5Thinking through Lines with Descartes

Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback

THE “IMAGE” OF thinking while thinking, of seeing while seeing, is not the image of something but rather of a line in movement. A drawing cogito is the one that aims to seize in an instant the line of a movement while moving as clouds in the sky. A spur of Descartes’s drawing cogito—even if not “consciously” observed by himself—can be found, for example, in his attention to the formation of clouds, which are intimately connected to the drawing of lines in the sky, or in his observations of the orbits of moon and sky in Principia Philosophiae.

Descartes’s interest in studying how to seize in a vision a line in movement, how to “see” the moving while moving, is also evident in his special enthusiasm about the “miraculous” perspective called anamorphic perspective.¹ Descartes’s fascination with the works of Jean François Nicéron on anamorphosis, particularly his book Thaumaturgus opticus, published in 1638,² and on the so-called secret and magic perspectives, and the realm of visual enchantments, is well-known.³ The intricate and effortful calculi in this perspective has to do with how to calculate the point or instant for viewing the whole painting or image while passing through it—that is, while the eyes are moving along it.⁴ Thus, to see a line in movement, one has to see with moving eyes. In a text by the French bishop and theologian Jacques-Bénigne Lignel Bossuet (1627–1704), there is a description of this point found suddenly along the movement of seeing that provides a vision of the whole movement, that renders the anamorphic perspective clearer:

Quand je considère en moi-même la disposition des choses humaines, confuse, inégale, iregulière, je la compare souvent à certians tableaux que l’on trouve assez ordinairement dans les bibliothèques des curieux comme un jeu de perspective. La première vue ne montre que des traits informes et un mélange confus des couleurs qui semblent être ou essai de quelque apprenti ou le jeu de quelque enfant plutôt que l’ouvrage d’une main savant. Mais aussitôt que celui qui sait le secret vous le fait regarder par un certain endroit, aussitôt toutes les lignes inégales venant à se ramasser d’une certaine façon dans notre vue, toute la confusion se démêle, et vous voyez apparaître un visage avec ses lineaments et proportions, où il n’ay avait auparavant aucune apparence de forme humaine. C’est ce me semble, Messieurs, une image assez naturelle du monde, de sa confusion apparente et de sa justesse cache, que nous ne pouvons jamais remarquer qu’en le regardant par un certain point que la foi en Jesus-Christ nou découvre.⁵

Figure 5.1. Descartes, Les Meteores in Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, & chercher la verité dans les sciences: Plus la dioptrique, Les Meteores et la Geometrie qui sont des saaais cete methode / [par Renat Des Cartes]. 1637, Royal Library Stockholm.

Anamorphic perspective, used with mastery by Hans Holbein in his very famous painting The Ambassadors, was conceived for the first time from a perspective of scientific aesthetics by Leonardo da Vinci, precisely to show the eye seeing.

In this anamorphic drawing by da Vinci, the eye can only see the eye in the image while passing along the drawing or when finding the unique point where the whole eye appears to vision, as a unique point where an egg can stand. It is about reaching a sort of point-instant that is neither an image nor a figure, a point-instant in which the whole appears at the time it is swaying away. This perspective is quite different from any view of figures, images, things, and entities. It is a kind of image happening in the profundity of the eye, an internal vision or view of the eye seeing the eye, the seeing seeing the seeing, that Descartes also pursues in his optical studies and even tries to depict as clear as possible through the engravings he orders and chooses to illustrate his work, such as the following engraving found in his Dioptrics.⁶

Figure 5.2. Descartes, Les Meteores in Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, & chercher la verité dans les sciences: Plus la dioptrique, Les Meteores et la Geometrie qui sont des saaais cete methode / [par Renat Des Cartes]. 1637, Royal Library Stockholm.

If anaclasis, as discussed before, can indicate the search of the shape of the line of thinking while thinking when seized in a point-instant, and anamorphosis provides the features of a perspective to see the whole while moving, these physical, optical, and mathematical concepts indicate Descartes’s attention to the moment in which the movement while moving is seized. Thus, the question is how to seize a movement while moving. Considering the optical concepts of anaclasis and anamorphosis and the notions of “internal awareness” to be in opposition to reflection and reflective knowledge, as mentioned, and of “mind intuition,” which we are here calling thinking intuition, Descartes discovers that thinking sees the thinking “at the time,” “as long as,” “while thinking” suddenly, in an instant, which he expressed in the adverb “donc,” ergo, “therefore,” the adverb of the attention to the surprise of suddenly seeing the I am thinking while thinking.

Figure 5.3. Principia philosophiæ, 1664, Royal Library Stockholm.

This attention to lines being seized suddenly, in an instant, simultaneously, by which the moving can be seized as a unity, is what enables the “pleasure of the senses” when in music different lines of a chant are heard as one and the chant is conceived as a whole, as Descartes observes in his earliest writing, the Musical Companion.⁷ Descartes’s cogito, the I am thinking that suddenly, in an instant, “sees” the I is thinking while thinking, can be described, as Jean Wahl once proposed, as the actualism of Descartes’s philosophy. His idealism is rather an actualism insofar as it affirms not an ideal realm of abstract ideas and concepts acquired solely by reason and rational inquiry but the fact that “only by an instantaneous act of thinking, the soul can get rid of its doubt.”⁸ The “actualism” of the cogito has to do with an attention that surprises at the instant the I am thinking, an overwhelming attention to what is happening, to the event of thinking in which thinking no longer needs to rely on memory, on the already said and thought before. Here there cannot be a question of seeing something—a truth—by means of a syllogism, but only by thinking intuition. In a conversation with the Dutch theologian Frans Burman, who argues that Descartes contradicts himself when denying that the cogito results from a syllogism, Descartes answers by saying “I am thinking therefore I am,” “I am attending only to what I experience within myself.” And further: “I do not pay attention in the same way to the general notion “whatever thinks exists.” As I have explained before, the authors do not separate out these general propositions from the particular instances; rather, it is in the particular instances that we think of them. This, then, is the sense in which the words cited here should be taken.⁹ In question is the seizing in the instant, in the “particular instance,” the movement of thinking itself, “the experience within myself,” something that brings Descartes very close to Plato’s concept of the instant as eksaiphnes. Some additional lines in the same exchange with Burman could be interpreted as contradictory to the role of the instant; thus, Descartes considers that it is false to affirm that “thought occurs instantaneously.”¹⁰ He claims, on the contrary, that “all my acts take up time, and I can be said to be continuing and carrying on with the same thought during a period of time.”¹¹ Far from a contradiction, what Descartes says here is that the I am thinking takes up time, is happening, enduring, entirely immersed in the “as longs as,” dum, and therefore “does not occur instantaneously.” However, its seizing, the insight of it, its eureka or admiration and wonder—what Plato and Aristotle called thaumatzein—occurs instantaneously, something the discussions about the anaclastic line and the anamorphic perspective can help account for. The instant, quoting Jean-Luc Nancy, “is not a chronological measure; it is quite evidently the achronic limits of such measure.”¹² It is more of the proper temporality of an overwhelming attention, an attention to what cannot be grasped as things are grasped (i.e., in their solidity or fixity), but an attention that seizes the unfixable—I am thinking while I am thinking, the duration of the event of thinking.

Figure 5.4. Principia philosophiæ, 1664. Royal Library Stockholm.

Figure 5.5. Leonardo da Vinci, Anamorphosis: Study of the Eye; on the left, Juvenile Face, in Codex Atlanticus, ca. 1478–1518; Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana; fol. 98r.; (artwork in the public domain; photo © Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, Italy/De Agostini Picture Library/Bridgeman Images).

Figure 5.6. Dioptrique. In Discours de la methode, Leyden, 1637, Royal Library Stockholm.

Figure 5.7. Maerten van Heemskreck, St Luke painting the Virgin’s Portrait (1532), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

As we have insisted in previous chapters, Descartes’s cogito—I am thinking while I am thinking—although not occurring instantaneously since it “takes up time,” is “seized” instantaneously in its whileness, in its “taking up time.” It is “viewed” as an artist sees a line being drawn while drawing. The motif of a hand drawing the drawing of lines has frequently appeared since the sixteenth century as well as in Descartes’s time. Descartes himself speaks about it in the Optics.¹³ There, he presents what Victor I. Stoichita called “automimesis,” the mimesis of mimesis, showing of the showing, the drawing of the drawing and the painting of the painting, what is depicted as a shadow of the own body, as the shadow of the drawing and painting hands in a portrait.¹⁴ One of the most famous representations of this “automimesis” in painting is the canvas by the Dutch artist Maerten van Heemskreck depicting St. Luke Painting the Virgin’s Portrait (fig. 5.7). It is indeed a large motif in the history of painting and iconography (see also El Greco’s canvas, fig. 5.8), which confirms that the cogito of a drawer and painter is the one entirely dedicated to draw not things but the drawing of things, to paint not objects or narratives but to paint the painting of objects and narratives—indeed, to see the seeing turning the face of things to the light.

Figure 5.8. El Greco, St Luke painting the Virgin and Child (1567), Benaki Museum, Athens.

Cogito as Mise en Abyme and Its Perspective

But the most central aspect in the drawing cogito and its “automimetic” structure is how to depict the I am thinking I am thinking, the seeing I am seeing, without reducing it to a mere reflection—to I am thinking that I am thinking, to simple self-consciousness where the “I am thinking” becomes an object for the thinking subject, and hence what loses what it is—namely, duration, its happening. Thus, the I am thinking, the cogito, is neither a thing nor an object but a continuous passing “thing,” a “trace” (also a Cartesian word), a vestige, or, to use a more contemporary term, an “after-image,” as the one of a line drawing the drawing of a line. The anamorphic perspective gives some hints of how the “as long as,” dum, the meanwhile or duration can be depicted. But we could also bring into our discussion the resource of a “mise en abyme,” which complements and develops the concept of “automimesis,” to which we have already alluded.

The term mise en abyme was coined by André Gide in his Journals from 1893, where he explains his literary project as the writing of the action of writing, comparing it to Dutch painters such as Memling and Quentin Metzys, and to Velasquez’s Las Meninas and the theater within the theater that Shakespeare presents in Hamlet. Nonetheless, he also says that this comparison is still not entirely accurate: “None of these examples is absolutely accurate. What would be more accurate, and what would explain better what I’d wanted to do in my Cahiers, in Narcisse and in La Tentative, would be a comparison with the device from heraldry that involves putting a second representation of the original shield ‘en abyme’ within it.”¹⁵ It was, however, when the French literary critic, essayist, and novelist Émile Henriot used this expression to characterize the proper character of the so-called nouveau roman in a popular article at Le Monde from 1957 that the term entered the theoretical literary and philosophical discourse in the 1960s, first through an essay by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Pour un nouveau roman.¹⁶ In contrast to the drawing and painting automimesis, where the action of painting is painted and thereby the instant of an action is reproduced in the act of painting itself, as in Velazquez’s Las Meninas, the concept of mise en abyme coined by Gide was taken theoretically to explain “any aspect enclosed within a work that shows a similarity with the work that contains it,”¹⁷ hence as a conceptual key to read and decode the structure and formal aspects of the work addressed within the work.¹⁸

To seize the I am thinking while I am thinking is not the same as seeing an image of something in a mirror. As we have stressed above, it is rather the vision of an afterimage, in the sense of seeing lines at the moment they are being drawn. Here, it is not really a question of mirrors in the sense of an image outside the inside. In question is rather an intensive being in the action, an extreme act of attention in which it is not possible to differentiate the subject and the object, the action and the passion in which the fact that I am being becomes clearly and distinctly experienced. If this entire attention, which restricts attention to everything else and thereby fixes it in the unfixed and unfixable ongoing rather than primally in what is going, should be described as a mise en abyme, it is above all because it presents an action taking place within an action. I am thinking (I am thinking)—what expresses the awareness about the fact that existence itself is existing (I am)—exposes an action within an action and not an action seeing itself in a mirror. The heraldic “en abyme,” in Gide’s considerations, differs from pictorial mirroring because it puts something (a second representation of the original shield) within it. The expression turns the theoretical attention from self-representation in a mirror to an action within an action, what is closer to the phenomenon of an echo, a sounding within the sounding that is nevertheless heard as one singular sound. I am thinking—a performative utterance that is the closest to a constative one—implies I am thinking I am thinking; I am seeing I am seeing. The way it “imitates” the very duration of the act is to write in such a way that it repeats itself through the very act of writing. Thus, to write renders a saying repeatable in itself infinitely insofar as, in the writing, infinity itself is in action. The intensive awareness of being, I am, when I am thinking is seized within I am thinking—that is, while I am thinking is itself the experience of an idea of infinity that negates the idea of an infinite in potency and of an infinite in progress—for Descartes, as Jean Wahl insightfully observed, infinity is in act.¹⁹ I am thinking (I am thinking), I am seeing (I am seeing). The fact that the act of thinking, the I am thinking, is performed as writing, is performed precisely in the drawing of lines; thus, to write is indeed to draw lines. Descartes’s cogito—I am thinking within/while I am thinking, and therefore I am—puts en abyme writing within thinking as its echo. In other words: Descartes’s cogito is the performative utterance of I am thinking that surprises itself as thinking in writing. Descartes is the writing philosopher not only because he almost exclusively writes (differently from Socrates, who never wrote) but because with him, thinking and writing are as one, instar unius, experienced or seen as one, uno intuitu. Descartes is a philosophical writer.

Cartesian Philosophy of the Writing Hand

Descartes is well recognized as an adept philosophical writer. He inaugurates a new philosophical style, praised for its clarity and simplicity, for its “order and measure.” Descartes is not only a philosopher who writes but also a philosopher who is a writer.²⁰ In this sense, it could be said that his thought has its own aesthetics. Essays have been written on Descartes’s literary qualities, such as Durs Grünbein’s recent Der Cartesische Taucher (The Cartesian Diver).²¹ Descartes’s disavowal of old philosophy relates to the shortcomings he saw in ancient and medieval metaphysical views and logic, and it has much to do with a rejection of the style of philosophizing, the classical aesthetics of thought,²² eminently oratory.²³ He inaugurated not only modern philosophical prose and the French language of theory and philosophy but also the practice of translation in philosophy.²⁴ Descartes wrote in both French and Latin, though he preferred, however, to write in French, the “native language” (langue de mon pays), whereas Latin reminded him mainly of the “language of my teachers” (langue de mes précepteurs).²⁵ But in what sense is he a “philosophical writer”?

Figure 5.9. Descartes, Letter to Père Mersenne, n. 122. Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

In the passage we cited from the fifth part of Discourse, Descartes compares his thinking procedure to a painter who, unable to represent all the different sides of a solid body equally well on his flat canvas, chooses one of the principal ones, and sets it facing the light and shades the others, “in just the same way . . . I undertook merely to expound quite fully what I understood about light.”²⁶ Descartes writes in “just in the same way” a painter paints;²⁷ thus, both “let that be seen which allows to see.”²⁸ The “same way” of writing like one paints can be observed in several aspects of Descartes’s way of thinking. In Jean-Luc Nancy’s inspiring readings of Descartes from the 1970s, he showed that Descartes’s autobiographical “style” can be not only “read” but also “seen”—thus, to read is, indeed, first of all to see—as a self-portrait in the pictorial practice of it. It would not be out of context to instead compare Descartes’s autobiographical Discourse with the art of self-portraits, such as can be observed when looking at one of his contemporaries Nicolas Poussin’s self-portrait.²⁹

Without making any comparison between Poussin’s and Weenix’s (see fig. Intro.4) art, we wish only to indicate that Descartes’s autobiographical “style” is more a pictorial than a literary one that can be traced back to Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, and the tradition of Meditations. Or it could be more accurate to say that proceeding “just in the same way” as a painter, Descartes inaugurates another style of autobiography; thus, the focus is no longer the “subject” but the awareness of existence existing while I am thinking, an awareness that “takes place” in writing, while writing.

