in a clear unified presence constitutes their resistance to being grasped immediately by the intuitus. This resistance is not because of the obscurity of the things but because of the non-transparency of the mind. Yet if anything, Descartes’ Regulae are meant as a pedagogy of transparency. Keeping in mind what Descartes understands by intuitus – «per intuitum intelligo… mentis purae et attentae tam facilem distinctumque conceptum» and «mentis purae et attentae non dubium conceptum, qui a sola rationis luce nascitur [368]» – the metaphor of light and transparency suggest an importance that goes beyond an epistemological figure, rather it suggests an epistemology rooted in a sort of metaphysics of participation on the one hand, and mediation on the other: the more we conform our minds to the light of reason, the more we participate in that light and reason, our wisdom (sapientia) – the principle and capacity for knowledge (scientia) – expands. From this vantage point the scheme appears to have strong neo-platonic underpinnings, built upon the structure of serial mediation – the higher substances mediating the unity of the lower substances with the originary and primordial unity, the One, from which all things come. Whether this metaphysics is at this point explicit in his own mind or not we cannot be sure 64 but we can perhaps venture that in Descartes there lies at least an implicit metaphysic in which knowing is at 63 64 Cf. COTTINGHAM, A Descartes Dictionary, 120-121. Cf. MARION, J-L., Cartesian Questions Chicago, 1999, 20-66 32 the same time mediating because given that the knowing subject is the principle of the intelligibility of things, the more sapient we are, the more things are rendered intelligible because they are seen in the transparent and pure light of truth, and as such are rendered more harmonious and united to the light of their Creator. We find this implicit metaphysical scheme explicitated in Plotinus’ Enneads, a scheme whose cosmological and epistemological underpinnings – in which the human being is the central mediator – serves as the basis of what Pietro Prini has called «the foundation of interior humanism»65. In our discussion of Descartes’ intuitus we noted the confluence of terms such as light, intuition, certainty, presence and contact or touch in the single experience of the moment of intuition. Deduction, when read according to the same key, represents an indication of the experience of absence, or the non-experience of presence. Since deduction is a series of intuitions joined together by threads of memory the very fact that it represents secondary certainty and not immediate and actual certainty has a concomitant consequence on the other aspects of that single experience of knowing; the series of intuitions, and therefore series of presences, contacts, lights, certainties, are interrupted by the intertwining of an absence of the immediacy of contact, light, presence, etc. It is true that we are still in the enclosure of the two certain operations of the intellect here, but it is also true that the paradigm of certainty is intuition, immediate and present whereas deduction, because dependent on memory with its charge of absence, falls short of the ideal. If the substance – so to speak – of deduction is constituted by a mix of intuition and memory it is worth investigating the meaning of memory in the Regulae in order to better understand, by opposition, the status of intuition, the conditions of certainty in the limitations of the human intellect, and in order to continue to piece together the clues Descartes has purposely or inadvertently strewn throughout the 21 rules as to the meaning of the concept of order. Having carried out a more or less exhaustive enumeration we learn that the term memoria is used 27 times in the Regulae. The characterization of memoria, can be grouped as follows: (1) memory as weak, in fact the weak link in the apparatus of the intellect and (2) memory as a clutter and hindrance, weighing down the agility of thought; memory therefore is to be bypassed, avoided wherever possible in order to free the mind to know with immediacy. But we also have the following semantic groups: (3) memory as in need of and capable of amendment – particularly through the exercise of «a continuous movement of thought [387]» - and (4) memory as an aid or auxiliary to the intellect and of assistance in the mind’s 65 Cf PRINI, P., Plotino e la fondazione dell’umanesimo interiore, Milano, 1992. 33 acquisition of truth66. 66 The term memoria appears twice in Regula III where Descartes mentions that memorizing mathematical theorems of others does not make us more apt at problem solving [367], and secondly and more relevantly, that «deduction in a sense gets its certainty from memory [370]»; twice in Regula IV where he introduces the notion of order as a prosthetic for weakening and burdened memory: «I shall try to bring together and arrange in an orderly manner whatever I thought noteworthy in my previous studies so that when old age dims my memory I can readily recall it hereafter, if I need to, by consulting this book, and so that, having disburdened my memory, I can henceforth devote my mind more freely to what remains [379])».; once in Regula VI where he notes that the investigation of a chain of inferences is not concerned so much with retaining the connections between the inferences in memory so much as distinguishing them with «the sharp edge of the mind [384]» (insinuating that memory is the “blunt” edge of the mind) [384]; three times in Regula VII where he says that «a continuous movement of thought is needed to make good any weakness of memory [387]», and prescribes the exercise of running through a complete survey or enumeration of aspects pertaining to the object of investigation «several times in a continuous movement of the imagination, simultaneously intuiting one relation and passing on to the next, until I have learnt to pass from the first to the last so swiftly that memory is left with practically no role to play, and I seem to intuit the whole thing at once [388]», thus relieving memory [388], redressing the «sluggishness of our intelligence [388]» and enlarging its «capacity [388]»; twice in Regula VIII, where he speaks of memory as filled and adorned by items of knowledge some of which are useless and others which make for learning [396], and that the intellect alone is capable of knowledge and it can be «helped or hindered by three other faculties, viz. imagination, sense-perception, and memory [398]», which must in turn be examined to determine in what respect each is a hindrance and in what respect an aid to the intellect, «in order to make full use of their resources [398]»; three times in Regula XI where it is repeated that the certainty of deduction depends in a sense on memory «which must retain the judgments we have made on the individual parts of the enumeration if we are to derive a single conclusion from them taken as a whole [408]», and mentioned twice more, again, as in Regula VII, in the context of the exercise of running through the relations of a series over and over again with a swift movement of thought in order to bypass memory, or to leave it with «practically no role to play [409]», thus, once again, redressing the “sluggishness of the mind” and enlarging its «capacity [409]»; nine times in Regula XII: the first three mentions – the first included in the enunciation of the rule itself [410]- reiterate memory as a faculty (along with imagination and sense-perception) that assists the intellect in exploring truth [410-411]; the next two mentions are in connection with the area of the brain he associates with the faculty of imagination and which he calls the phantasy [414] and which he identifies with «what we call memory [414]» and along with memory preserves figures perceived through the senses, corporeally [415]; the sixth mention refers to the memory as the name given to the cognitive power through which we know things when it is applied to the imagination in order to examine the various figures retained in memory [416]. The accent on this use of the term memory is laid on the cognitive power when it has to do with memory and not the memory as such. Rather it is called memory only in an analogical sense; the seventh mention reiterates the assertion that «memory is no different from imagination [416]» followed by a 34 This enumeration serves to bring into relief the character of the series of the mentions of memoria in the Regulae and also raises the question of their underlying conception, or rather, mechanism, of knowledge. I think we can read Descartes’ own delineation of the mechanism in a programmatic paragraph of the commentary to Regula XI: Rule Nine dealt only with mental intuition; Rule Ten only with enumeration. The present Rule explains the way in which these two operations aid and complement each other; they do this so thoroughly that they seem to coalesce into a single operation, through a movement of thought, as it were, which involves carefully intuiting one thing and passing on at once to the others [408]. Marion notes that for Aristotle the «movement of thought» has the character of a ‘recognition’ involving the past, whereas for Descartes it is a knowing in the present, not a re-composition in which the role of memory is constitutive but a simultaneous constitution of all the elements of the thing to be known in a single intuitive grasp67, in which the role of memory is, simply put, to get out of the way of this intuitive vision as much as possible. Knowledge, as intuition, is pure presence, and memory is absence: it represents what is absent to the intuitus and is ideally rendered absent when the intuitus achieves the ideal goal of complete presence. There is another metaphor suggested by the relation or mechanism of intuition and memory and it is that of speed. Intuition is speed of distinction: «…at least [that] which is corporeal and similar to the one which animals possess [416]». The eighth and ninth mentions speak of presenting the aspects of the ideas of a series of things in the simplest way possible so as to facilitate the memory’s retention of the task at hand [417], and of representing things not as they appear to the external senses but rather «certain abbreviated representations of them [417]» which are more useful the more compact they are, provided they «act as adequate safeguards against lapses of memory [417]»; the remaining five mentions all occur in Regula XVI, firstly in the enunciation of the rule itself, worth citing entirely: «As for things which do not require the immediate attention of the mind, however necessary they may be for the conclusion, it is better to represent them by very concise symbols rather than by complete figures. It will thus be impossible for our memory to go wrong, and our mind will not be distracted by having to retain these while it is taken up with deducing other matters [454]». The second and third mentions speak of the role of memory in retaining dimensions of an object at mind so that they can be examined readily when called upon by the intellect [454], and on the other hand memory’s unreliability and thus the «happy invention» of writing that allows us to bypass memory once again [454-455]. The last two mentions repeat the counsel of consigning whatever is not immediately needed but must be retained for later to writing in order that memory need not be relied on altogether [458]. 67 MARION, Ontologie grise, 168. 35 movement and memory is slowness. The ideal of coalescing intuition and enumeration into a single movement suggests the idea that Descartes associates slowness (similar to “sluggishness”) with matter and speed with the intellect, and since memory is corporeal to an extent, except when it is really the intellect in its function of memory (in which case it is not memory per se), it prohibits the flight of the intellect to pure vision and presence. But even the greatest speed falls short of Descartes’ condition for intuition, since intuition is the absence of movement because it is immediate presence. Absolute and permanent presence is not attainable in this life as long as we rely, as we must, on deduction. The best we can do within the limitations of human weakness is to configure the experience of deduction with the speed of uninterrupted movement such that all the gaps and links in the chain become less and less visible and the spaces, absences – that is, non-immediacy - between one intuition and another diminished to a minimum, but never fully eliminated. Before picking up at where we left off in Regula IV – after having looked at only the first mention of the term ‘order’ – and progressing to the subsequent mentions we should stop to speculate on the possible meaning of the term order as a response to the conception of knowing we have seen Descartes lay out in the first three Regulae. And we can do so succinctly: if the ideal of knowledge is the experience of the intuitus with its corresponding experience of presence, contact, light and certainty, then order, in Descartes’ system, whatever else it may or may not be, must in some way function as a mediator of immediacy, or as a mediator of presence, a mediator of light, a mediator of the intuitus. This is of course the same meaning we can give to the method itself, since the method consists precisely in order. But it also consists in disposition («Tota methodus consistit in ordine et dispositione [379]»). The relationship of the two is fundamental to the understanding of the method, but we will examine it in the next chapter. First we need to analyse the rest of the mentions of order in Regula IV. 1.6 Returning to Regula IV: preambula ordinis After delving into the previous rules that while not mentioning ordo even once are fundamental to understanding the terrain that ordo is meant to respond to and serve, we come back to the rule that saw the first mention of the term in the Regulae. The second and third instances of the term ordo are also found in Regula IV – «…in quibus aliquis ordo vel mensura examinatur, ad Mathesim referri [378]» in reference to the fact that order 36 and measurement are found in subjects based in mathematics, and in reference to the more general science of mathesis universalis that need not be referred to a particular subject but to order and measure in se: «…circa ordinem et mensuram nulli speciali materiae addictam quaeri potest…Mathesim universalem nominari, quoniam in hac continetur illud omne, propter quod aliae scientiae et Mathematicae partes appellantur [378]». But what is this mathesis universalis? A detailed treatment is beyond our scope, but perhaps the best interpretation of it’s function can be found in one of Descartes’ letters to Mersenne, dated November 20, 1629, in which he writes of a kind of mathesis universalis, that should serve as a model of a kind of language of order, built upon a true philosophy, which would aid judgment such that it «would be impossible to go wrong», a language that serves as a universal mediator between mind and the truth of things: I believe, however, that it would be possible to devise a further system to enable one to make up the primitive words and their symbols in such a language so that it could be taught very quickly. Order is what is needed; all the thoughts which can come into the human mind must be arranged in an order like the natural order of the numbers. In a single day one can learn to name every one of the infinite series of numbers, and thus to write infinitely many different words in an unknown language. The same could be done for all the other words necessary to express all the other things which fall within the purview of the human mind [AT I 80]68. The fourth and fifth instances, also in Regula IV, refer respectively to the resolution to observe order, and to order as an aid to the weakness of 68 DESCARTES, R., ‘Letter to Mersenne, 20 November, 1629’, in ID., The Philosophical Writings, III, 13. My italics. The letter continues: «If this secret were discovered I am sure that the language would soon spread throughout the world…the discovery of such a language depends upon the true philosophy. For without that philosophy it is impossible to number and order all the thoughts of men or even to separate them out into clear and simple thoughts, which in my opinion is the great secret for acquiring sound knowledge. If someone were to explain correctly what are the simple ideas in the human imagination out of which all human thoughts are compounded, and if his explanation were generally received, I would dare to hope for a universal language very easy to learn, to speak and to write. The greatest advantage of such a language would be the assistance it would give to men’s judgement, representing matters so clearly that it would be almost impossible to go wrong. As it is almost all our words have confused meanings, and men’s minds are so accustomed to them that there is hardly anything which they can perfectly understand. I maintain that such a language is possible and that the knowledge on which it depends can be discovered, thus enabling peasants to be better judges of the truth of things than philosophers are now». 37 memory and the conserver of the truth residing in memory: At ego, tenuitatis meae conscius, talem ordinem in cognition rerum quaerenda pertinaciter observare [378]. – Sed priusquam hinc migrem, quaecumque superioribus studiis notatu digniora percepi, in unum colligere et ordine disponere conabor, tum tu ista olim, si usus exiget, quando crescent aetate memoria minuitur, commode repetam ex hoc libello, tum ut jam iisdem exonerate memoria possim liberiorem animum ad caetera transferre [379]. The fourth mention in particular, «I have resolved in my search for knowledge of things to adhere unswervingly to a definite order [378]69» is remarkable in that from a certain nodal perspective we can identify it as operatively fundamental to the entire undertaking of the method; if the enunciation of Regula V is the geometric centre of the Regulae, this single autobiographical sentence in the commentary to Regula IV can be called its practical condition of possibility. Institution/following of order and therefore the institution of method itself is dependent upon the will to knowledge, which we can also read as the will to vision, to immediacy, or to presence. So from these first five mentions of the term we can individuate four groups of contexts: (1) darkness in the dis-ordered mind (2) order in mathematics and mathematics-based sciences, and in the general science of order and measure, mathesis universalis, (3) owing to weakness and increasing age and failing memory (this step embraces, so to speak, step four, the mention of weakness preceding that of the decision and that of age succeeding it), and (4) the decision to observe this order in future studies as well as to apply this order to past studies. These contexts can be categorized as follows (1) mind (2) science (3) human weakness (4) decision (which also involves the dimensions of freedom, will, and time, past, present and future). We can also chart a certain progression of the mind’s meditation from (1) on the mind itself without light – in the cave – to (2) on the light inherent in the order of science, to (3) on the recognition and acknowledgment of the mind’s weakness, to (4) on the decision to apply the light of the sciences to the darkness of the mind prospectively and retrospectively, and back to (3) on the recognition of the finitude inherent in being human and mention of the failing memory that threatens the unaided mind with the dimming of the light of reason. 69 My italics. 38 While steps (1), (2), and (3) are descriptive of the state the world, step (4) consists in the decision of the will to adhere to/institute order and thus to be absolved to some degree from the contingencies of finitude and darkness by this very instituted/adhered to order. This move not only operates on an epistemological level, but on the metaphysical as well as the pragmatic (soteriological?) level; seen from a certain light, it entails a recapitulation of the past and the imagined future in the light and unity of order, reconciling, as it were, the elements of truth in the knower’s course through time, saving the inheritance of memory from memory’s inadequacy, and providing a vessel upon which to chart the future of knowledge with certainty and meaning. The soteriological connotations of this recapitulation are unlikely accidental. Easy to pass over but perhaps most significant is that the institution or following of order, whichever is the case, is dependent on an act of the will. This act of the will is the decision to order things in the disposition adequate to the intellect, which, operating as intuition and deduction, can grasp them with certainty because they are evident. In other words the decision to order is an expression of the will to see. The compilation of contexts in the preamble to Regula V throws light on the elusive nature or status of this geometric centre, order, easily passed over as a matter of procedure. «Tota methodus consistit in ordine et dispositione eorum ad quae mentis acies est convertenda, ut aliquam veritatem inveniamus [379]». Order is an application of the mind to the nature of things such that the truth of those things might be grasped. It is something to be applied to the things in the universe that isn’t apparent in them and that they do not provide of themselves. But the implications go even further. If order isn’t possessed by things in the world in and of themselves, it is not possessed sic et simpliciter by the human mind either – otherwise there would be no need for the Regulae in the first place. The question of the nature of order suggests a previous, more immediate question: what is the locus of order, where does it reside, not only relative to the other rules – at their centre – but relative to reality? Marion’s answer, in it’s negativity, is revealing: L’essentiel de la méthode cartésienne reste dissimulé dans l’évidence aussi longtemps que, par le relevé de tels repères, ne se laisse entrevoir l’écart qui sépare le kosmos – où toute chose se compose en une suite naturelle, parce que la physis les dépose premièrement chacune en soi – de ce certain ordre, qui ne rend certaine la méthode qu’en régressant de la certitude qu’il y fonde70. 70 MARION, Ontologie grise, 74. My italics. 39 Now, if there is a gap («écart») between cosmos and order there is also a gap between man and himself, or between the thinking subject and the thinking subject’s thinking. Order is distinct and somewhat separate from the mind and from the cosmos. Wherever is it’s locus, it is beyond the gap. Yet at the same time it is this order that is to be employed by the mind to itself and by the mind to the things of this world. Its position (on the other side of the gap) suggests, at least, negatively, it’s status and nature: that of a third party between mind and itself and mind and cosmos. The nature of this third party is not yet clear, but it’s function at this point is: order, whose gap from both the object and the intellect is irresolvable, mediates the resolution of the gap between the intellect and the object, bringing them into immediate contact and presence; order mediates immediacy. The questions we face now, and which we will try to answer in the next chapter, are fundamentally two: what are the mechanics of this mediation, and what is the precise status of this mediator? 40 CHAPTER II Order in Regulae V, VI and VIII: some syntagms 41 We have gathered that ordo, like the method it constitutes, has a mediative function between simple intuition and the truth of things, mediating the experience of light, contact, evidence, presence. But unlike the method, which is unambiguously a rule of procedure, the status of ordo, while we know its function relative to knowledge, remains ambiguous. This is because we are not quite sure what to make of Descartes’ use of ordo to designate a quality already existent in external reality, or simply a mental projection onto things, designating the procedure according to which we must investigate them. 2.1 «Ordine persequendas» In addition to the Equipe Descartes’ enumeration of the occurrences of the term ordo throughout Descartes’ work, within the same volume is a tabulation of the fourteen co-occurrences in the Regulae of the term ordo alongside a term lying within the semantic group signifying to follow the order «suivre l’ordre»71: ordine persequendas/persequetur/persequamur, ordine perlustrare, ordine perscrutemur, ordine sequeremur, and so on72. The Equipe has also compiled an inventory of combinations of terms in the Regulae which illustrate the passage between what the researchers have identified as the two overarching uses of the term, designated ORDRE 1 and ORDRE 2; the former designates «l’ordre qui est la règle» (the order that is the rule) and the latter designates «l’ordre qui est l’effet de la règle» (the order that is the effect of the rule)73. This is followed up by an analysis of these two meta-acceptations throughout Descartes’ works. The different acceptations of ordo can be aligned with one of these two poles, the first implying an already existing order that must be followed or mirrored: «we must…tackle the simplest and least exalted arts, and especially those in which order prevails (in quibus ordo magis regnat) [404]»; and the second is the order that is instituted as a result of the employment of the rule: «…the order in which things are enumerated can usually be varied (ordo rerum enumerandum plerumque varius esse potest) [391]». The first is in re, so to speak, and thus a necessity, and the second is in intellectu and thus fulfils the function of a rule. 71 EQUIPE DESCARTES, ‘Contribution à la sémantèse d’ordre – ordo’, 312-316. EQUIPE DESCARTES, ‘Contribution à la sémantèse d’ordre – ordo’, 312-313. 73 EQUIPE DESCARTES, ‘Contribution à la sémantèse d’ordre – ordo’, 322. 72 42 Descartes’ use of the two acceptations doesn’t always appear as a passage but rather often as a simple alternation between the two poles as if they were two perspectives of the same thing. In Regula X for example, he uses the term indicating the two acceptations in the same phrase: «…the method usually consists simply in constantly following an order, whether it is actually present in the matter in question or is ingeniously read into it [404]»74. The question posed by this two-poled use of order is whether or not ordo in Descartes’ conception is a thing or an intellectual construct, or both; in other words, to which of the two ontologies can order be ascribed? In fact, from the two mini-studies – on «suivre l’ordre» and «ORDRE 1/2» – we are prompted to clarify the status of this order that is to be followed, be it order that is the rule or order that is the effect of the rule. Is the order that we ‘follow’ something that we actually follow or does the notion remain figurative? The bipolar use of the term ordo suggests that the notion ‘to follow the order’ contains a note of ambiguity; is it simply a procedure or technique, or perhaps something significantly more thing-like? The aim of the following pages is to examine Descartes’ Regulae and attempt to determine what kind of a thing ordo is, if indeed it can be considered a thing as such. The syntagms suivre l’ordre or ordine persequendas, etc. and the persistence of order as both rule and effect indicate that there is an ambiguity in the notion. However, an examination of three other syntagms may shed some light on the logic within that ambiguity. 2.2 «Ordo vel/et mensura» In the Regulae the term ordo constitutes one pole of a syntagm whose other pole is constituted by mensura on five separate occasions. The first appearance of the syntagm in the Regulae, in the commentary on Regula IV, is also the first time that ordo as such appears (not counting the appearance of in-ordinata near the beginning of the commentary, in 371): «Quod attentius consideranti tandem innotuit, illa omnia tantum, in quibus aliquis ordo vel mensura examinatur, ad Mathesim referri [378]». We might also note that the first time the term ordo appears in Descartes’ extant works is at the beginning of the Compendium musicae in which it is in function to arithmetic proportion as well: «…sed tantum in ordine ad arithmeticam proportionem…[A-T X 92, 8])»75; and the first time it appears 74 75 My italics. DESCARTES, The Philosophical Writings, III, 2. 43 in his extant correspondence, as ordre, is at least as early as his Letter to Beeckman, 26 March 1619, in the context of his project to completely refound science: «…I shall really put this science in order… a completely new science, which would provide a general solution of all possible equations involving any sort of quantity, whether continuous or discrete, each according to its nature [A-T X 156]»76. The second appearance of the syntagm in the Regulae is also in the commentary to Regula IV and is also the second appearance of ordo in the Regulae, this time appearing with the conjunction ‘et’ and no longer with ‘vel’ as in the first mention: «scientiam quae id omne explicet, quod circa ordinem et mensuram nulli speciali materiae addictam quaeri potest [378, 6]». This science that addresses all questions of order and measure should, he says, be called «mathesis universalis [378, 7]». The remaining appearances of the syntagm only occur again in the second of the three projected parts of the Regulae, in Regula XIV, in 451, 8: «ad ordinem, vel ad mensuram»; and in 452, 3-5: «tali ordine disponi, ut difficultas, quae ad mensurae cognitionem pertineat, tandem a solius ordinis inspectione dependeat». Regula XIV is dedicated to a specifically mathematical application of the method, and deals with the application of order to the figuration or representation of the «real extension of bodies [438, 6]»77. The final appearance, in Regula XVI is also arithmetical in context, referring to the dual function of numbers «quia scilicet iidem explicant, modo ordinem, modo mensuram [457, 19]». Given only these five appearances, we might be justified in assuming that order and measure are (1) identifiable, with ordo collapsing into mensura as a synonym (ordine vel mensura [378.1]); (2) distinct but inseparable (ordine et mensura [378.6]); (3) mathematical functions operating always in tandem (ad ordinem, vel ad mensuram [451, 8]; modo ordinem, modo mensuram [457, 19]); or we might understand (4) mensura to collapse into ordo in which it seems to fundamentally consist (constituting a collapse inversely symmetrical to the first): «a set of units can then be arranged in such an order that the difficulty involved in discerning a measure becomes simply one of scrutinizing the order [452:35]»78. This phrasing is similar to the formulation used in the enunciation of Regula V («Tota methodus consistit in ordine et dispositione [379]»). In reality there are two perspectives we can take in order to uncover the movement at play in these seemingly slight differences. The first is to try to discern and justify a certain evolution, a radical change, or constancy 76 My italics. DESCARTES, The Philosophical Writings, I, 56. 78 My italics. 