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The Dream of Descartes

By Gregor Sebba

Assembled from Manuscripts and Edited by Richard A. Watson

Published for The Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc.

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS Carbondale and Edwardsville

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Copyright © 1987 by Helen Sebba

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Designed by Cindy Small
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sebba, Gregor The dream of Descartes

(The Journal of the history of philosophy monograph series) "Published for the Journal of the
History of Philosophy, Inc." 1. Descartes, René, 1596-1650. 2. Dreams--History--17th
century. I. Watson, Richard A., 1931- . II. Title. III. Series. B1873.S43 1987 194 87-9488
ISBN 0-8093-1413-4 (pbk.)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National
Standard for Information Sciences--Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI
Z39.48-1984.

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CONTENTS
Journal of the History of Philosophy
Monograph Series vii
Preface
Richard A. Watson ix
Autobiographical Note
Gregor Sebba xi
A Brief Note on Method 1
The Dream of Descartes 5
1. Introduction 5
2. The First Dream 9
3. The First Interlude 15
4. The Second Dream 18
5. The Third Dream 25
6. The Critical Juncture 30

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7 The First Interpretation 33
8. The Dream of Descartes 42
9. Summary Conclusion 51
10. Note 56
Appendix 1. What Is "History of Philosophy"?
The Historiographic Problem 58
Appendix 2. Descartes Against Scepticism:
Philosophy Against History? 73

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THE JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
Monograph Series
THE JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY MONOGRAPH SERIES, consisting
of volumes of 80 to 120 pages, accommodates serious studies in the history of philosophy that
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been able to publish such studies only by truncating them or by publishing them in sections.
In this series, the Journal of the History of Philosophy presents, in volumes published by
Southern Illinois University Press, such works in their entirety.

The historical range of the Journal of the History of Philosophy Monograph Series is the same
as that of the Journal itself--from ancient Greek philosophy to the twentieth century. The
series includes extended studies on given philosophers, ideas, and concepts; analyses of texts
and controversies; new translations and commentaries on them; and new documentary
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The editors of the Monograph Series, the directors of the Journal of the History of
Philosophy, and other qualified scholars evaluate submitted manuscripts.

We believe that a series of studies of this size and format fulfills a genuine need of scholars in
the history of philosophy.

Richard H. Popkin
Richard A. Watson
--Editors

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PREFACE
Richard A. Watson

GREGOR SEBBA WAS FOND OF TELLING HOW HE BEGAN WORK ON HIS


monumental Bibliographia Cartesiana: A Critical Guide to the Descartes Literature, 1800 to
1960. He had an idea about Descartes, but before he started work on it, he thought he should
look through the literature to see what might have been said previously on the subject. That
was in 1949. Fifteen years later, the Descartes bibliography appeared containing 2,612
numbered items (plus a Steinberg cartoon, "Cogito, ergo Cartesius est."). For most of the
entries Gregor provided a line or two of summary and critical comment, and for 562 items he
provided extensive commentary. There are 66 pages of index in double columns of small
print. The book is a scholarly achievement of the first order, and has been indispensable to
Cartesian scholars ever since it appeared in 1964.

But Gregor still had not finished The Dream of Descartes. He gave lectures on the topic half a
dozen times over the years, told people about it, outlined his ideas in letters, but the
manuscript was unfinished at the time of his death in 1985.

Gregor Sebba's manuscripts, letters, and papers were examined by Aníbal A. Bueno, who sent
all those having to do with The Dream of Descartes to me. Richard H. Popkin provided the
manuscript of "What Is 'History of Philosophy'?" and several pertinent letters. Helen Sebba
copy edited the manuscript and corrected the proofs of the present volume. I am most grateful
for their help.

I started through the material with some trepidation, an image in my mind of Gregor rubbing
his hands together and smiling in his imitation of a sinister Jesuit and saying, "What now,
youngster?" It was a piece of cake. Gregor really had finished the manuscript, after all. He
had just never gathered it together in one place. But there it was, most of it in a draft dated
July 1973. The rest came from other pieces as indicated at the appropriate places in the text.
All I had to do was assemble it.

The Dream of Descartes is a brilliant and charming re-creation and analy-

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sis of a crucial event in the history of Western thought. The young René Descartes roamed
Europe seeking his vocation, and on this night had a premonition that a breakthrough would
occur. His way was revealed in a sequence of three dreams that he took to be inspired. His
own analysis of these dreams set him on the path to the Regulae, the Discours, and the
Meditations.

Sebba argues that in the process of creativity, intellectual ideas can be first expressed
physiologically in terms of body movements. In The Dream of Descartes he uses the case of
Descartes to demonstrate his thesis. The result is a bold and fascinating analysis of Descartes's
dreams as seminal in the creative process of genius.

Gregor Sebba had a strong interest in the historiography of the history of philosophy. His
"What is 'History of Philosophy'? I. Doctrinal vs. Historical Analysis" ( Journal of the History
of Philosophy, vol. 8 [ 1970], pp. 251-62) is a careful analysis of the distinction indicated, but
it is incomplete. This study is continued here in Appendix 1, What Is "History of Philosophy'?
The Historiographic Problem, which rounds out Sebba's views.

Sebba thought that his ideas on historiography could be best expressed in practice. He
proposed to provide a demonstration in a major work of which The Dream of Descartes
would be the main exhibit. Fortunately, he did finish The Dream of Descartes, but of the
major work we have only an outline. It is included here as Appendix 2, "Descartes Against
Scepticism: Philosophy Against History?" both to set The Dream of Descartes in context, and
because this outline is Sebba's substantive summary statement on the problems that most
concerned him in the history of philosophy.

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AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
REGOR SEBBA

FOR A HUMANIST ENGAGED IN A STUDY OF THE CREATIVE ACT, A full statement


of background would have to cover the whole range of his life experience and studies, since
this is what made him a humanist and gave him the knowledge of human personality needed
for the task. I must confine myself to what I think has been decisive.

First, the times. Born in Libau, Latvia, in 1905, I grew up in the South Tyrol. When Italy
declared war in 1915, the family was evacuated to Upper Austria. I studied in Vienna and
Innsbruck and finished just when the economic world crisis of 1929 broke out.

My basic studies were in chemistry and law at the University of Vienna, 1924-25, and in civil
and canon law, economics, and political science at the University of Innsbruck, 1925-29. I
received the degree of Dr. rerum politicarum at the University of Innsbruck in 1927, and the
degree of Dr. juris utriusque in 1929. I studied statistics as a postgraduate at the University of
Vienna, 1929-30.

All prospects of an academic career ended in 1933 when my position (assumed in 1930) as
Forschungsassistent in charge of staff and publications at the Institute for Minority Statistics
in the University of Vienna was abolished for budgetary reasons. I was an editor of
Wirtschaftliche Rundschau, Vienna, 1934-38, a career that suddenly ended when I was
arrested by the Gestapo after Hitler's take-over of Austria.

During those years I was Secretary General of the Austrian Political Society, Vienna, 1931-
34; Chairman, University Section, Austrian League of Nations Association, 1930-35; and
Chairman, Austrian Sociological Research Circle, 1931-36.

Emigration to the United States and six years ( 1939-45) of war service followed. I became a
United States citizen in 1943, and was forty-two years old when, in January 1947, I finally
entered a regular academic career in the United States, a country then, and now, facing times
as perturbing as the European 1920s. The unremitting task of understanding such times has

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forced me, like others of my generation, into ever widening study far beyond earlier
specialization. This, I think, is what has made humanists out of so many of us.

This background also accounts for the curious double track in my scholarly career. I wanted
to study philosophy and literature, but poverty forced me into the bread-and-butter study of
the law, which I never followed; the time, however, was not wasted. The thorough study of
Roman, canon, and medieval law gave me a solid historical foundation, and criminal law
taught me what proof is--something that will stand up in court. My teachers led me to a
concurrent study of the social sciences, so that I finished with two doctorates. During the
1930s I made my living as a university statistician, economist, newspaperman, editor, and in
the advertising profession, pursuing my research interests chiefly within a private research
group that I founded in Vienna in 1931. This Austrian Sociological Research Circle,
disbanded in 1936 when the political climate made further work impossible, brought together
some twenty young and a few older scholars from a variety of fields, leading young
intellectuals in political life from the extreme right to the extreme left, and representatives of
the main intellectual currents, from Vienna Circle positivists to metaphysicists and
theologians. Among those who survived Hitler and the war, few have failed to rise to the top
in their chosen careers.

Equally fruitful were working contacts with exceptional people in other walks of life: poets,
artists, musicians, architects, but also industry builders, bankers, statesmen, as well as some
prize specimens of what Karl Mannheim has called the floating intelligentsia. When I speak
about human creativeness, I speak about something I have seen at close quarters.

Scholarly work on creativity began as soon as I graduated. My first published paper in 1930
dealt with the sociology of art, a first confused attempt to locate art's creative source. Other
papers, including one on revolution and creativity, were presented and critically discussed in
the research group. But the task of understanding the upheaval of the interwar period was
paramount. It increasingly preoccupied the group. I remember one of the most brilliant papers
I have heard, given by Karl Polanyi in March 1933, which cut the ground from under such
optimism as was left with a prediction of the events ahead, culminating in the outbreak of
another world war in the fall of 1938, or 1939 at the latest.

When I began my academic career in the United States in January 1947, I chose the
University of Georgia because I wanted to spend a few years in the South, which I considered
to be a laboratory where the problems of the postwar era could be studied in nuce. I was
Professor of Economics and

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Chairman of Statistics there until 1959. I did a good deal of work in Southern economics and
a thorough study of the displaced persons problem from the viewpoint of the absorption of
immigrants and the psychology of survivors. I moved to Emory University in 1959 when I
was offered its new interdisciplinary professorship in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal
Arts through a Carnegie Foundation grant. Since then, I have devoted myself almost entirely
to doctoral teaching. A year-long inderdisciplinary seminar that I instituted in 1960 and taught
for ten years has produced more than a dozen Ph.D.s who went out to establish or reorganize
humanities programs throughout the country, as well as a number of teachers in literature,
philosophy, and the social sciences who consider themselves humanists and teach
accordingly. Other interdisciplinary seminars taught with the cooperation of research people
in various fields, such as the Greek seminar and the Baroque seminar, have become the model
for similar ventures in theology and other areas at Emory. My own seminars have dealt with a
wide range of topics, most of them related to my studies in creativity. My work with
undergraduates has chiefly been in humanities courses and in private noncredit seminars.

I was a Fulbright Professor in Political Philosophy at the University of Munich, 1964-65, and
a Danforth Lecturer, Morehouse College, 1968. I received the Outstanding Teacher Award at
Emory University in 1968, and the Thomas Jefferson Award in 1970. In 1973, I was made
Emeritus Professor of Liberal Arts at Emory University. In 1973-74, I was Professor of
Humanities at the University of Florida.

The center of my teaching and research in the humanities has been the problem of creativity.
It has led me deeply into seemingly remote areas that yet had to be studied in minute detail in
order to understand what exactly happened in the cases I undertook to analyze. My
Bibliographia Cartesiana: A Critical Guide to the Descartes Literature, 1800 to 1960, for
example, is a by-product of my study of the Dream of Descartes.

Nonetheless, I continue to write and lecture in the field of the social sciences, especially in
political philosophy. To me, this is a necessity. I cannot divorce the phenomenon of human
creativity from its setting in history and society. Conversely, the study of creative act in
Rousseau, to give another example, has led me to a quite different evaluation of the Contrat
Social and the Emile, and a study of the volonté générale, done twenty-five years ago, became
the key to an understanding of the complexities in this man's intellectual constitution.

I have had an abiding interest in the work of Eric Voegelin, a lifelong friend. I regard
Voegelin as one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth

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century, and am pleased to be the coeditor of a festschrift published in his honor in 1981. Like
Voegelin, I am a humanist scholar. If I were to define the term "humanist," I would center, not
on the field of the humanities and not on "humanism" either, but on the pursuit of the patent
and the hidden interconnections that manifest the unity of the phenomenon of man.

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The Dream of Descartes

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A BRIEF NOTE ON METHOD
1. DESCARTES'S DREAM CAN BE USED AS MATERIAL FOR AN ANALYSIS
THAT follows a given theoretical model or models, or it may be analyzed specifically in
order to understand its significance for this particular dreamer. In the latter case, the
theoretical model cannot be chosen in advance; the Dream itself must guide the
interpretation. This, however, presumes that the Dream (the whole sequence, including
the pre-dream and post-dream events as recorded) reveals a structure that allows us to
determine the nature of the event as a whole and to discern a consistent pattern of
development from pre-onset through the dreams and the interpretations to the post-dream
final conclusions drawn by the dreamer. Descartes's Dream fulfills both requirements.
The basic principle of interpretation, then, will have to be that the Dream itself should
guide the interpretation, and the proof of method will have to consist in the degree to
which this interpretation elucidates the whole event.

Freud suggested the presence of a developmental pattern in the series when he


characterized the first dream as a "deep" dream from the unconscious, while the third,
last dream is an example of Träume von oben--dreams "from the top of the head," so
close to waking consciousness that the dreamer himself can interpret them correctly.
2. This position runs up against some of the most widely held views about dreams,
especially the following:
a. If any structure is found in the Dream of Descartes, it is a structure evolved by the
dreamer in a process of recalling, considering, interpreting, editing, and finally
verbalizing and writing his account; the structure of the dream event itself is
inaccessible to us.
b. A dreamer's report, spanning the day or days before the onset of the night of dreams
or visions," of three specific dreams and the intervals between them, and the relevant
events of at least the first day after the last dream and its interpretation can be
considered prime material only as far as the very last set (dream, interpretation,
conclusions) is concerned. This

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follows Gouhier's objection and Freud's comment that the material for interpreting
the first dream is inaccessible; you cannot psychoanalyze a corpse.
c. The dreamer himself claims full recollection; he also claims that the dream event
carried a decipherable message, but dreams do not carry messages.

As to (a), I reply that the dream account is a continuation of the dream work which
itself, it is true, has become inaccessible to the dreamer as well as to us. We cannot
be concerned with what Descartes "actually dreamt"; we cannot enter into anybody
else's dream. But if we have a series of events that begins with a premonition of
dreams or visions, continues with the occurrence of these dreams or visions, and
leads directly into an interpretation, that is, involves a transformation of these
experiences and on to a definite waking conclusion, then we have a right to assume
that the whole event is governed throughout by a specific problem that produced the
dreams in the first place and guided the dreamer in their transformation into a
verbally expressible statement of record and conclusions. Freudian censorship, in
this instance, works positively, not negatively; instead of suppressing and disguising
the latent message, it suppresses or transforms all that is not relevant to that message.
This process is what I call the dream work, in a sense quite different from Freud's.
Since this dream work governs the whole process, any forgetting or transforming of
the earlier dreams falls under it; it follows that, regardless of the resemblance or
nonresemblance between actual dream content and reported dream content,
Descartes's account of his first two dreams is as relevant to the interpretation as that
of his third dream, the "dream from above."

As to (c), we need a typology of dreams, from precisely the viewpoint of what they
tell the dreamer. Disinterested, matter-of-fact self-observation, without even the
thought of recording it, ranging over two decades, discloses in my personal case that
there are dreams that carry messages; in my case they are very rare, and are
immediately distinguishable from dreams that do not, however puzzling and
intriguing these dreams may be. I forget dreams very rapidly, and message dreams
are no exception; but for me a message dream condenses quickly to a single visual
image that remains while the rest fades away, and it yields up its message suddenly,
in verbally expressible form, within minutes. This image, reduced to a blurred but
recognizable visual recollection, remains in my memory for a period that depends on
the importance of the message. I remember only one of these images, retained since
the early months of 1965; of the others I remember only that they occurred and that
they stayed with me for relatively short periods of time. The dream image still
retained concerns a vital aspect of my

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life; the other images vanished as the solution they offered became irrelevant
because the problem concerned was a passing one.
3. The problem of recall has a special significance with respect to Descartes's Dream.
Descartes expected a night of dreams; he went to bed literally waiting for the event. I
show that he may well have taken hasty notes during the night; but even if he did not, he
would awaken from each of these dreams with the awareness that something decisive had
happened, and he would go over the remembered dream again and again, fixing it in his
memory and looking for clues. (He had no way of knowing that there would be more
than one dream!) The record of the first dream corroborates this. Its schematic character
stands out. This is clearly the product of repeated rehearsals that left a presumably
rearranged, clearly articulated sequence. Since this process of consolidation and
rearrangement was part of the dream work, its results must be accepted as authentic, not
in the sense of reproducing the actual dream (which is impossible anyway because the
process of awakening is in itself a process of restructuring the dream pattern under the
growing impact of the structures of waking consciousness), but in the sense of retaining
in its most pregnant formulation those products of the recall process that most directly
bear on the message carried by the original dream visions.
4. Descartes himself has stated the task that this night of dreams had to perform, and
Leibniz was right in retaining this, and this alone, from the account he had just read:

Quod vitae sectabor iter?

This was the question, and the dream answered it.

The process by which this answer--a decision!--was arrived at is a simple one, if we


adopt the model of the unconscious as (a) a repository of all experiences, including the
"forgotten" ones (there are Eastern techniques for producing total recall, and recent
experiments that produce involuntary recall by stimulation of a certain brain locus), and
(b) as an active mechanism, independent of conscious thought for the solving of
problems that worry the conscious mind because it cannot find the clues to their
solutions. This mechanism can be likened to an unconscious shuffling and reshuffling of
bits selectively drawn from the memory store until a consistent, esthetically and
emotionally satisfying, "systematic" arrangement is found, which then, by various roads,
will suddenly rise to consciousness, accompanied by an overwhelming euphoric feeling
that disguises the difficulties of the solution--difficulties that in Descartes's case occupied
his conscious thoughts for a whole decade. Something similar happened to Rousseau on
the road to

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Vincennes. This euphoric feeling is a response to the sudden lifting of a seemingly
irremovable load.
5. On this model, the interpretation will have to grow out of a careful examination of the
following questions:
a. What did Descartes actually write? To determine this one must study the style of
Baillet and his method of translating and paraphrasing, by comparing his translations
and paraphrases with texts that are still extant.
b. What can we definitely say about the sequence and the time intervals of Descartes's
writing of his account?
c. What do we know about Descartes's sleeping, dreaming, and daydreaming habits?
d. What was Descartes's intellectual and emotional development between 10 November
1618 and 10 November 1619? What precisely was the role of Beeckman in this
period, and how did the attitude of Descartes towards Beeckman change, by direct
testimony in the correspondence, Beeckman's journal, and by inference?
e. What was Descartes's pattern of intellectual discovery during this year? What was
the nature of the periods of complete lassitude following periods of energetic
exploration? What was the nature of the "enthusiasm" that preceded the night of
dreams?
f. What psychological states involving the anticipation of visions and the feeling of the
presence of a guiding "Spirit" are compatible with Descartes's essentially
rationalistic mathematician's mind? How--by what process-could Descartes's critical
threshold be lowered to make him responsive to "dreams or visions"?

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THE DREAM OF DESCARTES
1. Introduction
DURING THE NIGHT OF 10 NOVEMBER 1619, RENÉ DESCARTES (THEN twenty-
three years old) had a dream in which the Spirit of Truth descended upon him to give him the
mission to philosophize. Not until 1632 was he ready to publish; the condemnation of Galileo
induced him to withhold his work, and thus nearly two decades passed before he "made
himself known," as the contemporary French phrase had it, with the Discours de la méthode
and the three Essais of 1637.

In March 1949, I presented an outline of my discovery of the extraordinary drama barely


hidden in the three dream-sequences that make up the Dream of Descartes. Since that first talk
at the University of Georgia, I have lectured on the Dream of Descartes at many universities
including Yale, Munich, and Lyon. Requests for copies of these unpublished lectures keep
coming in, so it seems to be time to put them into print.

This work exemplifies the principle I have followed in the history of philosophy: to interpret
the text, only the text, nothing but the text.

The only text available is Baillet's translation of Descartes's Latin notes in the petit registre
Descartes called Olympica, which has been lost. Baillet's translation follows the original
faithfully and reliably, within the limits of what an experienced rapid translator can achieve at
sight. His text consequently contains bridge passages and occasional circumlocutions. Careful
study of his translations of known Latin texts of Descartes makes it possible to eliminate
Baillet's additions and to restore what is definitely in Baillet's source. The original Latin,
however, cannot be restored by retrotranslation, especially in certain crucial passages in the
third dream.

An attempt to estimate the space taken up by the Olympica text in the original manuscript,
based on the average ratio between Baillet's French and Descartes's Latin words in the case of
quotations from other works, would indicate that in the lost notebook the Olympica text took
up just about the whole available space. This space was limited by the fact that Descartes used
the petit registre as students do even in our time--entering

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essay headings from the back as well as the front of the book. The average number of words
per page was estimated on the basis of letters of Descartes.The genesis of the text is as
follows: the text gives an account of the three dreams in sequence, followed by the results of
recalling and rethinking episodes after completing the main account. The last part of the text
was written the next day (after the visit of the painter); the final entries (apologetic and
promise of pilgrimage) still later.The general character of the dream sequence is as follows:
the comment on the increasing "Enthusiasm" preceding the dreams, together with the claim
that a génie predicted the dreams, must be taken au pied de la lettre. There is no evidence of
any addition or omission on Baillet's part.What Descartes was about to find (invenire) at that
time cannot be determined anymore. It has probably no more to do with the dreams than
creating the intellectual overexcitement that made it possible for the impending decision to
work itself out in this sequence of increasingly transparent symbolic dreams. The best thing
about this increasing transparence was said by Sigmund Freud in his Brief an Maxime Leroy
über den Traum des Descartes, 1 a reply to Leroy's request for an analysis of the three dreams.
What the decision had to resolve is clearly stated in the titles and content of the two poems by
Ausonius that appear at the beginning of the third dream: what way in life should I follow?
The second title answers: "Yes and No": finding the truth in the welter of contention.The
three dreams rise, as Freud said, from the deeply unconscious and very personal to a dreaming
"von oben," so close to the waking intellect that the dreamer himself can find the
interpretation. This rising sequence also takes the route per aspera ad astra. The ultimate
conclusion reached by the dreamer appears only after the dream, in the waking state, as a
result of repeated rethinking of the event--but it appears in the form of a symbolic misreading
of the second dream: the Spirit of Truth has descended to give the young man his mission in
life, the mission to philosophize.The three parts of the Dream of Descartes during the night of
the 10th to the 11th of November 1619 are the singular document of a creative awakening by
way of a consistent, rapid, articulated, fully successful process of experiential development in
which zetesis--the philosophical search for Truth with a capital "T"--reaches the stage of
noetic certainty and puts the seeker in possession of the experiential structure that will
determine the philosophical structure of the work to come.I begin with six preliminary points:
1. The sequence of three "dreams" forms a dramatic whole in which the rise from perilous
uncertainty to superb confidence in an as yet undefined

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revolutionary life mission is played out in a series of emotional and intellectual moves.
The same development determines the change in the symbolic mood of the dreams. The
dreamer himself "understood" his dreams clearly: he knew what they meant and put this
knowledge down on paper. The interpreter must not search or hunt for the "meaning" of
these dreams; he must try to recover what young Descartes himself knew about them.
2. The dreamer's account is truthful in this sense: it is the account of a searcher who has
found what he was after. As always, the descriptions of the dream sequences are already
transformations and manipulations of the dream experiences that cannot be held steady in
memory after awakening. The account is therefore a record of the dream work, not of the
dreams. And this, precisely, guarantees its truthfulness.
3. One of the three dreams was not a dream at all.
4. The sequence develops with iron logic. Each episode or sequence poses and answers a
question; the answer settles the question and raises a new question, one that could not
have been asked earlier. The dream thus offers an example of experiential, emotional,
and intellectual growth compressed into the events of one night.
5. A satisfactory interpretation must therefore be able to account for every detail in the
sequence, excepting references to personal memories of the dreamer that only he might
have identified. This means that the interpretation must follow the dreams as a literary
critic must follow the poem he interprets. No selective interpretation can open up the
"meaning" of the "night of ecstasy," although it may well shed light on special issues,
biographical as well as intellectual.
6. The dream night, then, was a journey of discovery, and a successful one. What Descartes
discovered was his mission, not his philosophy. Yet we shall see that his future
philosophy is already preformed, as it were, budlike, in the dreams. But no hunting for
the philosophical "meaning" of the dream symbols can reveal this: perhaps the most
unexpected, and the most striking, insight that emerged from the close reading of the
account concerns the body-mind relationship. What Descartes received in these "dreams"
were not philosophical ideas but philosophical experiences symbolically hidden in bodily
movements and experiences. Merleau-Ponty suspected that the key to the understanding
of the philosophy of Descartes was hidden in the relationship between the invisible and
the visible; he did not suspect, it seems, that the Dream of Descartes offers this key. If the
following interpretation is correct, the Dream of Descartes proves that fundamental
philosophical insights can be physically experienced long before they have been

-7-
reasoned out. The development of an original philosophy may thus be a search for a
system of rational thought that satisfies the memory of a unique physical experience of
the same form.

