GENIUS FORUMS

22 May 04

Dear Roy:

Here are my notes on Rene Descartes' Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy which you were kind enough to send to me:

Part One

Any time someone begins a treatise-establishing at excruciating length and in compound sentences-his own simple nature compared to others, his own modest intellectual gifts and attributes and his self-confessed unsuitability to even venture onto the lofty plateaus trod by his predecessors, my best advice is to keep a firm hand on your metaphorical wallet.

Part Two

He seems to make a great point of a "zero sum" based incrementalism which is theoretically interesting if you can pull it off, but I don't think he can or, at least, does (i.e. "the principle of these sciences must all be derived from philosophy" p.13). As the college professors say, "Prove?" There is no proof that all "these sciences" must be "derived from philosophy" so there is no demonstrable tabula rasa, no demonstrable zero sum. He arbitrarily chooses his own foundational given, declares it to be a rational starting point and "off he goes". This, it seems to me, is very French.

Part Three

The "content yourself with less" section is good and then swerves abruptly into paganism. The ancient philosophers "who, in earlier times, were able to free themselves from fortune's domination and who, despite sorrows and poverty, could rival their gods in happiness ... " If you are starting from a zero sum vowing to move only to an adjacent square once you are certain that it is solidly grounded (as Descartes has claimed to be his goal in Part Two), that's quite a sentence. How are you quantifying "fortune's domination" in a purely dispassionate and factual scientific sense? Where, precisely, is the boundary between "fortune's domination" and freedom and how do you know the ancient philosophers freed themselves from the former and so attained to the latter state? Did they free themselves from it totally, intermittently, wholly, incrementally, partially, collectively, individually? How are you quantifying, scientifically and factually, these fellows' happiness and their gods' happiness so as to determine the relative quantities of each and thereby determining their co-equivalency or, at least, establishing a correlation between the two? Even if their "gods' happiness" is mere hyperbolic absolutism, doesn't that implicitly militate against the possibility of attaining to a logical construct, effectively undermining Descartes' self-declared foundational ambition to restrict his assertions to the demonstrably factual? And even granting a measure of poetical license (and I fail to see why anyone would do so, in light of Descartes' own propositional "givens") how do you obtain absolutist (in the hyperbolic sense) happiness "despite sorrows". Surely any manner of sorrow would place your happiness well below an absolutist state. It's like saying, "Despite their flaws, they achieved perfection. ")
Far better his observation: "it suffices to judge well in order to do well and to judge as best one can, in order also to do one's very best, " which he then, to me, undermines with the flat assertion in the next paragraph, "I, meanwhile, rooted out from my mind all the errors that had previously been able

And there, I'm afraid, Roy, came the point where I used my notepad as an oversized bookmark some three weeks or so ago, resolving to attempt to at least read another ten or so pages and comment on them, but I'm afraid the only result has been a complete Mexican standoff where I would rather go completely "bookless" than to force myself to even finish reading the rest of that last sentence. "I, meanwhile, having rooted out from my mind all the errors that had previously been able ... " How on earth could any thinking person even pretend to be interested in how someone would end a sentence like that? Peter Straub phoned me last week to thank me for my most recent commentary on one of his books and mentioned that he had picked up the Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald book because I had mentioned it in a letter and asked if I had read it yet. And my whole unhappy tale came pouring out about how I had gone "bookless" for the last few weeks and thought, no that's it. I'll send Roy my notes thus far and call it a day and read something interesting tonight.

I still appreciate your having sent me the book. It's a very attractive name, redolent with intellectual status, even though the fellow himself, from what I can see, is a blithering French idiot (pardon the redundancy). I'll keep it on my shelf with your address still post-it noted inside the front cover. Who knows? It might be something that will awaken me to a whole new reality in my seventies. I do, I'm afraid, seriously have my doubts.

But, this does mean that I'm caught up on my mail, with two and a half days left in the "two-four" week-end. Yippee.

Sincere thanks,

-Collected Letters 2004

He arbitrarily chooses his own foundational given, declares it to be a rational starting point and "off he goes". This, it seems to me, is very French.

a blithering French idiot (pardon the redundancy)