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Thesis ID: CBB001561520

Painted Chimeras, Animated Grottoes and the Feigned World: Fable and Tableau in Descartes' Philosophy and Physics (2007)

Columbia University

Publication Date: 2007
Physical Details: 333 pp.
Language: English

Outside Links

Academia.edu

Science and art Philosophy Science and literature Linguistic or semantic analysis Metaphors; analogies Physics 17th century Descartes, René

This dissertation explores the function of "fables" and "tableaux" in Descartes' epistemological and metaphysical classics and his natural philosophical works. He compares both Le Discours de la méthode and the mechanistic cosmology of Le Monde to fables and paintings; however, this analogy defines not only the rhetorical presentation of ideas, but also their production and testing through a particular practice of creative thinking. Cartesian "fables" are more than mere stories and his "tableaux" are not limited to the art of painting: as concrete tools linking the senses and the imagination to thought, they function in a broader and more complex terrain. Like the instantaneous and self-evident intuitions and the rigorously linked deductions so important to Descartes' method, tableaux and fables are opposed, yet complementary. Cartesian tableaux set up a visual space of order that functions synoptically or synthetically: paintings, vivid analogies to the arts and textual illustrations embody complex relations in provisional wholes. By contrast, his fables unfold relations of contiguity, temporal succession and cause and effect, extending knowledge but also risking a precipitation of judgment. Both tableaux and fables aid reductive and schematic abstraction, but can also exhibit the concrete and complex consequences of general principles. As such, they both secure certainty and push at the frontiers of knowledge. In Descartes' epistemological and metaphysical writings, fables and tableaux critically represent error and illusion and a negative stage in the progress toward certainty. But they also serve to unify events and perspectives, making it possible to consolidate the transcendent subject of knowledge, rationalize representation, and impose the order of method. By contrast, Descartes' natural philosophical fables and tableaux are open-ended, provisional and hypothetical; he uses them to radically remake the world and the human body and show how the simple laws of matter can explain and create both a complex world and a perceiving human machine. As creations of the imagination, fables and tableaux bridge the gaps between mind and body, words and things, and general physical laws and diverse phenomena. They operate at the limits of concepts and categories, connecting them to what lies both outside and in between them.

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Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 68/06 (2007). Pub. no. AAT 3266625.

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