There is a great deal to be said about the methodology that the study of the Dream of
Descartes has imposed upon me. Some points are dealt with in my "What Is 'History of
Philosophy'? I. Doctrinal vs. Historical Analysis," 2 and in the appendix to this volume, "What
Is 'History of Philosophy'? II. The Historiographic Problem." But I can answer two questions
here: Do we have to know the life and the philosophy of Descartes to understand his Dream?
Or would such knowledge induce us to read into the Dream of Descartes what is not there?
The best work done on the Dream of Descartes, Henri Gouhier magnificent little book, Les
Premières Pensées de Descartes: contribution à l'histoire de l'anti-renaissance, 3 proves that
this is not so. No other treatment comes anywhere near this study of the young man during
these years of philosophical awakening, and nothing can match the rigorous scholarship, the
vast erudition, and the imaginative scholarship of Gouhier. Here is an interpreter with full
control over the mass of evidence and a profound, detailed knowledge of Cartesian
philosophy; yet the Dream of Descartes escapes him.

In my interpretation, the first dream recapitulates and solves the problem of the dreamer's
formative years at La Flèche (where the dream unrolls). Here the moral problem is faced in an
extraordinary conflation with the problem of noetic certainty and the problem of the physical
structure of the experienced world. Among the philosophically permanent structures achieved
by the dreamer, two must be singled out because they provide proof (the only one of this kind
I have found so far) that future thought structure can come into existence in the form of
specific physiological experience. One of them is simple: the appearance of the vortex (here a
symbol of uncertainty, but also the basic form of impelled motion); the other one also
represents a symbolic and experiential parallelism of motion, but this time it is the parallelism
between the dreamer's physical motions on his way from one side of the courtyard of the
college to the college church on the other side, and the mouvement de la pensée of the First
Meditation. The first dream has left the dreamer fearful, prayerful, and exhausted.

In the whole of the event of that November night, the second dream marks the turning point.
As Freud had observed (he had an uncanny gift for observing the obvious), the Dream of
Descartes as a whole rises from the depths up to the closest vicinity of consciousness, so that
the dreamer himself can in the end interpret it. This happens in the second dream.
Philosophically, it marks the ascendancy of ratio over the passions of the

-8-
soul. In the history of philosophy, the second dream is a capital event. Here the ground is laid
for the "this-sidedness" of Descartes's philosophy, marking the secular cleft in the
development of Western philosophy for which Descartes and Pascal are the paradigms. From
the viewpoint of a study of the creative process (which is my own and only viewpoint), the
second dream shows precisely how an experiential event prepares the ground for a noetic
achievement. Such an experiential event must not be mistaken for an existential one. The two
are co-present in each of the three dreams, but they are not identical.

After the interlude of the second dream, the third dream brings the resolution. Its drama
comes and passes almost unnoticed and in great quiet; it is the experience (not the concept) of
the cogito ergo sum.

Note on Bibliography and Translations


For references to works on the Dream of Descartes, see items 102-8 and the Index under
Dream of Descartes in my Bibliographia Cartesiana. 4 My translations of Adrien Baillet's
text on the Dream of Descartes are from volume 1 of his La Vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes. 5
Texts that I attribute to Descartes by extrapolation are placed in brackets.

2. The First Dream


After going to sleep, his imagination was struck by some phantoms which appeared to him
and frightened him so much that, seemingly walking in the streets . . .

The very first sentence of Baillet's account of the Dream of Descartes gives us the clue:
croyant marcher par les rues. The Latin word would be via or viae. The dreamer is walking
in the streets; the street (via) on which he encounters the phantoms is clearly a bad one: il se
trouve dans le mauvais chemin, as one would say in French; in plain English, he was "in a bad
way." The appearance of the word via in the very first sentence of the account sounds in fact
the keynote of the whole sequence of dreams and interpretations. The dreamer is uncertain
about the road to take in life; he knows that he had been on the wrong road, or else the
question of where to go would not have arisen. We will find that upon awakening from this
dream, he does not "interpret" it; he spells out what the dream had confirmed: that he had
been walking on the wrong road,

-9-
[which] frightened him so much that . . . he was forced to turn over to the left side in order to
be able to advance to the place where he wanted to go . . .

He was forced to turn over to the left side: il étoit obligé de se renverser sur le côté gauche.
This makes no sense when said of a man walking, but it makes great sense when applied to a
man lying in bed. Later on we shall hear more about his position when falling asleep; right
now we note that the account conflates the dreamer's position (lying down) while dreaming
with his position in the dream (walking). This conflation confirms that this is a genuine and as
yet untransformed dream memory, unless Baillet misunderstood or mistranslated the Latin
original. The usual way out of the difficulty consists in interpreting the passage as meaning
that he shifted his weight to the left foot, on the strength of what follows immediately:

. . . because he felt a great weakness on the right side, on which he could not support himself.

But why the repetition of côté, side, if what was meant was pied, leg? Richard Kennington in
his Descartes' 'Olympica' felt the difficulty and translated: "he was obliged to fall back onto
the left side," 6 a translation incompatible with the term se reverser, to turn around, to change
direction. Accepting the text as it stands, one finds that the wording clearly suggests that at
the beginning of this "dream," the dreamer was not yet sure whether or not he was dreaming,
a situation that will recur in the course of that night. He is still faintly aware of lying in his
bed; the statement that he thought he was walking down a street (croyant marcher par les
rues) confirms this. The plural les rues where one would expect the singular may be a slip on
the part of Baillet, who used the first common expression (marcher par les rues) that came to
his mind; if he found the plural in the text, this would corroborate our interpretation: the
dreamer is still trying to orient himself, he does not quite know yet what is happening. But
immediately afterward he remembers something: he wanted to go to a certain place. He was
not wandering around "in the streets." But he clearly does not know where he wanted to be.
What he does know is that "a great weakness on the right side" prevented him from moving
freely: there is something wrong with his "right side." In thinking over the dream after
awakening, he retranslated the patent symbolism of this image into Christian language: what
hurts him are sins not known to others.

Being ashamed of walking in this manner, he made an effort to straighten up.

-10-
He was walking bent over on the right, the weak side, plainly displaying his weakness before
the eyes of others. The effort produces an unexpected result:

but he felt impetuous wind, which, carrying him away in a kind of vortex, made him spin
three or four times on the left foot.

He is now deeply in the dream, but his memory is of the utmost precision. Why? Because it is
the memory of a most unusual type of physical motion, something more readily retained than
a polyvalued symbolic image. He remembers spinning three or four times on his left foot, the
good foot, while being swept away by the tourbillon. (We must, however, consider the
possibility that Baillet embroidered the account by adding l'emportant.) This wind, too, will
recur during the night and later in his waking reconstruction of the event; it will change its
character in the process. Here is is an "impetuous," an irresistible and imperious, tornado that
lifts him off his feet and makes him spin, physically. To see in this tourbillon the origin (or, as
has been suggested, an encoded announcement) of his famous vortex theory is wrong. He did
not discover the vortex theory in his dream; in fact, he never discovered it at all: he would
deduce it more Cartesiano as the inevitable consequence of irrefutable propositions: that the
universe is a plenum in which there can be no vacuum, since it is filled with extended
substance (matter); that this matter is in motion; and that the spacial universe, while
"indefinite" in extent, is bounded, so that matter in motion has no other way to go than around
and around. All this would come very much later. Nonetheless, there is an unexpected
connection tourbillon of the first dream and the vortex theory to come: Descartes had the
bodily experience of the irresistible vortex carrying a body with it and setting it into spinning
motion long before deductive reasoning forced him to adopt a theory so incompatible with our
common physical experiences. It is well to remember Henri Poincaré's linking of the
Euclidian concept of space with these very same daily experiences of moving and touching.
E. T. Whittaker once asked what would have happened to Newton's system had telescopes
capable of revealing spiral nebulae in the night sky been invented before he published the
Principia. The question makes us think of the boldness of Descartes's vortex theory, and the
first dream reminds us that he did have that physical experience of the irresistible vortex
carrying him and spinning him around long before he came to explain gravity by postulating a
vortex of galactic dimensions carrying the earth with it, spinning it, and with its

-11-
outermost edge of subtle matter pushing back to the surface of the earth whatever rose or tried
to rise from it.

This still was not what frightened him.

Ce ne fut pas encore ce qui l'épouvanta. On the basis of an examination of Baillet's way of
translating, we can safely consider this remark a bridge passage that Baillet wrote down while
forming the translation of the next sentence in his mind:

The difficulty he had in dragging himself along . . .

