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--Somnio

Ergo

Sum
 
 
Somnio, ergo sum
Donald Challenger

Afterthoughts 		 
Descartes Photo
 
One of the historical curiosities of the dreams of Nov. 10, 1619, particularly the final dream, is Descartes's own interpretation, for it has consistently bewildered modern biographers and historians. Descartes assigned allegorical meanings to most of the key elements, particularly those of the third dream:

  • The dictionary: Signified "all the Sciences gathered together."

  • The Corpus Poetarum: Signified "the union of Philosophy and Wisdom." Baillet tells us that Descartes believed poets -- "even the most mediocre" -- were empowered to "bring out the seeds of wisdom that are found in all men's minds ... much more easily and much more brilliantly than can the Reason of the philosophers."

  • Quod vitae sectabor iter?: The poem to which he turned by chance in the Corpus Poetarum -- What road of life shall I follow? -- "represented the good advice of a wise person or even of Moral Theology."

  • Est et Non: The poem offered to him by the stranger "he understood [as] Truth and Falsehood in human understanding and the profane sciences."

  • The storm: Finally, the wind that propelled him toward the chapel in the initial dream, Baillet records, "was nothing other than the Evil Spirit who was trying to throw him by force into a place that he intended to enter by his own free will. This was why God did not permit him to advance any farther even into a holy place.... Nevertheless, he was firmly convinced that it had been the Spirit of God that had made him take the first steps toward that church." (12)

    • Much of the "anti-Cartesian derision" with which Descartes's interpretation has met rests on three key points. First, the easy assignment of changing motives to God and the "Evil Spirit" seemed a transparent rationalization: God first leads him to the chapel, then prevents him from entering, while Satan seeks to "force" him into the chapel where he already intends to seek refuge. Second, the apparent "choice" represented by the texts in the third dream has little to do with the revelation that the waking Descartes attributed to the dream: that "the Spirit of Truth ... had wanted to open unto him the treasures of all the sciences." As represented by the dictionary -- if we are to grant Descartes's own signification for the moment -- the sciences in fact fare rather poorly in Baillet's documentation of Descartes's account. Third, Descartes rarely credits the poetic imagination with the kind of power he ascribes to it here; in the Meditations, he regards it as an inferior (and cumbersome) manifestation of "pure intellection," one that is "in no way necessary to my nature or essence." (13)

  
 


"The unconscious is constituted by the effects of speech on the subject, it is the dimension in which the subject is determined in the development of the effects of speech, consequently the unconscious is structured like a language."

Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis