3Descartes’s Performative Cogito

Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback

“I AM THINKING THEREFORE I am”—this magic formula appears only very few times in Descartes’s writings. Nevertheless, it is among the most recognized philosophical quotes in history. It appears first in the Discours de la méthode, pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la verité dans les sciences (published in 1638 in French: Je pense donc je suis), and was soon after translated into Latin where the famous phrase ego cogito ergo sum was printed. The passage from Discourse is well known: “But immediately I noticed that while I was trying thus to think everything false, it was necessary that I, who was thinking this, was something, and observing that this truth ‘I am thinking, therefore I exist’ was so firm and sure that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were incapable of shaking it, I decided that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking.”¹

The same “magic formula” appears in 1644 in Principa Philosophiae, written first in Latin and then translated into French. The passage is very close to the one of Discourse:

In rejecting—and even imagining to be false—everything which we can in any way doubt, it is easy for us to suppose that there is no God and no heaven, and that there are no bodies, and even that we ourselves have no hands or feet, or indeed any body at all. But we cannot for all that suppose that we, who are having such thoughts, are nothing. For it is a contradiction to suppose that what thinks does not, at the very time when it is thinking, exist. Accordingly, this piece of knowledge—I am thinking, therefore I exist—is the first and most certain of all to occur to anyone who philosophizes in an orderly way.²

It is surprising that this phrase, which expresses the first principle of a whole new philosophical foundation, does not appear in the Meditations, where the step-by-step process of Descartes’s discovery of this principle is more carefully described than in previous works. In the Meditations, the phrase, which is written in the style of a motto, instead reads: ego sum, ego existo, I am, I exist.³ The absence of the motto from the Meditations could suggest that it is more “the name of a thought,” “a singular intellectual operation,” “a protocol of reflection,”⁴ than a thought proper. Descartes himself poked fun at his intellectual operation in a dialogue written around 1647 and published posthumously, entitled La Recherche de la Vérité par la Lumière Naturale (The Search for Truth by Natural Light). In one passage, he puts in the mouth of Epistemon, one of the characters of the dialogue, the following ironic observation:

But after two hours of discussion, I cannot see that he has made much progress. All Polyander [another character] has learnt with the aid of this marvelous method which you are making such a song about is the fact that he is doubting, that he is thinking, and that he is a thinking thing. Marvelous indeed! So many words for such a meager result. Four words could have done the trick, and we should all have agreed about it. As for myself, if I were required to spend so much time and engage in such a long discussion in order to learn such an insignificant fact, I would be very reluctant to make the effort.⁵

As the first principle of the wonderful science he discovered, “I am thinking therefore I am,” the phrase that says all, easily becomes an empty formula, saying in fact nothing, but echoing in such a way that it becomes a phrase repeating itself, repeating itself, infinitely. In the dialogue, the “meager” result that it expresses—I am thinking—and therefore “I am”—is compared to an “acrobat who always lands on his feet, so constantly do you go back to your ‘first principle.’ But if you go on this way, your progress will be slow and limited.”⁶ The image of the acrobat always landing on his feet is perhaps the ideal image to show how this phrase expresses an action or act of thought that becomes the “principle” of thought. “I am thinking, therefore I am” is the formula for a movement of thought, the movement of an “acrobat who always lands on his feet.” The character Epistemon, who, as the name suggests, is involved with science in Greek, takes the Cartesian motto ironically because the phrase does not fit in the general idea of a scientific philosophical argument developed through inference and structured in the form of a syllogism. For centuries Cartesian scholars have discussed the inferential character of this phrase, the syllogism upon which it could be formulated. However, in his responses to the second set of objections, Descartes clearly rejects this “scientific” or epistemic procedure for arriving at his phrase. He writes, “When someone says ‘I am thinking, therefore I am, or exist’ he does not deduce existence from thoughts by means of a syllogism but recognizes it as something self-evident by a simple intuition of the mind. This is clear from the fact that if he were deducing it by means of a syllogism, he would have to have had previous knowledge of the major premise ‘Everything which thinks is, or exists’; yet in fact he learns it from experiencing his own case that it is impossible that he should think without existing.”⁷

