A Study in Genre: On Andrea Gadberry’s “Cartesian Poetics”

Andrea Gadberry | Cartesian Poetics: The Art of Thinking | University of Chicago Press | 2020 | 224 Pages

Descartes has long been typecast as the writer of radical separation of mind and body, of rationality above all else—even his contemporaries declared him the murderer of poetry. Though Descartes claimed poetry as one of the facets of his education that led him astray, Andrea Gadberry’s debut book, Cartesian Poetics, shows that contrary to popular opinion, Cartesian philosophy is rife with poetic devices used at the service of Descartes’ ideas (though some poets might well argue this still amounts to murdering poetry). At the outset of the book, Gadberry offers us a mission statement for her analysis:

Far from dead-ending the cliché of the cold cogito, the kind of thinking I discuss here is often an ambivalent institution: thinking is deeply felt and responsive to feeling, to passions and virtues like envy, repulsion, bitterness and hope—and even to boldness. 

With this approach, Gadberry joins the chorus of recent scholars whose work rehabilitates Descartes from the role of “the archvillain responsible for all of modernity’s worst impulses.” Cartesian Poetics sits neatly alongside other reevaluations of Cartesian philosophy that take seriously his work on the passions and virtue. (1) The book offers two propositions. First, to apply the tools of literary studies to Descartes’ writing to show that far more than most scholars are willing to concede, Descartes used poetic form and poetic conventions of genre to establish his ideas. Second, she presents Cartesian philosophy as a bildungsroman of reason, showing that it evolves from a childhood form of envy about others’ possession of it through youthful affinity to love lyric to the bittersweet realisation of reason’s limit. Gadberry’s Descartes reads as though he were an early Enlightenment thinker dedicated to the Kantian motto: sapere aude! 

Gadberry points to the ambiguities in Descartes’ Discourse on the Method. He presents it, she notes, as “a story of a fable,” offering his reader an ambiguous choice between interpretation. Of course, we can point to further examples of ambiguity within that text. When he presents his provisional code of morality, Descartes says there are “four or five” rules—as though he doesn’t yet know what he’s about to write down. The ambiguities here lead Gadberry to note that the enigma was a central tenet of education at the Jesuit college of La Flèche, where Descartes studied. Riddles, Gadberry tells us, were closely linked with forms of lyric poetry, and in this light we can see Descartes’ opening gambit: to announce that common sense is equally distributed among all humans, as a kind of negative riddle—meaning, one happily solved from the beginning. With this riddle, Descartes sets up a poetic device, hidden in plain sight, to prepare the reader for the uncommon modes of thinking that he will subsequently recommend. Then, as he gets to his conclusions, we are already primed to accept them as given. It is the starting point from which the reader is to be made comfortable, and which opens the conceptual space for the rest of Descartes’ ideas.

The negative riddle is itself fraught with a sense of ambiguity. While common sense might be equally distributed among people, we don’t have equal use of it. Gadberry points out that the Discourse is preoccupied with the notion of infancy, where the infantile mind is a bad sensory swamp. Later, in his Principia Philosophica and in the Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes points to infancy as the cause of error, through the preconceived notions and prejudices that we keep as we develop into adults. Childhood is also the only time when we can be accused of not having reason at all, as we lack language and thus the ability to use reason. Gadberry notes the horror inherent in this transformation, and particularly in childhood: “Unable to control the body and literally unable to speak, the infant in Descartes’s world incurs terrific losses which are then dragged into adulthood. Far more frightening than madness is the primordial swamp we all suffer wordlessly.”

The key to Gadberry’s Cartesian bildungsroman, and its first step, is the transformation from the lack of language to its possession. We can draw a parallel here between Gadberry’s Descartes and the Kant who wrote the essay “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” Kant describes enlightenment as humanity’s exit from its self-imposed minority. The word used for “minority” here is “unmundigheit”—literally, lack-of-mouthness, or the lack of speech. In the Meditations, Descartes arrives at the conclusion that much of the error and prejudice he carries with him are hangovers from childhood, things he’d inherited from teachers, parents, and other authority figures. Now, he wants to come to an Archimedean point in the sciences and in his knowledge, and in so doing, begin to speak for himself.

The condition of the infant is not just terrifying because it is unreasoned—it is also the condition of a complete lack of freedom. For Descartes and Kant, childhood is marked by being under another’s control and influence. It is only once we come to wield our powers of reason and language that we can become liberated. Gadberry thus shows us that Descartes anticipates Kant’s later arguments about how the development of reason is tied to the development of liberty. Kant will go on to write that the development of reason is likewise parallel to the development of morality, and as we are better able to act according to the dictates of reason, we are better able to act according to the moral law. Descartes doesn’t go that far, nor does Gadberry try to show that he does, but the foundational argument about the development of human reason is already there in his thought. 

Near the conclusion, Gadberry suggests that we ask more broadly how poetry structures thinking, how it can show what thinking can feel like, and how it creates “a literary atmosphere that makes the ‘different world’ of thinking possible.” This reminds me of a conversation I had with a poet-friend about the way poetry uses language. We agreed that poetry, more than any other form of writing, pushes language and meaning to its limits. I think Gadberry would likely agree, as her arguments in Cartesian Poetics show how Descartes needed this exact function of poetry to make his arguments. Using poetic form to help create a discursive space within which his ideas could occur is what gives them their particular force. In doing this literary analysis of Descartes, Gadberry illuminates these arguments in a new way, but more importantly, she shows that philosophers ought to pay attention to literary form. 

Coming to this book as a historian of philosophy and not as a literary scholar, I find that it offers an intriguing proposition, one that has much to offer to philosophers more broadly. By looking at the literary devices and forms that structure Descartes’ arguments, Gadberry offers us a way of reading that goes beyond the typical close readings done in philosophy. It also offers an expanded view compared to the current contextualist focus in philosophy, which tends to analyze the social and intellectual context of ideas, rather than their genre. Bringing an understanding of the conventions of genre has another benefit to the historico-philosophical domain that I hope will receive broader uptake. One of the key reasons many women philosophers have been “forgotten” is because they typically wrote letters, poems, or fiction—literary forms that were deemed acceptable—and not treatises. Not conforming to Western chauvinist standards of the appropriate form of scholarly discourse, many non-Western philosophers are dismissed as “sages” or “shamans.” Gadberry’s book shows that we cannot overlook how the constraints and conventions of genre shaped Descartes’ thought—and by extension, how genre shaped the work of lesser-known philosophers.

(1) This has become a large literature over the past thirty years, but the best broad assessments can be found in Deborah Brown’s Descartes and the Passionate Mind (Cambridge University Press, 2006), John Marshall’s Descartes’s Moral Theory (Cornell University Press, 1998), and Susan James’s Passion and Action (Cambridge University Press, 1997). Philosophers have largely ignored the literary conventions within Descartes’s works except as an aside; Christia Mercer’s paper “The Methodology of the Meditations: Tradition and Innovation” in The Cambridge Companion To Descartes’s Meditations (Cambridge University Press, 2014) is a notable exception.