77 44 between the meanings of ordo from the first syntagm up until the last. The other perspective is to compare the first two mentions with each other, synchronically as it were, since they are both mentioned in the same context and identify the different horizons the two syntagms respectively respond to. This context is that of the project of a new mathesis universalis. What is this mathesis universalis («mathesis, c’est a dire l’ontologie de l’ordre»79) and what does it consist of? Descartes is looking for a “mathematicity of mathematics”, a mode of abstraction prior to mathematical abstraction that is it’s source and to which all science can be subordinated and unified – «le secret commun de la certitude et de l’organisation des science – secret qui, parce qu’anterieur aux mathematiques, peut s’etendre au-delà de leur region»80, and a «secret, lui meme non mathematique»81. It consists in a radical abstraction of the hypokeimenon of all science82, such that the objects and principles of this abstraction constitute the categories of the new first science. Descartes writes that in mathesis universalis he intends «a general science which explains all the points that can be raised concerning order and measure irrespective of the subject-matter [378]»83. In reality this abstraction takes place in two degrees; in the first the particular characteristics of things are left behind and things are considered insofar as they can be seen as mathematical entities, number and figure; in the second abstraction numerical quantity is left behind and things are considered only in terms of order and measure84. «Fondamentalment, elle déborde le champ limité du quantitative, pour étendre le réseau des relations, mesurées et mensurantes, à un domaine infiniment plus vaste – puisqu’il finira par englober la métaphysique elle-meme85». Of course the vastest domain of science, classically, is the science of being as being, ens quantum ens, and in subsuming all things according to one category alone – that of order and measure86 – Descartes has signalled the objects of the new first science: mathesis universalis. These very objects, because they are more primordial and wider in scope to pure mathematics, transcend the field of mathematics while retaining its promise of certainty and are thus in 79 MARTINEAU, E., ‘L’ontologie de l’ordre’, in Descartes, Marion, J-L., ed., Paris, 2007, 121. 80 MARION, Ontologie grise, 61. 81 MARION, Ontologie grise, 61. 82 Cf. MARION, Ontologie grise, 61. 83 My italics. 84 Cf. MARION, Ontologie grise, 66. 85 MARION, Ontologie grise, 66. 86 Cf. MARION, Ontologie grise, 67: «Avec Descartes, ce qu’Aristote nomme l’étant/etre en tant qu’etre devient telle chose en tant qu’ordonnée et mesure». 45 a position to serve as the foundation of mathematical science. The superiority of this new universal science87 to the more particular sciences also resides in its indifference to particular subject matter, never burdening the intellect with the particular and concrete - and thus slow - investigation of things in their differences. If, then, both order and measure are the objects of this new science what is the relationship between the two? We know that both of them transcend the delimitation of mathematics but are they also identifiable, are they merely synonyms? When Descartes mentions the two syntagms ordo vel mensura and then ordinem et mensuram, he mentions them in the same discussion of the mathesis universalis but in slightly different immediate contexts: when he mentions ordo vel mensura he does so in the context of mathematics: «I came to see that the exclusive concern of mathematics is with questions of order or measure [378]»88 and he continues «and that it is irrelevant whether the measure in question involves numbers, shapes, stars, sounds, or any other object whatever[378]»89, seemingly identifying the two with measure. If mathematics were the domain of the two the order of things would be expressed in their measures, such that order in this context, under the perspective of mathematics, would indeed be equal to measure. Immediately subsequent to this sentence he writes: «This made me realize that there must be a general science which explains all the points that can be raised concerning order and measure irrespective of the subjectmatter, and that this science should be termed mathesis universalis [378]». As the degree of universality shifts upwards the conjunction changes from vel to et. As the science becomes more abstract – and therefore wider only insofar as the terms of the consideration of its objects are narrowed – ordo and mensura split apart indicating a difference in the two, even though they are inseparable as the objects of this universal mathesis. The synonymic relationship in mathematics gives way to a binary one in mathesis. In what does this binary relationship consist? Measure is necessary for order, since some kind of multiple delimitation of space – at least one – is necessary to be able to determine proportion and relationship among the distribution of extensions. Order is 87 According to Jean-Marie Beyssade most translators have translated the term mathesis universalis as universal mathematics, but mistakenly – we would be justified in doing so if only the syntagms of ordo and mensura and its contexts are taken into account. But the translation of mathesis universalis as ‘universal science’ is correct since Descartes himself explains that mathesis also means ‘discipline’ and any intellectual discipline is a ‘science’ [377]. Cf. BEYSSADE, J-M., ‘Ordre et mesure: Descartes aux limites de la raison’, in L’esprit cartésien, Bourgeois, B et Havet, J., ed., Paris, 2000, 13. 88 My italics. 89 My italics. 46 necessary for measure otherwise we could not make any sense out of the measures; indeed the notion of measure itself presupposes some kind of ordering of the measure and this order of measure is what makes it intelligible as a spatial delimitation. At this point order and measure are distinct, neither can be collapsed into the other, although they are inseparable. What will be instructive to us will be appreciating in what way the two are distinct and why. After these two mentions in Regula IV the term ordo soon appears in the enunciation of Regula V, but this time no longer coupled by mensura but by dispositio. In fact, throughout book one of the Regulae (Regulae I-XII) ordo appears 28 more times, all of which unaccompanied by mensura (the other seventeen mentions take place in book two). When the term mensura appears again coupled with ordo we are in the decidedly mathematical contexts of Regulae XIV and XVI. Also noteworthy is that the term mathesis universalis is only mentioned in the context of its objects, «ordinem et mensuram [378]» and is never referred to again throughout the Regulae, even when ordo is mentioned. Judging by the manner of the appearance of mensura in mathematical contexts and even on the limit of the mathematical, in the context of mathesis universalis, and given the ubiquity of ordo in all contexts we can surmise that of the two poles of the syntagm, one is confined to extension and the other is not, although not excluded from it. This stems precisely from the conditions for measure. For there to be measure there must be divisibility90. Only a body in extension can be divided. So indivisibles cannot be subject to measure. But divisibility is only the necessary condition for measure, not the sufficient condition91. In order for measure to be possible there must be unity in the form of a common measure, but this is not possible without the existence of order. Order is thus necessary for measure and so the latter is subordinated to the former, even though order only arises in the order of discovery after the perception of measure (in the field of extension). Now given that the object of universal science is everything it cannot stop at the order and measure of extension but must pass beyond it as well into the realm of the indivisible, which consist in ego and in God. In this realm there is no extension and thus there can be no measure (God’s immensity, im-measurability, is defined precisely because it falls outside the scope of measure92); but there can be order. The ‘et’ in ordo et mensura does imply a mutual implication, but from the perspective of ordo this mutual implication is its translation in the realm of extension alone, and 90 Cf. BEYSSADE, J-M., ‘Ordre et mesure: Descartes aux limites de la raison’,16. Cf. BEYSSADE, J-M., ‘Ordre et mesure: Descartes aux limites de la raison’,16. 92 Cf. MARION, J-L., Cartesian Questions, 65. 91 47 this suggests that ordo is transversal: it goes beyond the divisibleindivisible divide, leaving mensura behind93 (Martineau notes that Marion is mistaken to identify the syntagm ordo et mensura with ‘rapport et proportion’, because in doing so he confines ordo to the realm of measure and arithmetic, an error symmetrical to translating mathesis universalis as ‘universal mathematics’)94.The change in conjunction from vel to et is a sign not only of the distinction between ordo and mensura, but of the metaphysical gap between the two, and as such, of the transversality of ordo which does and does not belong in the syntagm. But we can look even further adrift, to Regula XIV, where the syntagm returns after its lengthy hiatus, and notice that while the first mention describes order and measure as two operations in tandem (ad ordinem, vel ad mensuram [451, 8]) as it does also in Regula XVI (modo ordinem, modo mensuram [457, 19]), the second mention, as pointed out earlier, seems to reverse the absorption of ordo by mensura operated by the conjunction vel in the first mention of the syntagm. Here measure, preceded by order, also consists entirely in order: «a set of units can then be arranged in such an order that the difficulty involved in discerning a measure becomes simply one of scrutinizing the order [452:3-5]»95. Of course much water has run under the bridge between Regula IV and Regula XIV, and this change corresponds to a proportional change in the use and understanding of the notion of order throughout the Regulae. Order by this point, even as suggested earlier, but now in the concrete practice of solving a problem, antecedes, surpasses, and contains measure. To clarify, our impression is that the move from the mathematical plane of certainty to the more universal mathesis, in which order is revealed as a more abstract and thus more primary category, is not simply a generalization, or even a universalization of or from mathematics, as Martineau points out 96 . Rather, order is already transversal and the difference is rather a step – via order – from the order of the mathematical to the order of universality97. C’est cette dimension epagogique de la revelation à Descartes de l’étant comme “en ordre et en mesure” que l’exegese répugne a apercevoir, persistant à ne déchifrer ici qu’un aveu de dependence ou d’emprunt à la 93 When ordo is mentioned in the Discourse, in 1637, it is mentioned without measure, for example: «Ces longues chaines…l’occasion de m’immaginer que toutes les chose…pourvu seulement qu’on garde l’ordre…qu’on ne découvre [AT-VI, 19,6-17]». 94 MARTINEAU, ‘L’ontologie de l’ordre’, 124. 95 My italics. 96 MARTINEAU, ‘L’ontologie de l’ordre’, 123. 97 MARTINEAU, ‘L’ontologie de l’ordre’, 123. 48 methode gèometrique: fermée à l’universel, la critique cultive ici un grand mot: “generalisation”98. More than a purely subjective institution it seems that there is a dimension of induction, epagogé, in the process, understood – in a wider acceptation than that of the logical movement from the particular to the universal – as «the movement of guiding towards»99, at least the sense in which Martineau assumes Heidegger’s definition: «le movement de… conduire jusqu’à cela qui vient au regard tandis que, d’avance, nous avons porté le regards par-delà l’étant particulier – le délaissant, et pour quoi? Pour regarder jusqu’à l’etre»100. From what we have seen of the dynamism to which ordo takes us upon our consideration of its status we can only agree with Heidegger. The movement is not one of generalization or universalization; there is only the movement out of one order, that where order is measure, to another order in which order and measure are the two operative categories and objects of a universal mathesis, and it takes us even further, since order leaves measure behind when it transcends the realm of divisibility and extension, and in surpassing measure it also founds it. It leaves it behind at the limits that measure cannot transcend (as we have seen in Regula IV). We can also project this absolute transversality of order beyond the intellect itself; this is so because when the intellect comes up against its limits – as in the enunciation of Regula VIII: «If in the series of things to be examined we come across something which our intellect is unable to intuit sufficiently well, we must stop at that point, and refrain from the superfluous task of examining the remaining items [392]» – order, which is not limited, leaves the intellect behind. When order accompanies the intellect to its limits, the intellect, like measure before it, remains within the limit, but order does not, it transverses it. Not only does order surpass the limit, it also contains the limit, in the same way that it contains everything else that it has accompanied and surpassed. How many limits does order surpass? How many successive concentric circles of order are there? Is there an infinite series of orders each in turn encapsulating and being encapsulated by an order? Is disorder encapsulated successively within order? The chain of questions would lead us up to an order that is in itself infinite and that contains all the other orders and encapsulates all the disorders such that in this ultimate and in se infinite order even disorder is rendered an aspect of order, a cusanian 98 MARTINEAU, ‘L’ontologie de l’ordre’, 122. MARTINEAU, ‘L’ontologie de l’ordre’, 121. 100 Cited in MARTINEAU, ‘L’ontologie de l’ordre’, 121-122. 99 49 coincidentia oppositorum 101 that integrates even contradictions within a single ordering order. We will confront this question further on, but first we will resume a pending query. Resuming the question of the double valence of ordo (ORDRE 1/2) where we have ‘order as the rule’ and ‘order as the effect of the rule’ but also the two loci of order -«whether it is actually present in the matter in question or is ingeniously read into it [404]102» – that is, in things or in the intellect (and then projected onto things) we find that this difference between rule and effect, and the difference between in intellectu and in re are differences of modes of manifestation. If order is transversal within and throughout each of these poles and the distinctions between them, the question of where order resides is resolved at least partially. It is independent of these residences and rather these residences reside in it even as order resides in them. If order is in things it also subsists where things do not, if it is in the mind it also subsists beyond the limits of the intellect’s capacities. Order both identifies and accompanies and then surpasses the limits, which are in themselves instances of order. Whether order is the effect of the rule or the rule itself seeking to impose itself on the matter to be effected, it is order that the rule finds in the effect and it is order that the effect anticipates in the rule. According to Marion the relationship of order and measure to things, or beings, in the Regulae, is that of abstractions to abstractions and this is because he understands both measure and order to reside exclusively in the mind: l’étant, pris dans son etre, s’énonce comme ordre et mesure; mais ordre et mesure resident “dans le seul entendement” [Règle VIII, 396, 4], comme la vérité et la fausseté qu’ils produisent; en un mot, l’etre de l’étant ne retourne jamais de l’abstraction à un étant par excellence – précisément parce qu’il fut pensé comme, et par abstraction103. 101 The reference to Nicholas of Cusa is not whimsical; Descartes’ knowledge of Cusa’s works, particularly De docta ignorantia in which the concept of the coincidence of opposites appears, has been documented and argued, most recently by Thibaut Gress, who insists that Descartes was, first of all, a man of his time, and secondly therefore, knowledgeable and influenced by the renaissance tradition, particularly the hermetic aspects that would have transmitted the historical stream of neo-platonism, the most familiar exponents of which, to Descartes, would have been Marsilio Ficino and Nicholas of Cusa. Cf. GRESS, T., Descartes et la précarité du monde: essai sur les ontologies cartésiennes, Paris, 2012. 102 My italics. 103 MARION, Ontologie grise, 68-69. My italics. 50 The citation is misleading because the italicized phrase suggests that Descartes claims univocally that order and measure reside in the intellect alone. Yet Descartes only mentions that truth and falsity are in the intellect alone [396] and this suggests a qualification to Marion’s conclusion that the being of being never returns from its abstraction because it is thought as and by abstraction. If order does not reside, as we sustain, only in the mind, then we must suspend the judgment, at least as far as our anticipation of an answer to the question concerning ordo can take us. It may well be the case that being never returns from its exile in abstraction, but what kind of abstraction are we talking about if one of its operators lies both within and without the bounds of abstraction? And is the mode of abstraction Descartes employs necessarily an exile? This all depends on what the ontology behind the mode of abstraction is, if it can at all be delineated. First, however, a deeper grasp on the notion of the transversality of ordo requires an apparent detour, only apparent because in reality it is a turn to what is likely an inner interlocution pervading the composition of the Regulae. 2.3 Ordo and De ordine The reader familiar with St. Augustine’s De ordine might have faintly recognized our argument concerning the passage of order to order and the ultimate containing of all things in order. Despite differences in setting and aim, St. Augustine’s De ordine and Descartes’ Regulae ad directionem ingenii have certain commonalities and it has even been suggested that there is a direct influence 104 . Although it cannot be determined whether during or after the ten years of the Regulae’s composition, it appears that Descartes had at least read and been influenced by De ordine in his writing of the Discourse on Method in 1637, the personal style of the latter being adopted105. According to Janowski it is probable that Descartes read De ordine before 1630, along with St. Augustine’s De Genesi ad litteram, De doctrina Cristiana, De libero arbitro, De Civitate Dei, De quantitate animae, De immortalitate animae, Confessiones, and De Trinitate106. I’ll only briefly touch on this work and only do so at this point in the 104 JANOWSKI, Z., Augustinian-Cartesian Index, Indiana, 2004. «It is almost certain that Descartes read On Order before 1637; whether he read it before discovering his “fine method”, around 1628-29, will probably forever remain a mystery». JANOWSKI, Augustinian-Cartesian Index, 150. 106 JANOWSKI, Augustinian-Cartesian Index, 151-153. 105 51 argument because it has been necessary to first find a point of contact between the use of the concept of order in Descartes’ Regulae and its use in De ordine, otherwise the argument remains one of vague association or merely a search for historical antecedents. As we will see the two notions are more deeply bonded than we might have considered prior to individuating Descartes’ notion of order as we have done. I am only going to evidence points of contact between the two with a few references that are in themselves instructive even prior to any commentary. Briefly then, St. Augustine makes use of what can be termed the polysemantic character of ordo to elaborate different organizations or categorizations of reality. Thus, for example, ordo rerum omnium [De ordine, 2.18.47], ordo divinae providentiae [De ordine, 2.5.15], ordo universitatis [De ordine, 1.1.1], ordo Dei [2.7.23], ordo divinus [De ordine, 2.20.54], ordo naturae [De ordine, 2.4.12], ordo causarum [De ordine, 1.3.8], etc. Above all his examination of the theme, written in dialogue form, is a dialogical ascent through the manifestations of order and disorder beginning with the mundane situation of the inability to locate the origin of a certain sound during the night [cf. De ordine, 1.3.6-7107]. St. Augustine’s treatment of the term in a much more straightforwardly metaphysical context should not disqualify the similarities with Descartes’, rather, it should if anything, throw a metaphysical light on the undertaking of the Regulae. The metaphysical thread is nothing entirely new since Gilson’s Index and more recently Marion’s Ontologie grise. What the interlocution with De ordine reveals is the kind of metaphysical vision underpinning the Regulae. Simply compiling citations from Saint Augustine’s text we discover themes such as the ubiquity and transversality of order: «There is an order to be found, within things and between them, which binds and directs this world [De ordine, 1.1.1]» 108 ; the subsistence of order even when not apparent: «outside the obvious order, yes; not outside order as such. Nothing is to be found outside it [De ordine, 1.3.8]»109; the uniting of apparent contradictions: Augustine: What do you think might be contrary to order? Licentius: Nothing. How can anything be contrary to a whole encompassing everything? Anything contrary to order, strictly speaking, ought to be outside it. But I see nothing outside order, therefore there must be nothing 107 AUGUSTINE, De ordine, tr. Borruso, S., South Bend, 2007, 9-11. AUGUSTINE, De ordine,3. 109 AUGUSTINE, De ordine, 11. 108 52 contrary to it [De ordine, 1.6.15] 110. We can briefly glance backwards and find it in our treatment of the other themes in the Regulae which we have considered as propaedeutic to order such as Descartes’ position that the quest for knowledge begins with self-knowledge and this with a retreat from the senses [cf. 368]: «The main cause of this error is the lack of knowledge of self. In order to know oneself it is most necessary to get out of the life of the senses into one’s interior, and there recollect oneself [De ordine, 1.1.3]»111 and «Don’t you think it is a great matter of order to learn about the soul? [De ordine, 2.5.17]»112 ; that one should begin with mathematics as a propaedeutic [cf. 365-366]: «no one should attempt to know such things without the two sciences of logic and mathematics [De ordine, 2.18.47]»113; and begin the practice of orderly thought by studying subjects where there is already an established and apparent order such as geometry, etc. [cf. 366; 378]; «Take now music, geometry, the motion of the heavens, number theory. Order is so overpowering in these, that anyone seeking its source will either find it there or will be led through them without error [De ordine, 2.5.14]»114. We find a striking similarity between De ordine and the Regulae on the status of memory, for example, spoken by De ordine’s Licentius (who represents Augustine’s neoplatonizing interlocutor in the dialogue): I am of the opinion that memory is…subservient. The wise man uses it as a slave, first by giving commands, and afterwards by imposing limits once the slave is sufficiently trained. This is to prevent memory from acting not for the benefit of the wise person but for its own…The truly wise clings to God and enjoys his permanent presence without hankering after it or fearing its possible disappearance. For God, being absolutely true, is also permanently present [De ordine, 2.2.6]115. 110 AUGUSTINE, De ordine, 21. AUGUSTINE, De ordine, 5. 112 AUGUSTINE, De ordine, 71. 113 AUGUSTINE, De ordine, 113. The citation continues, suggestively: «Philosophy also longs for unity but in a much higher and more divine way. It follows two lines of inquiry: the soul and God. Through the first we know ourselves, what we are; through the second, our origin, where we come from…the first makes us worthy of happiness; the second makes us actually happy. This is the order and wisdom of the curriculum. By following it, one becomes fit to understand the order of things: two worlds and God their common origin [De ordine, 2.18.47]». 114 AUGUSTINE, De ordine, 64. 115 AUGUSTINE, De ordine, 55. 111 53 Not only memory as a singular issue but also the mutually exclusive juxtaposition with vision, wisdom, immediacy, presence and contact is patent, more explicitly so in the following: «Why should [the wise man] need memory? He has everything before the eyes of the mind. In fact in the realm of sentient knowledge, with things before our eyes, we do not make use of memory. Now a wise man has everything before the eyes of the mind [De ordine, 2.2.7]»116. Descartes’ intuitus and the notion of presence is evoked, or rather, the idea of the intuitus evokes this notion of wisdom, (absence of) memory and immediate presence in St. Augustine. But are we also touching upon a deeper question here, explicit in St. Augustine but latent, implicit, or simply hidden in the Regulae, and decodified with the key that is ordo? The wise man, says Augustine, «has everything before the eyes of the mind», but what is this everything? «“Everything” means God himself grasped in a fixed and immutable glance, plus all the reality seen in God and grasped by the mind itself. What is memory for in this case? [2.2.7]»117. Have the Regulae to do with God? This question qualifies our original question concerning the status of ordo even further. The suspicion is that we may identify the concept of ordo as nothing less than Descartes’ equivalent of St. Anselm’s unum argumentum 118 . But this would cast the Regulae into the light of a philosophical theology, perhaps an epistemological theology. We will see if what remains of our examination of the concept of ordo in the Regulae provides an answer, however conjectural, to this question. We have not finished with St. Augustine however. Just as his interlocution has shed light on the previous aspects of order in the Regulae we will see it propel us forwards in our examination, particularly in our study of the next syntagm: ordo et dispositio. 2.4 «Ordine et dispositione» When St. Augustine deals with the question of apparent disorder he has Trygetius say that the life of a fool, while apparently disordered and beyond intelligibility, becomes intelligible and fits within a definite order 116 AUGUSTINE, De ordine, 57. AUGUSTINE, De ordine, 57. 118 Cf. ANSELM, Proslogion. 117 54 when seen from the perspective of the locus of that order119. What the example of disorder throws into relief is the radical non-subsistence of order in things other than itself. It is order that orders things and situations. The apparent order of ordered things when juxtaposed to the apparent disorder of disordered things only shows that order is present or evident in some things and absent in others, but upon traversing or transcending the limits of intelligibility we find that both the absence of order and the presence of order are weaved together (etymologically: ordered, cf. chapter one) by and in order itself, in which the order present in apparent disorder is made evident. Earlier in De ordine St. Augustine comments on the ultimate disorder – evil – and gives us a clue towards the decodification of our syntagm: Evil things are not outside order because God does not love them. He in fact loves to love good things, and also loves not to love evil things. This is the greater order of divine disposition. Both order and disposition (ordo atque dispositio) keep the universe together by this very distinction [1.7.19]120. The distinction in orders (the order of human intelligence and the order of God’s love) that order and disposition make manifest keep the unity, harmony and intelligibility of all things – the universe – together, even the things which are unintelligible to the human intellect (at least at the present time, which is why order is inherently eschatological in its meaning since it bears the promise of the presence or evidence of ultimate meaning). Will an analysis of the syntagm ordine et dispositione in the Regulae lend itself to a similar interpretation? We have to first determine what he means by the syntagm in Regulae V, VI and VII. «Tota methodus consistit in ordine et dipositione eorum adque mentis acies est convertenda, ut aliquam veritatem inveniamus [379]». We return to our point of departure, which now we are able to translate in the light of what we’ve seen previously; the «sum total of human endeavour [380]»121– lies in the order and disposition of everything of which the mind is capable of knowing certainly and indubitably (Regula II [362]) and to 119 AUGUSTINE, De ordine, 65: «Trygetius: I say that the whole life of a fool, though running in fits and starts, and in perennial disorder, is nevertheless inserted into the order of things by divine providence…Should anyone then limit one’s attention to the narrow reality of that life, he would feel utterly disgusted by it. But on raising the eyes of the mind to such heights as to survey the whole universe, he would find nothing out of order, each thing perfectly fitting in its own assigned place». 120 AUGUSTINE, De ordine, 25. My italics. 121 «In hoc uno totius humanae industriae summa continetur [380]». 55 which the eye of the mind (intuitus, intueri, Regula III [366]) «must be directed if we are to discover any truth (adque mentis acies est convertenda, ut aliquam veritatem inveniamus)». Up until this point we have not tackled the question of disposition, and this is because we have considered it necessary to get a preliminary grasp on the notion of order first, in large part because of the fact that of the eleven times that dispositio in any form appears in the text of the Regulae six form part of a syntagm with ordo (Regulae IV [379]; V; [379]; VI [391 and again 391]; XIV [452]; and XXI [469]), two appear in paragraphs directly concerned with ordo (Regula X [404-405]; and VI [381]), and one appears in a paragraph indirectly concerned with ordo (Regula VIII [398], in the context of the limits of what is knowable)122. Disposition is practically always connected to order, even though order is not always connected to disposition. We must assume at this point that disposition operates in function of order, probably as the alignment of elements in a certain order such that they reflect in their totality that very same order. The first line of the enunciation of Regula V shows that the function of ordo and dispositio is to arrange things in such a way as to facilitate their evidence to the mind; the eye of the mind should turn to those things thus placed in a convenient order and disposition that we may discover some truth. If order and disposition can be said to mediate truth that is because as mediation they consist in (order) and deploy (disposition) the conditions of its discovery. With the gaze of our mind, or the sharp edge of our mind (acies mentis123), turned to this order and disposition we may discover (ut inveniamus) some truth. The natural question at this point is ‘what does Descartes mean by truth?’ If order and its disposition are the conditions of truth, and if order, as we have seen, is the mediator of immediacy, evidence, presence, contact, then truth is all of these or any one of them. Truth is not so much adequatio rei intellectus but presence. Truth is presence because it is evidently and directly intuited, contacted, by the acies mentis. This affirmation is possible within the scheme of the Regulae precisely because the conditions of truth have to correspond to or at least proceed from the subjective conditions of certainty. Certainty is effected in the moment of evidence or immediacy. And order is that which configures thoughts and things such that their disposition mediates this immediacy. 122 The two remaining mentions both appear in Regula XII [415 and 424]. Acies mentis, from Plato and through Plotinus, Cicero and St. Augustine, means that pinnacle or point or edge of the mind that has an immediate intuition of truth, and in St. Augustine, increases in its capacity to intuit the truth by means of ascesis (and grace). Cf. FITZGERALD, A., ed., Augustine through the Ages, Cambridge, 1999, 5-6. 