This, again, is typical of a genuine memory of a dream. Just now the tourbillon had made the
dreamer spin on his left foot. Now he is "dragging himself along"--a description that fits the
earlier one of his having difficulty in walking erect and feeling a weakness in his right side.
Did Descartes jot down a few words immediately after the first dream, putting down
tourbillon or "wind" among words recalling his physical difficulties? It so, he may not have
remembered, when writing, at what point and in what way the tourbillon episode occurred; he
would fit it in at the place where the word occurred in his notes, although in taking the notes
the tourbillon episode might have come back to his mind after he had already begun to note
down his physical state on that wrong road.

The difficulty he had in dragging himself along made him believe that he might fall at every
step . . .

The dream symbolism becomes fully transparent. When your "right side" is weak, every step
you take may become a fall. No wonder that after awakening he prays to be saved from the
"evil influence" of his dream and from the consequences of his innermost sinfulness.

. . . made him believe that he might fall . . . until, having seen a college open on his way, he
entered inside in order to find refuge there and a remedy for his bad state [une retraite et un
remède à son mal].

At the end of the road is the college, and it is open. Il entra dedans: he passed through the
building into the courtyard. The "college" is the Collège de La Flèche, the Jesuit school where
he had studied for nearly eight years. The action that follows takes place in the main
courtyard. Un reméde à son mal plainly characterizes his urge to be "delivered from evil"--
that evil of

-12-
which his physical weakness is a symbol; by contrast, trouver une retraite means finding a
refuge from the hostile forces, the phantoms and that "imperious" wind that he cannot resist.

He tried to reach the church of the college where his first thought was to go to make his
prayer.

The translation or paraphrase is garbled; "his only thought was to reach the church, so that he
might make his prayer for deliverance there" would make more sense in the context. The
prayer will not be made until he wakes up from his dream; as the dream goes on, he is
deflected again and again both from his intention and from carrying it out:

but perceiving that he had passed a man he knew without greeting him, he wished to go back
to pay him his respects . . .

The first obstacle: physically and morally hard-pressed as he is, his "first thought" of praying
for deliverance vanished before the reluctance to appear uncivil to one he knew. His spiritual
director at La Flèche could have enlightened him about the state of his soul as revealed by this
incident, but the dreamer got the message from the dream itself:

. . . and was violently pushed back by the wind that blew against the church.

The "imperious" wind that had revealed the ultimate degree of his helplessness is now a
"violent wind" that prevents him from violating his resolve to seek deliverance from evil for
the sake of being considered a gentleman by an acquaintance. This wind tries to drive him
toward the church. But the rites of passage are not over yet:

At the same time he saw in the middle of the courtyard of the college another person who
called him by name in a civil and obliging way . . .

The dreamer is still all too susceptible to civil and obliging approaches; the man who
courteously stops him is a bringer of good news who

. . . told him that if he wished to go find Monsieur N., he [Monsieur N.] had something to give
to him.

The man who talks to him knows him by name; presumably "Monsieur N." knows him, too,
and the dreamer knows "Monsieur N." Did Descartes's

-13-
manuscript name this Mr. "N."? Did Descartes dream that the gentleman he talked to called
him "Monsieur N."? Did he know the name, substituting the "N." for it? Did Baillet,
translating at sight, substitute "Monsieur N." for something like "a certain gentleman"? We
cannot know, but the identity of "Monsieur N." will unexpectedly and in proper dream
fashion be revealed:

Monsieur Descartes imagined that this [gift] was a melon that had been brought from some
foreign land.

That famous melon, on which Marie-Louise von Franz, the disciple of C. G. Jung, has written
pages full of melon symbolism in her Der Traum des Descartes, 7 which has been given many
ingenious and some outlandish interpretations, which Descartes, in the course of sobering up
from his "enthusiasm," had himself interpreted as signifying "the charms of solitude, but
offered by purely human solicitations" ("sollicitations," translated by J. O. Wisdom in Three
Dreams of Descartes as "incitements") 8

With due respect to Descartes's own subsequent interpretation, it will be well to point out that
with the appearance of the man who knows him by name, the dreamer is back at La Flèche,
not only physically, but socially as well. He has encountered someone familiar, in the vague
way in which we recognize and do not recognize persons we dream of. This sends us back to
the list of fellow students with whom the boy and adolescent Descartes had spent his eight
years there. The list is unexpectedly short. In all the extensive correspondence that has come
down to us, there is only one mention of a fellow student: in a letter to Mersenne dated 28
January 1641, 9 Descartes inquires about a M. Chauveau whom he knew at La Flèche and
who came from--Melun. We know nothing about the relationship between the two, but the
whole dream episode, including the mysterious melon and the "charms of solitude, but offered
by purely human enticements," suggests that repression was at work. A memory arose, and
was quickly defused by a verbal pun: Melun becomes melon. Freud would have loved that.

In the context of the first dream, the melon episode is but another obstacle in the dreamer's
impeded progress toward the church, but it is a serious one, as the sequel shows. "But what
surprised him more," says Baillet for the sake of fluency and to gain time, "was to see that"

those who gathered around him with this person in order to converse, were erect and firm on
their feet: although he himself was always bent and teetering on the same ground, and that the
wind, which had tried several times to turn him around [le vent qui avoit pensé le renverser
plusieurs fois], had greatly diminished.

-14-
Again, the scene has been telescoped. People are gathering around the courteous gentleman
and the dreamer, and a conversation develops-another obstacle in the dreamer's way toward
the church. The wind apparently does not like that; it keeps on blowing, trying to turn the
dreamer around and get him back on his way, but it gradually loses force. Outwardly, all
seems well; the dreamer is amidst people carrying on civil talk; perhaps he participates in it.
Yet he is radically divorced from them, for, as the dream says in its brutal veracity, they have
a ground to stand on while he does not, although they all stand "on the same ground." He
alone does not have a footing, and not through the working of an outside force either: the
wind is no longer attacking him. The dream has revealed the condition of the dreamer in the
plainest symbolic terms:

He awoke on this imagination . . .

He awakens with this image still before him. What follows is not an interpretation, as has
always been said. The dreamer is not free to interpret yet.

3. The First Interlude


He awoke on this imagination, and felt right then [à l'heure même] an actual pain . . .

This actual pain was the physical discomfort he had felt throughout the dream and which had
channeled the symbolic dream work into the sequence of dream events that most tellingly and
directly revealed his intellectual and moral state. No wonder that this pain

made him fear that this was the work of some evil spirit [mauvais génie] who had wanted to
seduce him.

The dream itself says all that is necessary; from the very beginning it posed the problem of
the young man who seeks the right road after having gone down the wrong one, intellectually
and morally. The dream has in fact asked, long before the question will be asked directly:
what road shalt thou take in life? It gave the first answer: not this one. It was a menacing
answer; for the dream had said more: try as you may to find the right road, you are still on the
wrong one; everything in you strives against your moving to the

-15-
right one. The dream went farther. It specified, revealing the obstacles one by one; from
civility, through participation in social life, down to sensuality, which is more than just hinted
at in the melon incident; above all, a disinclination to give up the life he is leading. But the
dream also told the dreamer that he must give it up, not for moral or intellectual reasons, but
because an abyss separates him from the others, the abyss he felt as he stood as on a tossing
boat while the others went on talking, not noticing anything.

It is not surprising that he "awoke on this imagination," or thought so as he wrote down the
dream sequence; this is what preoccupied his mind upon awakening, together with the pain
that was real, not just dreamt. His immediate memory cut out the actual end of the dream,
which was not to come back to his mind until he had written down his account to preserve it
and was ready to go over his memories once more, in the light of what he had learned.

It is therefore wrong to read these dreams backward, from the final interpretations to the
original account, as Gouhier does, and Kennington, who explicitly states in his "Descartes'
'Olympica'": "I shall in what follows permit waking interpretations to supersede sleeping
ones, and the reinterpretations to qualify earlier ones." 10 We shall permit ourselves none of
that. Dream work is a work of symbolic understanding, growing out of conscious and
unconscious concerns, trying to tell the dreamer what he does not want to hear, but also
moving him toward resolutions for which he is unconsciously ready, however far from them
his conscious mind may be. Interpretations and reinterpretations are a continuation of this
work of symbolically untying knots. What matters is the process, not the products. If details
change in the interpretation and reinterpretation, if later statements contradict earlier ones, it is
because the images must change in order to bring to the fore what the earlier symbols had
already contained but did not fully convey. Dreams have their logic, and Descartes had some
logic, too, come to think of it. It was, after all, he, one of the finest logical minds of his time,
who dreamt these dreams; it would be surprising if they lacked even that logic that they have
by virtue of their being dreams.