This phrase, he says, is not the expression of a thought deduced by means of a syllogism but apprehended as “something self-evident by a simple intuition of the mind,” learned “from experiencing his own case.” The opposition between an inferential thought and a thought seized as self-evident by a simple intuition of the mind is the opposition between a thought that arises from binding relations between conceptual thoughts and thoughts taking place—that is, the thinking movement appearing to itself in its own movement. It is the difference between thoughts and thinking, between inferences, deductions, and the act of thinking, as a performative act. But in what sense should we assume that the famous Cartesian cogito, the “I am thinking,” from which follows as self-evident an intuition of the mind that “I am,” is a performative utterance? Are these words doing something in the sense the British philosopher of language J. L. Austin gave to the “performative”?⁸ Are they performing an action rather than saying something? Are they performative insofar as they are issued in the “doing of an action”? In Austin’s discussions of “speech acts”—performative utterances and illocutionary acts or forces—the focus resides on the distinctions between “performing an act” and “saying something” and further between “the performance of an act in saying something,” called an illocutionary act, and the “performance of an act of saying something.”⁹ His examples move within the dimension of speech Aristotle called logos semantikos, which is neither true nor false, the utterance of a wish or a prayer, in opposition to the logos apofantikos, which is an utterance to which the quality of being true or false can be ascribed. Austin discusses performative utterances in close connection to declarative utterances, to sentences that implicate nonexpressed but nevertheless very clear meanings due to the tight bonds to the context and circumstances in which they are uttered. Descartes’s dictum could be understood as performative in the sense of being a kind of declarative sentence: je pense, cogito, “I am thinking,” but it both performs an act and says that it performs an act: the “reference” of the statement is the very statement. It is similar not to a promise, a wish, or a prayer but to an utterance such as “I am saying that I am saying”; thus, the “I am thinking” means I am thinking I am thinking. That is why the Cartesian cogito has been understood through the centuries as self-reflexive, self-referring, and self-revealing. At the same time, it is also the performance of an act in saying and of an act of saying, indeed, of an act in writing and of an act of writing, understanding writing as a saying without sounds. Further, what immediately seems to confirm the performative feature of the Cartesian dictum “I am thinking, therefore I am” has to do with the “I,” since the phrase would not be at all performative—that is, meaningful—without referring to anything outside itself, if one said: Descartes thinks therefore he is. In his famous article about Descartes’s dictum as performative, Jaakko Hintikka considered that performative sentences are those that are “existentially consistent”¹⁰: “I am thinking, therefore I am” proves its performative force insofar as it is said by this “I.” I can say that someone else who exists does not exist, but I cannot say that I do not exist insofar as I am saying it. If I said, “I don’t exist,” I would only prove that I exist by the very act of saying it. The “I” in Descartes’s cogito—ego sum—always says, even without saying, that I am saying I am saying, I am thinking I am thinking.

What most discussions about speech acts and performative utterances let easily come to a second level is the dynamics of the act as such. Indeed, what happens during a happening? What happens during a performance? How does the performance perform? Hintikka compared the relation between cogito and sum, “I am thinking” and “I am,” as one of a process to its product. He even makes use of a musical metaphor and argues that “the indubitability of my own existence results from my thinking of it almost as the sound of music results from playing it or (to use Descartes’s own metaphor) light in the sense of illumination (lux) results from the presence of a source of light (lumen).”¹¹ In Descartes’s performative phrase “I am thinking, therefore I am,” the “therefore” can be understood as the index of the instant of emergence of a product from a process, the “light that results from the presence of a source of light.” But Hintikka was also sensible enough to remark that the “therefore” marks, rather than any “because” or “in so far,” an “as long as”: as long as I think, I am, as much as the music is as long as it is being played. That is why Descartes speaks not only of cogito, I think, but above all, cogitans, thinking, and of res cogitans, a thinking thing; thus, it is as long as there is light that one sees. What remains undiscussed is how, during the act of thinking, the act of thinking itself is seized as such and apprehended during its act, how the happening is apprehended during its happening. It cannot be apprehended or seized by any cognitive act that implies a distance in space and time. In connection to this, Descartes speaks of an “intuition of the mind.” Only this intuition can seize the happening while happening, the thinking while thinking, the perceiving while perceiving. In this intuitive apprehension, while I am thinking, I suddenly apprehend that I am thinking, and this in such a clear and distinct manner, in such a self-evident and intensive mode, that I experience that I am being. Indeed, what appears without any doubt is that to be thinking is what allows me to think being in such a way that the discrepancy between thinking and being is overcome: seizing that I am thinking while I am thinking means to experience the identity of thinking and being.

Central here is the character of suddenness, of an insight, “the role of the instant”¹² in Descartes’s cogitation. Indeed, the way the act is seized as an act during the act: this is, in our view, the main question related to the performative. In every word said, the being said is necessarily always co-implied but rarely an object of awareness. If I say I am saying—“I am saying to you this or that” and even “I am saying that I am saying,” this performative utterance can remain reflexive but still not really “experienced.” Writing, however, “I am thinking therefore I am,” Descartes brings something more to the question of “performative utterances” and “speech acts.” He brings the experience, the experience of thinking, which the English translation stresses when saying “I am thinking,” and that Descartes also stresses when writing in the seventh set of replies: “I begin to philosophize as follows: I am; I am thinking, I am, so long as I am thinking” (sum, cogito; sum, dum cogito),¹³ ego cogitans existo,¹⁴ and later in the same set, “noticing that there was nothing which I could know more certainly or more evidently than that I existed so long as I was thinking, I was right to make this my first assertion” (deinde advertens nihil certius evidentiusque a me cognosci, quam quod ego cogitans existerem, non male etiam hoc primum afferui).¹⁵ It is the experience of thinking that is expressed by the “so long as,” dum, and by the present participle, or more specifically, the gerund thinking, cogitans, that enables Descartes to say I am, in the very sense of “I am experiencing being while thinking, for I am experiencing the very experiencing”—and indeed the experiencing of a movement of thinking coming to words, coming to expression. In his Confessions, St. Augustine signals that the meaning of thinking derives from the Latin word cogitate, from bringing together, cogo, relating these words to ago (I do) and agito (agitate) or facio (I make) and factito (I make frequently).¹⁶ It is an action that gathers, according to Saint Augustine, the very action of logos, which means language, thought, and gathering, the very action of bringing the coagitation of the soul, of the breath that animates the body, into words.¹⁷ Thinking (i.e., coagitation), or in Jean-Luc Nancy’s reading of Descartes, chaogito,¹⁸ is an experience that experiences itself, of being surprising itself being. Again, how does thinking surprise itself thinking?