123 56 In order to delineate the structure of this mediation, or «follow this method [379]», we need to «reduce (reducamus) involved and obscure propositions step by step to simpler ones, and then attempt to ascend (ascendere) by the same steps from the intuition of all those that are entirely simple to the cognition of all the others [379]». This simple prescription, which is the description of the mechanics of ordo and dispositio, is simple only in its formulation; what it is meant to convey is, according to its author, «so obscure and intricate that not everyone can make out what it is [380]», which is why he dedicates the next two Regulae to its explication. Nonetheless, before moving on to Regula VI we can make note of one dynamic that, linked as it is to the acies mentis in the Augustinian sense, ensures that the use of the term acies mentis is no flatus vocis but carries some of the terms classical dynamic charge. The two movements of the mechanism are those of analysis, in which the complex is reduced to the simple, and synthesis, in which the complex is recomposed anew having determined clearly and distinctly the identity of the simple element. The key that gives away the Augustinian trace is the use of the verb ascendere, with its ascetical and neoplatonic charge, to describe the process of synthesis. It is not simply a reconstruction of a proposition but an exercise of the mind that lifts it upwards. If this trace appears less than convincing, the following phrase from De ordine squarely places the two movements in their ascetical context: «In analysis I seek unity purified; in synthesis I seek it whole [2.18.48]»124. As we have seen earlier in Regula III concerning the binary of intuition/deduction, the gaze is ideally one, simple; it is all intuition, with deduction a secondary but necessary operation owing to the weakness of its sustenance, memory. Hence Descartes’ prescription of the practice of running through the propositions in the exercise of intuition such that with one glance we can cover all the steps and links in a proposition as if they were one. The complex and the simple are not the many and the one; rather they are the one from the perspective of simplicity or the perspective of complexity, but fundamentally one. The methodical reduction to the simple and ascension to the cognition of all else operated by order and disposition should be understood in the light of this unity of the pure and the whole. From this perspective, if synthesis is an ascensio, then so is analysis; synthesis then can also be called a reductio, just like analysis, because both reductio and ascensio are reductio/ascensio ad unum, much like the cusanian dynamic of contractio and complicatio of the universe. Reductio and ascensio are distinct movements, yet they keep the vision of 124 AUGUSTINE, De ordine, 113-115. 57 knowledge unified since they both, in grades or steps («gradatim reducamus… gradus ascendere [379]»), progress from and lead to that unity established by order and disposition, echoing the progression of the already familiar syntagm of De ordine: «both order and disposition (ordo atque dispositio) keep the universe together by this very distinction [1.7.19]»125. All this is very significant since even prior to his commentary on Regula V and explication in Regula VI and VII, Descartes has established order and disposition in the light of a geometric horizon in which all its implications will ultimately explicate themselves, and this horizon, moreover, is inseparable from the ascesis of the mind. This symbiosis of the unified horizon with mental ascesis constitutes the medium of science that Descartes develops as ordo et dispositio. What, then, is the structure of this syntagm and how does it effect this horizon? First of all, by establishing the methodical space itself. Bonicalzi acutely observes that «mentre il filo [di Teseo] [cf. 380] orienta nello spazio labirintico, il metodo orienta lo spazio conoscitivo, lo ordina, lo dispone in modo da far emergere con evidenza la verità»126. How is the space established and organized? The enunciation of the rule reads Ad res simplicissimas ab involutis distinguendas et ordine persequendas, oportet in unaquaque rerum serie, in qua aliquot veritates unas ex aliis directe deduximus, observare quid sit maxime simplex, et quomodo ab hoc caetera omnia magis, vel minus, vel aequatiter removeantur [381]127. The space is established by the designation of an absolute to which all others are relative; this absolute is to be the most simple thing of all, to which those things more complex are to take their bearings. These simple things that can be designated as absolute are those which contain «the pure and simple nature in question: as all that is considered independent, cause, simple, universal, equal, similar, straight, or the like [382]», whereas the relative is «what participates in the same nature, or at least in something of it, in accordance with which it can be referred to the absolute, and deduced from it through some sequence». Descartes calls the relativity of the relatives «relations [382]» and these are whatever is «dependent, effect, 125 AUGUSTINE, De ordine, 25. BONICALZI, F., L’ordine della certezza: scientificità e persuasione in Descartes, Genova, 1990, 33. My italics. «To distinguish the simplest things from those which are complex, and to follow them out in order, it is necessary, in every sequence of things in which we have directly deduced certain truths from others, to observe what constituent has the greatest simplicity, and in what way all the others are more or less or equally removed from it». 126 58 compounded, particular, many, unequal, dissimilar, oblique, etc. [382]». Yet rather than being opposites, the binaries of the simple and the relative such as equal and unequal, independent and dependent, one and many, etc., are separated not by contrariness but by distance. The number of subordinate relations that separates the relative from the absolute is proportionate to the distance from the absolute. Contrariness here is measured in grades of separation rather than in qualitative difference, thus contrariness is cancelled out by the measure, and more fundamentally, by the disposition of the series of elements out of which the proportion and measure arise. The absolute and the relative are united by the same thing that divides them. The sense in which the simplest thing is an absolute is only relative therefore since the absolute is subordinate to the sequence or series («serie») in which it is disposed according to a certain order. It is no longer the absolute which determines the relationship of the elements around it, rather the absolute is preceded by the relation and thus defined within and in reference to that relation. «Lontano dall’assoluto aristotelico, l’assoluto di Descartes si istituisce nella relazione (rispetto alla quale esso è indifferente), anziche istituire la relazione»128. But who does the ordering and disposing? The mind that establishes the given order, thus disposing things within a series. A glance at the model engendered by this perspective immediately shows that the most absolute is not within the series of things but rather that which establishes the parameters of the series and is thus outside the series itself; the mind that establishes order and disposes the series is therefore the most absolute. For some things are more absolute than others from one point of view, but more relative from another. Thus the universal is indeed more absolute than the particular, since it has a simpler nature, but at the same time one can say it is more relative since it depends on individuals for its existence [382]. In ordering, furthermore, the mind disposes things not according to categories of being, aristotelically, «but only insofar as certain ones (things) can be known through others [381]». The extent and limits of knowability (represented by ease and difficulty) determine the topography of the distribution of the series of things. Those things therefore that orbit closer to the mind’s immediate grasp are established (or establish themselves?) as the relative absolutes among relatives related to them in grades of separation proportional to the complexity of the «mutually subordinate relations they contain [382]». The second half of the 128 BONICALZI, L’ordine della certezza, 54. 59 commentary on Regula VI [384-387] is dedicated to the manner in which the disposition in series from most absolute or simple to most relative or complex is to be employed to garner knowledge of unknown things from their relative disposition within the series and their relation to things that are known. Using the example of numerical proportions Descartes shows how we can discover the main and the mean proportional between numbers gathered indiscriminately once we have established them in an ordered series according to the proportions and relations that are already known. Since the investigation is not of natures but of relations the series levels both the known and the unknown according to these known relations and the unknown are known in terms of their relativity to the knowns and ultimately in terms of their distance from the most absolutely known. What separates the most absolutely knowable or simple, from the most complex and unknown is simply their distance along the same vector of relations. Order, which institutes the series, is what unites (by establishing the series), separates (by the disposition of each thing in the series relative to the absolute, in which each thing is subject to analysis), and unites again (once the proportion of the unknowns are worked out in the light of the series, thus disposed to the synthesis of the unity of the series as such). In Regula VI Descartes makes explicit the establishment of an epistemic order of knowledge and its acquisition alongside, or against (it is not yet clear which), the ontological order of ousia-physis. La connaissance – writes Marion – se fonde sur l’ego connaissant et non sur la chose; ce qui laisserait supposer que l’ousia se transpose dans la series, parce que, plus radicalment, l’ego l’institue où il lui plait, c’est-àdire y preside et s’y substitue129. Whereas the absolute in Aristotle is substance – ousia (that which susbsists independently in itself and not in or related to another) – in Descartes the absolute is only relatively absolute, depending on the point of view of the mind. Substance is irrelevant as a categorial point of reference. Order is genetic in Regula VI, not in the categorial sense in which species are referred to and belong in a certain genus, but rather in the epistemological sense in which reality is not divided according to species and genus but along centrifugal vectors regimented according to grades of immediate knowability. It is genetic in the sense that the most immediately knowable things, closest to the centre – the mind – generate knowledge of the least immediately knowable, those further out from the centre. It is genetic therefore «insofar as certain ones (things) can be known through 129 MARION, Ontologie grise, 99. 60 others [381]». The complex is therefore known only through the simple which is always the most relatively absolute in the series. Everything is instituted as relative to the mind and the gaze or perspective of the mind. Ordo and dispositio thus invert the Aristotelian notion of cosmos and taxis. This inversion is significantly thrown into relief in Descartes’ equivocal use of the term natura. Natura in Regula VI covers the meaning of the character of things130. Within this wide catchment area the term falls into two different orders of meaning. Descartes employs natura to indicate physis, when he speaks of «natures in isolation [381]» and «the nature of each thing [383]»; but he also employs it to designate certain things themselves which are absolutes, that is, those relative absolutes in the mind’s perspective: extension, motion, shape, and so on – the simple natures [cf. 381 and 382, twice]. He makes the transition between the two uses clear in the contexts of the two mentions of nature «in isolation» and «of the thing», made in order to reject them and contrast them with his new establishment of the term natura: «we do not consider their natures in isolation but compare them with one another, in order that certain ones may be known through others [381]» and «we are here considering the sequences of things as objects of knowledge and not the nature of each one of them [382]». The two combine to give an elementary characterisation of the simple natures he is instituting: things not considered in isolation, not as self-subsisting, but insofar as they are comparative, known genetically through, and with reference to, others [381]; and, more succinctly, as objects of knowledge [382]. Nature in this sense is now both instituted and constituted by order, that is, the ordered relationships determined by the order of thought, and not by physis. The thing considered in this manner becomes an object, that is, something that is known not as a thing-in-itself but constituted as relative to knowing; constituted by and in its relationship to the absolute, the mind. Heidegger observes that until Descartes every thing present-at-hand for itself was a “subject”; but now the “I” becomes the special subject, that with regard to which all the remaining things first determine themselves as such. Because – mathematically – they first receive their thingness only through the founding relation to the highest principle and its “subject”(I), they are essentially such as stand as something else in relation to the “subject”, 130 He employs the term natura nine times altogether in Regula VI. 61 which lie over against it as objectum. The things themselves become “objects”131. 2.5 Ordo and terminus: an unwritten syntagm Thus everything is relative to the human subject who institutes an order and disposes in series, things become objects, and the subject is absolute. But is the subject the absolute absolute? When we read for example in Regula VII that «Hic autem ordo rerum enumerandarum plerumque varius esse potest, atque ex uniuscujusque arbitrio dependet [391]» then we might be confirmed in this perspective. But within Regulae VI, VII, and VIII we find instances that undermine this idea; every attribution of ease and difficulty to the knowledge of different things («vero non facile est cunctas recensere [384]»), the advice to begin study with easy things and not difficult things («studiorum initia non esse facienda a rerum difficilium investigatione [384]») in order for the method to work, the need to reflect upon the ease and difficulty of knowing these distinct things themselves («attente reflectendum est ad inventas veritates, cogitandumque diligenter, quare unas aliis prius et facilius potuerimus reperire, et quaenam illae sint [384]»), and most explicitly of all in the enunciation in Regula VIII of the limit of the reach of the method: «Si in serie rerum quaerendarum aliquid occurrat, quod intellectus noster nequeat satis bene intueri, ibi sistendum est, neque caetera quae sequuntur examinanda sunt, sed a labore supervacuo est abstinendum [392]». The human intellect thus imposes order and disposes according to knowing but even in the epistemic order these things come distributed and disposed according to a certain order, at the very least an order of ease and difficulty, and some things within this order occur – adventitiously (occurrat) – which the intellect cannot intuit because they lie beyond its epistemic capacity. Any limit inherent in the intellect’s capacity to know and to order reveals it as inherently limited; if the mind’s establishment of order cannot account for the totality of order but has to negotiate this 131 HEIDEGGER, M., What is a Thing? tr. Barton, W. – Duetsch, V., Chicago, 1968, 1045. According to Heidegger, in the same work, Descartes’ philosophical project, in the wake of the Suarezian «extended interpretation [of the] medieval Aristotle [100]», was, at the same time that it was an argument with the tradition, a willingness to take up the question of substance, that is, the «thingness of the thing [100]». He takes up the Regulae ad directionem ingenii in order to demonstrate his thesis. «In it – he says – the modern concept of science is coined. Only one who has really thought through this relentlessly sober volume long enough, down to its remotest and coldest corner, fulfills the prerequisite for getting an inkling of what is going on in modern science [101]». 62 establishment with at least some semblance of an existing order consisting in the predisposition of things as ready to be ordered by the human intellect, then these two orderings – that of the human intellect and those things that can be known either easily, or with difficulty, or not at all – have to be accounted for by a more fundamental ordering that transcends both things and the intellect. This more fundamental ordering stands as more absolutely absolute in a series in which the subject is now revealed as relatively absolute. When the subject disposes order any which way it wants it is absolute since everything depends on its choice («arbitrio dependet [391]»). When that choice of ordering responds to even the slightest hint of an already present ordering manifested in the disposition of things to be ordered, then the subject is relative to a more absolute order, in which his choice has been antecedently determined or arbitrated (arbitrium arbitratum) to some degree. Heidegger notes that the subject, this “I”, which has been raised to be the special subjectum on the basis of the mathematical, is, in its meaning, nothing “subjective” at all, in the sense of an incidental quality of just this particular human being. This “subject” designated in the “I think”, this I, is subjectivistic only when its essence is no longer understood, i.e., is not unfolded from its origin considered in terms of its mode of being132. That there is an order recognizable by the mind, but which the mind has not access to because it transcends it is made clear when Descartes writes although beginners profit Regula VIII because it saves them from wasting time, «but to those who have «perfectly learned the seven preceding rules, it shows how in any science whatsoever they can satisfy themselves so as to desire nothing further [393]». This is because «whoever received from this rule the order to halt [393]» knows «with certainty [393]» that he has attained knowledge of the limit and this is not ignorance but science, the knowledge of order. This certainty – that which qualifies it as science and not opinion – of the attainment of this limit is achieved through the elimination of the possibility of knowing by means of a complete and sufficient enumeration, as detailed in Regula VII: «et si forte, ut saepe continget, vias omnes, quae ad illam hominibus patent, potuerimus perlustrare, liceat audacter asserere, supra omnem humani ingeni captum positam esse ejus cognitionem [389]». Knowledge of the limit is not only science however but bears a practical application as a pedagogy of desire. The intellect learns to desire its limits because the intellect which desires knowledge learns to 132 HEIDEGGER, What is a Thing?, 105. 63 understand that knowledge of its limits and its capacities is the fundament of the knowledge of everything else: Et quamvis multa saepe ipsi proponi possint, a quibus quaerendis per hanc regulam prohibebitur: quia tamen clare percipiet, illa eadem omnem humani ingenii captum excedere, non se idcirco magis ignarum esse arbitrabitur, sed hoc ipsum, quod sciet rem quaesitam a nemine sciri posse, si aequus est, curiositati suae sufficiet abunde [396]133. Not only are we to seek to understand only that of which we can be certain, we learn to desire to only seek that and to remain within the limits of what our knowledge is capable of because the knowledge of these limits is already the attainment of the knowledge of the order of things. The knowledge condensed above all in the knowledge of the limit is the knowledge of the topography of the human intellect, and it is therefore the knowledge of the ground of the knowledge of everything that can be known. «Nothing can be known before the intellect, since the knowledge of all other things depends on this, and not the reverse [395]». From the perspective of the limit knowledge of the intellect indicates that the intellect is both absolute in relation to the series of things it orders yet relative in relation to the order in which it finds itself ordered. But how is it that the mind imposes order but is also at the same time ordered itself prior to its own self-awareness and exercise? Picking up on the apparent ambiguity between the use of order to designate what the mind enacts upon things and order as that which is already existing in things, Bonicalzi notes ordine/metodo si implicano infatti secondo una ambiguità che viene dallo stesso termine ordine che compare in alcuni passi come qualcosa di naturalmente dato, dunque da seguire, in altri come qualcosa che non si presenta da sé (da escogitare, spiegare…), dunque da stabilire e che è indeterminato («talis» ordo)… si tratta proprio di istituire il passaggio da un ordine all’altro come trascrizione che permette certezza conoscitiva134. If Descartes therefore seems indifferent to the status of order as either in nature or excogitated it is not because of negligence but because of the ambiguous nature of order itself as that which permeates every field 133 «And although many things can often be proposed to him, the investigation of which are forbidden by this rule he will nevertheless not think himself more ignorant for having clearly understood that they exceed the bounds of the human mind; but this knowledge itself, that no one can know the thing in question, will amply satisfy his curiosity if he is reasonable». 134 BONICALZI, L’ordine della certezza, 58. My italics. 64 of its own application but is not enclosed within any, neither by the human intellect. It doesn’t matter as long as it is order and corresponds to the exigencies of the intellect’s desire to know. Order is both a mode of knowing and at the same time that which transcends this mode of knowing insofar as knowing is confined to the human intellect. But the human intellect, insofar as it employs this mode of knowing, mastering the first seven rules, is carried along with order to the point of its transcendence, the limit, the knowledge of which becomes the fundament of a new order in the intellect, one in which it is both absolute and relative; in the first case because it disposes with order and in the second because it is disposed by order. Order progresses from order to order encompassing every concentric circle of existence in its path while simultaneously permeating and defining each circle. Order mediates the passage between these orders and the knowledge of them, rendering them clear and distinct yet maintaining them all within the unity of its own fold. 65 CHAPTER III Order in Regula VII: enumeratio et conversio 66 3.1 «Sufficienti et ordinate enumeratione complecti» Regula VII, the third rule in the inseparable nucleus that forms the core of the Regulae [cf. 392], is advocated as that which brings scientific knowledge to completion, fundamentally by means of two mechanisms: (1) the continuous uninterrupted movement of thought – seen before in Regula III – and (2) a sufficient and ordered enumeration: «Ad scientiae complementum oportet omnia et singula, quae ad institutum nostrum pertinent, continuo et nullibi interrupto cogitationis motu perlustrare, atque illa sufficienti et ordinata enumeratione complecti [387]». The two loci upon which this rule is weighted are both constitutive of, constituted by, and radicated in order, as we have come to understand it thus far, and as such they serve as conditions of the completion of the method that consists in order. Order is operated by the subject in both what we will refer to as the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ poles of this rule – placing them in citation marks to underline their ultimate common radication in the operation of the subject who orders («Hic autem ordo rerum enumerandarum plerumque varius esse potest, atque ex uniuscujusque arbitrio dependet [391]»). We must remember that their radication in the operation of the subject does not render these poles as ultimately subjective; rather, as we have seen, both the subject and the subject’s operation of order are limited by a prior order that conditions them both by means of the limits within which they must respectively dwell and operate: the capacities of the mind, on the one hand, and the ease or difficulty or impossibility of knowability of the things to be ordered, on the other. With that caveat in place we can designate enumeration as the ‘objective’ pole (at any rate the result of the enumeration that stands before the mind in an ordered series, and not the act of enumerating as such which is more clearly ‘subjective’ in the sense we have qualified). We will call the ‘subjective’ pole emendation. This is represented by the «movement of thought which is continuous and nowhere interrupted [387]» by which means «ingeni etiam tarditas emendatur, ejusque capacitas quadam ratione extenditur [388]». The emendation of the mind is simultaneously the extension of its capacity. «Enumeration, or induction, is an inventory of everything that bears on any given question [388]». This inventory is compiled by enumeration or induction, a synonymy introduced by Descartes and inexistent in Aristotle. This synonymy constitutes a difference of considerable 67 significance and further concretizes the scope and nature of Descartes’ dissolution of the Aristotelian categories of being, a dissolution operated by the establishment of ordine et dispositio as both the method and the effect of the method. In Aristotle enumeration precedes induction, as the recollection of particulars that provide the material for the operation of induction, which is the passage from the particular to the universal. In induction the genus is the middle term which mediates this passage by referring one extreme to another in the form of a syllogism: A=B, B=C, therefore A=C, since they both share in B. Enumeration on the other hand is never equated with induction because while enumeration can be theoretically an endless cataloguing of instances induction is always a passage from the particular to the universal because the universal in a certain sense always accompanies the identification of the particular just as the particular, since grasped by sensation, is sense evidence of the universal; «l’induction, – writes Marion – comme elle a parie liée à la sensation…voit, pour ainsi dire l’universel dans le particulier; ou plutot ne voit le particulier comme tel que parce qu’elle le voit comme informé de et par l’universel: apparition sensible de l’universel»135. In order for the universal to escort the particular in the mediation of induction an ontological framework comprised of a categorical order of being is required – precisely the levelling of which Descartes carried out in Regula VI. If Aristotelian enumeration is unscientific and endless inventory on its own yet Aristotelian induction is untenable where no categorial system of being holds sway, how does Descartes assume the conflation of the two into a scientific procedure without the mediation of «syllogistic fetters [389]»? For Descartes a sufficient enumeration is already induction because the order and disposition of the series to be gathered is already preestablished, such that the terms included in the series are not extremes in need of the mediation of a syllogism, but are already mediated by their inclusion in the enumerated series and therefore find themselves in the midst of an a priori relation. Upon enumeration the mediation is immediately given and the relating of the terms within the order of this series thus disposed is also an immediate given, graspable by a single intuitive glance without any interruption to the pure flow of thought. This is possible because whereas «we are unable to distinguish with a single glance of the eyes all the links of a very long chain [389]» if we were to have all the connections between the various links in the chain present to our mind’s eye could see «how the last is connected with the first [389]». 135 MARION, Ontologie grise, 103. 68 If, furthermore, the connection between the links in the chain of deduction were to be the term of the ordered series itself then the mere glance at the ordered series would be also a glance at all the connections at once, since it is the connection and not the individual elements that constitute the absolute term and thus identity of the series. In Regula XIV Descartes further explains this single operation that replaces the syllogism as a comparison: This common idea passes from one subject to another only by means of a simple comparison, through which we affirm that the thing sought after is, in one respect or another, similar, identical, or equal to the thing given, in such a way that in all ratiocination it is only by comparison that we know the truth with precision…Every cognition whatsoever which is not gotten by a simple and pure intuition of one isolated object, is gotten by the comparison of two or more objects with one another. Indeed almost all the labour of human reason consists in preparing this operation; for, when it is open and simple, there is no need for any aid of art, but only of the light of nature alone, for the intuition of the truth that is gotten through it [439440]. Each A is B and each B is C and therefore each C is A, is not a syllogism where B is the middle term and the mediator of the rapport between A and C; rather B is the term that makes the comparison possible. Therefore B, as mediator, both permeates and envelops; it is identified with the entire series, is the nexus between the elements in the series – because they are in the series – and is the reason why they are in the series already in relationship. The series itself is the relationship and no ulterior mediation is needed between the two elements. This way their mere juxtaposition in the series allows for an immediate comparison, not one that requires the discursive movement of thought, that of the syllogism, where three movements are made at least: A is B; C is also B; A is C. Rather, all that is required is the single movement of a glance at the terms juxtaposed serially. This allows for their quick and easy comparison in a movement that can only scarcely be termed a movement if the mere act of gazing is deemed a movement properly speaking. There is therefore no mediation between the gaze and the constitution of the series in relation because the two are simultaneous: I only begin to look at something when I look at something. The immediacy of the look eliminates the mediation of the syllogism. But of course this immediacy eliminates mediation only through another mediation which is that of the instauration of the ordered series. «La comparazione tra termini – writes Bonicalzi – permette di vedere nella relazione secondo un 69 procedimento infinito capace di produrre conoscenza nuova: l’enumerazione ordina infatti una somma di rapporti fino a condensarli in un rapporto unico, nuovo»136. Now since the enumeration is an ordered one it need only be sufficient and not always exhaustive or distinct [cf. 390]. Sufficiency is not a quantitative category but a qualitative one. Sufficient means not defective [cf. 389]; enough so that there are no weak links in the chain of deduction, since the connection between the elements is the strength of the ordered enumeration (and vice versa the ordered enumeration is the manifestation of the connection). This of course leaves the possibility of an almost endless enumeration in regards to questions of quantity, in which case the series could not be constituted anyway since certainty cannot be attained. But it also means that in regard to questions such as the incorporeality of the soul, for example, «it will not be necessary for the enumeration to be complete, but it will be sufficient if I include all bodies at once in certain classes, in such a way as to demonstrate that the rational soul can be referred to none of them [390]», and therefore the endless gathering of enumeration is avoided. 