Dum scribo, intelligo—while I am writing, I understand: these words also belong to rule twelve, where Descartes presents his theory of colors as shapes and as such as (rhythmic) structures of lines. He compares this understanding that occurs while I am writing with senses, being stimulated by an object, receiving the object as a (nonfigurative) figure impressing the “common sense.” Descartes describes this understanding that happens while writing in the following way:

In exactly the same way I understand that while I am writing [dum scribo], at the very moment when individual letters are traced on the paper, not only does the point of the pen move, but the slightest motion of this part cannot but be transmitted simultaneously to the whole pen. All these various motions are traced out in the air by the tip of the quill, even though I do not conceive of anything real passing from one end to the other. Who then would think that the connection between the parts of the human body is less close than that between the parts of the pen? What simpler way of portraying [excogitare] the matter can be imagined?³⁰

In his readings of this passage, Nancy calls attention to how Descartes aims to describe “within my writing gesture the mode of instantaneous transmission, without transit, which grants me in truth knowledge of the world.”³¹ He also observes in this passage of the Rule how Descartes recounts this instantaneous understanding that occurs while writing, of how the body and soul, though abyssally separated, are as intimately connected as “the parts of the pen.” The pen—through which the I am thinking is written down, putting “en abyme,” the thinking understanding, while writing—is the “simpler way of portraying [excogitare] the matter,” the relation between body and soul, pen and writing, writing and thinking. In Nancy’s own words: “The human body, in its exterior exteriors and its interior, in its multiplicity and its unity, holds itself like a pen, and no doubt more than a pen—formidable calamus.”³²

Figure 5.10. Nicholas Poussin, Portrait de l’artiste, 1650, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

This passage from Rules therefore opens the possibility to reread the problem of Descartes’s dualism, of the disconnection between the body and the soul, in a quite distinct way, if this relation is “read” and “seen” as the one between the thinking and the writing, hence from the connection between the thinking soul and the writing hand. This passage suggests something of an enigmatic “instantaneity” of thinking while writing, of thinking in writing and how writing is a privileged act of the hand that shows en abyme, a handling in act. It is amazing to follow Descartes’s reflections on the “two-side” movements of a hand, writing with a pen; thus, he instructs us that while tracing on a sheet of paper individual letters, at the same time, the tip of the quill draws in the air invisible lines. While letters are been drawn on a paper (what is called writing), invisible lines are drawn in the air, “cartography” and “areography” coincide, something that Nancy did not overlook in his remarks, also underlining Des-cartes own name, the Sir of Cartes, of Paper and Letters. As such, corporeal and aerial lines are drawn simultaneously, one being the other without being an image of the other. This mysterious graphology, which should rather be called graphomancy, that writing is, exhibits the way the “whileness,” the “as long as,” indeed, the act can be seen in its “invisibility” and touched in its “untouchability,” so to speak. This passage presents the scene of what Paul Valéry once called “la main de l’oeil,” the hand of the eye,³³ the hand in act—drawing, writing, as the “image” of the handling as such, of the present participle thinking, writing, seeing, moving, acting, of the tense of a performative practice in which one is being, is existing in such a way that the existence of existence—I am—emerges for oneself as thoughts and emotions arise from letters on the paper. As Descartes says in Principles:

It can also be proved that the nature of our mind is such that the mere occurrence of certain motions in the body can stimulate it to have all manner of thoughts which have no likeness to the movements in question. This is especially true of the confused thoughts we call sensations or feelings. For we see that spoken or written words excite all sorts of thoughts and emotions in our minds. With the same paper, pen and ink, if the tip of the pen is pushed across the paper in a certain way it will form letters which excite in the mind or the reader thoughts of battles, storms and violence, and emotions of indignation or sorrow; but if the movements of the pen are just slightly different they will produce quite different thoughts of tranquility, peace and pleasure, and quite opposite emotions of love and joy.³⁴

The passage does not speak explicitly about the writing down of the movement of thinking but stresses how written letters, the very materiality of the paper, the pen and the ink, the movements done while writing (the engraving of lines, traits, and signs) provoke thoughts and emotions. Descartes does not speak of senses and meanings related to conventional signs but rather attributes to letters qualities that are proper to draw, to painted lines the thoughts and emotions they may evoke. Descartes reads letters in a visual artistic manner, letting lines “talk,” so to speak. He thereby reminds us that a main characteristic of writing is that it comprehends the act of reading: writing is to read at the same time, but read the being written, the act of writing. He is less interested in the content of meaning and more attentive to what could be called the “physics of writing,” for he seems to discover in it the actuality of thinking—that is, how the I am thinking appears to itself not as an image but as an action within this action, where being and thinking really become as one, instar unius. Writing is reading not only between the lines, as Nancy insisted, but the being written of lines, the movement of writing as such, which is figureless but nonetheless extreme figuration, the act of drawing lines of figures of and for thought. Descartes inaugurates the most modern style of writing that has been conceived in modernity: the writing down of the experience of thinking while writing.