The Art of Thinking as the Art of Seeing the Seeing

In a letter to Antoine Arnauld from July 29, 1648, Descartes writes the following: “Being conscious of our thoughts at the time when we are thinking is not the same as remembering afterward. Thus, we do not have any thoughts in sleep without being conscious of them at the moment they occur, though commonly we forget them immediately.”¹⁹ Being conscious of our thoughts at the time we are thinking—this is the core of Descartes’s cogito. The consciousness of the cogitans dum cogitans,²⁰ of this while thinking, is what Descartes considers the evidence expressed with “donc,” ergo, “therefore,” which surpasses any certitude derived either from the senses or from syllogisms and pure abstract reasoning proper of learned “philosophers who take no account of experience and think that truth will spring from their brains like Minerva from the head of Jupiter,” as he wrote in Rule VI.²¹ The experience to be accounted for here, Descartes claims, can be described as an attention that is neither a sense-perceptive attention nor an abstract ideal attention, being even more overwhelming than the formers. As previously mentioned, Descartes understood this thinking attention in terms of intuition, a mental or, more precisely, a thinking intuition that is not at all dissimilar to Husserlian accounts of intuition. In Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Descartes says: “By ‘intuition’ I do not mean the fluctuating testimony of the senses or the deceptive judgment of the imagination as it botches things together, but the conception of a clear and distinct mind, which is so easy and distinct that there can be no room for doubt about what we are understanding [. . .] That everyone can mentally intuit that he exists, that he is thinking” (vol. 1, 14). Be aware, conceive, pay attention—that is, “intuit” that one exists, that one is thinking—this is a mental intuition entirely distinct from sensuous intuition. It is another kind of intuition with even more intensity of certitude than bodily intuitions. As thinking intuition, it differs from sensuous intuition, but as thinking, this intuition should be differentiated “from certain deduction on the grounds that we are aware of a movement or a sort of sequence in the latter but not in the former, and also because immediate self-evidence is not required for deduction, as it is for intuition, deduction in a sense gets its certainty from memory.”²² It is from this stronger evidence brought by thinking intuition that the first principle for all possible knowledge shall be taken. This thinking intuition of being (thinking) while thinking provoked Descartes’s enthusiasm, the dreams he dreamed and interpreted while dreaming, and further influenced the way he conducted his life. This thinking intuition is even more than an “intuition”; it is indeed an emotion: the way thinking moves thoughts in existence and existence in thoughts.

Modern philosophical conceptions of Descartes focus on the Cartesian cogito, extracting it, however, entirely from its temporal “thickness,” from what is most central in it, which is the “as long as” and “while.” They focus rather on the subjective capacity to render thought an object of thought, paying attention to the constitution of contents of thoughts rather than the experience of the flow and movement of thinking. Insofar as what is in question for Descartes in this thinking intuition is, above all, the seeing of seeing and not the seeing of something—indeed, the thinking of thinking and not the thinking of something even if itself, the laws of reflection are not very suitable. Descartes writes in his Replies to the Six Set of Objections that

it is true that no one can be certain that he is thinking or that he exists unless he knows what thought is and what existence is. But this does not require reflective knowledge, or the kind of knowledge that is acquired by means of demonstrations; still less does it require knowledge of reflective knowledge, i.e., knowing that we know, and knowing that we know that we know, and so on ad infinitum. This kind of knowledge cannot possibly be obtained about anything. It is quite sufficient that we should know it by that internal awareness which always precedes reflective knowledge.²³

How should we understand this “internal awareness which always precedes reflective knowledge?” In contrast to the infinite regress that follows the reflection and its knowing that we know that we know that we know, and so forth, this internal awareness is the enigmatic awareness of seizing the movement while moving, without any fixed point outside the movement, which would enable an observation of it, but the movement itself—I am thinking—becomes the only fixed point. This means that the I am thinking—the unfixed in chronological time and in geometrical space, becomes the only fixed point from which the infinity of time and space can be “seen” and thought. Descartes proposed here a very strange perspective, not the central perspective as in classical thought, art, and philosophy but a perspective in which the point of fugue is itself in movement, is itself in fugue, the perspective anchored in “I am so long as I am thinking,” a perspective from within the in-between. The difficulty lies in the fact that—while moving, while happening—thinking and seeing withdraw while happening in such a way that what “remains” is not something or even an image but rather a kind of afterimage or, more accurately, an imageless image. Nevertheless, it is surprised in a certain moment as such—namely, as a moving movement—therefore acquiring some consistency even if inconsistent, we could say, showing a figure even if without contents.