3.2 Enumeration, space, and contact We have described order as mediation of the mind’s vision with immediacy, evidence, and presence – a touching and contact with the mind – and we’ve said that the instrument or operative form of this making evident is the enumerated series. What form does the immediacy-mediation of order manifest when deployed as series? It takes on the form most adequate to vision: space137. Se pensiamo che lo strumento della messa in evidenza è la serie la quale dispiega, in una (messa in) presenza, una continuità di realtà, allora si smaschera la funzione dell’ordine. La serie sostituisce alla spiegazione causale, che è propria della temporalità, una spiegazione nell’ordine, che è propria di una spazialità atemporale138. Order essentially mediates between the gaze, on the one hand, and things, on the other, in such a way as to facilitate their encounter in a virtually timeless space. The encounter is thus composed of the gaze and 136 BONICALZI, L’ordine della certezza, 56 As opposed to time, which would be most adequate to hearing. 138 BONICALZI, L’ordine della certezza, 59. My italics. 137 70 the things disposed as the gazed at. A consideration of this encounter coherent with the framework put forth must reach the conclusion that since there is virtually no time lapse between a thing and the immediate intuition of this thing, there is no movement between the two and therefore no covering of any distance separating the two. The immediacy of vision is therefore identical to the immediacy of touch. The tangible dimension of Descartes’ language in the seventh rule is almost unnoticeable, and unsurprisingly so, since it deals with enumeration-induction as a step in the deployment of the method. Thus the verb complector, complecti in the phrase «sufficienti et ordinate enumeratione complecti [387]», is often translated in the most procedural acception possible. Both the Ariew 139 and Cottingham 140 translations as «included»; whereas Belgioso’s translation prefers «abbracciarle con una enumerazione sufficiente ed ordinate»141 – “to embrace them, to hug them [the things]”, and Marion and Costabel’s translation prefers «comprendre dans un dénombrement suffisant et fait selòn l’ordre»142 – “to comprehend, to encompass”. The three different choices mean more or less the same thing when used in the same context, but not when they constitute the context. There is a difference between include, comprehend and embrace. Complecti is the infinitive of complector and can be translated literally as «to embrace, encircle, surround, encompass», or «to enclose»; it’s transferred meaning can be translated as «to hold fast, master», or «to attach oneself to, esteem»; it can be applied to the mind as «to embrace, grasp, comprehend»; another transferred meaning is «to unite in oneself, or itself»143 which is suggestive from the neoplatonic angle we will approach later on. An authoritative latin-italian dictionary translates the term as «abbracciare, cingere… abbracciare con la mente, concepire… comprendere, riunire, raccogliere… riassumere, concludere»144. In any case it seems to us that the Belgioso translation – who later on translates complecti in the same manner («da poterle abbracciare con un unico intuito (ut illa omnia possit unico intuitu complecti) [389]»145) when referring to the capacity of the intellect which is often not so great to be able to embrace [things] with one sole 139 DESCARTES, Philosophical Essays and Correspondence, 14. DESCARTES, The Philosophical Writings, I, 25. 141 DESCARTES, Regole per la direzione dell’ingegno, 717. 142 DESCARTES, R., Règles utiles et claires pour la direction de l’esprit en la recherche de la vérité, tr. Marion, J-L. – Costabel, P., The Hague, 1977, 22. 143 Casell’s latin dictionary, London, 1935, 113. 144 CASTIGLIONI, L. – MARIOTTI, S., IL: Vocabolario della lingua latina, Torino, 2007, 233-234. 145 DESCARTES, Regole per la direzione dell’ingegno, 720-721 140 71 intuition – which is also the most recent, is the most correct in preserving the nuances that the literal translation as abbracciare (to embrace) contains and that is lost in ‘comprendre’, or ‘include’, not to mention the dynamic nuance of the intuitus that touches, makes contact, with an immediacy only possible in the midst of presence. In fact, a little after the (in-)completion of Descartes’ work on the Regulae he speaks of this embracing and touching dynamic of thought in his letter to Mersenne of May 27, 1630, and distinguishes between the two: «comprendre, c’est embrasser de la pensée; mais pour savoir une chose, il suffit de la toucher de la pensée»146. In an insightful comment on Regula VII Bonicalzi accentuates the perspectival shift that takes place between looking at the enumeration as elements in a series or as a series of elements: Scopo dell’enumerazione è percorrere la serie secondo l’ordine dell’incatenamento operando così la trasformazione di una successione di intuizioni nell’intuizione di una successione, dunque una rappresentazione secondo l’ordine dello spazio e non quello del tempo147. The transformation of a succession of intuitions to the intuition of a succession is a transfiguration of the action of enumerating elements of a series into the action of embracing the elements with a well-ordered and sufficient enumeration. The primary verb here is embracing, and not enumerating. Embracing with a sufficient and well-ordered enumeration implies the verb of enumerating, but it is the verb that accompanies this enumerating that qualifies the meaning of the enumeration: enumerating is accordingly a mode of embracing with thought. It is not that the enumeration precedes the embracing; rather, enumeration is the mode of embracing, and the completion of the enumeration reveals its reason and end. The distinction is analogous to the difference between sitting on the bus and travelling by bus. Sitting on the bus is an action, but the action of travelling by bus qualifies the action of sitting on the bus; the action of travelling is carried out by means of sitting on the bus. Enumerating therefore is embracing, but what is the relevance of this connection? The embracing of a succession of intuitions through enumeration is the mind’s grasping, touching, making contact of the series disposed according to order; since the series of enumerations is ordered (has been mediated by order), it is ordered to the mind’s conditions of 146 DESCARTES, R., Tutte le lettere 1619-1650, a cura di Belgioioso, G., Milano, 2005, 152. 147 BONICALZI, L’ordine della certezza, 59. My italics. 72 knowing, and thus turned – disposed – towards the mind that grasps it to itself. Disposition is a directionality, and the series thus disposed is oriented in the mind’s direction. Extending the bus metaphor, the passengers seated on the bus face the direction of (are disposed towards) the bus’ destination, and are moved towards their destination: immediacy with the mind. We have come full circle to the initial consideration of the role of the intuitus, which we must still see as the wider operational frame of the operation of enumeration, as its context and its goal. To use another metaphor here, enumeration is a ladder that gets kicked away once it has been climbed only to reveal that its base and its top are in the same place. The enumerating is the extending of the contracted ladder of each single intuition, only to contract again in the single intuition of the succession. The immediacy of the enumerated series to the mind’s gaze comes about insofar as the mind is mediated by, and mediative of, an order which it has decided to establish. The moment order is established is the moment that things are made immediate to the mind. We must understand the moment here as the entirety of the operation of the establishment of order which implies its manifestation in disposition and concretion in enumeration; yet the three together form the single operative moment of the establishment of order. The moment that all the things in the enumerated series are marked by order – ordered – they become reconstituted as fundamentally oriented to order, and insofar as the series is relative to the mind as its most absolute absolute (as opposed to the most absolute, simple nature, of the series, which in turn is relative to the mind), they are all constitutively ordered to the mind’s conditions of knowing. But we cannot stop at the consideration of the series as relative only to the ordering mind; we have to consider the mind itself as an element in a larger series, itself ordered. The same order that disposes the enumerated series and transcends it also orders and transcends the mind because it precedes it and limits it. Just as the series is drawn to the mind that orders it by means of the mediation of order, so is the mind drawn to the order that orders it. Just as the mind orders things to itself upon its establishing and following of order, when the mind follows order it establishes it and follows it in itself, and the same movement that radicates and orients things in the mind which mediates order to them, is that which radicates and orients the mind in turn to order which, permeating the mind, mediates order to the mind itself. Due to this radication and orientation of things in the mind’s grasp, put simply and graphically, wherever the mind goes they go. We have seen that order permeates and transcends each dimension of reality, from that of 73 extension (and measure) to that of non-extension, to that of the mind, as if rising through concentric circles centrifugally, with each successive circle embracing all the others. Since order as such must continue to traverse the limits of these concentric circles until it reaches a point that is unlimited, its logical destination is infinity, or the point that is both the innermost circle yet also the infinite one that contains all the others, The image of the circles here is inadequate (how do you represent infinity?), but what is understood is that order crosses over the last limit into a field without limits, and it takes everything before it with it. This field must be unlimited and cannot be contained by any order, although it must contain and effect all other orders, effectively leaving us with the necessity of its being identified as an un-ordered orderer. 3.3 Epistrophé The dynamics we have just expounded logically follow upon what we have extrapolated from the text of the Regulae, but can they also be illumined by a structural symmetry elsewhere? Certainly the destination of order, the innermost yet infinite-most concentric circle or point, recalls Nicholas of Cusa’s coincidentia oppositorum148, the infinitely maximal coinciding with the infinitely minimal, because both as infinite are beyond limits and thus necessarily one and the same, since to be two would be a mutual limitation. However it is the step previous to the arrival at this point that most concerns the context of Regula VII. The structure generated by the notion of an ordered disposition of a series of things turning and moving towards their most absolute point of reference is the mirror image of the classic neoplatonic movement of epistrophé, that is, conversio – conversion or turning-towards. This is doubly the case when we recall that our treatment of intuitus in Regula III, to which we have returned in this chapter, was placed alongside Plotinus’ notion of thinking as touch and immediacy. This plotinian notion of thought as touch also merits a turn in light of what we will see as its connection to the idea of epistrophé. Our scope here is not to enter into the details of plotinian or neoplatonic thought, but to very briefly outline its basic structure, with an eye to identifying a general symmetry that might provide us with some 148 Cf. NICHOLAS OF CUSA, De possest, tr. Hopkins, J., Minneapolis, 1986; also cf. ID., De docta ignorantia, tr. Hopkins, J., Minneapolis, 1981. 74 perspective from which to look at Descartes’ project in the Regulae149. The three ‘moments’ or ‘movements’ in the neoplatonic structuring of reality are: (1) the One: the self-identical principle prior to being, originary of being, although not identical to being (which, being thought and being one, is subject to alterity150). The One is «a simple nature [phusis aplès], a unitary force [energeia mía], that does not have a part in act [energeia] and one in potency [dunamis]»151, such that «being [einai] and activity [energeia] are one and the same thing»152; (2) the second ‘moment’ is that of proceeding (prodos). All reality proceeds from the One as its Source: «all beings are beings in virtue of the One (what could there be if there were no unity?)»153, and this Source «absolutely transcends and contains in itself the entirety of the structure of every reality»154. The One does not need completion since it is self-contained and contains everything. Multiple realities flow forth from the perfect, overflowing and exuberant goodness155 of the One in a hierarchical gradation that proceeds centrifugally. The Nous, or «Intellectual-Principle»156, is the self-relation to the One and is the first reality in this proceeding. The Nous then posits the rational Soul, the «the second emanation»157, and the third emanation which is matter. The nous, the rational soul and matter are all present in man; roughly speaking, the nous as acies anime, the soul as soul and matter as the body. This hierarchy of gradations is altogether representative of multiplicity with reference to the One. The further away from the One it is, however, the more this multiplicity is not only alterity but also opposition to the One, with matter being the most radically opposed to the One, or most turned away from it, and nous being that which is always turned to the One in 149 Descartes would have read Marsilio Ficino and Nicholas of Cusa, but we haven’t the time or space to refer to them. A basic outline of the neoplatonic system wll suffice for our purposes. 150 Plotinus’ reflection on Aristotle’s designation of the first mover as «thought that thinks itself [ARISTOTLE, Metaphysics, 1074b34]» revealed a tension of identity and difference in need of resolution: «Neither is he thought, otherwise above him would be an alterity…He knows not nor thinks himself since ignorance exists when a second being exists and the one knows him not [PLOTINUS, Enneads, VI, 9,6]». 151 PLOTINUS, Enneads, VI, 8, 4. 152 PLOTINUS, Enneads, VI, 8, 4. 153 PLOTINUS, Enneads, VI, 9. 154 BEIERWALTES, W., Plotino. Un cammino di liberazione verso l’interiorità, lo Spirito e l’Uno, Vita e pensiero, Milano, 1993, 31: «the Plotinian nous should be understood as a thinking self-relation, that, in the Ideas immanent to it, thinks its own being and its own thought». 155 PLOTINUS, Enneads, V, 2, 1, 9 156 PLOTINUS, Enneads, V, 2, 1, 10 157 PLOTINUS, Enneads, V, 2, 1, 15-16 75 contemplation. Matter, since it is furthest from and opposed to the One, is associated with darkness, with the scant penetration of the light shining from the One. Plotinus’ identification of matter with evil stems from a reflection on the fragility of the physical world, susceptible to corruption and death and often attracting the soul into vice,1 pulling it downwards into «a dark pit», into the «place of dissimilitude» where it dies, «submerged in the body», a «sinking into matter»158. To sum up, reality and realities, generated and proceeding centrifugally from the One/Good, and therefore intrinsically expressions of this unity and goodness, develop at the same time an aversion and opposition to their Source, falling into darkness, evil and disorder. Yet the (3) third movement in reality is that of the return of all things back to the One in the movement called epistrophé, conversion. Just like reality proceeds from the One through a series of mediations its return to the One is effected by means of a series of mediations. The nexus where the contrast between the world as irradiation of the Good and the problem of evil originates is in the rational soul, and it is here that it must be resolved, as it must order and turn the realities below it, as well as its own self, towards the One; «[the rational soul] looking in front of itself it thinks; looking at itself, it conserves itself in being; looking at what follows it, this orders, governs and commands»159. Epistrophé is a turning inwards and towards renewed coherence with the One, from darkness to light: «le mot strephein – writes Hadot – sert à designer, dans le mythe de la Caverne, la rotation de “l’oeil de l’âme de l’obscurité vers la lumière» 160 . This conversion inwards and upwards requires a spoliation of all exteriority, including, in a certain sense, the exteriority that is the body161 (in which the soul is at its basest point is mixed with matter162 and which therefore assaults the soul with immoderateness, 158 PLOTINUS, Enneads, I, 8, 13, 14-23. Keefer makes the allusive observation that the word «ombre» in a sentence in La recherche de la verité – «rien, que de l’air et de l’ombre» – suggests the elemental darkness – caligo elementalis – that surrounds the soul during this life and is also connected with matter and irrationality. He notes that scholars generally trace the use of images of darkness and illusion in Descartes directly to Plato because they are not familiar with hermetic writings (a vehicle for neoplatonic ideas in the renaissance period, for example Cornelius Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia) [Cf. KEEFER, ‘The Dreamer’s Path’, 61-62]. 159 PLOTINUS, Enneads, IV, 8, 3, 26-31. My italics. 160 HADOT, P., Plotìn, Porphyre: études neoplatoniciennes, Paris, 2010, 37. To this end he cites De musica VI 5, 13; De magistro I 4, 46; De beata vita 4,34; De div. quaest. 83, 9; De immort. animae 7, 12 et 12, 19; Confessiones V 2, 2. 161 PRINI, Plotino e la fondazione dell’umanesimo interiore, 65. Prini also likens Plotinus’ notion of the body to Descartes’ res extensa. 162 PLOTINUS, Enneads, I, 8, 4, 15-17. 76 vices, irrationality163 and obsessive phantasms, generating desires, fears,164 and tensions that cloud the hegemonic and finalistic function of the soul165), and the exteriority of the forms of the mind: «the soul must be nude of forms, in order that no obstacle impedes it from receiving the fullness and illumination of the First Nature»166. In this framework we can recognize the parallel with Descartes’ understanding of the intuitus as immediacy. Thus turning away from exteriority and matter the soul is turned to the One and led into its contemplative activity where that part of the soul that contemplates, because dwelling in the noetic world (here we can understand the acies anime), is «radically immune to every passion» 167 . The soul becomes infused by the presence of the light of the noetic world – through contemplation – such that the lower parts of the soul which are influenced more directly by the body become attracted to this light and modify their behaviour accordingly, as when «a man living next to a Sage would profit by his company, either becoming wise and good himself or, for sheer shame, never venturing any act which the nobler mind would disapprove»168. «Epistrophé a donc à la fois un sens cosmologique et un sens noologique» says Hadot. In St. Augustine the noological and moral sense («il s’agit avant tout d’un retour vers le Dieu present à l’intérieur de l’ame, Dieu qui est Vérité, Lumière et Raison»169) as well as cosmological sense («la creature est tout d’abord dans un état informe, qui tend à l’éloigner de l’unité divine; mais il prend forme, si elle se retourne vers sa source; elle est alors illuminé et achevée»170) are formulated within the horizon of Christian faith. The Confessions can be read according to this scheme as the history of the «conversion-illumination»171 of St. Augustine. 163 PLOTINUS, Enneads, I, 8, 4, 9-12. PLOTINUS, Enneads, IV, 8, 2, 46. 165 PRINI, Plotino e la fondazione dell’umanesimo interiore, 66. 166 PLOTINUS, Enneads, VI, 9, 7, 15-16. 167 PLOTINUS, Enneads, III, 6, 5, 2. 168 PLOTINUS, Enneads, I, 2, 5, 25-27. Also: «The souls whose tendency is exercised within the Supreme have the greater power; immune in that pure seat they create securely; for the greater power takes the least hurt from the material within which it operates; and this power remains enduringly attached to the over-world: it creates, therefore, self gathered and the created things gather round it [Enneads, IV, 3, 6, 2124]». 169 HADOT, P., Plotìn, Porphyre: études neoplatoniciennes, 39. 170 HADOT, P., Plotìn, Porphyre: études neoplatoniciennes, 40. Hadot’s references are De Genesi ad litteram I 1, 2; I 4,9; I 6, 12; II 8, 16; III 20, 31; IV 18, 34; Confessiones XII 9,9; XIII 2, 3; XIII 5, 6. 171 HADOT, P., Plotìn, Porphyre: études neoplatoniciennes, 40. References: Confessiones, XIII 12, 13: «conuersi sumus ad te». 164 77 In both these Augustinian appropriations we can see glimmers of Descartes, and both are striking in their similarity to the project of the Regulae. The moral and noological sense resemble the scope of the Regulae as the attainment of wisdom and universal science set out in Regula I, while the cosmological sense, in which the creature «prend forme, si elle retourne vers sa source» and is thus «illuminé et achevée», resembles that ordering and disposing dynamic of Regulae V-VII in which the elements in the series, turned towards the intellect which in turn is disposed towards its source, become distinct (and clear) and fulfil their place in their relationship to the absolute in its function as a metronomic principle of harmony, according to which they are enumerated. We can imagine this enumerated series standing aligned, collectively faced towards the mediator that has ordered them in a univocal tension towards the unity that transcends the very same mediator of unity. From the perspective of this transcendental unity, order, which mediates unity, is revealed in a new categorization as this very same unity expressed in time and space, that is, the conditions generated by the fact of multiplicity and to which multiplicity are in turn subjected to. Order is the mediation of unity into a coherent multiplicity in the movement of prodos and is the mediation of multiplicity into unity in the movement of epistrophé. 3.4 Ordo et dispositio as restoration of nature Seen through the optic of epistrophé, the characteristics of nature as simultaneously proceeding from the Good yet also pulling away from the Good in a disordered resistance to its Source/Creator, suggest a reconsideration of the role of order and disposition in its regard. The establishment of the series relative to the ego that conceives it effects the instauration of a formal univocity in the consideration of nature that corresponds to ordine et dispositione. This is so to such an extent in fact that «the order of things to be enumerated…can often vary, and it depends on the choice of each person [391]». The product of enumeration, then, the series, is an instauration of an epistemological paradigm of reality in which things are insofar as they can be known according to the mind’s conditions of knowing: the series «achève la disposition de l’ordre en posant l’ordre luimeme comme absolu, en sorte de disposer les res en tant que connues – relatives à l’ordre»172. In this instauration natura gives way to ordo. Nature is no longer understood as physis in the Aristotelian sense but as ordered relationships that can be determined and easily conceived and thus «included 172 MARION, Ontologie grise, 95. 78 in a sufficient and ordered enumeration [387]» that can be «run through, one by one, in a movement of thought which is continuous and nowhere interrupted [387]» in a structural mirroring – or effective simulation – of an intuition, so that one can seem to «intuit the whole thing at once [388]». This inversion of the locus of intelligibility, from the things to the mind that conceives them, can be seen as the dissolution of the notion of being and the dismissal of any metaphysical importance therein. We find in Marion for instance: «La subversion de l’ousia ne constitue pas moins l’instauration d’un nouvel horizon pour l’Etre des étants, que la catastrophe terminale, où s’abolirait le souci de l’Etre»173. But from the perspective of the epistrophic dynamism we are delineating in Descartes’ usage of ordo, this ‘subversion’ and ‘instauration’ take on a light that suggests something much grander in its scope than an epistemological re-categorization. The break with the aristotelian scheme of kosmos and taxis – «La contradiction des natures révèle parfaitement comment l’ordre et la disposition rompent (avec) le kosmos et la taxis»174 – in favour of that of ordo and dispositio seen from this perspective is not so much a question of the re-evaluation of reality according to a purely epistemological principle; this it is, but only insofar as this epistemological principle is preceded and informed by an ontology in which order and disposition play a fundamental role in the restoration of a nature fallen into disorder and disharmony. The shift from kosmos and taxis to ordo and dispositio is constitutive of epistrophé, understood within the frame of a cosmic movement that integrates the mediation of the mind into the rescuing of nature into a renewed unity and harmony with its principle from out of its disordered and precarious state. In traditional neoplatonism the precariousness of nature is the result of its distance from the light and subsequent turning away from and opposition to the One; in St. Augustine’s Christian appropriation of neoplatonism the precariousness of nature is the consequence of its subjection to sin, and thus is in open rebellion against its Creator. This is why the univocalization of being into enumerated series, disposed according to the order established by the mind is not necessarily a reduction of being to number and measure; it throws into relief the relational aspect of things in their cosmic relation to the ego. Like any primordial relation nature requires a word received first in order to be disposed into relation, in this case a re-establishment of the relation lost. This word is ordo, which precarious nature receives as a word of reconciliation and which re-establishes it into relation with the one 173 174 MARION, Ontologie grise, 93. MARION, Ontologie grise, 93. 79 through the mediation of the ego/mediator who in turn is mediated by order towards the One. This relationality is made apparent only in considering them insofar as they are related to the human mind, and this relationality, through its subjection to order and the transversality of order is necessarily revealing of its relationship – this time through the human mind – to the Creator. Through this re-instauration of their relationship to their Creator, operated by order and disposition, the primordial relationality of nature is revealed and deployed, and it is reconciled with and re-instituted into its original harmony as expressions of the communication of the Good according to its fundamental dynamism: bonum est diffusivum sui175. 3.5 Absence and time: order as eschatology We had earlier characterized the enumerated series disposed in a certain order as fundamentally spatial in its presence to the intellect, as opposed to the temporality of a causal explanation: «La serie sostituisce alla spiegazione causale, che è propria della temporalità, una spiegazione nell’ordine, che è propria di una spazialità atemporale»176. We have leaned on Bonicalzi’s categorization of order as manifest in spatiality and while this is an adequate synchronic account of order when it is evident and present, order also necessarily implies the encompassing of non-spatiality, otherwise it would be limited to the same spatial configuration it has itself limited, and this cannot be so, since order necessarily traverses the limits of spatial measurement. Order, to put it in open-ended negative terms, also embraces the meaning of non-spatiality. It goes beyond the limits of the spatial to what cannot be seen and measured. And thus, in contradistinction to the model of certain knowledge mediated by order – the immediate and direct intuition – order, even in Descartes, implies a certain temporality, not that of causality, but that of the temporality implicated in the passage from notknowing to knowing. In other words, order embraces both the presence of order and the absence of order and the passage from the one to the other. It 175 Perhaps this relationality can also be understood within the fold of St. Thomas Aquinas’ doctrine of the transcendentals as developed in his Questiones disputate de veritate. Understanding nature in primarily its aspect of order (relative to the human mind) can be seen as - far from an abolition of being - a privileging of those aspects of being that dispose it to the reception of the soul/subject: the good and the true. This would of course need further investigation and lies beyond our scope here. 176 BONICALZI, L’ordine della certezza, 59. My italics. 80 weaves them together with its thread of intelligibility that surpasses the limits of the human intellect. Order here is in need of the mediation of time to become manifest from its absence into its presence. Just as it disposes itself to the mediation of the human intellect, order also allows itself to be mediated by time in the process of becoming established in the ordering process. But paradoxically just as order mediates the human intellect, order mediates even its own mediation by time because it traverses its own ordering into distinct spheres of reality, and thus also traverses the limits of time and reaches into the infinite and a-temporal. It therefore envelops the meaning of the combination of spatiality and temporality and the different orders enclosed therein. The importance of order’s delayed mediation of the absence of evidence and presence in those instances when they are not manifest to the human intellect and beyond its reach – such as in the apparent absence of order posed by the existence of evil – lies in that order is ultimately, following the logic of the Regulae, eschatological. In perceived (present) order and in awaited (absent) order, in the juxtaposition in series of the known alongside the unknown in a univocal disposition and ordering, order takes on the meaning of the answer that is given and yet to be given, but ultimately always given, even if the passage from its absence to its presence is subjected to the mediation of time. From the perspective of epistrophé the eschatological character of order is even clearer, since the notion of the originary unity of the universe is identical to that of its final unity, and the mediations of realities by higher realities, for example the mediation of matter by the human mind, manifest its incidence as signposts and promises along the way from darkness and absence to light and presence. With the notion of order as both the vehicle of mediation and also the space of mediation Descartes has (advertently or inadvertently) woven together the immediacy and presence of the intuitus, occasioned in the trope of spatiality, to the concept of cosmic conversion, epistrophé, which adds a dynamism and finality to the disposition in an ordered series, and through epistrophé to the concept of order as that which is promised in it’s own absence, occasioned in the trope of temporality, resulting in a conceptualization of order as structurally eschatological. Along the same lines we can say that by means of the mediation of order Descartes has wrested the primacy of being from the concept of nature in order to establish the primacy of the human intellect, and then further – since the mediation of order doesn’t stop at the human intellect – crossing the limits of human knowing into the absence of meaning and intelligibility, where it hides all the while weaving together everything it has traversed, only to 81 appear again in the reconciliation of nature and the human intellect itself into a cosmic harmony with the One/Creator. We have extrapolated this meaning from the behaviour of the notion of order in the Regulae, yet we find a distant similarity in a place where we have found it before; St. Augustine’s treatment of order, according to the study of Bouton-Touboulic, «innove en unissant sous le meme vocable d’ordre le cosmos et le saeculum, l’ontologique et l’historique, l’histoire étant le lieu où le mal, privation d’etre, s’intégre à l’ordre»177. Yet if history is the place where time, space and disorder are integrated into order, history is mediated by the actions of men. We have considered order so far in this chapter in its ‘objective’ aspect, but this treatment would be incomplete without a consideration of the ‘subjective’ aspect, that Descartes alludes to in Regulae VI and VII, and develops in Regulae IX – XII. Our consideration of the concept of order would be amiss if we did not take into account the one limit that order does not traverse: freedom. The requisite of the establishment of order in the reconciliation of all things to the originary and final order is the mediation of the human intellect, and this mediation only passes through the door of human freedom – otherwise their would be no need for a method in the first place. 