Reading Descartes Otherwise by Lee Kyoo;

Author:Lee, Kyoo;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2013-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

THE THIRD BREAK

So the third and “big” break, as hinted earlier, is something like an epistemological big bang. I am exaggerating here a little, but a sense of loss of control does frame the whole of the First Meditation. The loss of a grip on reality is the communicative frame of this philosophical diary. How that affects the whole of the Meditations as a reactively virile quest for objective reality transcendentally buttressed by God is a separate and much larger issue, which I can only touch but not (even begin to try to) contain in this book. Here, suffice it to illustrate the rather moody, affectively charged beginning of the proto-Cartesian Cartesian text.

Tear and fear: From the start of the Meditations, those two affective elements seem to have gone missing. Something happened before this composition, something sensational that tore apart young René’s seemingly fully formed subjectivity. Recall that setting: a winter’s night in the traveler’s lodge, in the stove-heated room (pole, oven-room) where the Meditations reportedly took place, “a Dutch stove, … a sort of chimerical home, in a corner of a boat,” where a child would suddenly discover that “she is herself, in an explosion toward the outside.”76 Indeed, “Descartes,” too, as the story goes and is told many times, “arrived at the minimal, fundamental truth of his existence curled up by himself in soliloquy in the corner of a warm room.”77 What is that threat from which he recoils like a baked prawn? What is it that caused him to wrap himself up with the trappings of philosophical introspection? No, a shock:

[Paragraph 1] Some years ago, I was struck [animadverti, suis aperçu] by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realize that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last. But the task looked an enormous one, and I began to wait until … (M, 7:17/2:12, emphasis added)

“Struck” is an overtranslation but a faithful overreading. What it brings out most “acutely” as Foucault would have seen is the virginal sense of surprise and danger, of stupefaction, impregnated in the host text yet easily missed by a mere “notice,” a merely correct translation of “animadverto” or “s’aperceivor que.” John Carriero also rightly pays attention to this word “animadverto” (turn my soul toward) as it appears later in the text (M, 7:29/2:19), marking it as “especially momentous.”78 What I will add to that is simply this point: The turn has in some significant sense has already taken place before the beginning. That is, Descartes begins to “wonder”—he wonders how to get to “know” the world all over again. Such a striking force of “the new that arrives” reappears as if in vengeance: Dumbstruck, Descartes decides to demolish everything for a change.

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