There are many passages in Descartes’s work where he accounts for his way of writing and even for the need to care about writing. Descartes was a writer that was not only always writing but was intentionally always rewriting. In a letter to Father Mersenne, we can read:

You will be appalled at the amount of time it is taking me to complete what is supposed to be a very short Treatise which people could probably read straight through after dinner. . . . In case you find it strange that I have started writing several Treatises, . . . only to abandon each of them, the reason is quite simple: I kept gaining new knowledge as I worked, and in order to make room for it I always had to start afresh on a new plan. . . . But now at last I am sure that I shall not change course again, since my present design will be serviceable, whatever new knowledge I may acquire in the future.³⁵

Hence, to write down the thinking means first to be continuously beginning to write, not only rewriting the same treatise but “writing several Treatises,” to “start afresh”; thus, thinking never rests. For the common interpretation of Descartes’s process and project, it could be understood that this continuous writing marks his early philosophical attempts until the moment he “shall not change course again, since my present design will still be serviceable, whatever new knowledge I may acquire in the future.” How should we understand this “present design”; will be serviceable whatever new knowledge may be acquired? It can be easily argued that this “present design” is literature, or, more precisely, that the present design is the one that rendered philosophy literature. Descartes can be considered not only the father of modern philosophy but the father of modern French literature. Descartes himself compels his reader to read his Principles of Philosophy as a roman, a novel: “I should like the reader first of all to go quickly through the whole book like a novel, without straining his attention too much or stopping at the difficulties which may be encountered.”³⁶ He can be considered the inventor of the “philosophical novel,” le roman philosophique, if we assume Jacques Derrida’s view.³⁷

Discussions about Descartes’s style, about his use of autobiography, about Descartes as a literary author and writer are many.³⁸ Essays on the relationship between Descartes and Marcel Proust³⁹ as well as Descartes and Beckett⁴⁰ arouse many interesting considerations about Descartes’s literary skills and the role of his “philosophical or theoretical novel” for modern literature. For some, Descartes can be defined as a theoretical novelist insofar as he proceeds in Discourse as a storyteller,⁴¹ for introducing the narrative “I” in almost every paragraph of his works, with a few exceptions, such as the Rules. Autobiography is the form of Discourse in the sense it tells the story of the narrator. But it is also performative, thus the narrative I says that it says. Discourse was published first anonymously, though it deviates in style from the autobiography strictu sensu, since the “self” here is unknown; it presents a “self” that could be a fictional character about whom a biography is told. But what shall not be forgotten is that philosophical novel is a written novel, and hence the novel of writing itself. This is what emerges clearly in the Cartesian device of writing the biography of an anonymous “I,” at least when conceived, and even if the secret about the narrative “I” was revealed some years later. Thus, through this device, an effect is produced that can only be done through writing—namely, the effect of instantaneous identification. Written, the “I” is read as everyone’s own I. Indeed, written, the “I” is at once the most universal and the most singular: it is the I of each one (reader) and of everyone, and each one, the singular, is this I that comprehends everyone, the universal. Spoken, the “I” becomes, on the contrary, unmistakable; thus, the voice that says “I am” can only be this very one. The philosophical or theoretical novel inaugurated by Descartes differs from common fiction since it does not produce the mediate layers of identification between the reader and the characters of a novel; it is quite differently the performance of the writing’s own performativity, the one of rendering the most singular the most universal, the here and now whatsoever here and now. Descartes explains his purpose in Discourse, saying the following:

My present aim, then, is not to teach the method which everyone must follow in order to direct his reason correctly, but only to reveal how I have tried to direct my own. One who presumes to give precepts must think himself more skillful than those to whom he gives them; and if he makes the slightest mistake, he may be blamed. But I am presenting this work only as a history or, if you prefer, a fable in which, among certain examples worthy of imitation, you will perhaps also find many others that it would be right not to follow; and so I hope it will be useful for some without being harmful to any, and that everyone will be grateful to me for my frankness.⁴²

Discussing the meaning of the Cartesian fable, Nancy stressed Descartes’s “frankness” when saying that he writes not a fable but as a fable. He does not disguise his procedure but always makes it transparent when stating, for instance, in The World that he will clothe part of his discourse as a fable for the sake of making “this long discourse less boring for you.”⁴³ He does not write in a fabulous manner but as a fable. Using the term fabula in such a clear way, such that he was even portrayed holding a book in which “mundus est fabula” is written and readable, he also makes clear, as Nancy showed so well, that differently from a fable that wants to teach precepts, he does not want to direct anyone, only give an account of how he had directed his mind himself in the search for truth.⁴⁴ Descartes’s philosophical fable is a discourse that follows the course of his thinking in actu, which tells the story of the event of his thinking rather of his mind, something that cannot be repeated, that is inimitable, and hence what allows him to state “I am.” It is therefore an inimitable example, an original that cannot be copied and that tells that in its way of telling. What Descartes’s philosophical fable, his discourse, accounts for, is the course of the I am thinking being seized while I am thinking, the uniqueness of this event. The whole Discourse is performative. It is a performative discourse in the sense that Émile Benveniste described it and that Nancy explicitly recalls in his discussions:

The performative utterance [énoncé], being in act, has the property of being unique. It cannot be produced except in special circumstances, at one and only one time, at a definite date and place. It does not have the value of description or prescription but, once again, of performance. This is why it is often accompanied by indications of date, of place, of names of people, of witnesses, etc.; in short, it is an event because it creates the event. Being an individual and historical act, a performative utterance cannot be repeated. Each reproduction is a new act performed by someone who is qualified.⁴⁵