177 BOUTON-TOUBOULIC, A-I., L’Ordre caché: La notion d’ordre chez saint Augustin, Paris, 2004, 648. She goes on to that St. Augustine «transforme ainsi radicalement les conceptions néoplatonicennes du mal, épuissement de l’etre, mais en garde l’exigence d’une union à Dieu par un processus de connaissance et de purification». 82 CHAPTER IV «Becoming accustomed»: the anthropology of order in Regulae IX-XII 83 4.1 Will and order That the human being should find himself as the crucial link in the mediation of order casts the perspective of the establishment of order in the Regulae upon the subjective conditions that allow for this mediation to take place. Despite the notion of order as an establishment involving the capacity of the intellect to recognize and institute order in things (following and effecting the rule of order) the fact of freedom forces us into a consideration of the relationship of the will with the concept of order. Indeed prior to the formulation of the constitution of the method in Regula V («Tota methodus consistit in ordine et dispositione [379]») Descartes announces his decision to employ order tenaciously and in the midst of its application to go no further until order has been fully manifested (hence the tenacity): «At ego, tenuitatis meae conscius, talem ordinem in cognitione rerum quaerenda pertinaciter observare statui, ut semper a simplicissimis et facillimis exorsus, nunquam ad alia pergam, donec in ipsis istis nihil mihi ulterius optandum superesse videatur [379]»178. Once we have thrown into relief the emphasis on the exercise of the will in the act of decision, we get a glimpse of its fundamentally constitutive role in the exercise of the method. The prominent role of the will, furthermore, indicates the intertwining character of the presence of order in both the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ aspects of its mediation. We can see allusions to these subjective conditions in the constitution of Descartes’ development of the methodical dynamics of ordo and dispositio in Regulae V, VI and VII. If the epitome of certain knowledge is the intuitus then it follows that the subjective conditions Descartes lays out are related to the capacity to ‘see’; Now if these conditions are those through which the establishment of order is mediated then this establishment of order is in some way dependent upon the nexus of ‘freedom/seeing’ and the activity that directly and proportionally connects the two: the exercise of the will. Of course the will’s exercise requires persistent training culminating in the habit of mental ascesis. In these three regulae, that contain in nuce the subjective dynamics that Descartes subsequently develops in Regulae IX, X and XI, we see ordo alternately in the role of a propaedeutic and as the fruit its own propaedeutic. Order, in this regard, is a pedagogy of the spirit by means of which, through the exercise of the will, the spirit increases both its capacity to see order and its capacity to institute order. 178 My italics. 84 From the perspective of the subject, the will precedes the establishment of order, since order is set forth by the will’s decision. The will also accompanies the development of order since this is sustained by the exercise of mental ascesis. But the decision to establish order is also preceded by the logically prior ordering of the will – at least in the sense that the will is constituted as (potentially) positioned to preside over the institution of this order and this constitution is prior to the decision of the will. The relationship could be almost infinitely circular to the extent in which the human will is concerned. Order and decision to order, order and the decision to sustain order ascetically, order and the will mutually sustained and conditioned in a symbiotic relationship. The moment that the human will hits upon the limits of its capacity, this almost infinite circularity also hits its limit and origin, yet this cedes – from the human subject’s point of view – to an infinitely infinite circularity between order and a suprahuman will that decides this order and decides to sustain this order. This is not so much a theological jump as much as a logical progression, since this suprahuman will may be that either of a personal God who ‘wills’ in the analogically anthropological sense, or an impersonal force or even a void, whose circular relationship with order may be that of not existing alongside order such that order orders without an accompanying volition; but whether this circularity is constituted by order and a volition or by order without volition, it still fulfils the role of a determination of sorts; it fills the logical space necessary to complete the progression from the almost infinite circularity (human volition and order) to the infinitely infinite circularity (suprahuman volition/non-volition and order), since a radical logical indetermination has nevertheless the effect of a form of determination of the ordering activity of order. In other words, an in-determination is nonetheless a form of determination. How is this circularity in the relationship between human will and order expressed in the Regulae? We suggest that it is expressed throughout the text in any place where order and some form of exercise of the will appear in the same passage. To focus our regard however we will examine Descartes’ use of one verb that we suggest serves as the matrix in and through which this circularity manifests itself, and in the light of which we can best read and qualify the ascetical exercise of the mind in its active self-conditioning towards the appropriation of order: assuescere – to accustom or to be accustomed. 85 Descartes’ development, therefore, of the two faculties of perspicacitas and sagacitas in Regulae IX, X and XI, charged with increasing the mind’s capacity to respectively intuit and deduce with greater penetration, can be most comprehensively understood in the light of his use of the verb assuescere. 4.2 Becoming accustomed 4.2.1. Bearing the open light The verb appears in the enunciation of Regula IX upon the introduction of the section dedicated to the subjective conditions of the method: «Oportet ingenii aciem ad res minimas et maxime faciles totam convertere, atque in illis diutius immorari, donec assuescamus veritatem distincte et perspicue intueri [400]»179. All our effort must be used to concentrate on those smallest and simplest things, but it also must be used to dwell on those things – to stop among them for a long time – since our habitual inclination is to superficially move beyond those things onto others more complicated or apparently more enticing. This is the ascetical accent of Regula IX in which the direct activity of the mind is called into question. But to what end? Until we become accustomed («assuescamus») to intuiting the truth clearly and distinctly. And it is this verb assuescere which at first glance suggests the active repetition of a given action (one ‘is accustomed to doing something’ a particular way, ‘has the custom of doing’ such and such, is ‘used to doing’ such and such), that clearly also represents a certain passivity. This is so in the sense that to actively ‘accustom oneself’ to something is at the same time to ‘become accustomed’, and therefore receptive to that thing. In all seven explicit mentions of assuescere in the Regulae (in Regulae II [363], IV [371], VI [384], IX [400 and 401], and X [405, twice]) it is used in the reflexive sense of ‘to be accustomed’. The semantics borne by the active (but not the passive) dynamism of this verb are also borne by the verb exercere, mentioned 10 times in the Regulae (in Regulae I [359], II [363], VIII [397], IX [400, 401 and 402], X [403, 404 and 405], and XII [429]). Two syntagms in Regula IX containing the terms exercere and aptior («aptiores reddi ad illas exercendas [400]» and «exercitio ingenia ad hoc reddi possunt longe aptiora [402]») each express the meaning of the word assuescere while at the same time distinguishing the semantics of exercere and assuescere. The paragraph in which the latter syntagm is 179 My italics. 86 found [402] also forms a larger syntagm which clarifies the relationship between assuescere and exercere and renders assuescere almost synonymous to aptior: Assuescant igitur omnes oportet tam pauca simul et tam simplicia cogitatione complecti, ut nihil unquam se scire putent, quod non aeque distincte intueantur ac illud quod omnium distinctissime cognoscunt. Ad quod quidem nonnulli longe aptiores nascuntur, quam caeteri, sed arte etiam et exercitio ingenia ad hoc reddi possunt longe aptiora [402]180. If assuescere is rendered only almost (and not entirely) synonymous to aptior it is because it is assuescere that qualifies aptior; that is, the form which aptitude takes on in the context of the application of the method is that of ‘being accustomed’. At this point assuescere, or ‘being accustomed’ is an aptitude that contains an active dynamism (that expressed by exercere) but this active dimension does not exhaust its meaning. We need to understand the manner in which this verb is constituted by a passive dimension. We can do this by briefly analysing the semantic fields surrounding the other five mentions of the verb. A cursory glance at the contexts of the uses reveals a dichotomy between those of Regulae II and IV in which Descartes attacks the procedure of scholars who proceed without method (or without the method, in any case) and the uses in Regulae VI and IX, in the context of the delineation of the method. The two mentions in Regula X reproduce this dichotomy in the space of one paragraph. Hence we have the context of falsity in Regula II («et quia crediderunt indignum esse homine litterato fatori aliquid se nescire, ita assuevere commentitias suas adornare, ut sensim postea sibimetipsis persuaserint, atque ita illas pro veris venditarint [363]»), in which one, by being accustomed to adorning rather than clearing away false arguments, is no longer able to distinguish them from the truth, and thus proclaim them as true. Accustoming themselves to falsity they see, construct and speak that which is false. And we have the context of darkness in Regula IV («certissimum enim est, per ejusmodi studia inordinata, et meditationes obscuras, naturale lumen confundi atque ingenia excaecari; et quicumque ita in tenebris ambulare assuescunt, adeo debilitant oculorum aciem, ut postea lucem apertam ferre non possint [371]») in which, on the one hand (the ‘objective’ pole), the natural light is obscured or darkened and, on the other (the ‘subjective’ pole), the mind is blinded and the acuteness of the eye is weakened through being accustomed to walking in the dark and dis180 My italics. 87 accustomed or unaccustomed to walking in the light, the same light with which and in which they are able to tell truth from falsity. The last segment of the phrase is particularly interesting: «ut postea lucem apertam ferre non possint [371]» – such that they can no longer bear the open light. The concepts hidden in the words «lucem apertam ferre» are what interest us most and we sustain that, combined with the verb assuescere, they contain in nuce the entirety of the subjective conditions, that is, the anthropological prerequisites, for the operation of the method. An allusive occurrence of the syntagm «lucem apertam» can be found in a strikingly similar vein in the works of Francis Bacon, in the context of his Instaurationis magna, pars V, ‘Descriptio globi intellectualis’, in which the «lucem apertam» is the destination reached after coming out of the dark and shadowy places, «ex locis opacis et umbrosis in lucem apertam»181. The neoplatonic influence seems present here as it is in Descartes and adds to the weight we are giving this little phrase, not least because Bacon’s Instaurationis magna shares the scope of Descartes’ Regulae: the emendation of the mind (and Descartes was in the midst of his work on the Regulae when Bacon published his Novum Organon in 1620). Ariew translates «lucem apertam» as «the light of the day»182 as does Belgioso («la luce del giorno»183). We have translated it literally as «the open light» because it preserves the dynamic at work in the phrase better than the more metaphorical but perhaps too colloquially familiar «light of day». We will have an idea of the structure of this open light by the end of this section, but we venture now to postulate this structure as that which renders a clearing in the intentionality of knowing such that whatever enters that clearing is rendered clear and distinct. The open light is in this sense an ‘analytical’ light, precisely because it delineates the contours, lines and forms of what it is poured out on. But this open light is also that which binds the things gathered in the clearing together, not by reducing the space between them that allows their distinction to be rendered lucidly, but by joining things together within the 181 BACON, F., The Works of Francis Bacon, 15 voll., London, 1824, IX, 296. The paragraph where the syntagm is located reads: «Omnibus qui aderant digna magnitudine generis et nominis humani oratio visa est, et tamen libertati quam arrogantiae, propior. Ita autem inter se colloquebantur: se instar eorum esse, qui ex locis opacis et umbrosis in lucem apertam subito exierint, cum minus videant quam prius; sed cum certa et laeta spe facultatis melioris». 182 DESCARTES, R.,Philosophical Essays and Correspondence, tr. Greene M. – Ariew R.,, 7. 183 DESCARTES, R., Regole per la direzione dell’ingegno, in ID., Opere postume, a cura di G. Belgioioso, 699 88 very same intuitive gaze. The open light in this context is the ground or fundament of the distinct and clear things in the gathering of a particular ordered and enumerated series, and disposed or inclined towards the origin or bearer of that light as the absolute to which all these things in the clearing are relatives. The open light thus distinguishes, binds and draws things to itself. The verb ferre has a variety of meanings and among those which fit in this context we have those of ‘to bear’ in the sense of ‘to withstand’ and ‘to bear’ in the sense of ‘to hold’ ‘to contain’ or ‘to carry’; ‘to receive’; ‘to manifest’, ‘to show’, ‘to present’, ‘to disclose’; ‘to give’, ‘to generate’ or ‘to produce’; and we have ‘to denominate’ and ‘to call’184. In synthesis, the eyes of those dis-accustomed to the natural light are unable to receive, withstand, bear, manifest, or generate the open light. If they are unable to receive it and to bear it they are unable to generate it since they don’t have it, and if they are unable to show and generate it then they are unable to mediate it because this «open light» needs to be accepted, received and borne by the one who mediates it to other things. But the moment that one is illumined by this open light one is already bearing and manifesting it and therefore also mediating it. It is transmitted to the extent to which it is borne, and it is borne to the extent to which one is accustomed to it. But ferre also encloses the two meanings of ‘to denominate’ and ‘to call’ which in this context respectively correspond to the structure of ordering and to that of turning-towards and revolving around the ego. In the last section we saw how the series compiled and disposed in an ordered enumeration is effected upon the prior ‘denomination’ (so to speak) of the terms in an established order, while this ordering is a ‘calling’ of things to order around the absolute, and as such is a mediation of their turning – conversio – towards their immediate absolute in the series, the ego, in order in turn to draw them, in the ego that bears them, towards the most absolute in the series of which the ego is a part, the infinite absolute, the One/Creator. These two meanings also apply in the perspective of nature as that which has drifted away from its source and towards the caligine of darkness and shadows, into discord and disharmony (whether seen from the Christian perspective of the effects of original sin or the neoplatonic dynamic of the centrifugal distancing of matter from the light), and is called through the human mediation of order back into the luminous harmony with the One/Creator. 184 Dizionario Latino (http://wwww.dizionario-latino.com). Also cf. LEWIS, C. – SHORT, C., A Latin Dictionary, Oxford, 1969, 737-739. 89 If we were to base ourselves solely on the interpretation enclosed in these three words, lucem apertam ferre, we would conclude that the subjective conditions of the method – the capacity to see and establish order – depend upon our ‘being accustomed to withstanding/ receiving/ bearing/ manifesting/ disclosing/ giving/ generating/ denominating in/ and calling to/ the open light’. 4.2.2 Seeing geometrically We’ve extrapolated these meanings from a consideration of the negative context of Regulae II and IV, but in order to see if they actually obtain in the structure of the method we have to now consider the use of assuescere in the context of the method properly speaking, beginning with its appearance in the commentary to Regula VI. The methodical exigency, outlined in this rule, of intuiting the simplest natures – those most absolute in any sequence – is accompanied by a number of practical parameters geared at capacitating the mind towards this intuition. First of all they can be intuited either by experience or by the light implanted within us: «vel in ipsis experimentis, vel lumine quodam in nobis insito licet intueri [383]». How do we intuit these simple natures and how do we capacitate the light implanted within us by which we see them? The simple natures must be distinguished from those more relative natures in the sequence by diligent observance («diligenter esse observandas [383]») of the manner in which they form the nexus in each series and we must also «observe in what way all things are more or less or equally removed from it [381]». The manner in which the more complex or relative natures are removed from the simple or absolute natures is in the form of a numerical progression measured in the number of conclusions interposing between the former and the latter, that is, in grades of separation. The mention of grades of separation appears four times in the commentary to this rule, thrice implicitly (381, 382 and 383) when Descartes speaks of things that are known through others, and once explicitly when stating that the number of conclusions separating relatives from the absolutely simple in the series «must be noted, so that we may know if they are removed from the first and simplest propositions by a smaller or greater number of steps (gradibus) [383]». The act of «noting» these conclusions takes place in the traversal of the grades of separation, a movement that brings us back to the dynamics of ascensio/reductio which we have already seen in our treatment of Regula V. As we noted earlier reductio and ascensio are distinct directions of the same ultimate movement of unity of vision that traverses the entirety 90 of the series in grades or steps («gradatim reducamus…gradus ascendere [379]») and in both cases this movement is finalized in the achievement of analytic purity and synthetic wholeness185. The mutually implicative structure of this movement suggests the geometric distribution of the elements in the series along these grades of separation. The simple and the complex, the analytic and the synthetic, mutually imply the geometric progression and reduction from and to a simple nucleus, and the necessity of being able to perceive this geometric relationship present in and through all the «interconnections (mutuum illorum inter se nexum [382])» with and around the maximally simple element «and their natural order (naturalemque ordinem [382])»186. Our observing and taking note of this geometric distribution engenders in us the apprehension of a pattern. A pattern is a single figure comprised of multiple figures but grasped as one, a unity. Descartes refers to the sequence of connections again [cf. 383] and notes that they must be distinguished, by «some insight of the mind (acumine quodam ingenii187) [384]» because of the difficulty of retaining them in memory. Once again he speaks of the need to «form the mind [384]» in order that it might readily «perceive these sequences [384]» whenever necessary. Now the end or aim of this exercise is neither the distinction of the relations [cf. 382], nor the observation of the pattern of interconnections [cf. 382]. Rather, these are prerequisites that enable us to «proceed from the last of [the relations] to the most absolute, passing through all the rest [382]». The onus is on developing speed of movement, from the most relative to the absolute. Why? Learning to distinguish the relations and to Cf. AUGUSTINE De ordine, tr. Borruso, S., 113-115: «In analysis I seek unity purified; in synthesis I seek it whole [2.18.48]». 186 What does Descartes mean by ‘natural’? We might be tempted to think of a slip up here in which in the midst of instituting an epistemological order he consents a reference to the order of being in the classic Aristotelian sense. Or he uses the term nature in the sense in which the new organization and disposition of things according to their knowability to the mind engenders a new organization of the cosmos, a new taxis and the manner in which the things are interconnected between them is natural to this context, the context of that which comes naturally first to the mind. I lean towards the second interpretation, as do Marion and Costabel, citing the correspondence in Geometrie I, 372, 15-18: «…parcourrir la dificulté selon l’ordre qui montre, le plus naturellement de tous, en quelle sorte elles dependent mutuellement les unes des autres [cf. DESCARTES, R., Règles utiles et claires pour la direction de l’esprit en la recherche de la vérité, tr. Marion, J-L. – Costabel, P., 175]». 187 Translated by Marion and Costabel as «une certaine pointe de l’esprit [DESCARTES, R., Règles utiles et claires pour la direction de l’esprit en la recherche de la vérité, tr. Marion, J-L. – Costabel, P., 178]», thereby reinforcing the similitude with acies mentis in Regula V. 91 perceive the patterns through the practice of diligent observation of the things present enables the subtler capacity of anticipating the pattern by penetrating to it’s absolute centre on the evidence of even its most relative and peripheral component. The figure is analogous, say, to the detective who figures out the motive and identity of a criminal from some apparently irrelevant cue hitherto unnoticed. The method therefore seems to rest upon the ability of the mind’s eye to perceive this geometric relationship, to apprehend it’s pattern, as it were, in a single glance, to the extent to which it is enabled to anticipate the pattern from even it’s most peripheral relation. We could say the method is both dependent upon and formative of the capacity to see geometrically. Now if it both depends on and forms this seeing, the relationship of the two can again be seen as symbiotic, since the mind needs order (here referred to in metaphorically geometric terms) to see, and order requires the mediation of this seeing mind for its own deployment. Read in the light of our interpretation of the verb ‘assuescere’, Descartes’ advice to take the most effective means for the attainment of this capacity to see geometrically is consistent with this symbiotic relationship: «nihil aptius esse sum expertus, quam si assuescamus ad minima quaeque ex iis, quae jam ante percepimus, cum quadam sagacitate reflectere [384]». The ease with which this dynamic lends itself to being overlooked in the text can be seen for example in how Ariew’s simple omission of the term «assuescamus» renders the phrase: «to reflect with some sagacity on the very smallest of those things we have already perceived»188. The active dynamic of the subject is emphasized while the passive dynamic must be extrapolated through the context. Belgioioso and Cottingham, however, translate it more literally, and I think more adequately, as «abituarsi a riflettere»189 and «accustoming ourselves to reflecting»190. Significant in this context is the use of the verb «occurrere», which appears 20 times throughout the Regulae. There are two instances that suffice for our consideration on this point: the first lies within the commentary on Regula VI in which Descartes proceeds to explain the mechanics of the method with the example of trying to find the three mean proportionals lying between the given numbers 3 and 48 [cf. 386]. 188 DESCARTES, R., Philosophical Essays and Correspondence, tr. Greene M. – Ariew R., 13. My italics. 189 DESCARTES, R., Regole per la direzione dell’ingegno, in ID., Opere postume, a cura di G. Belgioioso, 713 190 DESCARTES, R., The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, tr. Cottingham, J. et al., 3 voll., I, 23 92 Descartes asks if it is more difficult to do so than it was to find the previous set of proportionals lying between the numbers 3 and 24, and answers: «at first sight it does seem so [386]». However he then he goes on to say: «But then it occurs to us at once (sed statim postea occurrit) that this difficulty can be divided and diminished [386]», as if coming to us through an inspiration of sorts; the second lies in the formulation of Regula VIII when it is referred to the presentation of a limit to our intuition of the elements in a series: «If in the series of things to be examined anything presents itself (aliquid occurrat) which our intellect is unable to intuit sufficiently well, we must stop there and should not examine what follows, but abstain from superfluous labour [392]». In this second case, the appearance of the limit also takes place in the form of an inspiration. These two instances highlight the simultaneously active and passive dynamic in the execution of the method. What occurs to us, presents itself to us, does so as something external to us, yet occurring within our intuitive capacity, either as an opening that clears the way forward in the attainment of truth, or as a door that, like a negative light, reveals a the knowledge of a limit (and is thus also a step forward in the attainment of truth). In both cases that which occurs, occurs during the exercise of the method, in the first instance at the outset, and in the second instance some way along its course. Seen in a wider light, what occurs occurs within the active/passive process of ‘becoming-accustomed’. Under this reading we understand that the occurrence of a certain truth – be it an opening or a limit – is the fruit of the activity of becoming-accustomed. The method, in essence, is ‘becoming-accustomed’ to order. This involves observing order, allowing order to order us through our will to conform ourselves to order, and instituting order in our ordered (because conformed to order) action. Remaining within the commentary on Regula VI, let us turn back to Descartes’ final note prior to the examples concerning the mean proportionals: Finally, it should be noted, in the third place, we ought not to begin an inquiry with the investigation of difficult matters. Rather, before we set out to attack any definite questions, we must first collect indiscriminately all the truths that spontaneously present themselves, then gradually see if others can be deduced from them, and from these last yet others, and so on. That done we must reflect attentively on the truths we have discovered and consider carefully why we have been able to find some sooner and more easily than others, and which ones they are. This we do so that we may also be able to judge, when we begin some definite question, to what other inquiries we could profitably apply ourselves first [384]. 93 With the method we begin with what is given spontaneously and we begin with what is easy, rather than with what is difficult; and we gradually examine all the truths given spontaneously to us. Three attitudes are discernible in these preliminary counsels: an indiscriminate receptivity to what is given spontaneously; an assiduous responsiveness to the spontaneously given by undertaking a gradual examination of each and every given; and intellectual humility in the face of the task at hand, in the counsel to begin not with what is difficult, but with what is most easily present to the intellect 191. We could perhaps group the three attitudes further into just one: generosity. Generous reception of the reality of the given, a generous cooperation with the given to bring it to fruition, and a generous recognition of the structure of reality. This three-tiered generosity is an aspect of the wider reality of “becoming-accustomed”, the fundamental decision necessary for the conditioning of the will to enter the path of the method. The decision, to emphasize the point once more, is a decision to receive. It is the active cooperation with the given that enables the mind to perceive and establish order because it enables it first, and above all, to receive it. This decision, like all resolutions, doesn’t really become an orientation of the will properly speaking until it is rendered consistent. The will is modified in a certain orientation through the development of certain virtues, and these in turn are acquired by the combination of the application of a certain pedagogical method and the constant repetition of that method, in other words a training or practice. Descartes speaks of the necessity of repetition in the commentary to Regula VII in which the «sluggishness of the mind is corrected and its capacity in a certain sense extended [388]» by running through «one by one, in a movement of thought which is continuous and nowhere interrupted, all those matters which bear upon our undertaking [387]», and to do so «several times [388]». Thus Descartes describes the procedure from the point of view of the activity itself. The locus of his concern, however, is in the subject of this activity, the consideration of which he dedicates Regulae IX, X, and XI to. 4.3 Regulae IX and X: perspicacitas et sagacitas In Regulae IX, X and XI Descartes expounds two faculties of the mind upon which this capacity of seeing rests, the growth of which demands a constant practice of intellectual ascesis. These are «perspicacity, 191 An attitude consistent with the words ‘Initium sapientiae timor Domini’ written on his first notebook. 