The dreamer's state upon awakening was that of utter existential uncertainty, the state that the
mature thinker would try to produce by the vehicle of the universal doubt, having long lost the
faculty of attaining it, though he undoubtedly retained the memory of once having felt it to the
bone. The struggle between the old life that had him in its clutches and the new one he was
seeking without knowing where to find it--that struggle was moral, intellectual, sensual, even
physical. It called for a search of conscience, and the dreamer, now awake, found in it one
cause for his inability to stand up straight and put his feet on firm ground: the fact that he had
led a double life

-16-
and the fear that the hidden life might bear poisonous fruit in the future. He felt that his pain
was the work of some evil spirit that had tried to seduce him.

He immediately turned over on his right side; for it was on the left side that he had gone to
sleep and had had the dream.

It was the left side that hurt; why, then, had he felt, dreaming, his right side to be weak? The
contradiction has often been noted; we also recall that at the beginning of the dream his
weakness in the right side had forced him to turn over onto the left. Physically, if we accept
his statement about going to sleep lying on the left side, the heart side, an uncomfortable
position maintained for a length of time might well produce muscular pain. The turning over
in the dream episode would then be the dream reaction to the discomfort he already felt, but it
had to be the right side that was weak and the left one that was good, because this is what the
dream tried to tell him, and succeeded in telling him: Your "right" side is weak. The
symbolism takes precedence over the physical. In setting down the dream account, he
evidently does not notice the inversion, another bit of factual evidence that the account was
written while the memory of the dream was still fresh and its symbolic message only too clear
in the mind. (Note that this is not to say that Descartes wrote down the account in the petit
registre, nor that, if he copied it from notes he jotted down soon after dreaming, he did not
edit them. But we do say that the account as we have it strongly points to the conclusion
above.) It is this message that preoccupies him after moving into a more comfortable position:

He prayed to God to ask to be guaranteed against the evil consequence of his dream [d'être
garanti du mauvais effet de son songe] and to be preserved from all the misfortunes that could
threaten him in punishment for his sins . . .

The mauvais effet, the evil effect or consequence of his dream is not, as an all too literal
reading might suggest, the effect of the dream upon his future life. What follows shows
clearly the meaning of this prayer: may God give him a warranty against the evil
consequences of the life he had been leading, as revealed by this dream that forced him to
think, upon awakening, of his sins,

which, he recognized, could be grave enough to draw upon his head the bolts of heaven [les
foudres du ciel]: although he had up to now led a life quite irreproachable in the eyes of men.

The prise de conscience has been thorough. The dreamer has searched the hidden recesses of
his soul and found what he does not like to find; still, he is

-17-
rather hypothetical about the gravity of these hidden sins: they just might be grave enough to
draw thunder and lightning upon his head, although he had led a quite irreproachable life in
the eyes of men. The "although" explains the fear he is experiencing; it reflects, now on the
plane of salvation, what remained the dominant impression received from the dream--his
radical divorce from others and the uncertainty into which it threw him. "In the eyes of men":
we see the dreamer standing alone among the people who calmly converse while the ground
under him is uncertain and the wind is trying to push him away from them toward the church,
the symbol of salvation. The first dream is commonly called a nightmare. We have shown
how false this is, if "nightmare" is defined as it usually is. Yet the dream was a nightmare in
the waking sense: the nightmare of a future that avenges past transgressions.

4. The Second Dream


As we turn to the second and the third dreams, we must retain the insight that the first one
gave us. For so powerful is the logic of the event that this connection between physical and
emotional experience and rigorous philosophical argument will occur in ever bolder form.
This insight runs directly counter to the prevailing notion of the philosopher as a thinking
machine, an imperfect one that goes through trial and error, makes mistakes, is influenced by
notions and language absorbed by the thinking system, but nonetheless a machine that works
toward a noncontradictory system and (unlike the computer) is creative, that is, programs
itself (another source of error and bias, since this self-programming is not always free from
nonphilosophical design, such as safeguarding one's philosophy not just against
counterarguments but against counteraction by the powers that be). Such a conception of the
philosophical mind is applicable to the young man in his poêle, to stay with the case at hand.
Those who, disregarding this specific and documented case, reject the conclusion about the
connection between physical experience and rigorous thought on the general ground that mind
is autonomous, at least as regards its connection with body, have the burden of proof in the
face of the evidence that students especially of mathematical and scientific invention have
produced. This connection has been most thoroughly explored by Stanley Burnshaw in his
book The Seamless Web ( New York: Braziller, 1970), which is documented far beyond its
main theme, the nature of poetic creativity. As to the Dream of Descartes, the account
continues to offer surprise after surprise, while confirming more

-18-
and more what the study of the first dream has brought out. We turn to the second dream, the
one which, to our knowledge, not one among the interpreters of the dream has even
recognized for what it is, a "dream" that is no dream at all.

In this condition he fell asleep again after an interval of nearly two hours spent in divers
thoughts about the goods and evils of this life. He immediately had another dream in which he
believed he heard a sharp burst of noise that he took to be a thunderclap. The fright it gave
him awakened him instantly . . .

Another "nightmare"? Certainly another unexpected fright. One might wonder why a young
officer, a man of great physical courage who kept his head cool in danger, if we are to accept
the story of the murder he faced and foiled, should be so scared by dreams that, after all,
hardly measure up to the title of "nightmares." But this young man was in such a state of
"Enthusiasm," so overwrought, that he would come to speak of the "Enthusiasm" as the work
of a Spirit. He had gone to bed in the expectation that "a dream or vision" would bring the
revelation, the understanding, that he had been unable to attain by wearing his brain down,
trying to think things out. It must have been a euphoric expectation of wondrous things. When
the dream curtain goes up, he is dragging himself along a street, and the first thing he sees are
ghosts. Relentlessly the first dream exposes his weakness; the curtain closes again with him
teetering, ashamed, fearing to fall any moment--surrounded by people who stand around
unconcernedly talking; and yet they stand on the same ground that seems to give way under
him. It is as if he expected to be led to dinner and found the executioner's ax lying on the
dinner table. His fright is not that of a coward in danger; it is the fright of one who has just
seen himself as he is. He expected to enter the Paradiso and found himself unaccountably in
the Inferno; no wonder he finds himself thinking about sin and punishment after awakening
from that dream.

The second dream, given this scenario, would then have to be his passing through the
Purgatorio, and this is what it indeed is. How did he enter it? The answer is physiological.

He tells us that after his prayers for protection and forgiveness, he spent "nearly two hours"
meditating on the good and the evil in the world, the theme of a poem of Ausonius that has a
long and (to tell the truth) tedious catalogue of the dubious goods that this life has to offer:

What path shall I pursue in life? The courts are full of uproar; the home is vexed with cares;
home troubles follow us abroad . . . the merchant must expect ever new losses . . . the
unwedded life has its sore troubles, but the futile watch that jealous husbands keep is worse. .
. . Again, he who loves to live a

-19-
life stained with lascivious pleasures should consider how sinning kings are punished, as was
the incestuous Tereus or King Sardanapalus. . . . The opinion of the Greeks is the wisest one:
for they say that it is good not to be born at all, or, being born, to die early.

Quod vitae sectabor iter? There is nothing good, nothing certain, nothing safe in the common
life, and the divine judgment is inscrutable: the thunderbolt from heaven (les foudres du ciel)
may strike you, however innocent you appear to others, however slight your hidden sins may
seem to you.

In these two hours, the emotional uproar caused by the unforeseen terror of the first dream
subsides as the dreamer goes through the list of goods and evils, a veritable "catalogue of
ships" that becomes repetitious and allows the physiological rhythms to become normalized.
Gradually he slips into that border zone between waking and sleeping where is is impossible
to distinguish between controlled waking thought and more and more unconscious interior
monologue. Those of us who are accustomed to hard intellectual work and like to take a break
lying down, perhaps with a book, know this state. One reads, and imperceptibly one begins to
"read" what is not on the page. Freed from the compulsion exerted by the printed word, the
mind drifts into free associations that grow out from the impression of what has been read,
gradually turning into a phantasized sequel more and more fully governed by the unconscious
mind. Being in a state between waking and sleeping, the body lies immobile, without
voluntary shifting, but also without that unconscious shifting and muscle play that deep sleep
provides. In this state the senses are unusually excitable. Any outer stimulus may be
magnified out of proportion and strike the daydreamer as an event out of nowhere,
unconnected with anything that preceded it. This state ends with a sudden muscular
contraction, a jerk that rips the daydreamer out of this mental no-man's-land. There is a
moment of fright where he does not know where he is, the flow of associations suddenly
breaks off and the familiar contact with the everyday world is not yet made. This moment is
particularly upsetting if one is in an unfamiliar place. Readers of the mature Descartes know
that this state is the physiological and imaginative equivalent of the question that for
Descartes poses the cognitive problem of reality, the question how to know whether one is
dreaming or awake. The incomplete treatise that Descartes called La Recherche de la vérité,
The Search for Truth, has for its motto "the word from the comedies": Veille-je, ou si je dors?
"Am I awake, or am I dreaming?"

