Enthusiasm and Platonic furor in the Origins of Cartesian Science: The Olympian Dreams (2020)
Gómez López, Susana (Author)
Early Science and Medicine: A Journal for the Study of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Pre-modern Period
Volume: 25
Issue: 5
Pages: 507-535
In the Olympica, the lost manuscript wherein Descartes described his famous three dreams, he wrote that on the night of Saint Martin in 1619 he felt asleep in a state of enthusiasm. He interpreted the dreams that ensued as the divine revelation of the principles of a new and admirable science. I here propose that the Olympica were a literary fiction devised by Descartes to legitimize his arrival on the philosophical scene by proposing the principles of a new science. The function of dreams as the best way to reach true wisdom is in line with a long philosophical tradition. This paper offers an attempt to understand the Cartesian enthusiasm in its context, that is, before the criticism of enthusiasm as something incompatible with reason became widespread and when it was still linked to the Platonic theory of furor – poetic and divine – the state that allows the subject access to the truth.
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