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The question is then how the “I am thinking,” which is a sort of movement, is touched by its own movement in such a way that it is surprised by it and “seizes” it with thinking (mental) intuition as the own being. The I am thinking, the cogitans, is a verb mode, which is the present participle or continuous form in English, and that denotes an ongoing action, indeed the movement proper to an ongoing act. It is about a movement proper to a duration, a time-space in-between. It is neither movement nor rest; thus, it does not describe the change from one position to another that could be measured according to a previous and a posterior. It presents a proper and enigmatic physics of movement—indeed, the physics of a thinking movement. Although we do not find a clear treatise of the “physics” of the thinking movement while thinking in Descartes, there are passages in his works where the movement of thoughts are described. They present rather a “physiology of the thinking movement”; thus, they aim to present a clear figure of the movements of thoughts within the thinking body. Here, Descartes is also a “physician.” In the Treatise of Man, Traité de l’Homme, written in French in 1664,²⁴ Descartes performs his proper study of the relation between body and soul, which is the one of studying carefully how external impressions and interior sentiments act upon the physical body and how the physical body produces sensations, sentiments, and senses; he analyzes the digestion of meats; the beating of the heart and of the arteries; the nourishing and growing of the organs; respiration; being awake and being asleep; the reception by the body of light, sounds, odors, tastes, and warmth; the external movements of the organs that follow both the actions of the objects presented to the senses as well as the passions; the impressions to be found in the memory; and the impression of ideas in the organ of common sense and of imagination.²⁵ The human body is presented as a machine, an automaton, a comparison that has been a source of fascination in the modern and postmodern eras from La Mettrie and Vaucanson, the materialist physicians from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, until our era of artificial intelligence and robots. But this human machine is compared to some specific machines—to those used in royal gardens to bring water to large extensions, to musical organs in the church—mostly machines that are featured with tubes conducting and distributing the elementary forces of air, water, sound, and light. In Descartes’s physiological descriptions, we find close parallels to Leonardo da Vinci’s scientific studies, his drawings of the human muscles and organs, where arteries, for instance, appear as tubes and irrigating canals, the body tissues and ligaments in their closest similitude to vegetal fibers. Descartes writes: “Again, regarding the brain, they will not be able to imagine anything more plausible than that it is composed of many tiny fibres variously interlaced; for, in view of the fact that every type of skin and flesh appears to be similarly composed of many fibers or threads, and that the same thing is observed in all plants, such fibrous composition is apparently a common property of all bodies that can grow and be nourished by the union and joining together of the minute parts of other bodies.”²⁶

The similarities between Descartes’s view of the body as machine and Leonardo da Vinci’s has been keenly observed and discussed by Paul Valéry.²⁷ A more detailed comparative study between both studies on optics, on light and shadow, on the laws of reflection and refraction, and above all, their anatomic views and studies of the tourbillon and winds, would be out of the scope of our present work, but nonetheless a very exciting task.²⁸ Nevertheless, what we can stress by this reference to the pictorial dimension of Descartes’s descriptions of the human body-machine is how it is depicted as the drawing of built landscapes, with tubes and canals, almost resembling a Dutch landscape painting, which shows the similitude between the forms and functions of the body and the forms and functions of a cultivated nature.

In this comparison with built landscapes, with canals, ducts, tubes, threads, fibers, and ligaments, the movement of thoughts within the body are described by Descartes in sketching out a physiology of thinking. In the Treatise of Man, Descartes is interested in how the object and its figures, understood as what “can give the soul the occasion to perceive movement, size, distance, colours, sounds, smells and other such qualities,”²⁹ imprint not only on the brain but on the “spirits”—these winds produced along the circulation of the blood—upon the surface of the gland where imagination and the common sense are located. These impressions of the figures of the objects, taken in the sense used in the quote above, within the moving surface of the spirits upon the gland, Descartes calls “ideas”—that is, “the forms and or images which the rational soul united to this machine will consider directly when it imagines some object or perceives it by the senses.”³⁰ Here, Descartes proposes a theory of thinking movement that is much closer to a theory of drawing than to a physical theory of movement. He speaks of traces and lines, of imprints of impressions upon volatile surfaces, the spirits, defined as “a very fine wind, or rather a very lively and pure flame, which is called the animal spirits,”³¹ passing upon the gland, which is the place of imagination and common sense, the sense that, as early as the time of Aristotle, is the one that senses the senses. The whole issue of this “machine” that moves by itself, automatically, is the astonishing internal, subcutaneous landscape of fluids and flames, nerves and ligaments, fibers and tissues, so similar to subterranean floods and rivers, roots and sources, in which the internal movement of the blood in the body—for him, nothing but “continuous circulation”—emerges as the external movement of the water in the external world. Descartes is fascinated with the intensive life taking place inside the body, in this secret cave so similar to the “caves and fountains that can be found in the gardens of our king,”³² that, though not being able to receive air and light directly, if not when wounded and thereby at the risk of death, can only live through the way the elements air, light, water, and food penetrate the body through an amazing net of perpetual communication and circulation, accomplished by the movement of the blood.

What is interesting to observe here is this strange art of imprint that Descartes connects to how ideas are formed within the body. It is an odd imprint in that it imprints impressions in winds upon the surface of this special gland found within the brain, a distinct kind of image when compared to the usual description of an imprint upon a wax surface or any solid surface. Descartes is much closer to the way lines are drawn in the “air,” closer to a kind of aerography or even of drawings of lines upon the sky. Looking at how he wanted the drawings in his Treatise to appear, we can see, for instance, the gland inside the brain connected to the eye. Descartes could have had an engraving—we should not forget that these illustrations are engravings of drawings³³—only with the brain and the gland, but he is interested in the connection between the eye and the gland, not only because he was attached to the common metaphor of the eyes of the soul but perhaps because he aimed to see how the eyes can see the movement of ideas being conceived within the body. (See fig. 6.1.)