He immediately had another dream in which he believed he heard a sharp burst of noise that
he took to be a thunderclap. The fright it gave him awakened him instantly.

-20-
There was no dream: only a sudden awakening with a muscular jerk. Again we must admire
the precision and veracity of the account. There was no rewriting of this in the light of the
dreamer's later interpretation; the account describes what he actually heard: un bruit aigu et
éclatant, as Baillet translates, a sharp burst of noise, which he takes to be a thunderclap. What
actually happened can be easily surmised. A floorboard cracked suddenly, or there was a
sound like the crack of a whip outside, coming in faintly through the closed, shuttered
windows; this sound is magnified by the hypertense ear of the dreamer, who awakens with a
muscular shock that acts like a blow on the optical nerve:

and having opened his eyes he saw many fiery sparks scattered throughout the room.

There are individual differences in the effect of such startling awakening on the senses. To
some people it is noise that is magnified, producing an auditory illusion; in others, at night, it
is the optical nerve that is excited by the muscular contraction. In the case of Descartes, it was
both, sound and light, and the optical phenomenon was by no means unfamiliar to him; it was
merely unexpected.

This thing had already, frequently, happened to him at other times; and it was nothing very
unusual for him to awaken in the middle of the night so intensely [d'avoir les yeux assez
étincellans] that he was able to make out the objects nearest to him [pour lui faire entrevoir
les objets les plus proches de lui].

This could very well be an accurate translation of the text, or at least of the first part of it:

This had often happened to me before.

But Baillet, who had a lexicographer's or bibliographer's memory, might have--quite happily--
provided this information from Descartes Dioptrics of 1637, where he expressly discusses this
phenomenon from selfobservation and proceeds to give the correct scientific explanation,
anticipating by 175 years its classical formulation as das Gesetz der spezifischen
Sinnesempfindungen by the German physiologist Johannes von Müller. This law of specific
sense impressions states that any stimulus will produce the sense impression proper to the
nerve that it excites, regardless of the nature of the stimulus. A blow on the ear, for example,
will be heard, while the same blow on the eye will cause sparks to be seen. Descartes also
explains

-21-
why it has to be sparks: the optical nerve branches out to grasp the retina by fibers touching it
at many points. If suddenly excited, it transmits the stimulus to these fibers, which produce
the impression of a point of light, a spark, wherever the fiber touches the eye. But this
explanation was to come later, a result of his anatomical dissections. In 1619, he did not have
it, though he must have wondered about the cause of a striking phenomenon that he had
experienced before.

There is another bit of information suggesting that the essence of the whole passage was
indeed in the petit registre. The text says that on earlier occasions his eyes had flashed so
strongly (that they had been so "sparkling") that he could make out the objects nearest to him
even in the dark. Obviously the phenomenon of sparks produced in accordance with Johannes
von Müller's (or, really, Descartes's) law cannot support the statement that these sparks
illuminated the room. Yet the observation is sharp and truthful, confirming that these sudden
awakenings were, at least occasionally, of the same type as the awakening here called the
second "dream": a spasmodic muscular shock causing the eyes to open suddenly, the pupils
wide open, since the eyes are as yet unfocused. And since rooms at night are rarely totally
dark, the unfocused eye might well have a dim perception of "the objects nearest to him,"
distinguishing darker areas within the dim, unfocused field of vision.

If, then, the experience was familiar to him, why the fright? There are three reasons that
reinforce each other. The first is physiological. The muscular jerk that awakens the
daydreamer is precisely the jerk with which we react to a sudden, unexpected fright; the
German word for experiencing that jerk is zusammenschrecken. Shreck means fright, and
zusammenschrecken means making oneself smaller in sudden fright, head down, elbows and
knees up. Second, the preceding dream had provoked the fear of punishment from heaven--les
foudres du ciel--of a thundering strike from on high. This lingering memory--an expectation
of what might happen--immediately gives the dreamer the link between what he actually
heard and what he precisely described, and what he thought it was:

. . . a sharp burst of noise that he took to be a thunderclap.

Simultaneously, he saw what he had repeatedly seen before: sparks filling his chamber. In
ordinary circumstances, this would have reassured him, but not in a night like that, a night
that had begun with the expectation of "dreams and visions" coming to him from beyond the
human realm. The momentary disorientation of that moment between fantasy and reality
opened up an abyss: what if the chamber was really filled with sparks? In this

-22-
case, the dreamer would be confronted with a supernatural phenomenon that, since he was
aware of his actual or possible sinfulness, would be shattering. It would, in fact, be nothing
less than a miracle, the very last thing a budding rationalist could face. The terse factual
account thus opens up the question that the preceding one had ignored, plunging him back
into the religious atmosphere of his years at the Jesuit college, and farther still, into his
childhood and the memory of the nurse who brought up the motherless child. "My religion is
that of my nurse," he would answer when a Dutch Reformed pastor, decades later, asked him
point blank. Up to this point, the air has been thick with intimations of the supernatural, with
sin and the punishment of it, with his moral conduct, and the thought of "good" and "evil" in
this life. Now the question stares him in the face; no longer can he escape a decision, for the
sparks were filling his chamber. It was not what he had experienced before, for never before
had he had any reason to suspect the workings of a supernatural agency.

What he now does marks his exit from Purgatory:

. . . he wanted to have recourse to reasons drawn from philosophy . . .

Thus Baillet, and again we wonder whether he is translating or explaining. If the latter be the
case, his explanation hits the mark. With a jerk--a mental one, this time--the dreamer tears
himself away from the religious mood that had held him captive and takes recourse to reasons
drawn from philosophy, where "philosophy," as customarily in this time, means mathematics,
science, epistemology, and metaphysics in one. Here is a phenomenon that is either produced
by a supernatural agency or by causes that he does not yet know but that he knows to be
natural. The decision is reached not by speculation or by a leap into faith, but by experiment.
This is the obvious explanation of the text that follows, a text that all interpreters have passed
over without comment, the only exception being Henri Gouhier, who, with his customary
honesty, said that he did not understand it:

. . . and he drew from this procedure conclusions that were good for his [state of] mind [il en
tira des conclusions favorables pour son esprit] after having observed, opening and closing
his eyes alternately, the nature of the species that appeared to him.

The term la nature des espèces is a scholastic one. It refers to that theory of perception that
explains vision as the transmission of phantasmata, or species substantiales, from the object
that releases them to the receiving eye. The question was: are the sparks in the chamber, or are
they in the eye? A

-23-
decisive experiment answers it. If, upon closing his eyes, the sparks disappear, then they are
in the chamber, and, since there is no natural explanation of such a phenomenon, it must be of
supernatural origin. If, on the other hand, they are seen even with the eyes closed, then they
are in the eye, as they had been on all previous occasions. Being a good experimenter, the
young man verifies his conclusion by repeating the experiment several times.The result not
only set his mind at rest, as Baillet says; it marks a breakthrough. The first dream had to bring
up the past and to cast the darkest spiritual shadows upon the future, if the young man was to
embark upon the right road with that superb confidence and certainty that can be had only by
coming to terms with the past. Part of that was freeing himself from any suspicion that the
supernatural might directly impinge upon nature and produce phenomena that have no natural
causes. This question had occupied him at least since his encounter with Beeckman, and this
preoccupation went to the heart of the task before him. The questions are:
1. Is the natural world autonomously governed by laws accessible to properly guided
reasoning and observation?
2. What are the limits of purely rational cognition?