However, despite the clarifying aspects Benveniste offers about performative utterances, what the Cartesian philosophical tale performs is another kind of performative discourse since the uniqueness, the “here and now” of the event of thinking, is a here and now that is and is not here and now—for it is happening. The proper character of the “present participle,” the “cogitans” through which Descartes describes the reality of the cogito, of the I think, and the uncountable uses of this form in this “fable” indicates the uniqueness of this performative uniqueness—namely, the one of being the most universally singular, of a here and now that are everywhere and at any time. Thus, cogitans, thinking, can be said in whatsoever tense: I was thinking, I will be thinking. But the most decisive thing here is to consider that thinking is a duration, a whileness, “dum,” an “as long as,” an in-between experienced from inside, that cannot be measured by a sequence of nows, insofar as it is the instancing of the instant, its all-comprehensive movement that confers the overwhelming sense that being is being, that existence is existing: therefore I am.

There is, however, a discrepancy between the I am thinking and I am writing I am thinking. This discrepancy is what Descartes’s philosophical writing aims to write, indeed, the discrepancy between I am thinking and I am accounting not for my thoughts but for the experience of thinking and the emotions it provokes, indeed the e-motion, the moving this movement provokes. Descartes does not want to recall through memory the course of thinking, even if he cannot not do it. His intention is to write down the thinking while it is happening, what appears clearly in rule twelve in his discussions about the pen and the hand writing letters and lines. But there is always a gap between the experience of thinking and writing the event of thinking being experienced, a gap that is perhaps closest to Kafka’s short tale about someone trying to set his watch by looking at the Prague astronomical clock: he will always be a second late. It is indeed the “second” of delay, the aprés-coup or afterimage between the thinking and the writing.

The fable of the “I” that is at once the most singular and the most universal is also renewed—for instance, in Descartes’s decision to write Discourse in French. He also utters performatively saying, “And if I am writing in French, my native language, rather than Latin, the language of my teachers, it is because I expect that those who use only their natural reason in all its purity will be better judges of my opinion than those who give credence only to the writings of the ancients.”⁴⁶ Derrida remarked insightfully on the incoherence between writing in “my native language, rather than Latin” for the sake of being more universally read by those “who use only their natural reason.”⁴⁷ It is the incoherence of a national language being taken as the means for universality, a view that could be connected with Abbé Gregoire’s linguistic project proposed to the French Commune during the revolution, which in fact was proposing the “annihilation of the dialects [patois]” and the instauration of a national language.⁴⁸ Descartes wanted to be read, however, rather in the sense that the reader would undertake his own “way”; the universality of his “method” was precisely the universality of each individual undertaking the search for truth and not absorbing the truth proclaimed and acclaimed by others or even imitating the “Philosopher’s” method. Following the Philosopher’s method means not following someone else’s way or method. By choosing to write in French, Descartes also wanted to be read by women, “j’ai voulu que les femmes mêmes pussent entendre quelque chose, et cependant que les plus subtills trouvassent aussi assez de matière pour occupier leur attention.”⁴⁹ Incoherencies that might be attributed to Descartes, such as the decision to not write in Latin—still the “universal” erudite language of his time—for the sake of a universality even more universal, give rise to interesting discussions about Descartes’s thoughts on language.⁵⁰ However, the point that must be stressed here is the literary “index” of Descartes’s method, the narrative figure of the “I,” the narrator that appears here as the most singular and the most universal at once. The question of who is the Cartesian “I” (the Cartesian subject), has, on the one hand, been affirmed and reaffirmed continuously and, on the other hand, consistently destroyed and deconstructed, its written status, “Je,” “ego,” “I,” which renders it at one time mine (Heidegger’s “Je” and “Jemeinigkeit”)⁵¹ and simultaneously everyone’s, each one is not the last answer, when observing that the “I” is thinking. Or to render the ambiguity of this expression “I is thinking” clearer, when underlining that the I is the thinking. That means that I am thinking, the cogitans is the subject of this philosophical tale, the one who tells about itself. It is a cogitography or, to use a more common term, a psychography.

Descartes is the writer of the writing down the experience of thinking rather than thoughts. In this sense, it can be said that he writes a psychography or cogitography rather than an autobiography. The I am thinking writes and tells about itself, both that it is thinking and how it is thinking. The I am thinking, like all present participles, is in this way “present” in the here and now, that in the here and now, is brought everywhere and at every instant. This is what provides the certitude—meaning the overwhelming experience—that I am, indeed, that I am being. It is precisely this “uniqueness” that follows every instant while thinking that also renders this experience the experience of everyone as well, what is performed when putting en abyme, this event, in the very writing of this sentence. The unique experience of being thinking here and now, a here and now that exceeds every here and now, is uttered performatively, addressing everyone not in a dialogue but in a way that everyone is compelled to undertake the search for truth in each one, as each one, in the frankness of the own way.

