DESCARTES’ DEVIL

THREE MEDITATIONS

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Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc., provides a publicationvenue for original philosophical thinking steeped in lived life, inline with our motto: philosophical living & lived philosophy.

PRAISE for

DURS GRÜNBEIN

*“An inspired poet, brilliant essayist and erudite explicator,

Durs Grünbein, in his profound engagement with anothergenius, Descartes, has much to say in this book about poetry,history, science, philosophy and the human soul. An entirelyremarkable work.”

—C. K. WILLIAMS, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book CriticsCircle Award, and author of The Singing, Repair, and

Flesh and Blood

*“Descartes’ Devil is a moving and beautifully constructed

book that opens our eyes to the fantasy, humor, and imagina-tion of Descartes. Grünbein’s thought-provoking reflectionson the poetry and modernity of the philosopher—this man‘chosen to set the course for all of us’—are heightened andmade whole by his own playful poems, which conclude eachmeditation.”

—HEATHER EWING, author of The Lost World of James Smithson: Science, Revolution, and the Birth of the Smithsonianand A Guide to Smithsonian Architecture: An Architectural

History of the Smithsonian

*“This book is nothing less than a rewriting—and a su-

pre mely convincing one at that—of the history of ideas ofthe last four hundred years. Durs Grünbein forces us not onlyto rethink how we view ourselves as rational, thinking humanbeings, but he also compels us to reimagine the task of phi-losophy in the modern era.”

—CHRISTOPHERYOUNG, University of Cambridge, author of The Munich Olympics 1972 and the Making of

Modern Germany

*“I ... couldn’t help but stay awake all night reading Grün-

bein’s severe work ... absolutely unignorable ...”—HELENVENDLER, The New Republic, author ofPoets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats

*“Grünbein’s … work has a depth that deserves our atten-

tion.”—DAVID HELLMAN, San Francisco Chronicle

*“With Descartes’ Devil, Durs Grünbein, one of the leading

figures in contemporary European poetry, joins the companyof such great European poet-thinkers as Leopardi, Valéry andUnamuno. By locating the origin of the modern poetic ‘I’ inDescartes’ provocations, he challenges contemporary as-sumptions about the kind of work poetry should do, and thenproposes what it might be capable of doing. Through a boldlyunfashionable reappraisal of Cartesian ideas, he invokes analmost pre-Socratic ideal: that poetry and philosophy are as-pects of the same imaginative mode. But where Wittgensteinproposed it, Grünbein is in the process of realizing it. Hisown writing has now converged on a remarkable style, onecapable of conducting powerful and original thought with noloss of lyric intensity. This book offers a timely corrective tomuch twenty-first-century Anglophone poetry and its petti-fogging, idea-free tendencies: ‘poetry’, as Grünbein remindsus, ‘is a guardian of the non-trivial’, and the poet ‘someonewho puts language into a state of exception’. In this astonish-ing book Grünbein has richly honored his own definitions.”

—DON PATERSON, winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Whitbread PoetryAward, and author of Nil Nil, God’s Gift to Women, and

Landing Light

ABOUT THIS BOOK

In three beautifully wrought meditations on the import ofRené Descartes’ legacy from a poet’s perspective, DursGrünbein presents us with a Descartes whom we haven’tmet before: not the notorious perpetrator of the mind-body-dualism, the arch-villain of Rationalism but the in-spired and courageous dreamer, explorer, and fabulist.Reading Descartes against the grain of the widely acceptedview of the philosopher as the proponent of a cut-and-dried, disembodied, and, hence, misguided view of hu-manity, Grünbein discloses the profoundly humane andpoetic underpinnings of the legacy of this “modern man parexcellence,” and, by extension, of modernity as a whole. Un-covering the poetic foundations of Descartes’ rationalismand, concomitantly, the poetic lining of the mantle of rea-son, Durs Grünbein, one of the world’s greatest livingpoets and essayists, shows us that reason is never morealive than when it is most poetic.

DESCARTES’ DEVIL

THREE MEDITATIONS

DURS GRÜNBEIN

Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc.

