Reading Le Monde as Pedagogy and Fable
This chapter explicates the opening sections of Le Monde. It is particularly concerned with their non-Scholastic rhetoric and organization, given their having been written in the vernacular, in honnête hommestyle. It also explores why some core elements o
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Reading Le Monde as Pedagogy and Fable
9.1
Introduction
In Le Monde Descartes offers a bold exposition of realist Copernican cosmology and corpuscular mechanism. Indeed, with Le Monde the corpuscular-mechanical approach to nature first aspires to the level of natural philosophical systematics which had characterized the Aristotelian teaching and its neo-Platonic competitors.1 Le Monde can be approached in several ways. For example, one might emphasize its mode of presentation, for it is far from a formal natural philosophy textbook and more an appeal to the commonsense and everyday rationality culturally attributed to an honnête homme—that is, an intelligent, practical, trustworthy gentleman, well educated, but not embroiled within—or attracted to—the controversies and trivialities of the Schools.2 Or, one might ponder in detail the curious mode of presentation of the middle sections—the well known fable of the world. In this chapter, we shall be doing both, but only as means to a deeper end, explored in the next chapter. In this book our focus ultimately remains on the process of emergence of Descartes,
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Le Monde is termed ‘more original than any of [Descartes’] other works’ by no less an expert than Theo Verbeek (Verbeek, 2000, 149). 2 Ranea (2000) As the Editors comment (Gaukroger et al., 2000, 12) in their Introduction: Ranea ‘shows that Descartes treated experience and experiment as something problematic that had to be regulated, thus demonstrating the existence of an earlier and continental variant of the English controversy over how one defines the ‘experimental life’, studied by Shapin and Schaffer. Ranea focuses on Descartes’ dialogue, La recherche de la vérité par la lumière naturelle, in which one of the interlocutors, Poliandre, is cast as the honnête homme, relying on his natural faculties and not on scholastic training. In addressing himself to the honnête homme, Descartes is identifying an audience of practical gentlemen whom believes he can educate to adjudicate (in his favor) in natural philosophical controversies. Ranea therefore argues that Descartes intended his natural philosophy as something that might close controversies stirred by the endemic variability and unreliability of factual reports.’ J. Schuster, Descartes-Agonistes: Physico-mathematics, Method & CorpuscularMechanism 1618-33, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 27, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4746-3_9, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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9 Reading Le Monde as Pedagogy and Fable
corpuscular-mechanical natural philosopher, out of the original carapace of Descartes, physico-mathematician. We shall therefore in the end concentrate on the central natural philosophical topics, claims and constructs in Le Monde, linking them to the genealogy of Descartes’ development, and to our understanding of what natural philosophical contestation was chiefly about in his generation. In other words we are setting up the next chapter to offer a synthetic reading, explicating Le Monde as the point where Descartes’ long
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