A performative utterance is unique and proper. Nevertheless, it shows itself; it shows its own action. It exhibits the act of saying in saying as the writing exhibits its action I am writing and thinking when writing I am thinking. The sight involved in all performativity addresses the other in a certain way that is different from addressing another in a dialogue. Descartes was not a solipsist, although he withdrew from society and academia, preferring to be in a warm “room of his own.” Nor was he, however, a Platonist in the sense of conducting a dialogue of the soul with itself. He wrote the Meditations, which have been considered a form of philosophical “retreat,” in the manner of St. Ignatius, a kind of philosophical diary,⁵² but even in these “meditative,” intimist diaries called Meditations, he defines them in relation to the reader, this other always present for the writer, beginning with the writer himself who reads the writing while being written. As he says: “Analysis shows the true way in which the point in question was discovered . . . so that if the reader is willing to follow it, and pay sufficient attention to every point, he will make the thing his own, and understand it just as thoroughly as if he had discovered it for himself. . . . Analysis is the best and truest method of education, and it was this method alone which I used in my Meditations.”⁵³

If Descartes’s method is to be considered analytical, it is not so in the sense of analytical philosophy and its compulsion to adjust philosophical method to the scientific idea of method. Descartes defines this scientific method rather as synthetic in the same passage. His own method he prefers to call “analytical” insofar as it renders it possible for the reader to follow “every point,” the “flow” of thinking so that he can “make the thing his own, and understand it just as thoroughly as if he had discovered it for himself” because the reader must think while reading. I am thinking also appears suddenly when I experience “I am reading” while reading, dum lego.

What is important to keep in mind here is the way in which the other is addressed through Descartes’s performative utterances. The other is addressed insofar as one also experiences I am thinking in such way that one may also say “I am,” I am thinking—neither solipsism nor dialogue; neither dialogue with himself nor dialogue with others. Descartes proceeds in a manner more reminiscent of Shakespeare—they are indeed contemporaneous and also with Cervantes for a few years.⁵⁴ His cogitography is closer to a soliloquy. A soliloquy, such as those spoken by Hamlet and Julius Cesar in Shakespeare’s tragedies, performs thinking in act. It is, first, not about talking with oneself but rather the utterance or exhibition of the happening of thinking before a spectator, before a reader. It has an essential dramatic feature to which Descartes was quite attuned.⁵⁵ It invites the other to be another by its own—being in this sense more for the other than with the other, as the writer is for his reader not being with the reader, while the reader is with the writing for being the reader one is.

But in Descartes, there are still other forms of being in his cogitographics (psychographics) and soliloquies. Descartes writes responses to objections. He does not engage in dialogue but responds, referring to former formulations, quoting himself in a certain way, retaking the movement of thinking in which thoughts have arisen. He responds in the form of letters and wrote many letters that are not merely responses to objections. Undoubtedly, writing letters and the act of correspondence inherently has the expectation of response. Descartes’s letters are an important part of his body of work, and every critique of his “subjectivist,” “solipsist,” and “intimist” philosophical style should first be countered with the acknowledgment that Descartes’s work was also epistolograhic. Descartes’s letters correspond to the what that moves him altogether—namely, the experience of thinking, the experience of experiencing thinking, and therefore that “I am.” Thus letters, which also means the letters on the paper, move the reader to write back; they demand a certain kind of response, which is the writing. In letters, the act of reading the writing is in itself writing. In their exchange and exchangeable character, letters perform what the philosophical discourse and meditation set out to do: that everyone undertakes the search for truth by oneself, that each one that reads, writes a response to what has been written, and this response remains both the most private—“my letter to you”—and the most public—a written letter that as written can, and would, be published.

Among the vast number of letters Descartes wrote, there are the famous letters to Elisabeth, Princess Palatine of Bohemia, written between 1643 and 1649, in which the question about the unity of body and soul are treated in a less (or even non-) dualistic manner. And the letters to Christina, Queen of Sweden, should not be left out of this discussion. In these letters addressed to noble and royal women, important aspects of Descartes’s thought are presented in his own way of thinking in and through writing, and where his experience of thinking can be experienced by others in a way that makes their own experience of thinking while reading. These letters move the reader to write down the event of thinking. In this sense, it can be said that they e-move and e-motion the reader.

According to Descartes, in an earlier quoted passage from Principles of Philosophy, this work should be read as a novel and then read and reread until the reader himself could solve by himself all difficulties and problems he eventually could have found in his readings. As much as Descartes, the writer, always writes new treatises, his readers should read and reread until they feel themselves satisfied with their understanding. The work opens with a dedicatory letter to Princess Elisabeth. The dedication is a letter, and the letter, a dedication. Already, the intimate connection implied by a letter to a female reader and a dedication reveals much about the nature of his writing. The letter begins by stating, “Your Serene Highness, The greatest reward which I have received from the writings I have previously published is that you have designed to read them.”⁵⁶ This special reader, Princess Elisabeth, is a special and privileged reader insofar as she, as Descartes affirms, in her “generous and modest nature will welcome the simple and unadorned judgment of a philosopher more than the polished compliments of those with smoother tongues.”⁵⁷ He knows that this reader, Elisabeth, prefers to read and listen to philosophical judgment more than flattering words; he knows that philosophical judgments—that is, thinking thoughts—are more seductive than seduction. This is why he writes, “I shall therefore write only what I know to be true either from reason or by experience, and in this introduction. I propose to philosophize just as I do throughout the rest of the book.”⁵⁸ The letter, the dedicatory letter to this special woman in Descartes’s life, is a philosophical letter that philosophizes just as he does throughout the remainder of the book.