New York • 2010

Translated from the Germanby Anthea Bell

Edited by Michael Eskin

Original Publication:Der cartesische Taucher. Drei Meditationen

© Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2008

First English Edition

CONTENTS

First Meditation: No Pure ‘I’ / 13

Second Meditation: School of Autopsy / 43

Third Meditation: Theme for a Well-Ordered Brain / 81

~Notes / 127

Select Bibliography / 133

Chronological Table / 135

About the Author / 137

DESCARTES’ DEVIL~

THREE MEDITATIONS

“I knew … that the wealth of ideas in poetryawakens the mind.”

René DescartesDiscourse on the Method for Conducting One’sReason Well and for Seeking Truth in the Sciences(1637)

FIRST MEDITATION

NO PURE ‘I’

In a letter to Elizabeth of Bohemia, Countess of the Palat-inate, dated 22 February 1649, René Descartes makes acomment on the art of poetry that electrified me when Ifirst read it: “And I think that the humor for making versesproceeds from a strong agitation of the animal spirits,which cannot but entirely confuse the imagination of thosewho do not possess a well-ordered brain, while merelyslightly exciting those who are strong and disposing themtoward poetry.”1 Remarkable words from a philosopher.It’s worth looking at them separately and lingering on thispassage, which, as usual in Descartes, contains an entiretrain of thought. But first, a comment on what you areabout to read: The following reflections should be re-garded as loosely connected meditations. I shall allow my-self the liberty of setting them out like a montage, as akind of mosaic of ideas. Or they could be said to windabout like a labyrinth—not so much the labyrinth of myown isolated self as that of every conscious modern mind.

My question is how the poetry of modernity has con-cealed itself in that mind for almost half a millennium. Imust add here that my use of the term ‘modern’ entirelyignores accepted divisions into periods. I reserve the rightto a different perspective. ‘Modernity’, in my view, is aphenomenon bespeaking the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous, a point of intersection of many discon-nected historical progressions and evolutionary leaps thathave nothing in common but the one effect of shooting be-yond the events that occasioned them into a supra-tempo-ral sphere. In this sphere, people like Archimedes andEinstein are contemporaries, or, to remain in the latitudesof the arts, so are poets like Ovid and Apollinaire, andpainters like Vermeer and Kandinsky. As a rule, ‘moder-nity’ is the billboard on which achievements that have beenaround for a long time are posted.

~And so to Descartes and his relation to poetry. To come

straight to my point: I see him as paving the way for an an-thropologically based poetics. To be sure, the notion that

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the appearance of Cartesian philosophy revived poetrymay be obsolete—already Ernst Cassirer considered andrejected it in his comparative study on Descartes’ The Pas-sions of the Soul and Pierre Corneille’s psychology of drama.Yet, there are striking parallels between the philosopherand the tragedian. Both subscribe to the idea of the humanbeing as a clockwork of emotions kept going by passionsthat are relatively static, almost ready-made, but guidedand corrected by the weight of moral reflection. From ananthropological viewpoint, such a mechanistic approachwas radically novel. What started out as a mere ‘technicaldrawing’ of the human psyche was to have unforeseeableconsequences for our view of humanity as a whole and,thus, for what occupies the poets. We are still a long wayfrom any kind of genuine psycholinguistics or neurologicallanguage theory. Four hundred years separate us from suchconcepts as the neocortex or mirror neurons; yet, with aradical mid-seventeenth-century conjecture, a beginningwas made. As philosopher Karl Popper puts it: “When wespeak of an (electric) nerve impulse, Descartes speaks ofthe flow of animal spirits. When we speak of a synapse ora synaptic knob, Descartes speaks of pores through whichthe vital spirits can flow.” But what has all this got to dowith poetry, and does it change our understanding of whata poem is?

I shall return to this later. For now, suffice it to notethat this was a radical break with such classical ideas as thedoctrine of temperaments and Stoic psycho-dietetics. Re-lying on psychological abstraction in his analysis of psy-chodynamics, Descartes overshot any conceivable goal.Neoclassical aesthetics, Boileau’s L’art poétique in particular,would only try to contain what we begin to glimpse here.The metaphor of the animal spirits turns writing poetry intoplaying with fire—an inner fire that pushes the limits ofthe imagination while keeping its cool. A surrealist couldnot have expressed it more daringly. The ‘I’ itself becomesthe observer of the play of emotions, approaching themlike the rim of a volcano and peering down into the crater.