To see the eyes seeing evokes the question of a point of blindness that renders every seeing possible. Indeed, the eyes cannot see the eyes if not using something other than the eyes, as a mirror. Since without the “prosthesis” such of a mirror the eyes cannot see the eyes, they experience a blindness precisely when seeing something. This is a departing point for Jacques Derrida’s discussions on drawing blindness in his beautiful book on drawings, Memoirs of the Blind, The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins.³⁴ In his thoughts on the drawing’s blindness, the blindness implicated in the painter’s and drawer’s seeing, Derrida, looking at works in the Louvre Museum that depict blindness, pays attention not only to the loss of view that renders vision possible but also to how blindness is the visual force of every self-portrait; thus, a self-portrait is indeed the portrait of an eye—the painter that cannot see the eye seeing—the painter. It is also from the blindness of the drawing and painting eye that Derrida accounts for the distinction between drawing and writing. A further motive in his discussions in the book is on the focal point of the drawing pen, which cannot be seen while drawing. Point of fugue, blind spot, focal point, and the point in which the blinds tend to fall into the abyss of blindness, all these decisive instances and moments render sensible the blindness of seeing in the very seeing. Without being able to expose here the richness of Derrida’s thoughts and how he relates this blindness to memory and ruins, the latter understood mainly as inceptive loss, few works have “seen” so deeply the touching and tactile vision of blindness as this book. However, there is still a “blind spot” in his reflections, which is the experience of seeing a moving line, a movement while moving, the experience of moving eyes, something that the performativity of Cartesian cogito discovers to a certain extent. This experience has to do with the strange vision of a line drawn by the hands, which is indeed what defines a drawing and which the English word expresses so clearly.

Figure 3.1. L’Homme: Et un traitté de la formation du foetus, Paris, 1664, Royal Library Stockholm.

As mentioned before, the eyes cannot see the movement of ideas being conceived in the same way they see things, objects, figures, or images of things. To see these movements implies the same difficulty as to see the seeing while seeing—that is, to see the movement of seeing—not to see the eyes seeing what a mirror could provide but something even more difficult—namely, to see the movement of seeing while moving the seeing. This requires an entirely different perspective and laws of vision.

Questions related to this awkward “vision” of seeing while seeing, indeed of the thinking while thinking, appear in other works as well. In Rule VIII and in the eighth part of the Meteors, Descartes tries to solve the problem of finding the shape of a line anaclasis, a term derived from the ancient Greek ἀνακλάω, meaning refraction, the forced bend of a joint, used in physics and mathematics to describe the point where a line or a ray of radiation stops, is interrupted, focusing all parallel rays to a single point, that which formulates the phenomenon of refraction in distinction to reflection. This term has also been used in rhetoric and poetical treatises, meaning the replacement of a long syllable by a short in order to break the rhythm. The notion of an anaclastic line could be borrowed here from Descartes’s more technical studies on physics and optics for the sake of indicating what kind of “image” is the one of the thinking while thinking, of seeing while seeing. Thus, this line is a line “traced” along with the view of the proportion or ratio between the angle of incidence and the angle of refraction.³⁵ This line is traced in the air, and considering Descartes’s further discussions in Meteors, it can be described qua line as a kind of cloud-drawing in an aerial surface. In looking more closely at the drawing of this line in the air than the mathematical and physical problems that urged its formulation, we must look at the lines being drawn and hence with the vision of a line while being drawn in the air and not only with a drawn line. Scientifically and philosophically, Descartes’s thinking is very close to that of an artist who depicts above all the drawing of lines itself. The “I am thinking,” ego cogito, is not far from “I am drawing,” meaning I am seeing lines being drawn. Descartes’s cogito could therefore be described as a drawing cogito, cogito designans.

The Soul of Cartesian Eyes—A Critique of Merlau-Ponty’s Critique of Dioptrics in the Eye and the Spirit

The drawing and painting dimension of the Cartesian cogito has already been examined by Paul Valéry and the way he approached Descartes’s cogito from Leonardo da Vinci, situating Descartes among the painters and da Vinci among the philosophers. In his readings of Descartes, Paul Valéry focused on this figure of a man looking at the eye from inside the body, of the eye seeing the eye, the seeing seeing the seeing printed in the Optics, and he insisted that Descartes’s obsession was with observing the observing, with imagining the imagining. For Valéry, Descartes is the closest to Leonardo da Vinci, and his beautiful essay about the Method of Leonard da Vinci can and should be read as a translation of Descartes’s thoughts on method to the language of painting. Da Vinci, as Valéry insists, is a painter who has taken painting for philosophy.³⁶ Making this connection from the ambitions of both men to a mathesis universalis based on order and measure, from the way science was seen by both as a way to scrutinize the interiority of matter, revealing how both were, in many ways, surgeons and anatomists of all existing bodies and how the mind and the spirit was placed in the body of matter, Valéry opens the possibility to reread Descartes’s medical scientific investigations as an exercise of the observing and imagining vision, very close to a painter like Leonardo da Vinci. Thus, the larger discussion about Descartes’s denial of the world, his skepticism and extreme idealism, can be read differently, indeed, as the seeing of seeing rather than the nonseeing of the world. Focused on the seeing of seeing, on observing observing, on thinking thinking taking place and time, Descartes’s Archimedean point shows dimensions that bind the philosopher and the painter who aimed to see the seeing of things in the possible concepts and images of things. As much as da Vinci, Descartes’s philosophy shares the enthusiasm that arises from the instant of a vision.