The dialogical character of philosophical thought is well-known since Plato introduced dramatic dialogue as a philosophical genre par excellence. It was also Plato who declared that philosophy is “the talk that the soul has with itself.”⁵⁹ But Plato also wrote philosophical letters, among which the famous Seventh Letter contains the core of the Platonic understanding of philosophy, which also ushered in a long tradition of philosophizing through letters. Descartes—who could be considered the modern non-Socratic philosopher, who only wrote while Socrates never wrote, who voluntary preferred the solitude of his poêle to the company of his fellows, who wrote soliloquies and only very rarely dialogues—indeed philosophized through letters. Five volumes of the eleven that constitute the corpus of his philosophy, edited by Adam and Tannery, contain his letters. Letters can be understood as writing’s proper form of dialogue, since in letters, the soul talks not to itself but to another, to an addressee, another that is present in its absence. Letters operate, so to speak, between the public and the private, between the solitude of the self and the community with another. In letters, the writing is for someone, is dedicatory. This perhaps allows us to make an adventurous claim: that Descartes’s philosophical novel and fable doubles as or is to a large extent a dedicatory letter.

Figure 5.11. Elisabeth of Boehmia; Elisabeth at the age of twelve, from a portrait by Casparus Barlaeus, Herford Museum.

A dedicatory letter is a letter moved by emotions. It is not difficult to “prove” that for Descartes, thoughts are not only rational, abstract, and conceptual thoughts. In article 9 of Principles, he asserts what is mean by “thought”: “By the term ‘thought,’ I understand everything which we are aware of as happening within us, in so far as we have awareness of it. Hence, thinking is to be identified here not merely with understanding, willing and imagining, but also with sen-sory awareness” (Cogitationis nomine, intelligo illa omnia, quae nobis confciis in nobis sunt, quatenùs eorum in nobis conscientia est. Atque ita non modo intelligere, velle, imaginari, fed etiam fentire, idem eft hîc quod cogitare).⁶⁰ Moreover, he also insists that very simple and self-evident matters become only more obscure when philosophers try to render through logical definitions. In Principles, Descartes also alludes to how “spoken or written words excite all sorts of thoughts and emotions in our minds.”⁶¹ Revisiting a passage we have already quoted here, we can again read that: “With the same paper, pen and ink, if the tip of the pen is pushed across the paper in a certain way it will form letters which excite in the mind of the reader thoughts of battles, storms and violence, and emotions of indignation and sorrow; but if the movements of the pen are just slightly different they will produce quite different thoughts of tranquility, peace and pleasure, and quite opposite emotions of love and joy.”⁶²

This passage follows a sentence in which Descartes discusses how the nature of the mind is such that various sensations can be produced in it simply by motions of the body. He observes immediately that “certain motions in the body can stimulate it to have a manner of thoughts which have no likeness to the movements in questions.”⁶³ The emotions provoked by certain movements of the hand while writing letters—indeed, dedicatory letters and the responses of the one to whom the letters are dedicated and written—provoke, in turn, manners of thoughts that have no likeness to the movements that give rise to them. This sentence could also be read in the sense that Descartes’s frank thoughts that arise in and through his thinking experience correspond to emotions provoked by certain bodily movements when writing, and indeed, in dedication to someone, here to Princess Elisabeth. Descartes is describing how the passions of his soul are disguised in thoughts that apparently have no likeness to what provoked them when reading a hand writing. Could it be possible that some thoughts that apparently have nothing to do with, for instance, love emerge when reading the hand writing of a beloved, when listening to words said by the beloved? Is philosophy then rather a disguised wisdom of love? Would it be so that his letters to Elisabeth are disguised love letters, in which philosophical emotion, the emotion that arises when, while thinking, thinking surprises itself thinking to the degree of intensity that it experiences that being is being, existence is existing, that “I am”? It is indeed a matter of wonder, this instant of sudden attention to the fact that I am thinking, that becomes apparent while thinking. “Wonder” says Descartes in Passions of the Soul,

is a sudden surprise of the soul which brings it to consider with attention the objects that look unusual and extraordinary. It has two causes, first an impression in the brain, which represents the object as something unusual and consequently worthy of special consideration; and secondly, a movement of the spirits, which the impression disposes both to flow with great force to the place in the brain where it is located so as to strengthen and preserve it there, and also to pass into the muscles which serve to keep the sense organs fixed in the same orientation so that they will continue to maintain the impression in the way in which they formed it.⁶⁴

In fact, it is what is caused by “a movement of the spirits, which impels the soul to join itself willingly to objects that appear to be agreeable to it” that Descartes defines love in Passions of the Soul.⁶⁵ Love, in the various forms Descartes accounts for, such as benevolent and concupiscent love, the first that “prompts us to wish for the well-being of what we love, and the other . . . which makes us desire the things we love,”⁶⁶ and things such as simple affection, friendship, and devotion, names a movement of the spirits provoked by several movements in the body in such a way that the body becomes aware of this moving movement along its event in the experience of wonder. Philosophical emotion, since the time of Plato and Aristotle, had been described as “wonder” and named philia tes sofias, philo-sophia, as love of wisdom discovers other dimensions with Descartes. It is the emotion of surprising oneself thinking while thinking, such an intensive presence at the instant, to the actuality of the instant—that is, to the acting while acting—that equals being in love and the love of being at this very instant.