94 in having a distinct intuition of each thing, and sagacity, in easily deducing certain facts from others [400]». His treatment of the two virtues also further develops the significance of repetition as the key to their attainment, and deepens the notion of becoming-accustomed. Perspicacity and sagacity clearly correspond to the two operations of intuition and deduction. They can be developed or left undeveloped – with the proportional effect in the effectiveness of the respective operations of intuition and deduction – the difference between these two states being the free decision to continuously exercise the will in their development or not. Since all the regulae that follow Regulae V, VI, and VII are in Descartes’ words merely particular explanations of what is generally held in these three we will look at traces of the appearance of the faculties of perspicacity and sagacity in the context of these because it is here where we can have a fuller picture of the way they are interwoven into the general picture of the establishment of order. Descartes has already alluded to these in Regulae VI and VII – sagacity explicitly and perspicacity implicitly, both times mentioned together in the same phrase [cf. 384 and 387]. He begins his commentary to Regula IX with a statement of his aim for the next two rules, which is «to explain by what procedure we can become more skilled in using [the operations of intuition and deduction] and at the same time developing the two principle faculties of the mind, perspicacity, in having a distinct intuition of each thing, and sagacity, in easily deducing certain facts from others [400]»192. The aim of Regula IX specifically is to increase the capacity of clear and distinct intuition of the truth: «We ought to turn the whole force of our minds (ingenii aciem) to the smallest and simplest things, and to stop there for a long time, until we become accustomed to intuiting the truth clearly (perspicue) and distinctly [400]» 193 . Although it appears as only an adjective in the enunciation (perspicue), the virtue of perspicacity is at the centre of Descartes concern. He contrasts the behaviour of those who try to grasp many objects with one single glance and «see none of them distinctly [401]», with that of «artisans who practice delicate operations, and are accustomed to direct the force of their eyes attentively to single points, [and] acquire by use the ability to distinguish perfectly things as tiny and subtle as may be [401]». Curiously the first behaviour is criticized while the second is praised; in Regula I the Cartesian ideal of science is very clearly against the specialization of the sciences according to the model of handicrafts [cf. 360]; in Regulae III, VII and XI, he speaks of the need to 192 My italics. «Oportet ingenii aciem ad res minimas et maxime faciles totam convertere, atque in illis diutius immorari, donec assuescamus veritatem distincte et perspicue intueri». 193 95 run through everything before the mind’s eye in a single movement. Yet here it is precisely this aspiration that he seems to criticize. In reality it is not the aspiration but the method, or precisely lack thereof, which he criticizes. Yet this rule is dedicated not so much to the procedure of the method but to the conditioning of the one who undertakes the investigation of truth, specifically the conditioning of his faculty of perspicacity. The attitude of volitive generosity delineated in Regula VI constituted by (as per our categorization) indiscriminate receptivity, assiduous responsiveness and intellectual humility, are recollected in this rule and manifested in the faculty of perspicacity. According to the rule we are to indiscriminately receive, and assiduously respond, with the «whole force» of our minds to these smallest and simplest of things, humbly rejecting the «sublime and profound theories of the philosophers [401]» in order to attend to the school of these «simplest and easiest matters [401]», where we detain ourselves «for a long time [401]». The length of the detainment upon these things depends upon the generosity of our will on the one hand, and on the pedagogy of the things themselves, on the other, that – through our dwelling among them with our mental gaze fixed on them – draws us into their logic, into their order, «until we become accustomed»194 to them, in order that we might intuit «the truth clearly and distinctly [401]». Becoming-accustomed to receiving the simplest things through «method and practice [402]» increases our capacity to see the order with which things are related and tied together so that we can be able to «discern the truth with equal facility whether…from a simple or from an obscure subject [401]». This is the secret of all sciences, that «however hidden, [they] can be deduced, not from great and obscure matters, but only from those that are easiest and most obvious [402]», and this is because their discovery is already given in nuce, in that the same order underlies the simple things and every other thing195. Once again we see that the presence of the term assuescere maintains the tension of the passive and active dynamic of the method together, and reminds us of the antecedent presence of order as the frame and dynamism of the deployment of the will. 194 My italics. The following, from the second Ennead of Plotinus is similar in structure (and perhaps spirit) to Regula IX: «The kind of philosophy we pursue is characterized…by simplicity of character and pure thinking. It pursues what is venerable, not what is arrogant; and if it inclines towards boldness, it is not without reason, a great deal of assurance, caution, and the greatest circumspection [PLOTINUS, Enneads, II 9, 14, 38 – 43]». 195 96 There is a certain nearness or closeness, involved in this detaining or stopping among the simple things that recalls the idea of the intuitus making contact and touching the truth of things. The almost affective trope involved in this conception of the method has precedents, once again, in Aristotle and Plotinus. Marion’s juxtaposition of the etymologies of the Aristotelian term ackhinoia and perspicacitas speaks a similar tongue: «proximité (ackhi-) de l’esprit (nous) correspond assez bien à la vision (spectare, per-spicacitas) transperçante (perspicacitas) du regard de l’esprit (intuitus)» 196. Qualified by, and rooted in, the dynamic of ‘becomingaccustomed’, the semantic valence of perspicacitas loses nothing of the affective charge of ackhinoia, proximity of the spirit. Being accustomed to dwelling in the light of the simple things – to being ‘close’ to them – is becoming-accustomed to order, adjusting our eyes to it’s light and learning its rhythm. We become, as it were, connatural197 with it, anticipating its movements and judging not only its truth but also according to its truth. At the same time that we perceive order and remain close to it we are conformed to it: this conformation is ultimately the form and dynamism of the activity-passivity of ‘becomingaccustomed’. Growing in connaturality means to grow in the sharing of a nature, or a way of being. In a laconic phrase, capturing perhaps the essence of his entire philosophical mission, Plotinus anticipates the animating spirit of the Cartesian project: «every soul is, and becomes, that which it contemplates»198. Reading things through the accustomed, connaturalized, perspicacious gaze, according to light and order of the simple nature we dwell with and are close to enables us to recognize and institute – mediate – this same light and order in the world around us, even when it is not so clearly visible at first sight, nor to the person unaccustomed to the logic of the simple and easy things. Where the latter is un-attuned to the traces of light and order in difficult and convoluted – ‘dark’ – matters, he who is accustomed to light and order through nearness to the simple natures is attuned and capable of following the ordered trace of light. This notion of following the order perspicaciously intuited in the simplest natures outwards along paths of deductions constructed upon the 196 MARION, Ontologie grise, 157. St. Thomas Aquinas has developed the notion of connaturality as the affective knowing of the principle of moral judgment that allows for the immediate discernment of the true and the good in the practical sphere, according to the relational knowledge of God. See D’AVENIA, M., La conoscenza per connaturalità in S. Tommaso D’Aquino, Bologna, 1992. 198 PLOTINUS, Enneads, IV 3, 8, 15-16 197 97 base of the simple intuition is the field pertaining to the faculty of sagacity. Simply put, sagacity is the faculty that allows us to easily «deduce certain facts from others [400]». If intuition is rooted in the faculty of perspicacity, deduction is rooted in that of sagacity. We’ve already seen that when dealing with the concept of deduction that while the baseline trope of intuition is presence, that of deduction, via its dependence upon memory, is absence. Sagacity is the faculty that weaves together intuitions by traversing the absence between them. In this sense we can say that the essence of the effectivity of sagacity is its capacity for anticipation. Sagacity anticipates the advent of the presence of the simple nature, and therefore of its intuition, throughout the duration of its absence. It is an active anticipation, and alongside the faculty of perspicacity, whose activity is the sustained vision in presence, it seems decidedly more so. This is because this active anticipation takes the form of the weaving together and instituting of the structure of order where order is not immediately present to vision, and preparing the ground for its advent. Therefore this capacity to anticipate the presence of the light and the presence of an order in the midst of their absence is the subject and aim of Regula X. This active tonality mustn’t however obscure for us the importance of the passive dynamic in its attainment, a dynamic manifested clearly throughout the commentary to the tenth rule. If the intuition of the most simple things, the simple natures, which are also the most absolute things in any series, is the encounter of the mind with the truth in its manifest presence and conforming power, then deduction, which is the weaving together of an ordered sequence upon the base of the simple nature become present in the perspicacious intuition, is the mediation of the encounter between the disordered chaos of things and the simple nature which serves as a basis for their own ordering, since they are all ordered to the extent that they are ordered around this simple nature in a series. Succinctly then, if perspicacious intuition is the encounter of the mind with the simple nature, sagacious deduction is the mediation of the multiplicity of disordered or hitherto unordered things with this originary simplicity. The intensity of the intuition, and the solidity and reach of the deduction, however, as Regulae IX and now X sustain, depend upon the conditioning and capacitation of the faculties of perspicacity and sagacity, since, as we have seen previously, the human mind is the mediator of order and presence to the extent to which it has become accustomed to the presence of order, and this to the extent that it has allowed itself to be conformed by means of the generous cooperation of the will. Thus, in the enunciation of Regula X we read the following: 98 In order that the mind may acquire sagacity (ut ingenium fiat sagax), it is necessary to give it practice (exerceri) in investigating what has already been discovered by others; and it ought to traverse methodically even the most trifling inventions of men, but especially those which best explain or presuppose order [403]199. From the enunciation of the rule and patently so throughout its commentary we see the passive and active dynamics at work. Paramount in importance is the necessity to train the mind, «to give it practice», yet the method of this practice is that of becoming familiar with the order already evident, discovered, constructed, and acknowledged. The inventions of men that best explain or presuppose order are the most useful in this training «provided we do not learn them from others, but discover them ourselves [404]». This is because the activity of becoming-accustomed requires that our mind applies itself to the search for order, in order that, drawing near to order it may accustom us to it, forming us and conforming us. All of this must be done in those proven disciplines or inventions that best explain or presuppose order, «in which order most prevails [404]». The reason is that these disciplines show us in very distinct terms «innumerable arrangements, all different from one another and yet regular, […] the scrupulous observation of which the whole of human sagacity consists [404]»200. All human sagacity consists therefore in the observation of the manner in which these diverse elements are woven together into unity, similar to the unity of a mosaic. It is not the solution to the problem of the unity of the multiplicity that is important but the exercise of scrupulous observation. The method itself in this sense is far more important than the immediate aim it is deployed to achieve. This is why we mustn’t engage in guesswork, which far from being harmless, even if it luckily hits upon the solution of a certain problem, «would weaken the light of the mind and we would accustom ourselves [405]» to remaining on the surface of things, never penetrating deeper. What is key in this practice is the increasing the light of the mind through the scrupulous observation of the order obtaining in the unity of the most diverse elements. It is not the achievement of the key to the unity that is most important, but becoming-accustomed to sustaining one’s proximity to the presence of order through its constant observation because in this way, through this constant observation of the way in which the 199 Ut ingenium fiat sagax, exerceri debet in iisdem quaerendis, quae jam ab aliis inventa sunt, et cum methodo etiam levissima quaeque hominum artificia percurrere, sed illa maxime, quae ordinem explicant vel supponunt. 200 My italics. 99 absence of order is mediated through the order of a series or arrangement that we draw close to order and are able to reproduce its mediation anywhere else. Lest we pretend that the ability to reproduce this order anywhere else lies in the arrangement of the proportions and the relations obtaining in a certain circumstance, Descartes reiterates the need to «practice those easier matters, but with method, so that we may become accustomed through simple and known paths, and as if in a game, to penetrating always to the inner core of things [405]»201; this is the path to the fast and easy deduction evident principles to apparently difficult and complicated progressions. Aiming his bayonet at the ‘dialecticians’ [405] who he accuses of predilection for the precept and the form over and above the things themselves [cf. 405] he says that «truth often escapes these fetters, while those meanwhile, who have used them remain entangled [406]», and further on that their syllogism is of no use for the attainment of truth because by means of it they can learn nothing new that they did not know already, and is thus «entirely useless for those who wish to investigate the truth of things [406]». Not the precepts or the rules or the proportions, but becomingaccustomed to the light of order and following it wherever it leads is the sure way of arriving at the truth of the things themselves and the right relation of these truths between each other. The discovery of the new depends on the ability to see relationships where they exist but are not evident to the mind that isn’t accustomed to looking into the light of order, but is rather tied down in the artefacts of order, such as the laws and precepts of the ‘dialecticians’. The one who clings to order itself perceived not only the artefact but the activity of order, and this is the point. It’s a matter of becoming attuned and attentive to order. Thought must «be kept attentive [406]» and this is achieved through the method which, «in the more trivial cases, is usually nothing but the constant observation of order, whether existing in the thing itself or ingeniously thought out [404]». 4.4 Regula XI: embracing propositions and relations simultaneously 4.4.1 Amplifying the intellect Indicative of Descartes’ onus on the conditioning of the mind for the apprehension of truth is the advice he proffers in Regula XI of «conceiving distinctly several propositions at a time [407]». This advice appears in the 201 My italics. 100 eleventh rule and not the ninth or tenth, precisely because the order of training the mind demands that it first be adept in perspicacity and sagacity, in intuition and deduction, in order to then simultaneously conceive things clearly and distinctly as well as the relation between these clear and distinct things: After we have grasped by intuition a certain number of simple propositions, if we wish to infer some other proposition from them, it is useful to run over them in a continuous and uninterrupted movement of thought in order to reflect on their relations to one another, and as far as possible to conceive distinctly several at a time. For it is in this way that our knowledge becomes much more certain and the power of our mind is greatly increased [407]. The previous two rules made a counter-example of those who tried to see everything at once and who did not focus on the simplest and easiest things. In the present rule the advice is precisely to widen one’s scope to the point of grasping everything at once but upon the basis of a mind formed upon the perspicacious intuition of the simple truths. It is the difference between proceeding from the light having already become accustomed to seeing this light, on the one hand, and on the other hand proceeding from darkness, unaccustomed to discerning the light and order of things. The former proceeds with order/method and the latter proceeds disorderedly. Not so much because he hasn’t the procedure as much as because he hasn’t the capacity. Perhaps no other rule makes as robust a claim to categorizing order as a capacity of the mind as does Regula XI. This capacity is manifested in the activity of conceiving propositions «distinctly several at a time» in a mutual assistance and mutual completion of the two operations of intuition and enumeration or deduction «to the point of seeming to merge into one by a certain movement of thought which perceives each fact attentively by intuition and at the same time passes to the others [408]» thereby «recogniz[ing] the relation that exists [409]» between them and «simultaneously embrac[ing] [410]202» them. The «cooperation [408]» of intuition and deduction, and therefore of perspicacity and sagacity, yields two fruits: it proffers «more certain knowledge of the conclusion with which we are concerned [408]», and it «renders the mind more skilful in other discoveries [408]» by correcting «its sluggishness («ingenii tarditatem emendari [409]») and enlarging its comprehension (amplificari capacitatem [409]»). 202 My italics. 101 We should however detain ourselves in what is described as the means to achieving this enlarged comprehension: ‘simultaneously embracing’ distinct propositions and the relation between them. Through the practice of this simultaneous embracing we «get into the habit of (ad usum adquiramus) distinguishing immediately what is more or less relative and by what degrees it is reduced to the absolute [409]» and this, says Descartes, is the rule’s «greatest utility [409]». What does this great utility consist of? The term ad usum adquiramus falls into the semantic catchment area of the term assuescere, becoming-accustomed, and implies the same dynamic203. The capacity of immediately distinguishing the relative relativities and their distance from the absolute is a fruit of having become accustomed to the absolute and seeing all that is relative from its vantage point. Perspicacity obtains us access to this central vantage point and sagacity obtains us the facility of travelling to and from the centre at speed, to relatives removed by increasing degrees along the vectors converging in this centre, the simple nature, that which is absolute in the series of propositions. More figuratively this capacity is that of embracing, in a single act or gaze of the mind, the simple nature and – setting out from this locus – its real and possible centrifugal deployment in multiple relations along their increasing degrees of separation from the simple nature; and at the same time it is the identifying and embracing of the relations from wherever they are located along the radius of this simple nature and reporting or carrying along this radius in a centripetal movement back to the absolute or simple nature. This accordion-like contraction and expansion/explication of the various propositions according to their degree of relativity takes place in the mind itself. Therefore the greater the capacity to simultaneously embrace the relations – in terms of both speed and breadth – the greater capacity it has to order things in and around the centre. The mediating power of order is itself mediated by the capacity of the mind that has been mediated by order itself and conformed or accustomed to itself, in a virtuous circular relationship. 4.4.2 The significance of speed The notion of enlargement is not the only important one here, however. Speed, far from being peripheral or merely figurative, plays an important, and particularly eschatological, role in the scheme. Order orders, regardless, but the speed with which it orders the world to itself in its embrace is mediated by the speed with which the mind, allowing itself to 203 On this correlation see also MARION, Ontologie grise, 155. 102 be conformed to the light and rhythm of order, can embrace and mediate the world within its grasp. Descartes uses the term ‘immediately’ in this context, again in the fold of the dynamic of becoming-accustomed, and in the scope of exploring the new: Whoever accustoms himself to reflect on these and similar matters, every time he examines a new question, he immediately discovers the source of the difficulty, and what of all ways is the very simplest one for solving it, and this is a very great aid to knowledge of the truth [410]204. The importance of speed reports us back to the emphasis Descartes places on it in his elaboration of intuition in order to attain an immediate, virtually timeless, contact with truth, unfettered by dependence on unreliable memory. In the present rule, however, he writes that «memory (on which, we have said, depends the certainty of conclusions that embrace more than we can grasp in one intuition) though unstable and infirm, can be renewed and strengthened by this continuous and repeated movement of thought [408]205». Why renew memory? To what purpose? The entirety of the mentions of memory throughout the Regulae until this point has signalled the need to bypass it, to depend upon it only when absolutely necessary, and indeed, one might be justified in interpreting the aim of the Regulae – particularly III, VII and XI – as a pedagogy in the abandonment of memory. Certainly the healthier our memory is the more effective it is in not coming between us and the intuition of truth. It is also clear that a healthy memory speeds up the process of deduction, and thus the simultaneity and certainty of the mental embrace: the «certainty [of enumeration or induction] depends to some extent on memory, in which our judgments about the individual points enumerated must be retained if some one single judgment is to be drawn from all of them [408]». A healthy memory is, to all intents and purposes, is a memory capable of disappearing from the process of knowing. But there is another reason, simpler and wider in scope but fully within the interpretation we have offered until now. Memory, like everything else is subject to the ordering power of order which restores things to itself and in itself, through the mediation of the mind, and evidently the successive mediations of the human faculties. Memory is renewed in its contact with order whose conditioning of the mind lies not only in enlarging its capacity but increasing its speed. The virtual simultaneity of the embrace of both the simple propositions and all its 204 205 My italics. My italics. 103 centrifugal relations also comprehends the embrace of the memory and all the faculties involved in setting the scene for this embrace. They are all virtually drawn into the immediate, timeless, gaze of the intuitus, quickened to the point of contact with the truth of things. Every faculty of the mind, and – since we must logically extend ourselves outwards to embrace every concentric reality that order embraces – the human body, and all other bodies, and the relations between them, is gathered together in this single comprehensive contact with the truth. And in this contact they are renewed and become accustomed to it nearness, are thus made more apt (aptior) to this encounter, as well as being made more apt mediators of this encounter; they become so to the extent in which they adopt and conform to the same dynamic of the simultaneously centrifugal and centripetal embrace that draws all things inwards to their source and travels outwards again in a renewed and renewing creative generosity. That Descartes has placed the dynamic of becoming-accustomed-toorder – and the inherent symbiosis of the passive and active dynamics this entails – at the apex as well as throughout the entirety of the process of ordering, suggests that at the nucleus of his conception of the mediation of order is an encounter constituted on the one hand by the infinite generosity of order that donates itself, and, on the other hand, the spontaneous generosity of the will that responds to the donation of order by cooperating with it. The pattern of this encounter also constitutes the form and the vitality of every point along the process of ordering, from the most distant relationships between propositions to the simple natures and even among the human faculties themselves. From out of this encounter the re-ordering of the world in the form of a reconciliation with its source is mediated; all effected by, in, and through order and mediated by the cooperation of man’s freedom in the decision to seek and adhere and become-accustomed to order, becoming therefore the bearer of its presence in the every sphere subject to the intellectual gaze. The preceding is the logical articulation of the two poles of the encounter between the human being and order from the point of view of the structure of mediation. But this mediational structure also reveals an underlying anthropological structure in the Regulae; perhaps more accurately it indicates the form of the centre of this anthropological structure. The animating centre of the method in the Regulae is the mediation effected by the human being’s decision, out of the generosity of his will, to freely give himself to order. At the threshold of this decision lies an openness to the encounter with this mediating order, one that orders him, integrates him, and above all gives ultimate meaning to his life by providing it with a center to integrate around and also by infusing it with 104 that same meaning throughout his faculties, and within his actions and outwards to the fruits of his activity; all his being, actions, circumstances, history, anticipations of the future, relationships, everything is drawn into the orbit of this central order and infused by its dynamism. This is what mediates, because it flows outwards from the absolute and draws in every relative into a more intense relation with this absolute. It would be an error therefore to picture the human being’s mediation as that of an intermediary who stands between two parties and relays the communication from both sides. Rather the human being is mediator to the extent of the intensity with which he encounters and adheres to order, to the extent to he becomes accustomed to centering himself around order and to allowing order to therefore radiate outwards from this centre, integrating and reconciling his faculties to itself and in and through itself, and also extending into his relationship with reality, every reality, in all of its dimensions. If the human being is the mediator of order he is so to the extent that he has become symbiotic with it, has adhered to it and allowed it to penetrate and take root in him and configure him to itself. The deepest meaning and consequence of the notion of becoming-accustomed is the always and already structure of openness to the otherness of this order. The openness to order therefore cannot be reduced simply to an attitude but is veritably an opening –in loosely ontological terms – that is, as it were, structured in the form of an anticipation of an encounter with order. In man’s centre then lies an opening and a threshold that looks towards and invites the encounter with that which is beyond him. 4.4.3 The form of freedom Therefore at the dynamic and open centre of the method, the threshold of the structure of the mediation of order, lies a decision to seek order, to be coherent with the already anticipatory form of this dynamic open centre itself. The condition of decision is freedom, and the realization of freedom is decision. Yet this freedom and its exercise in decision is one pole of the effectuation of the dynamism of order, the other being order itself and its initiative. The contribution of freedom and decision to the mediation of order is always as a cooperation with order in response to its initiative. This initiative is manifested in the realization of the situation of the lack of order, the inner demand for order, its possibility within the scope of freedom’s cooperation. Thus freedom as the co-operator of order is already previously conditioned to respond to it. This means that freedom is already and always in a relationship with order, a relationship which is 105 also always an anticipation of a more intense encounter and union with this same order. The relationship with order, the encounter, and the anticipation itself is intensified, quickened, in the ever-increasing anticipationrealization of order. This also means that man’s centre, as freedom, is not his own self but order which actualizes his freedom by engaging it in the creative mediation of order. His centre is displaced by his decision to adhere to order. It becomes the dynamic adherence – the becomingaccustomed – to order; it becomes the encounter, through the commitment – rather, the donation – of his freedom, manifested in this decision. The more he donates his freedom to order, the more he mediates, the more he becomes this mediation, and the more he becomes himself in his status as mediator. This freedom actually becomes creative, meaningful and free, from darkness, confusion, ignorance and so on, to the extent to which it adheres to order, which makes it more free. Why? Because freedom which obeys this order obeys the coordinates, configurations, that allows it to follow truth wherever it becomes manifest. Freedom becomes free from the darkness of non-truth to the extent that it is able to follow this one fundamental order. Being obedient to truth means being freed from slavery to everything else. When freedom is donated in the generous decision of the will – the same decision we’ve seen Descartes mention, autobiographically, in Regula IV, the immediate preambula to the method’s centre: «I have resolved in my search for knowledge of things to adhere unswervingly to a definite order [378]» – we have donated the will to the following of order wherever its course leads us. The notion of following order opens us to an important distinction: order in the Regulae is considered dynamic rather than static. The objective of the method is freedom from the mental constraints that hinder a clear intuition of the truth. It is order’s dynamism– energeia – and not the things that order has ordered that are to be followed. The pedagogy of the method is aimed at teaching to follow the ordering of order, and not stall in the products of order, those things already ordered. Order is always an ordering, always active, always dynamic. The propositions alone, the tenets alone, that order has ordered, are not to be clung to, as Descartes accuses the scholastics of doing, with the result of truth escaping through their formulae, their fetters [406], like a slippery bar of soap. Ordering itself, the source of these works, the always new and renewing and creative dynamism is what must be sought. We do so in order to learn the pattern of order, to become-accustomed to the workings of order, to become attuned to order, as we would become-accustomed to an artist after assiduous study of his works. We do so in order to learn the 106 rhythm of order, its temporality and speed, its movement and dynamism, something that is mirrored by the quickness and repetition demanded of the movement of running through several propositions at once in Regulae III, VII and XI. This speed and repetition are aimed at mirroring and interiorizing the dynamism of order and not just its structure. 