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Durs Grünbein Descartes’ Devil

~The letter to the Countess Palatine is a nod to us from

the Early Modern period. It already contains the seed of awhole theory of the imagination based on the physiologyof the brain. The lady to whom it is addressed needed con-solation, and Descartes writes to her as a sympathetic ad-viser. For this was not just any noble lady but a staunchsupporter of his philosophy and one of the cleverest wom-en of her time. One of his major works, Principles of Philos-ophy (1644), is dedicated to her. She was the eldest daughterof the luckless ‘Winter King’, Frederick V of Bohemia, andafter her father lost his throne in 1620 she lived in exile inthe Netherlands. From the time of their first meeting inThe Hague—when she was twenty-four and the philoso-pher was almost fifty—she was one of Descartes’ most im-portant interlocutors. Her judgment mattered to him; hervirginal skepticism put his reasoning to the test. Their cor-respondence is a fine testament to the new relationshipbetween the sexes in the Free Republic of Minds, if onlybecause it shows the thinker in the role of nobleman. Acourtesy that brings us closer in human terms to the arch-theoretician Descartes shines through the armor of logic.The compliment he pays her on the dedication page of hisPrinciples of Philosophy is almost risqué: “… to a youthfulprincess who reminds us, in her person and her age, not ofthe learned Minerva or one of the Muses, but rather of theGraces.”

As we learn from Descartes’ letter, the princess hadbeen ill and, while confined to her bed, had “felt an incli-nation to write verse” to distract herself. The philosopher,a true gentleman, assures her that such activity is entirelynatural in circumstances like these, invoking Socrates, whohad done exactly the same during his confinement in anAthenian prison. And here, in the context of speaking ofverse, a word lights up, inclination—meaning a certain basicdisposition or leaning—which opens up a whole spectrumof scientific associations: from the geometry of conic sec-tions, to the planetary orbits of the astronomers, to the

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First Meditation No Pure ‘I’

geometer’s art of measurement made possible by theearth’s magnetism and the deviations of the quiveringcompass needle from the horizontal, in a word: inclination.This implies that the mind as well must stand at a partic-ular angle of inclination to the course of everyday life, beit due to sudden exaltation or racking illness, euphoria ordejection. Whether elated or depressed, the mind must bein a certain mood (the body slightly bent, perhaps, as in Al-brecht Dürer’s engraving of the brooding angel), only thenwill the organism be jogged into creativity.

For lines of verse to begin to flow, the tedium of a lifenumbed by habit must be interrupted—by some suddenevent, however small, that shakes it up. Poetry cannot bewritten to order. When Descartes speaks of “humor” inconnection with poetry, he doesn’t mean the capriciousideas of a whimsical mind but humeur, which to a Frenchspeaker means ‘disposition’ or a specific ‘cast of mind’—not to be confused with humour, that kindly and playfulstate of mind. As always, Descartes makes a precise dis-tinction, and to distinguish, to make conceptual divisionsin good Aristotelian fashion, was this thinker’s principaldaily occupation.

In Les passions de l’âme, he lists six original passions of thesoul: love, hate, desire, joy, sadness, and, heading them all,admiration (to Descartes the noblest of the emotions)—we might think of it as closely related to the Kantian notionof the sublime. Multiplied and divided, these passions giverise to dozens of subspecies. Thus he works out, crossingand combining them with each other in progressive analy-sis, the drives and virtues: envy and shame, disgust, re-morse, and the overarching virtue of generosity. He de-fines joy as “a pleasant emotion of the soul consisting inthe enjoyment of what is good,” and we are reminded ofFriedrich Schiller’s schöner Götterfunken from Beethoven’sNinth. He also recognizes intellectual grief. He asks him-self why the envious have faces of a leaden color and ex-plains the origin of tears: Vapors are shed from the eyesjust as sweat emerges from the pores of the skin. Of trem-

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Durs Grünbein Descartes’ Devil

bling he says that it has two causes, “the one is that some-times too few vital spirits reach the nerves from the brain,the other that sometimes there are too many of them forthe small passages in the muscles to close properly.”

At a single stroke, he outstrips the psychology of hisday and crowns it with a dynamic theory of the emotions.Once again, it is physics that provides a solid foundation,and this, as we may notice, in the age of Metaphysical Po-etry. In England, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, GeorgeHerbert, and John Donne are writing intellectual medita-tions in poetic form, while on the continent body andmind are being linked by a system of communicating tubesthat no longer have anything in common with the glassflasks and cooling coils in the alchemist’s lab. The new dis-tillation device made of flesh and blood is fed by the emo-tions. Anyone wishing to understand Descartes’ bold the-ory of the writing of verse must start with them.