Few contemporary philosophers have been so influenced by the poetic thoughts and essays of Valéry and have written so insightfully on painting as Merleau-Ponty. His entire body of work is marked by a critique and deconstruction of the Cartesian cogito, for the search for prereflective and prelinguistic realms of experience in which body and mind could be surprised in their chiasmatic unity.³⁷ The Eye and the Spirit is a book about the seeing of the seeing as the fundamental gesture of painting. As Claude Lefort writes in his introduction, Merleau-Ponty aimed to show in this book that “painting does not celebrate any other enigma than the one of visibility.”³⁸ The whole book is about showing that the act of painting is a wonder born from the fact of vision: from the fact that we see, that there is vision, rather than on what we see, on what can be seen. It is also an attempt to render philosophy capable of thinking this fact as painters paint it—that is, as they render visibility visible. Merleau-Ponty always keeps the famous quote by Paul Klee in mind, saying, “Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern Kunst macht sichtbar” (art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible). This demands from philosophy, as it does Merleau-Ponty, a learning from and with painting for the sake of unlearning centuries of philosophical habits of seeking the redemption of the soul in the abstraction and refusal of the sensible (“chercher le salut de l’âme dans la deliverance du sensible”).³⁹ For centuries, perception and sensible awareness have been sacrificed. Therefore, according to Merleau-Ponty, all philosophical problems can only be solved through the examination of perception. For him, this perceptive solution stands in direct conflict with the philosophy of Descartes. If Descartes has a program to take leave from the senses, Merleau-Ponty aims to bring thoughts back to the senses, the mind back to the body as its unique source of creation. He aims to learn from the painter who “pense en peinture,” who thinks in painting. It is quite interesting to observe that despite the capacity that Valéry recognizes in da Vinci and the similar quality he sees in Descartes, Merleau-Ponty, himself a devoted reader of Valéry, considers this the strongest opposition in relation to Descartes. Merleau-Ponty’s starting point is the phenomenological insight in the twofold sense perception, that the senses are sensed at the time they sense, that one is touched when touching as much as one is seen when seeing. For Merleau-Ponty, phrases like “My body simultaneously sees and is seen” (“Mon corps est à la fois voyant et visible”),⁴⁰ “the undividedness of the sensing and the sensed” (“l’indivision du sentant-sensible”),⁴¹ “the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside” (“le dedans du dehors et le dehors du dedans”),⁴² express the true enigma of the body. Painting renders visible this seeing that is seen when seeing. Painting “gives visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible” (“donne existence visible à ce que la vision profane croit invisible”).⁴³ Without using the same vocabulary we use here, he seizes the present tense as a source of understanding—or of thought—in this very particular way of thinking in/through painting. He writes that “the painter, whatever he is, while he is painting practices a magical theory of vision” (“le peintre, quel qu’il soit, pendant qu’il peint, pratique une théorie magique de la vision”).⁴⁴ The painter interrogates about the secret genesis of things in our bodies, painting therefore a kind of philosophy of vision, a vision of vision, indeed, this reflexivity of the sensible, of the visible. According to Merleau-Ponty, every painting shows that which also explains the passion of painters for self-portraits, mirrors, in which the seeing eye is seen while painting.

It is in the realm of a discussion about mirrors that a critical discussion of Descartes’s Optics appears in Merleau-Ponty’s text.⁴⁵ For Merleau-Ponty, the mirror is “the instrument of a universal magic that changes things into spectacles, spectacles into things, me into other and the other into me” (“l’instrument d‘une universelle magie qui change les choses en spectacles, les spectacles en choses, moi en autrui et autrui en moi”).⁴⁶ He says that painters have often dreamed of mirrors because, through this mechanical trick and perspective, they have recognized “the metamorphosis of the viewer and the visible, which defines our flesh and its vocation” (“la métamorphose du voyant et du visible, qui est la definition de notre chair et celle de leur vocation”),⁴⁷ thoughts inspired by the French painter Robert Delaunay, the founder of the Orphism art movement.⁴⁸ He considers that this striving for seeing the being seen by the seeing corresponds to a drift to “total or absolute vision.”⁴⁹

Descartes appears in Merleau-Ponty’s discussions as the extreme opposite of the painter’s vision. Thus, for him, Descartes is one who “no longer aims to frequent the visible and who decides to reconstruct it according to a model from it.”⁵⁰ To Merleau-Ponty, the only aim of Descartes is to investigate how vision is produced in order to invent, if this would be the case, “artificial organs” to replace and correct natural vision. Descartes searches the light as an action through contact, like things touched by the cane of a blind person. The blind person sees with the hands, which is what helps explain the Cartesian model for vision as being the hands. It is strange that Merleau-Ponty does not consider that painting is not only a “praise to the hands,” borrowing the title of Henri Focillon’s remarkable essay,⁵¹ but above all, a thinking with the hands. For Merleau-Ponty, Descartes cannot understand the poetics of a mirror insofar as a Cartesian cannot see himself in the mirror. “A Cartesian does not see himself in the mirror; he sees a dummy, an ‘outside,’ which he has every reason to believe other people see in the very same way but which, no more for himself than for others, is not a body in the flesh” (“Un cartésien ne se voit pas dans le miroir: il voit un mannequin, un ‘dehors’ don’t’ il a toutes raisons de penser que les autres le voient pareillement, mais qui, pas plus pour lui-même que pour eux, n’est une chair”).⁵² Following this line of thought, Merleau-Ponty adds, “The mirror image is nothing that belongs to him” (“son image spéculaire n’est rien de lui”).⁵³ These can be considered strange remarks if we recall how his contemporaries have portrayed Descartes, being the philosopher that most possesses portraits.⁵⁴ Instead of alluding to the question of portraits in painting, Merleau-Ponty discusses the icons. The textual basis for addressing these thoughts is Descartes’s own observations about engravings in copper, the tailles-douces, which reads:

The perfection of the image often depends on its not resembling its object as much as it might. You can see this in the case of engraving (tailles-douces): consisting simply of a little ink placed here and there on a piece of paper, they represent to us forests, towns, people, and even battles and storms; and although they make us think of countless different qualities in these objects, it is only in respect of shape that there is any real resemblance. And even this resemblance is very imperfect, since engravings represent to us bodies of varying relief and depth on a surface which is entirely flat. Moreover, in accordance with the rules of perspective they often represent circles by ovals better than by other circles, squares by rhombuses better than by other squares, and similarly for other shapes. Thus, it often happens that in order to be more perfect as an image and to represent an object better, an engraving ought not to resemble to it.⁵⁵

A similar position against resemblance can also be found in the first line of Descartes’s treatise The World, where he argues that “although everyone is commonly convinced that the ideas we have in our mind are wholly similar to the objects from which they proceed, nevertheless I cannot see any reason which assures us that this is so.”⁵⁶ His starting point is therefore that “there may be a difference between the sensation we have of light (i.e., the idea of light which is formed in our imagination by the mediation of our eyes) and what it is in the objects that produces this sensation within us (i.e., what it is in a flame or the sun that we call by the name ‘light’).”⁵⁷ Descartes dismisses resemblance as a source of truth, as many scholars have pointed out,⁵⁸ and many scholars inspired by Foucault’s thoughts of Descartes dismiss the whole renaissance order of analogies and resemblances for the sake of founding the modern grounds of representation,⁵⁹ which is a transformation of the concept of mimesis. In Merleau-Ponty’s readings of the passage cited above, Descartes is “clearly” refusing the reflexivity of the seeing and the seen that emerges strongly and in an obvious manner in the experience of a mirror. Descartes sees the image in the mirror, as does Merleau-Ponty, as something that excites and stimulates our mind as words and letters that do not resemble at all what they mean, as much as the engravings give us “sufficient indices to form an idea about the thing that does not come from the icon.” In this sense, the engraving or painting acts for us as a book or text proposed for our reading. For Merleau-Ponty, in doing so, Descartes “liberates” us from the task of understanding how the painting of things in the body could make them be felt by the soul: “We need no longer understand how a painting of things in the body could make them felt in the soul” (“Nous sommes dispensés de comprendre comment la peinture des choses dans le corps pourrait les faire sentir à l’âme”).⁶⁰ He concludes then that “there is nothing more going on between the things and the eyes, and the eyes and vision, than between the things and the blind man’s hands, and between his hands and thoughts. Vision is not the metamorphosis of things themselves into the sight of them; it is not a matter of things belonging simultaneously to the huge, real world and the small, private world” (“des choses aux yeux et des yeux à la vision il ne passe rien de plus que des choses aux mains de l’aveugle et de ses mains à sa pensée. La vision n’est pas la metamorphose des choses mêmes en leur vision, la double appartenance des choses au grand monde et à un petit monde privé”),⁶¹ what renders present the absent, what pierces the heart of being.⁶² In Merleau-Ponty’s view, painting is for Descartes a metaphysics but never a metamorphosis. Moreover, he also criticizes Descartes because he takes drawing as a kind of model for painting,⁶³ because he prefers the engraving, tailles-douces,⁶⁴ for presenting the object only through its exterior or its envelope.⁶⁵ Besides missing the reflexivity of vision, in taking drawing for a source for painting, Descartes also remains blind to painting insofar as, according to Merleau-Ponty, he did not examine the so-called second qualities (e.g., colors,⁶⁶)—that which rendered it impossible for him to meet the problem of a universality and an openness to things without concepts.⁶⁷ But the most important experience and notion that remains closed for the Cartesian eye is depth: from Merleau-Ponty’s point of view, there is no depth in Descartes’s visions; there is no eye for depth in Descartes.

But should Descartes’s lines necessarily be read in this way? Do the tailles-douces and Descartes’s appraisal of them and of drawings prove blindness for an openness to things without concepts? Maybe not without concepts, but intriguingly without images. Is Descartes such a superficial thinker, lacking any depth and profundity of vision? The question is whether what Descartes really aims for is “the limpidity of perceptions without objects in the margins of a world without equivocation,” a “thought that no longer wants to haunt the visible and decides to reconstruct it according to the model it forges to it.”⁶⁸