4.5 Regula XIIa: aiding the intellect 4.5.1 «Ingenium», imagination, and the entire human being Descartes shows a remarkable awareness of the psychological and physiological conditioning that accompanies and is inseparable from the spiritual/intellectual act of the intuitus. It is why he dedicates the first part of Regula XII to the counsel of applying all human faculties that might aid the intellect into the work of knowing, because it is the dynamism of the whole human being that is gathered together and quickened into a condition of intense openness to the encounter with the dynamism of orderordering. It is the whole human being that knows, the intuitus is the apex of this knowing, but to know is to know order and to really know order is to become accustomed to it. Every human faculty in this sense knows order when order is really known, because every faculty participates in and is affected by the contact of the intuitus with the conforming and transforming dynamism of order. This affirmation finds its clear corroboration in Regula XII’s explanation of the ‘common sense’ of scholastic fame with a figure of the point of the pen’s movement moving every other part of the pen along with it: I understand that while I am writing, at the very moment when individual letters are traced on the paper, not only does the point of the pen move, but the slightest motion of this part cannot but be transmitted simultaneously to the whole pen…Who then would think that the connection between the parts of the human body is less close than that between the parts of the pen [414]? Descartes thus conceives of the rapport between the intuitus and the rest of the mind’s faculties in a similar vein, and explains it more categorically in the enunciation and commentary to Regula XII. «Finally – he writes – we must make use of all the aids which intellect, imagination sense-perception, and memory afford in order…to intuit simple 107 propositions distinctly»206. The intellect and all the aids of the intellect, conceived in their ultimate function, is the spiritual energy or power [cf. 415] of knowing. This spiritual energy or power – which Descartes calls «ingenium [416]» – embraces, dynamizes and orders the entirety of the human being in the activity of knowing: The power through which we know things in the strict sense is purely spiritual, and is no less distinct from the whole body than blood is distinct from the bone, or the hand from the eye. It is one single power, whether it receives figures from the ‘common’ sense at the same time as does the corporeal imagination, or applies itself to those which are preserved in the memory, or forms new ones which so preoccupy the imagination… …According to its different functions, then, the same power is called either pure intellect, or imagination, or memory, or sense-perception. But when it forms new ideas in the corporeal imagination, or concentrates on those already formed, the proper term for it is ‘native intelligence’ (ingenium) [415-416]. Represented in this passage is a clear conception of knowing as an activity of the totality of the human being. A further note on the auxiliary of the imagination is important at this point in order to delineate the mechanics so to speak of this unity-in-knowing. Of all the aids it is the imagination that stands out as the most dynamic element. In a sense it appears to embrace the intellect and the senses, the spirit and the body, as well as memory: The phantasy (the term is interchangeable with the term imagination. See footnote to this quote) is a genuine part of the body, and is large enough to allow different parts of it to take on many different figures and, generally, 206 Denique omnibus utendum est intellectus, imaginationis, sensus, et memoriae auxiliis, tum ad propositiones simplices distincte intuendas [410]. 108 to retain them for some time; in which case it is to be identified with what we call ‘memory’ [414] 207. Nonetheless the imagination appears to maintain the distinction between these faculties, all the while expressing their unity in the concrete activity of knowing. It plays the role of a mediating element within the epistemology articulated in Regula XII. As an auxiliary to the intellect, the imagination has an ambiguous status seeing as it serves a double function of furnishing images to the intellect and of formulating hypotheses [cf. 415]208. It can at times be understood as a function of the intellect, or the place where the soul or body acts209. Thus, while the intellect takes on the function of imagination it is not the imagination that imagines but the 207 Strictly speaking the term imaginatio appears 37 times in the Regulae. 28 of those appearances are shared between Regula XII (16 times) and Regula XIV (12 times). The other mentions are consigned to once in each of Regulae III, IV, VII, VIII, and XV, and twice each in Regulae XVI and XVIII. But to restrict the semantic field of imagination to the term imagination in the Regulae would be misleading since Descartes uses the terms imaginatio and the decidedly Aristotelian phantasia interchangeably (Cf. COZZOLI, D. Il metodo di Descartes, Macerata, 2008, 73). The term phantasia appears 21 times in the Regulae, 11 times in Regula XII, 7 times in Regula XIV, once in Regula VIII, and once in Regula XVI. A first glance at the statistics already indicates that his use of the two terms is at the very least always related, and at most interchangeable. Of the three terms nominated as auxiliaries to the intellectus (mentioned 51 times) – imaginatio, sensus, and memoria – imaginatio (including phantasia) is mentioned 58 times in total, sensus is mentioned 49 times and memoria 27 times. The formulation of the enunciation of Regula XII is almost misleading in its emphasis on the auxiliaries to the intellect and its single mention of propositiones simplices [410], for we would expect the lion’s share of Descartes’ subsequent commentary to deal with the intellect’s auxiliaries. While he does deal a fair bit with them, the majority of the commentary is taken up with the delineation and categorization of what constitutes a simple nature (not mentioned in the formulation of the rule) and in what ways they are to be discovered – an easy task since they are all self-evident [427] – as well as, crucially and with a greater deal of effort, in what way they are to be distinguished [427]. This major part of the commentary to the rule, constituting Regula XIIb, is crucial to understanding the gist of the commentary upon the intellect’s auxiliaries in XIIa. Once the object of the intellect – the simple natures – is elucidated, the function of the intellect, and thus of its auxiliaries is further clarified, emphatically so when Descartes writes that «the whole of human knowledge consists uniquely in our achieving a distinct perception of how all these simple natures contribute to the composition of other things [427]». 208 Cf. COZZOLI, Il metodo di Descartes, 73. 209 COZZOLI, Il metodo di Descartes, 73: «Descartes indica con i termini immaginare/immaginazione facoltà diverse (funzioni diverse della stessa energia mentale), e con i termini immaginazione/fantasia, i luoghi del corpo ove l’anima agisce». 109 intellect that imagines in the corporeal place assigned to the imagination210. Furthermore, «the intellect can either be stimulated by the imagination or act upon it [416]». The senses act upon the imagination by depicting images of bodies upon it, and the imagination can act upon the senses directing them to objects [cf.416]. The imagination mediates between the intellect and the senses, as the senses do between the imagination and objects, and finds its role in distinguishing and presenting the simple corporeal natures before the intellect211. Following the text through to the end of this section of his commentary, we note that this coordination of the intellect and body through the imagination dynamized by the ingenium extends to and includes the external representation effected by the body in written characters and symbols: «If…the intellect proposes to examine something which can be referred to the body, the idea of that thing must be formed as distinctly as possible in the imagination. In order to do this properly, the thing itself which this idea is to represent should be displayed to the external senses [417]» and to these in the form of «abbreviated representations [417]212» that serve as «adequate safeguards against lapses of memory [417]». Descartes applies this principle consistently in the second set of twelve rules, those expressly dedicated to the exploration of the simple natures [cf. 399]: Regulae XIII, XIV, XV and XVI, are dedicated to the disposition of things in useful visual juxtaposition, with Regulae XIV, XV, and XVI being concrete examples of the management of memory and imagination for the purpose of aiding the intellect, while Regulae XVII, XVIII and XXI counsel the visual placement of things in series, presumably for the sake of ease of representation. In Regula XVI, for example, the representation of things by «very concise symbols rather than by complete figures [454]» makes it «impossible for our memory to go wrong [454]»213. 210 COZZOLI, Il metodo di Descartes, 73. Nonetheless Descartes does not trust the imagination unreservedly and while at the same time assigning it a fundamental role in the knowledge of corporeal simple natures, he suggests that it be limited as much as possible when the simple natures to be dealt with are not corporeal [cf. 416], for example the nature of the soul, or volition, etc. 212 My italics. 213 «Quae vero praesentem mentis attentionem non requirunt, etiamsi ad conclusionem necessaria sint, illa melius est per brevissimas notas designare quam per integras figuras: ita enim memoria non poterit falli, nec tamen interim cogitatio distrahetur ad haec retinenda, dum aliis deducendis incumbit [454]». 211 110 4.5.2 Temporality and timelessness Now because of the adherence of the entire human being to its dynamism, the concept of order reveals, surprisingly, its irreducibly historical nature. Surprising because the essence or foundation of the “historical” adherence to order, which is necessarily temporal, is that it is an encounter with an immediate a-temporal moment, an experience which of course has its form and structure in intuition – in the intuitus – which Descartes has expounded on in Regula III and taught how to reach in Regulae VII and XI particularly. So, for example, I intuit order, I know things, in time, historically, on Monday or Tuesday, in this year or that, last week or this week. Yet what I know, what I touch, what I make contact with, through the apex of my mind, and which subsequently orders this apex and mediates this order to the rest of my faculties and radiates outwards into all my other relationships with reality and so on and so forth is, logically also the source and foundation of this temporality, this order which orders it and orders everything beyond it. Knowing, therefore, in the Regulae, is contact with eternity, because all knowing is knowing of order, and order in whatever is known is a continual mediation of order through successively inclusive thresholds until and including the infinite and atemporal. The repetitive to and fro of the intuitus that runs through the entire series at once, quickening the passage from the absolute to the relative with every repetition, reiterates this historical-timeless encounter over and over again, although each single repetition takes place from a successive historical moment and thus an ingenium that is that little bit more trained, accustomed, conformed, ordered, and consequently more capable of this encounter. This is why it is also necessarily eschatological also. It is an encounter with the timeless, immediate, ultimate meaning in the simultaneous frame of historical temporality. That it takes place on an epistemological, microcosmic, level only confirms the eschatological idea in that it is an entire world as seen from the perspective of any single subject, and the entirety of this subject himself, who is brought nearer and nearer in an ever increasing conformation to the source of order. It is eschatological because this contact with order and becoming-accustomed to order is a conformation to order in all its aspects, and therefore also the aspects of temporality and a-temporality, which in turn are mediated to realities successively distant from this central point of order. All reality thus is reported, in and through the mind, in the moment of intuition, into union with order, mediated in and through and by this 111 order itself. This is the same dynamic of epistrophé/conversio which we have seen at the end of the previous chapter, but now seen through the perspective of the subjective pole, that is the human cooperation with order’s ordering dynamism. 4.6 Abbreviated good: the simple natures in Regula XIIb Descartes dedicates the second and dominant part of the commentary to Regula XII to an articulation of the status of the simple natures, despite only mentioning them in passing in the rule’s enunciation, within the context of the application of all the aids of the intellect in order «to intuit simple propositions distinctly [410]» 214 . A brief survey of Descartes’ conception of these simple natures will reveal them in the light of the pedagogical dynamism of order. We must first turn back to the commentary to Regula VIII, where Descartes briefly mentions the simple natures, with the promise of dealing with them in detail in Regula XII. The simple natures in Regula VIII are ‘things’ and are so insofar as they are attainable by the intellect; they are things in terms of their manifestation to the intellect: «we should turn to the things themselves; and we should deal with these only in so far as they are within the reach of the intellect [399]». He goes on to divide these ‘things themselves’ into simple and composite natures, of which the latter comprises a further division of things given as composite before the intervention of the intellect and things «put together by the intellect itself [399]». These things composed by the intellect may or may not contain falsity, but in both the composite and simple natures that are presented as such prior to the intervention of the intellect «there can be no falsity [399]». Descartes proposes to deal with natures that are «composite in reality [399]» in the third book or set of rules but of course never gets there. The simple natures are to be the subject of the second book as well as the subject of the latter part of Regula XII. Essential – and sufficient – for our purposes is the claim that there is no possibility of falsity insofar as these simple natures are concerned; in the context of the search for certain knowledge the simple natures literally equate to ab-solute gifts, requiring nothing of the receiver except that he receives them. At the end of chapter three we suggested that the operation of ordering and disposing of nature in series constituted a manifestation of the reconciliation and recapitulation of nature within the dynamism of the communication of the Good. We dealt with this ordering and disposing from the point of view of the operation of the mind upon things and 214 «ad propositiones simplices distincte intuendas [410]». 112 propositions. Now we propose to see this same operation of ordering and disposing from the point of view of the things themselves, specifically in their apex, or acies, the simple natures, which can be veritably characterized as the Regulae’s acies rei, the ‘sharp edge’ of things, insofar as they are the point of contact of things (material or intellectual) with the acies mentis or intuitus. By thus presenting themselves to the mind and engaging the mind, the simple natures train the mind, accustoming it to themselves in order that it might encounter them ever anew, in an ever greater receptivity. In this sense the simple natures are bearers of an active and autonomous dynamism, independent of the mind, but upon which the mind is dependent if it is to achieve certainty. The mind is therefore paradoxically dependent upon the gift of certainty in order to attain – through cooperation with the dynamism of this gift – to the achievement of certainty. As well as being gift, and ‘acies rei’, the simple natures are also abbreviations, and thus mirror the «abbreviated representations [417]» operated by the ingenium in its employment of all the aids to the intellect in the first part of Regula XII. They mirror the process of the abbreviation of propositions and relations into concise symbols, ordered and disposed in such a manner as to mediate the intuitus’ grasp of propositions and relations simultaneously. Within our two-poled framework of the dynamism of order the simple natures are the representation of things in abbreviated form to the intellect, for the sake – mirroring our employment of symbols and representations in service to the fragility and finitude of our memory – of mediating their encounter with things themselves. But why characterize them as abbreviations, what insight can this description render? The form and comportment of these simple natures and their adequation to the structure of the intellect depicts them as simultaneously a communication of things as well as a pedagogy in the attainment of knowledge of these things. The abbreviation is both the presence and also the promise of the possession of things, the already and not-yet. The dynamic of the abbreviations that are the simple natures is their ‘eschatological’ presence; that is they are already a presence of the things/good in terms digestible to the human intellect yet at the same time they are a training/preparation in the apprehension of a greater presence of things or the good – ultimately an infinite training towards the reception of infinite things or the infinite good - by means of the conformation of the mind that they effect. The human mind in its fragility is capable of receiving only so much certain knowledge of things, and must become accustomed to a greater reception of them through the practice of ‘bearing the light’ of their truth. 113 The simple natures accordingly present themselves as the abbreviated good, and through the process of becoming accustomed to this abbreviated good, the mind lives the abbreviated but real presence of the good, and strives towards the promise of the plenitude of the unabbreviated good. It becomes accustomed to and therefore capable of bearing the open light. The simple natures are thus embraced by the overarching pedagogy of order and revealed as the manifestation of order’s “objective” pole in its relationship with the intellect. Through the encounter and relationship with these simple natures the mind is conformed to the dynamism of order and capacitated to comprehend it and to dwell within it. Naturally we must turn to Descartes’ articulation of these simple natures in Regula XII to corroborate our thesis. «When we consider things – he writes – in the order that corresponds to our knowledge of them, our view of them must be different from what it would be if we were speaking of them in accordance with how they exist in reality [418]». The example of a body with extension and shape – it is not a real composite of corporeal nature, extension and shape because these three elements do not exist separately, but from the point of view of our intellect it is a composite of three simple natures because we understood each one of them distinctly and separately prior to encountering them combined in the same thing [cf. 418]. «That is why, since we are concerned here with things only in so far as they are perceived by the intellect, we term ‘simple’ only those things which we know so clearly and distinctly that they cannot be divided by the mind into others which are more distinctly known [418]»215. The simple natures are thus the building block so to speak of any certain knowledge that can be formed. But they would not be this were they not entirely trustworthy and this is why the simple natures are evident and never contain any falsity…for if we have even the slightest grasp of it in our mind – which we surely must have, on the assumption that we are making a judgement about it – it must follow that we have complete knowledge of it. Otherwise it could not be said to be simple [420]. Again they appear as the gift of certainty and truth, prior to any effort or merit on the part of the intellect. Under the light of our own 215 The simple natures can be either purely intellectual, such as knowledge, doubt or volition; or purely corporeal, such as extension, shape and motion; or be referred to both bodies and spirits, such as unity, duration and existence; link-type natures, such as ‘sameness’, ‘difference’, comparatives, etc.; privations and negations can be included in this list as well, for example the opposites of natures such as ‘existence, motion, and duration’ which are respectively ‘nothing’, ‘rest’, and ‘instant’ [Cf. 419-20]. 114 interpretation thus far we can see them as manifestations of the generosity of order that donates and invites to a greater possession of itself (and in this evidence and certainty that provides itself as the building blocks of further certain knowledge we already see the presence of the eschatological dynamism at work), and it does so through the invitation to the generous donation of the will in the decision to correspond to the dynamism of this gift by means of mental effort: «we need take no great pains to discover these simple natures, because they are self-evident enough. What requires effort is distinguishing one from another and intuiting each one separately with a steadfast mental gaze [425]». As well as offering the promise of certain knowledge, the simple natures are also the limits of our understanding: «It is not possible for us to understand anything beyond those simple natures and a certain mixture or compounding of one with another [422]». By so constituting themselves as the boundaries of the possible fecund deployment of our intellect they provide a certain path to truth by way of negation. This combination of the dynamics of invitation (to the attaining of more certain knowledge) and negation (of certain knowledge beyond the limits of their presence) mirrors the pedagogical relationship of master and pupil. This guidance of the master – the simple nature – indicates a sure path of certain knowledge flowing from the certainty of its intuition, that of deduction: «there are no paths to certain knowledge of the truth accessible to men save manifest intuition and necessary deduction [425]»216. This 216 The natures we call composite are those that we have either encountered through experience or we ourselves have put them together. The intellect cannot be deceived by any experience «provided that when the object is presented to it, it intuits it in a fashion exactly corresponding to the way in which it possesses the object, either within itself or in the imagination [423]». Hence the locus of error is in judgement, and in assuming that the senses or the imagination present things unfiltered to the intellect exactly as they are in reality without having sound reasons for this being the case. Only when direct intuition takes place can the intellect judge to be looking at reality. Usually objects are presented in a «composed» manner, with the additions of the possible distortions of the senses and the imagination. «It follows from this that we can go wrong only when we ourselves compose in some way the objects of our belief [423]», and therefore the simple natures never deceive us. There are three ways in which composition can come about, «through impulse, through conjecture, or through deduction [424]». Of these three the only one that can be trusted to furnish certain knowledge, even though it too can be tricked more subtly, if for example it proceeds from something particular and contingent to deduce something general and necessary: «It is clear that mental intuition extends to all these simple natures and to our knowledge of the necessary connections between them, and in short to everything else which the intellect finds to be present exactly within itself or in the corporeal imagination [425]». 115 pedagogy into certain knowledge is the key to the entirety of the endeavour of «human knowledge [which] consists uniquely in our achieving a distinct perception of how all these simple natures contribute to the composition of other things [427]»217. The tone of this chapter, explicating what we have called the anthropological centre of the Regulae has been framed within the dynamics of ‘becoming-accustomed’. Descartes concludes his commentary on Regula XII with a succinct summary of his entire pedagogical counsel for the apprehension of the simple natures in this same tone: «As for simple propositions, the only rules we provide are those which prepare our cognitive powers for a more distinct intuition of any given object and for a more discerning examination of it. For these simple propositions must occur spontaneously; they cannot be sought out [428]»218. The counsel sounded throughout the Regulae amounts to the preparation of the spirit for the advent of the simple nature, both the spirit and the simple nature being manifestations of the dynamism of order. The entirety of the method is enclosed within the dynamism of order that initiates and completes its own ordering through the mediation of the mind. Order is the form and dynamism of the good and the two poles of this order – the free human intellect on the one hand and the simple natures on the other – are the abbreviated presence of the good. They manifest the eschatological dynamism of order for this very reason, in that they point to their origin in which resides the fullness of their presence, and they prepare the mind for the anticipation of the advent of this fullness within the quickening dynamism of a relationship whose mutual commerce and mutual encounter is the good that offers itself (‘bonum diffusivum sui’). The simple natures are the language of order, the abbreviations of reality that, learned by the mind, capacitate the mind to recognize and to speak – to institute – the ordering of order in all things. 217 Descartes extends this claim exponentially: «from what has been said it follows that we should not regard some branches of our knowledge of things as more obscure than others, since they are all of the same nature and consist simply in the putting together of self-evident facts [427-8]». 218 My italics. 116 APPENDIX A brief historical survey of the semantic range of the term ordo 117 Ordo prior to the seventeenth century According to the research carried out by Lucio Bertelli and Italo Lana and published in Ordo: colloquio internazionale del lessico intelletuale europeo219, the conceptual history of the Latin term ordo is rooted in the Greek language, in the terms kosmos and taxis, whose philosophical import migrates into the Latin tongue. The term kosmos which appears as far back as the archaic epic Greek poems, numbering above all in the Iliad, the Odyssey, and in Hesiod220. The semantically related term taxis does not appear until Anaximander’s Fragment 221 . Initially the term kosmos has two major acceptations: in the first case a prescriptive acceptation – as in a juridical ordinance – and in the second case, indicative of regularity222. In both cases the semantic field is shared with that of taxis. Commenting on Anaximander’s use of the term taxis in his Fragment, which he translates as follows - «But from whatever things is the genesis of the things that are, into these they must pass away according to necessity; for they must pay the penalty and make atonement to one another for their injustice according to Time’s decree (taxis)»223 Werner Jaeger points out that it represents a «philosophical interpretation of the rationale of the world» 224 as well as «the first philosophical theodicy»225. Lexicographically this double discourse brings together the two meanings we have seen ascribed to the terms kosmos/taxis, which now refers to both the order of justice in political life and the order inscribed in the natural world: In the life of politics the Greek language refers to the reign of justice by the term kosmos; but the life of nature is a kosmos too, and indeed this cosmic view of the universe really begins with Anaximander’s dictum. To him everything that happens in the natural world is rational through and through and subject to a rigid norm226. 219 BERTELLI, L. – LANA, I., ‘Kosmos nella lingua dell’epica greca’, in Ordo: Atti del Colloquio internazionale del Lessico intellettuale europeo, a cura di Fattori, M. – Bianchi, M., 2 voll., Roma, 1979, I, 3-12. 220 BERTELLI – LANA, ‘Kosmos nella lingua dell’epica greca’, I, 5. 221 BERTELLI – LANA, ‘Kosmos nella lingua dell’epica greca’, I, 7. 222 BERTELLI – LANA, ‘Kosmos nella lingua dell’epica greca’, I, 7. 223 JAEGER, W., The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, Oxford, 1947, 34. My italics. 224 JAEGER, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, 34. 225 JAEGER, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, 36. 226 JAEGER, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, 35-36. 118 Kosmos and taxis then take on the meanings of, respectively, social order and order of battle, in the sense of the deployment of troops, both appearing in Herodotus227. Taxis is also used by Plato and Aristotle in a more technical sense228. In Aristotle the term taxis is used in the sense of an impartial ‘staging’ and distribution of beings in the cosmos, not so much as an economy, rather as a principle of simple positing229. The term kosmos appears to have two different broad meanings, those of ‘order’ and ‘ornament’, with the former being divided into four distinct semantic areas pertaining to (1) military and weapons deployment: ‘ordered disposition’ (as in a serial ordering of arms or soldiers disposed towards and in function of the achievement of a concrete objective); (2) action and behaviour: ‘rule’, ‘norm’, ‘convenience’ and ‘opportunity’ (to act or behave outside the coordinates of the established social norms and rules, customs, tradition, of a political society or the natural order is inconvenient, dis-ordered, and violent); (3) speech and song: ‘convenience’, ‘opportunity’, and ‘ordered disposition of the matter’ (to speak or to sing according to the order of a certain tradition, drawing from ones memory the faithful and correct ordering of the events, to narrate in an ordered fashion, to articulate a well constructed argument, to communicate an idea in such a fashion that it is rendered maximally intelligible); (4) ‘preparing’ and ‘executing’ (the disposition and structuring of actions for the undertaking at hand)230. A recent etymological dictionary relates the term kosmos on the one hand to the latin censeo, ‘to estimate’, and censio, ‘assessment, rating’, and on the other hand traces its Sanskrit roots to the terms meaning ‘to praise’, ‘to declare, announce’, and ‘to show, point out’, and notes that its «original meaning was probably to put in order (by speaking)»231. 