The force that activates the process is the arousal ofwhat Descartes calls esprits animaux, animal spirits. Thesewonderfully ghostly vital spirits are an invention of thephysicians of the period, useful in any kind of diagnosis,from an insidious fever to a fit of sensual lust to insom nia.In this—their original—form, as subversively diabolicalparticles that obsessively course through the body, we firstencounter them again in the works of the late Romanticswith their fantasies of magnetism and their spiritistic prac-tices. By ‘animal spirits’ Descartes means a gaseous secre-tion of the blood, setting out from the heart, circulating inthe blood, and, like all gases and vapors, rising upwards.On reaching the pineal gland, a small specialized organ sit-uated directly under the base of the skull and functioningas an atomizer, they are sprayed into all the chambers ofthe brain. Before we all start chuckling, let’s keep in mindthat Descartes, himself an industrious anatomist, had dis-sected the organ with his own hands. All this won’t seemso curious at all if, instead of the pineal gland, we think ofthe hypophysis of the diencephalon, that drop-shapedstructure about the size of an avocado stone. Then the droll

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First Meditation No Pure ‘I’

bulb, the only organ in the entire cranium that is not oneof a pair, becomes the familiar hormonal gland that is partof the limbic system and responsible for memory, learning,and the management of our emotions. To Descartes, thisgland was the seat of the soul.

~“Gentlemen, rather than promising that I can satisfy

your curiosity about the anatomy of the brain, I now admitthat it is a subject about which I know absolutely nothing.”These words by Danish anatomist Nicolas Steno (1638–1686) Descartes, too, ought to have spoken. However, hebelieved that he had a perfect command of the subjectwhen, in his Treatise On Man, he explained the mechanismof the brain, and of the pineal gland in particular. Animalspirits are the subtler parts of the blood, tiny particles ofmatter—“like the parts of a flame spraying from a torch,”he writes—some of which make their way into the inter-stices of the brain, others into the nerves, others into themuscles, thus setting off reflection, reaction, and move-ment, albeit in reverse order.

The farsighted Leibniz was subsequently to snuff outthis very idea by replacing it with his theory of monads,which doesn’t accommodate dynamic entities of this kind.He was to rout the animal spirits as something dangerouslyirrational—willful goblins that would only wreak havoc inthe well-ordered structure of the best of all worlds. Thequestion of how the soul sets the vital spirits to work, heexplains, is invalid because there is no relationship of anykind between body and mind. Undoubtedly, he did suc-ceed in exorcising the lively sparks from the Baroque bodymachine. Something that exists only when items clump to-gether, in the same way as platelets form thromboses,doesn’t therefore, he argues, have to be present as a realentity. Leibniz goes so far as to declare all sensation im-material in an attempt to restore the unity of body andmind. With his infinitesimal exorcisms, he finally puts toflight the esprits animaux, those light-shunning ghosts in thebrain’s ventricles. He ...

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Durs Grünbein Descartes’ Devil

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Illustrations: ‘Cartesian Devil’ (p. 4), etching, in: Johann Heinrich Moritz vonPoppe, Der physikalische Jugendfreund oder faßliche und unterhaltende Darstellung derNaturlehre, mit der genauesten Beschreibung aller anzustellenden Experimente, der dazunöthigen Instrumente, und selbst mit Beyfügung vieler belustigenden physikalischen Kunst-stücke. Erster Theil. Mit sechs Kupfertafeln (1811); ‘Rainbow Watcher’ (p. 34), en-graving from the “Eighth Discourse (Of the Rainbow)” of Descartes’ LesMétéores (1637); “Caduca Fluxa Vanitas” (p. 72), etching by Wolfgang Kilian, in:Jakob Balde, Poema de Vanitate Mundi (1638), courtesy of the Bavarian State Library, Munich, Germany.

Our special thanks to Joseph Biel for the original artwork on p. 6 (frontispiece:“Durs Grünbein with Mask of René Descartes in Snow”) and p. 126 (“Skull àla Descartes”). Both images copyright © 2009 by Joseph Biel

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