Descartes’s Unwritten Treatise on Painting

It is interesting that Merleau-Ponty could not recognize how Descartes’s views on drawings allow not only a parallel between Descartes and the painters, such as da Vinci, as Valéry suggested, but also a strong connection to Valéry’s views on drawing and its dancing essence. Descartes’s aesthetical views are not only close to the aesthetics of drawings, which so strongly characterize the era in which he lived; they are also very close to abstract nonrepresentational art. Descartes is critical of representation, in language and in art. If representation is understood as resemblance, for Descartes “signs and words [. . .] in no way resemble the things they signify.”⁶⁹ He has a similar conception of images: “In no case does an image have to resemble the object it represents in all respects, for otherwise there would be no distinction between the object and its image.”⁷⁰ And the most “modernist” conception in relation to the unrepresentational feature of images is uttered in the same passage:

Indeed the perfection of an image often depends on its not resembling its objects as much as it might. You can see this in the case of engravings: consisting simply of a little ink placed here and there on a piece of paper, they represent to us forest, towns, peoples, and even battles and storms; and although they make us think of countless different qualities in these objects, it is only in respect of shape that there is any real resemblance. And even this resemblance is imperfect, since engravings represent to us bodies of varying relief and depth on a surface which is entirely flat. Moreover, in accordance with the rules of perspective they often represent circles by ovals better than by other circles, squares by rhombuses better than by other squares, and similarly for other shapes. Thus it often happens that in order to be more perfect as an image and to represent an object better, an engraving ought not to resemble it.

Descartes proposes in these lines an aesthetic theory of the image as a regime of nonresemblance. It could be understood as an excess of representation rather than nonrepresentation.⁷¹ It also leaves room for a thought about a thinking without images, or perhaps more precisely, about a thinking with figures that are without narrative contents—indeed, with abstract figures. The short unwritten treatise on visual arts that we find in Descartes’s Meditations, and to which we have already alluded, is characterized mainly by a distinction between three kinds of painting and a very peculiar theory of colors. The first sort of painting one finds in this “unwritten treatise” can be called realistic or figurative painting, being “paintings, which must have been fashioned in the likeness of things that are real, and hence that at least these general kinds of things—eyes, head, hands and the body as a whole—are things which are not imaginary but are real and exist.”⁷² The second kind of paintings are those that although trying “to create sirens and satyrs with the most extraordinary bodies . . . cannot give them natures which are new in all respects; they simply jumble up the limbs of different animals.”⁷³ This could be called imaginative painting. But there is still another kind of painting that “manage[s] to think up something so new that nothing remotely similar has ever been seen before—something which is therefore completely fictitious and unreal.”⁷⁴ It could then be called fictitious or unrealistic painting. It is when discussing the third kind of painting, the fictitious and “unreal,” that Descartes affirms that despite being totally fictitious and unreal, it still has something real—not only because it exists but because of its colors: “at least the colours used in the composition must be real.”⁷⁵ The colors are the index of reality of the unreality of totally fictional things. Indeed, a discussion about “abstract” painting surprisingly emerges here, for Descartes states immediately after that “real colours (are) from which we form all the images of things.”⁷⁶ Such an affirmation could have come from the mouth of Cézanne, above all, the Cézanne of Merleau-Ponty, the artist who recognized himself in Balzac’s character of Frenhofer in Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, a painter who sought to express life through the use of color alone.⁷⁷ It could have been Mondrian as well, or any other abstract geometrist. And it is from this affirmation about colors that Descartes proceeds to a short discussion about “images” and shapes,” imago and figura, and further to the “corporeal nature in general,” to extension, quantity, size, number, place, and time—indeed, what we call abstract proprieties or qualities, that, if read from the viewpoint of modern abstract painting’s practices and theories, renders Cartesian argumentation much more a painting argument than a dreaming one.

Figure 3.2. L’Homme: Et un traitté de la formation du foetus, Paris, 1664, Royal Library Stockholm.

To these thoughts on colors found in the Meditations, we should add his discussions about colors in Rules twelve. Discussing how to conceive of shape in a clear and distinct way, Descartes takes color as a suitable example to explain shape. He considers that no one can deny that a color is extended and consequently has shape. To show this he proposes an “abstraction,” “setting aside every feature of colour apart from its possessing the character of shape, and conceive of the difference between white, blur, red, etc, as being like difference between the following figures or similar ones.”

Figure 3.3. René Descartes, Regulae ad directionem ingenii; texte de l’édition Adam et Tannery; notice par Henri Gouhier, 413, Royal Library Stockholm.

Even if Descartes does not develop these reflections on the relation between colors and lines, this translation of colors into lines opens a discussion about rhythm, or what Paul Klee called in his lessons at Bauhaus “structural rhythms” from which a doctrine of colors can be developed.

Finally, the theory of colors as shapes outlined by Descartes—“for it can be touched as well as seen”—is to be unfolded from his theory of light, which is for him the main concern that connects his physics and his metaphysics, the body and the soul. Regarding painting, Descartes considered that “a painter cannot represent all the different sides of a solid body equally well on his flat canvas, and so he chooses one of the principal ones, sets it facing the light, and shades the others so as to make them stand out only when viewed from the perspective of the chosen side. In just the same way, fearing that I could not put everything I had in mind into my discourse, I undertook merely to expound quite fully what I understood about light.”⁷⁸ Central to the reconstruction of Descartes’s short treatise on visual arts is the thought that painting represents solid bodies—not images, not contents, not narratives—facing the light; hence, for him the act of painting is the double action of depicting the seeing of the seeing and the facing of how light hits the body.

Figure 3.4. Paul Klee, Bildnerische Gestaltungslehre: I.4. Gliederung, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.