227 BERTELLI – LANA, ‘Kosmos nella lingua dell’epica greca’, I, 7. BERTELLI – LANA, ‘Kosmos nella lingua dell’epica greca’, I, 7. 229 Cfr. MARTINEAU, ‘L’ontologie de l’ordre’, 132-133: «Mais si taxis il ya pour [Aristote]…c’est uniquement au sens d’un étagement, d’un ajointement qui, au lieu de hiérarchiser dogmatiquement l’étant, y distribue impartialement…la même grâce (charis). Cette grâce, c’est celle de l’etre partout présent dans l’Etant comme ousia : suscitant des dignités, elle n’inflige aucune indignité; composant un monde, elle n’en dispose point l’économie; coordonnant l’étant à l’étant, elle ne subordonne (n’ordonne) fondamentalement rien». 230 BERTELLI – LANA, ‘Kosmos nella lingua dell’epica greca’, I, 8-11. 231 BEEKES, R., Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Boston, 2010, 760. 228 119 Keudel 232 divides the semantic field of the term ordo into eight groups: (1) the first group concerns the use of the term to refer to concrete and spatial realities. The oldest and always present meaning of the term ordo is identified as «a line, a straight and regular line, a series of things or persons, stood side by side to each other»233. It also takes over the notion of the Greek term taxis of the disposition and deployment of troops and arms for for battle, as well as indicating the structure of particles of a given type of matter, an acceptation seemingly first used by Lucretius 234; (2) the second group refers to the temporal dimension and indicates a «regular temporal succession»235 of events, but also in the area of discourse in which it indicates the correct succession of the individual parts of a discourse, either prose, or poetic236; (3) ordo comes to be used to indicate a state of things that is opposed to chaos and thus comes to be identified as one pole of the dichotomy order-disorder (the latin ‘inordinatum’ being coined by Cicero upon his translation of the movement away from chaos and into order illustrated in Plato’s Timaeus, in which the pair taxis and a-taxis are used to illustrate the coordinates of the action of God’s arranging the disorderly movement of all things into an ordered and meaningful harmony237. This meaning is also applied beyond the cosmic or natural sphere later on and used to describe the effect of human organization, administration, and even the sciences238 (an acceptation which immediately calls to mind Descartes’ project in the Regulae); (4) the sphere of action and morality is the next beneficiary of the term which is applied to the legal and political sphere as well as the religious and liturgical sphere239 (the correct order of the acting out of a sacred ritual, etc.); (5) to indicate immutability and stability as opposed to transience or fortuitousness240; (6) to indicate beauty, harmony, convenience, proportionality, as opposed to disproportionality, dissonance, and so on241; (7) as a method and a principle that generates an ordered structure, as found in juridical language, in language of Christian faith to express the ordinance or command of God, or 232 KEUDEL, U., ‘Ordo nel «Thesaurus Linguae Latinae»’, in Ordo: Atti del Colloquio internazionale del Lessico intellettuale europeo, a cura di Fattori, M. – Bianchi, M., 2 voll., Roma, 1979, I, 13-22. 233 KEUDEL, ‘Ordo nel «Thesaurus Linguae Latinae»’, I, 13. 234 KEUDEL, ‘Ordo nel «Thesaurus Linguae Latinae»’, I, 14. 235 KEUDEL, ‘Ordo nel «Thesaurus Linguae Latinae»’, I, 14. 236 KEUDEL, ‘Ordo nel «Thesaurus Linguae Latinae»’, I, 14. 237 KEUDEL, ‘Ordo nel «Thesaurus Linguae Latinae»’, I, 15. 238 KEUDEL, ‘Ordo nel «Thesaurus Linguae Latinae»’, I, 15. 239 KEUDEL, ‘Ordo nel «Thesaurus Linguae Latinae»’, I, 15. 240 KEUDEL, ‘Ordo nel «Thesaurus Linguae Latinae»’, I, 15. 241 KEUDEL, ‘Ordo nel «Thesaurus Linguae Latinae»’, I, 15. 120 in reference to a rule of life and principle of community as found in monastic orders242; (8) the use of the term to indicate a group or a stratus of society, i.e. those who receive holy orders, or a senatorial order, or a military order243. Etymologically, it appears the original meaning of ordo refers to «the series of threads of the warp (‘ordito’) upon the loom»244. It is related to the verb ordire which means something similar to ‘to weave’245. Keudel notes that there is no material trace in the word ordo itself to support this meaning. Regardless of the lack of material traces the image itself is remarkably suggestive: the series of threads that constitute the warp are the pattern upon which the welt is weaved, and together the weave and warp constitute a more complex pattern, and all this plotting and intertwining takes place upon the loom, an ancient symbol for divine wisdom, associated with the goddess Athena, whose name, according to Plato’s etymologies in the Cratylus, means the “mind of God”, theou noesis246. The loom might also be taken to symbolize the kosmos itself, thus leaving us with the suggestive symbol of a reality that consists of orders upon orders upon an ultimate, fundamental order of all things. It suggests an order that is at the same time wisdom, an intelligence that penetrates and disposes all levels and areas of reality. Another dictionary indicates the Sanskrit root ordo as the verb meaning ‘to go or to strive upward’247. There appears by now a discernible descriptive correspondence between the intricate etymological terrain of the term ordo and the dynamism of the concept ordo as we have analyzed it in Descartes’ use in the Regulae. This correspondence of course obtains regardless of Descartes awareness or unawareness of it. Seneca248 uses the term ordo with the already noted acceptations but emphasises a new one, important for its explicitly philosophical accent. He explains ‘form’ as follows, «formam, haec est habitus et ordo mundi quem videmus» 249 , introducing a hendiadys to further make explicit that it comprises the way things are and the way things go, and later asks how it is that, and who has made, the undifferentiated, confused and chaotic mass 242 KEUDEL, ‘Ordo nel «Thesaurus Linguae Latinae»’, I, 16. KEUDEL, ‘Ordo nel «Thesaurus Linguae Latinae»’, I, 16. 244 KEUDEL, ‘Ordo nel «Thesaurus Linguae Latinae»’, I, 13. 245 KEUDEL, ‘Ordo nel «Thesaurus Linguae Latinae»’, I, 13. 246 PLATO, Cratylus, 407b: «θεοῦ νόησις». 247 LEWIS, C. – SHORT, C., A Latin Dictionary, Oxford, 1891, 1277. 248 DELATTE, L. – GOVAERTS, S. – DENOOZ, J., ‘Ordo dans l’oeuvre de Sénèque et dans le Corpus Hermeticum’, in Ordo: Atti del Colloquio internazionale del Lessico intellettuale europeo, a cura di Fattori, M. – Bianchi, M., 2 voll., Roma, 1979, I, 23-25. 249 Cf. DELATTE – GOVAERTS – DENOOZ, ‘Ordo dans l’oeuvre de Sénèque’, 23-24. 243 121 comes to resemble a coherent world comprised of a harmony of distinct substances. Ordo, habitus, and forma are merged into a semantic cluster underlining the idea of a personal force of organizing reason that distinguishes substances and brings them into an intelligent and purposed harmony. At the same time the semantic field of each individual term taken on its own is increased as it incorporates the meanings of the cluster. The tractate entitled To Asclepius, of the neo-platonic Corpus Hermeticum, also proffers a rich articulation of ordo250 that explicates the meanings of the internal structure or form of things, their distribution, and their temporal succession and includes them all as components of the overarching meaning of ‘organization’, which is also qualified as beautiful, as revealing of an underlying hierarchical structure251, and through which all things are held together («enim mundus ordine gestatur [39, 16.5]»). The authors note the involvement of the space-time continuum thrown in relief under the diachronic aspect ordo252, an aspect which throws light on the historical dimension embedded in the term. As is that of St. Augustine and the tradition after him, St. Bonaventure’s development is a philosophical commentary on the modus, species, and ordo253. Thus God is the depositor of order («sed omnia mensura et numero et pondere disposuisti [Wis. 11:21]»), of which he possesses three different kinds: the order of wisdom, the order of nature and the order of justice. 254 The created world is an ordered world characterized by beauty and government and the creature’s relation with the Creator as first principle is constituted by the threefold efficient, formal and final, causality: «Omnis enim creatura constituitur in esse ab efficiente, conformatur ad exemplar et ordinatur ad finem; ac per hoc est una, vera, bona; modificata, speciosa, ordinata; mensurata, discrete et ponderata; est enim pondus inclinatio ordinativa»255. This passage throws into relief the 250 Corpus Hermeticum, ed. Nock, A. – Festugiére, A.-J., Paris 1945, p.350-351. The text cited reads: «Has ordo consequitur, id est textus et dispositio temporis rerum perficiendarum. Nihil est enim sine ordinis conpositione; in omnibus mundus iste perfectus est; ipse enim mundus ordine gestatur vel totus constat ex ordine (l’Ordre, c’est-à-dire la contexture et la succession temporelle de tout ce qui doit se réaliser. Car rien n’échappe à l’arrangement de l’Ordre, et c’est en toutes choses que cette belle ordonnance s’accomplit: en effet le monde lui-même suit l’Ordre en son mouvement, bien plus, il ne se maintient tout entier que grâce à l’Ordre)» [39, 14.4 – 39, 16.5]. 251 DELATTE – GOVAERTS – DENOOZ, ‘Ordo dans l’oeuvre de Sénèque’, 25. 252 DELATTE – GOVAERTS – DENOOZ, ‘Ordo dans l’oeuvre de Sénèque’, 25. 253 HAMESSE, J., ‘Ordo dans quelques oeuvres de St. Bonaventure’, in Ordo: Atti del Colloquio internazionale del Lessico intellettuale europeo, a cura di Fattori, M. – Bianchi, M., 2 voll., Roma, 1979, I, 27-57. 254 HAMESSE, ‘Ordo dans quelques oeuvres de St. Bonaventure’, 36. 255 BONAVENTURA, Breviloquium, Viterbo, 1991, I, 179. 122 place of the concept of order in Bonaventure’s philosophy of being: by means of the efficient cause the creature is given being – oneness, truth and goodness; the creature is conformed – fashioned and ordered – to the formal cause, and therefore beautiful; to the final cause the creature is measured, set apart, and weighed (inclinatio ordinativa) and this way receives its place in the harmony of the whole. It is important to note, as the Lexique Saint Bonaventure suggestively underlines, that «order is one of the properties of every creature. Order, like weight, derives from the goodness of the thing»256. Order in this sense can be read as a dynamism derivative from the dynamism of the good (bonum est diffusivum sui). The innovation of St. Bonaventure’s use of ordo is, however, in the moral sphere (ordo vivendi)257, in the sense of a rule of life, implying knowledge, will, and action258. The ordo vivendi is implied by the righteous (rectitudo) life lived according to the Scriptures, a rule of life aligned with the will of God259. True to his proclivity for triads, Bonaventure accords the threefold caused creature created in God’s image a threefold principle – life, intelligence and will260 – and with this, freedom. The order of the universe, as the created harmony, becomes a choice for man and out of his freedom he can choose to live according to the divine order or act against it, introducing a note of discord and disorder into the universe. This realm of freedom corresponds to the order of justice (ordo iustitiae) in which God’s will is respected or not. Bonaventure designates two spheres, that of created order (ordo factus) and that of order-in-the-making (ordo factivus), the second of which, in the realm of the ordo iustitiae corresponds to the task of aligning the personal will with God’s will and thus re-ordering the universe in accordance with the divine harmony261. St. Thomas Aquinas’ use of ordo, analyzed by Roberto Busa262, denotes the following: relation and rapport, which implies alterity and the functionality of one pole of the relation towards the other263; in a static acceptation, the correct distribution or disposition of several objects in a whole or in a sequence in function of an end264; in a dynamic acceptation, 256 BOUGEROL, J-J., ed., Lexique Saint Bonaventure, Paris, 1969, p. 103. My italics. HAMESSE, J., ‘Ordo dans quelques oeuvres de St. Bonaventure’, 51. 258 HAMESSE, J., ‘Ordo dans quelques oeuvres de St. Bonaventure’, 32. 259 HAMESSE, J., ‘Ordo dans quelques oeuvres de St. Bonaventure’, 33-35. 260 HAMESSE, J., ‘Ordo dans quelques oeuvres de St. Bonaventure’, 38. 261 HAMESSE, J., ‘Ordo dans quelques oeuvres de St. Bonaventure’, 39. 262 BUSA, R., ‘Ordo dans les oeuvres de St. Thomas d’Aquin’, in Ordo: Atti del Colloquio internazionale del Lessico intellettuale europeo, a cura di Fattori, M. – Bianchi, M., 2 voll., Roma, 1979, I, 81-91. 263 BUSA, ‘Ordo dans les oeuvres de St. Thomas d’Aquin’, 85. 264 BUSA, ‘Ordo dans les oeuvres de St. Thomas d’Aquin’, 85-86. 257 123 the correlation of objects according to an organizing principle that mediates between different entities in a plurality, mediates the rapport between the origin and the originated and the tendency towards an end, and mediates the levels of a hierarchy 265 ; a program or plan, as signified by the expression ratio ordinis266: the qualities, consistencies, forms, formulae, contents, potentialities, energies, radii of action…with which the orchestration of the universe is unfolded: each thing and event being a beautiful note in itself and beautiful in its insertion, commensurate by means of its functionality in service of the beauty of the whole and valued from the whole267. St Thomas also makes use of the Augustinian triad of «modus, species, et ordo» which like Bonaventure he relates to the Sapiential «omnia in mensura et numero et pondere disposuisti» [Sap. 11:21]. Busa gives a useful definition of the triad: form is the content, colour, intrinsic and proper message of each fragment of reality; modus is it’s measure and dimensions, and it’s balance within the harmony of the whole, that is, its proportioning, finishing, and perfecting in function of the whole; ordo is its insertion as a cog in the system of an organization or, if you will, as a beat or note within the development of an orchestral concert268. In Dante ordo is to express the grades of angelic hierarchy, the rational distribution of the arguments of a treatise, the laws of relationships that regulate human society, and above all the harmony of the universe269, Le cose tutte quante hanno ordine tra loro, e questo è forma che l’Universo a Dio fa simigliante. Qui veggion l’alte creature l’orma de l’etterno valore, il quale è fine al quale è fatta la toccata norma270. 265 BUSA, ‘Ordo dans les oeuvres de St. Thomas d’Aquin’, 86. BUSA, ‘Ordo dans les oeuvres de St. Thomas d’Aquin’, 87. 267 BUSA, ‘Ordo dans les oeuvres de St. Thomas d’Aquin’, 87. 268 BUSA, ‘Ordo dans les oeuvres de St. Thomas d’Aquin’, 88. 269 DURO, A., ‘Ordine, ordo e derivati in Dante’, in Ordo: Atti del Colloquio internazionale del Lessico intellettuale europeo, a cura di Fattori, M. – Bianchi, M., 2 voll., Roma, 1979, I, 185-189. 270 DANTE ALIGHIERI, La Divina Commedia, Pr, c. I, vv. 103-108. My italics. 266 124 Ordo as used by some of Descartes’ contemporaries The study of the semantic field of the term ordo in the Regulae carried out by the Equipe Descartes provides an examination of the term in various dictionaries from Descartes’ lifetime up to the century following his death271. They summarize the findings in five groups: (1) order as injunction; (2) order as a constant direction, in the sense of disposition, succession, series, etc.; (3) order as that which puts an end to confusion when introduced where the was none, very similar to the notion of method; (4) order as distinct from rule, the latter is observed, the former is followed; (5) order understood as mandate is derived more from the notion of arrangement or rule (imposed upon a given situation) than that of disposition (of the thing in itself)272. As a chronological category ‘Descartes’ contemporaries’ stretches from his immediate predecessors, whose articulation and use of the term remained the basic template followed by thinkers in Descartes’ lifetime, to his contemporaries proper and up to and including his immediate successors (and perhaps even remote successors, even up to the present). Three thinkers in the latter category were Jacopo Zabarella, Rudolph Goclenius, and Eustachius a Sancto Paulo. In the former the treatment of the term in Galileo, Beeckman and Mersenne are illuminating. During Descartes’ lifetime the notion of ordo in the wider context is associated with, appearing at times alongside, and at times as an acceptation of, the concept of method, which was in turn conceived as a part of the overall structure of philosophical logic273. Jacopo Zabarella, whose De methodis libri quatuor was published in 1578, nineteen years before Descartes’ birth, formulated the distinction that would set the tone for the articulation of the philosophical notion of method for the next century. Zabarella distinguishes two general acceptations of the term method: the first identifies method with ordo, defining it as the «overall ordering of subject-matter»274 whereas the second refers to method as a «logical technique of discovery (methodus, properly so called)»275. 271 EQUIPE DESCARTES, 317-321. EQUIPE DESCARTES, 321. 273 DEAR, P., ‘Method and the Study of Nature’, in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, by Garber, D. – Ayers, M., edd., 2 voll., Cambridge, 2008, I, 148. 274 DEAR, ‘Method and the Study of Nature’, 148. 275 DEAR, ‘Method and the Study of Nature’, 148. 272 125 Rudolf Göckel (Goclenius) notes in his Problemata logica, also published in 1597, that ordo and methodus are sometimes distinguished: so that ordo is the proper disposition of the precepts of any discipline; [while] methodus is indeed the process of declaring and proving those precepts, or the way by which the more unknown and obscure parts of a discipline are explicated and demonstrated through [things] more manifest and better known276. Descartes’ familiarity with Eustachius a Sancto Paulo’s Summa philosophica quadripartita (1609) is well known. Eustachius also treats the question of order and method along the lines drawn out by Zabarella, but articulated in a manner strikingly similar to Descartes’ formulation of these same points in the Regulae: The name of method is understood in two ways: first, indeed, as an order and series of all those things that are taught and arranged in some complete field of learning or a part of it; secondly, as an ordering, or that judgment of the mind by which those things in some discipline are disposed uninterruptedly277. Noteworthy in Eustachius’ definition is the more conflated use of the terms method and order than in Zabarella and Glocenius, but also the way in which the binary order/ordering serves to explain what method is: order, and ordering, disposition and disposing. Peter Dear notes however that for Eustachius it is the second acceptation of the term method, the active acceptation so to speak, that is the more proper278. We have already seen the importance Descartes ascribes to the ‘uninterruptedness’ of the disposition of things, especially in Regulae III, VII, and XI. Although 33 years Descartes’ senior, Galileo died only eight years before him, and despite not possessing Descartes’ philosophical stature his use of the term order in his description of the natural world and his eschewal of Aristotelian categories places him within the field of Descartes’ contemporaries by virtue of affinity as well as chronology. 276 Cited in DEAR, ‘Method and the Study of Nature’, 148. «Methodi nomen dupliciter accipitur: primo quidem pro ordine & serie eorum omnium quae in universa aliqua doctrina vel ejus parte traduntur ac digeruntur; secundò, pro ordinatione seu eo animi judicio quo res illae in aliqua disciplina continue disponuntur», cited in DEAR, ‘Method and the Study of Nature’, 149. 278 DEAR, ‘Method and the Study of Nature’, 149. 277 126 In Galileo 279 the binary ordine/disordine is used with rigorous symmetry280. To begin with disordine refers to «the rupture of a very precise order, that in which the harmony and perfection of nature consists» 281 . A symmetrical distinction is also made within the term disordine to indicate on one pole the cosmological acceptation, the disorder among the constituent parts of a whole282, and, on the other pole, the logical acceptation, mental or logical disorder283. It also has sub-acceptations in each of these two divisions, some of which we will see are very similar to the use Descartes’ makes of them: thus, ordine also means ‘rules’, ‘line’, ‘rank’, ‘file’, or ‘series’, and also refers to order as spatial disposition, notably in cosmological contexts such as the Dialogo…sopra I due massimi sistemi del mondo… in which he aims to demonstrate the unsustainability of Aristotle’s cosmological conception284. An interesting use of ordine that refers to the objective pole but according to the observer’s perception refers to «the regulated succession in space and time of different objects: the order that is with which things appear to the observer (“da occidente verso oriente, che è secondo l’ordine de’ segni”) or with which one succeeds the other (“col medesimo ordine che la diminuzione o perdita dei medesimi gradi”)»285. The turn away from an aristotelian cosmology manifest in Galileo’s use of ordine signals the permeation of the concept of order throughout the entire universe, which God has created entirely according to order and entirely good, subject to an eternal law «operating with absolutely rational and uniform procedures»286. No longer confined to and intelligible in the perfect and stable supra-lunar or celestial sphere and excluded from the corrupt and imperfect sub-lunar sphere, the concept’s newly forged cosmological associations are mirrored in its new semantic alignments: order also now corresponds to and is synonymous with: perfection, which «no longer consists in grades of participation in being…It is order and not being that now provides the criteria of perfection»287; and nature, «which 279 GALLUZI, P., ‘Il tema dell’ordine in Galileo’, in Ordo: Atti del Colloquio internazionale del Lessico intellettuale europeo, a cura di Fattori, M. – Bianchi, M., 2 voll., Roma, 1979, I, 235-277. 280 GALLUZI, ‘Il tema dell’ordine in Galileo’, 237. 281 GALLUZI, ‘Il tema dell’ordine in Galileo’, 237. 282 GALLUZI, ‘Il tema dell’ordine in Galileo’, 238. 283 GALLUZI, ‘Il tema dell’ordine in Galileo’, 238. 284 GALLUZI, ‘Il tema dell’ordine in Galileo’, 238-239. 285 GALLUZI, ‘Il tema dell’ordine in Galileo’, 239. 286 GALLUZI, ‘Il tema dell’ordine in Galileo’, 248. 287 GALLUZI, ‘Il tema dell’ordine in Galileo’, 249. 127 cannot not produce order, which is necessarily eminently perfect and eminently simple»288. Whereas nature, corresponding to the sub-lunar sphere, is intrinsically disordered in Aristotle, because always corrupt in relation to the celestial sphere towards which it strives, in Galileo nature, because created and subject to the order of the entire created universe, is not intrinsically but only extrinsically disordered. Order, in effect, is not, as in Aristotle, a fact that is internal to bodies and which therefore determines it’s position in the cosmos necessarily, but a relational fact between bodies among themselves and within the series of numerous bodies, and relative to their place in the universal order established by God; since the universe in Galileo is uniform in its subjection to rational laws there are no longer ‘orders’ within the cosmos (i.e. sub- and supra- lunar) – in which order is relative to the location or space – but one single order to which all space is relativized. In turn, because of this uniformity of the universe, the status of motion or movement is also transformed from something transient and corresponding to disorder until the achievement of stasis, and thus perfection, into a permanent state of bodies as mobile because they are in the universe. Movement is thus not an intrinsic quality of imperfection or disorder but rather a constituent of an ordered universe. Both movement and stasis are relativized as two expressions of the state of bodies extended in the universe, and the diversity of either bodies or their movement/stasis is a result not of qualities but of the «ottima disposizione» conferred by nature/order «according to rules of maximum economy and simplicity».289 The metronome of this diversity is proportion; since order is fundamentally relational and not essential, the «theatre of order and perfection is geometric space» 290 and therefore perfection and order lie in the proportional relationships between «speeds, times, magnitudes, distances» 291 and ultimately in systems of geometrico-mathematical relationships, which have their ultimate source in the order established by God in the creation of the universe, according to «numero, pondere et mensura»292. In a significant preparation of the ground for Descartes’ own conception of order, Galileo sustains that the human mind has the capacity to understand the order of the universe because it has the capacity to reason 288 GALLUZI, ‘Il tema dell’ordine in Galileo’, 249. GALLUZI, ‘Il tema dell’ordine in Galileo’, 252. 290 GALLUZI, ‘Il tema dell’ordine in Galileo’, 253. 291 GALLUZI, ‘Il tema dell’ordine in Galileo’, 252. 292 GALLUZI, ‘Il tema dell’ordine in Galileo’, 252. 289 128 according to geometrico-mathematical methods. This capacity, expressed and made possible in pure mathematics is a point of contact between God’s mind and the human mind, both being afforded the same degree of certainty concerning the same objects: …l’intelletto umano ne intende alcune così perfettamente, e ne ha così assoluta certezza, quanto se n’abbia l’intessa natura; e tali sono le scienze matematiche pure, cioè la geometria e l’aritmetica, delle quali l’intelletto divino ne sa bene infinite proposizioni di più, perché le sa tutte, ma di quelle poche intese dall’intelletto umano credo che la cognizione agguagli la divina nella certezza obiettiva, poiché arriva a comprenderne la necessità, sopra la quale non par che possa esser sicurezza maggiore293. All of this implies a corresponding «logical order which “proceeds with discourses and with passages from conclusion to conclusion” and only with time and fatigue is capable of reconstructing the series of relationships in which the order of things consists»294, an order which God always and already grasps. That the universe is famously a book continuously laid open before us and written by God in mathematical language with the characters of geometrical figures295 makes the effort to learn that language a deeply religious act296 in which God is recognized and praised in and through his works and the order in which He has arranged them. 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TOMMASO D’AQUINO, Sulla verità, Milano, 2005. _____, La somma teologica, Bologna, 2014. 133 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ................................................................................................... 3 Concordances of ordo in Descartes’ opus .......................................... 6 Distribution of the term ordo in the Regulae ...................................... 8 Chapter I: Order in the context of Regulae I-V .......................................... 10 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 Order in Regula V ............................................................................. 11 Order in Regula IV ............................................................................ 13 Intuition and light in Regula III ........................................................ 16 The «end of all studies» in Regula I ................................................. 26 Regula III revisited: deduction, memory and absence ...................... 30 Returning to Regula IV: preambula ordinis ..................................... 36 Chapter II: Order in Regulae V, VI and VIII: some syntagms..................... 41 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 «Ordine persequendas» ..................................................................... 42 «Ordo vel/et mensura» ...................................................................... 43 Ordo and De ordine .......................................................................... 51 «Ordine et dispositione» ................................................................... 54 Ordo and terminus: an unwritten syntagm........................................ 62 Chapter III: Order in Regula VII: enumeratio et conversio ........................ 66 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 «Sufficienti et ordinate enumeratione complecti» ............................ 67 Enumeration, space, and contact ....................................................... 70 Epistrophé ......................................................................................... 74 Ordo et dispositio as restoration of nature ........................................ 78 Absence and time: order as eschatology ........................................... 80 134 Chapter IV: «Becoming accustomed»: the anthropology of order in Regulae IX-XII ........................................................................................ 83 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 Will and order ................................................................................... 84 Becoming accustomed ...................................................................... 86 4.2.1 Bearing the open light .............................................................. 86 4.2.2 Seeing geometrically ................................................................ 90 Regulae IX and X: perspicacitas et sagacitas .................................. .94 Regula XI: embracing propositions and relations simultaneously .. 100 4.4.1 Amplifying the intellect .......................................................... 100 4.4.2 The significance of speed ....................................................... 102 4.4.3 The form of freedom ............................................................... 105 Regula XIIa: aiding the intellect ..................................................... 107 4.5.1 «Ingenium», imagination, and the entire human being ......... 107 4.5.2 Temporality and timelessness ................................................ 111 Abbreviated good: the simple natures in Regula XIIb .................... 112 Appendix: A brief historical survey of the semantic range of ordo.......... 117 Ordo prior to the seventeenth century ............................................ 118 Ordo as used by some of Descartes’ contemporaries ..................... 125 Bibliography.............................................................................................. 130 Table of contents ....................................................................................... 134 135