This second question he himself formulated by saying that these limits were at the line that
separates natural science from alchemy, astrology, and other occult sciences. Biographical
facts recently uncovered show that precisely during his stay in Bavaria he investigated these
occult sciences through personal contact with at least one avowed practitioner of them, the
German mathematician Johann Faulhaber. Even the possibility that he went to Linz in Austria
to meet Kepler, who lived there, can no longer be excluded. In all this he was plainly on the
side of the natural sciences, but equally plainly he did not reject the occult sciences out of
hand without finding out what he could about them. In short, he was prepared for his second
"dream" and what he received from the little experiment he made was again a living
experience: the experience of having a frightening burden of guilt and fear lifted from him by
having "recourse to reasons drawn from philosophy":

Thus his terror vanished, and he went back to sleep in a very great calm.

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5. The Third Dream
A moment later he had a third dream, which had nothing terrifying, as had the first two.

The despondent mood should have changed to euphoria, considering that this third dream
opened by telling him that he possessed all that he had desired:

In this dream he found a book on his table without knowing who had put it there. He opened it
and, seeing that it was a Dictionary, he was delighted, in the hope that it would be useful to
him. The same moment he found another book under his hand (which was no less new to him)
[the words I have put in parenthesis are probably Baillet's], not knowing from where it had
come to him.

The silent shadow play is very close to the dreamer's waking thoughts; the symbolic guise is a
mere film overlying that thought.

He found to be a collection of poems by various authors, entitled Corpus omnium veterum


poetarum Latinorum. He was curious and wanted to read something; and, opening the book,
he happened upon the verse Quod vitae sectabor iter?

What road shall I follow in life? The question had been with him from the first moment when
he found himself on the wrong road, with his "right side" faltering. The substance of the poem
had occupied him as, upon awakening from the first dream, he thought about the goods and
evils in life. Now he has before him the book he had read in college: Corpus omnium veterum
poetarum Latinorum. He does not know who gave it to him, just as he does not know where
the Dictionary came from. A dictionary has all the words of the language in it, with their
translation or explication. It is a complete record and useful, since it gives its owner access to
whatever in the language he wants to know. What he does not know is how these two books
appeared on the table, but this does not trouble him; they are familiar, both of them. The fact
is that he has had them all the while, as his preserved writings of that year 1619 show. What
had kept them out of sight is the welling up of his past life and his fears of the future. These
obstacles are gone, and the symbolic books simply materialize on the table.

At this very moment he saw a man he did not know . . .

-25-
He knew him very well, as we shall see; but the dream work draws the conclusion that he will
reach a decade later: his identity and his function must not be acknowledged:

. . . but who presented to him a piece in verse, beginning with [the words] Est et Non and who
recommended it to him with praise as an excellent piece. M. Descartes told him that he knew
what it was, and that this piece was among the Idylls of Ausonius which were to be found in
the thick Anthology of Poets that was on his table. He wanted to show it himself to this man,
and began to leaf through the book, the order and arrangement of which, he boasted, he knew
perfectly well. While he was searching for the place, the man asked him where he had got the
book, and M. Descartes replied that he could not tell him how he had come by it, but that a
moment before he had handled yet another book, which had just disappeared, without his
knowing who had brought it to him or who had taken it away again. He had not finished
[speaking] when he again saw the book appear at the other end of the table. But he found this
Dictionary not complete as when he had seen it the first time.

Dream work being a process, the first clues to follow lie in the action, not in the symbols
presented. Both the action and the symbols compress into a swiftly shifting sequence of
several cardinal themes that rise together, jostle each other, and are compressed in one short
paragraph. This paragraph is framed by the beginning and the end of the shadow play, the
appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of the Dictionary. Within this frame we have
another appearance: that of the stranger, who is clearly connected with the equally suddenly
appearing Anthology of Poets and with the two keynote poems of Ausonius, Quod vitae
sectabor iter? and Est et Non: "What road shall I follow in life?" and "Yes and No."

Whatever the Dictionary may symbolize (it is not hard to guess what), let us stay with the fact
that it is complete (and therefore useful, which delights the dreamer) when it appears, and that
it returns incomplete, after having vanished for a while.

A parallel from the life of another great French thinker will make clear the meaning of this
quite transparent symbolic play. In 1749, Jean-Jacques Rousseau takes the road to Vincennes
to visit his imprisoned friend Diderot; while walking, he takes a copy of the Mercure de
France out of his pocket. As he opens it, his eye falls on an announcement by the Academy of
Dijon offering a prize for the three best essays on the question whether the progress of
civilization has improved or corrupted morals. Suddenly, he is overcome by a storm of ideas,
sinks down at the foot of an oak tree, weeping so copiously that when he rises, a quarter of an
hour later, the front of his

-26-
waistcoat is drenched with tears. In the most famous and most detailed of his accounts of this
episode, he exclaims that if he had only been able to retain all that he came to understand
during this brief span of time, not a single question in political science would have remained
unanswered; but, alas, all he could write down in haste was the "harangue of Fabricius," the
centerpiece of his First Discourse, an embarrassingly poor and uninformative piece (which
indeed it is). The phenomenon is well known and well attested. There are moments when the
intellectual logjam breaks, when, as the German language has it, einem der Knopf aufgeht--
when the knot falls apart--and the key idea that suddenly illuminates and orders the whole
field "pops into the mind." There follows a brief state of euphoria where the mind, rapidly
moving out from this center, suddenly sees all the knotty questions opening up to solution,
one after another. There is no time to think things through carefully; the problems fall like a
row of dominoes, or so it seems. The victory is complete--until the "Enthusiasm" abates. At
that point, one can no longer remember what one knew or believed one knew at the peak of
discovery, and if one tries to reconstruct the blinding vision, the road is strewn with obstacles
that will require the most patient, careful handling in order to obtain, after long labors, what
seemed to be in the discoverer's hands.

Descartes had been striving for the Archimedean point ever since the encounter with
Beeckman had aroused him. Behind the specific problems of geometry and mechanics that
occupied him, he saw the need for a general method of determining which questions were
solvable and which were not. Beyond that, again, rose the recognition that scientific progress
could not go on piecemeal and randomly--that there must be one method by which all
answerable questions can be answered with certainty. But a method--in Greek methodos--is a
road that one takes. The very first thing that the opening scene of the third dream tells us is
that the dreamer was aware of being on that road, that in the éblouissement of this road he felt
that the answers to all answerable questions were already in his hand, that in the interlude
concerning the two poems this awareness vanished from him, and when he himself tried to
bring it back (telling the stranger about that marvelous Dictionary that had come out of
nowhere), it did reappear, no longer complete as before.

But who was the stranger? The Dictionary and the Corpus poetarum have appeared, and the
dreamer chances upon the poem on the road in life. At this point, the stranger appears, again
unexplainably, but clearly connected with the appearance of the two books. It is as if he had
chosen the precise moment for entering, the moment when the search for more concrete

-27-
understanding of the deeper issues begins. The relation between the stranger and the dreamer
is that of a master and a disciple who is striving to show his knowledge and independence but
finds himself stymied. The stranger gives him the piece of writing called Est et Non and tells
him how good (important) it is. This in contrast to the dreamer's happening on Qoud vitae
sectabor iter? in leafing through the Anthology of Poets before him. The disciple eagerly
displays his knowledge: he knows the poem, he identifies it, he tells the stranger where it is to
be found in the book. He then tells him, not without pride, that he is thoroughly familiar with
its arrangement, meaning: "I can at any time answer the question: where is this poem Est et
Non? I can at any time solve the problem."

The stranger somewhat ironically asks him whether he knows where the book, that is, his
knowledge, comes from. The dreamer has no answer to that question, but tells the stranger of
the other book he had handled, which had not only come, but vanished, in a manner beyond
his understanding. This other book, the Dictionnaire, reappears almost mockingly before he
has time to finish his sentence. It appears, not at or under his hand, but at the far end of the
table, where he cannot get to it; but he does know that it is a shadow of its former self.

However, still browsing in the Anthology of Poets, he did get to the poems of Ausonius . . .

--only to find himself embarrassed again, despite his knowledge of the arrangement and
contents of the Anthology:

. . . and not being able to find the piece beginning Est and Non he told the man that he knew
an even more beautiful one than this by the same poet and that it began with Quod vitae
sectabor iter?

With remarkable consistency, the game between master and disciple continues to the end. The
master asks questions that expose the disciple's incomplete and uncertain knowledge; the
disciple answers like a highly intelligent student who frankly admits what he does not know,
but uses the occasion to say something closely related that he does know, this time suggesting
that this knowledge may be new to the master:

The person asked him to show it [the poem Quod vitae sectabor iter?] to him, and Descartes
began to search for it, coming upon several small portraits in copper engraving: which made
him say that the book was very beautiful, but that it was not the edition he knew.

-28-
The master replies to the new information volunteered by the disciple the way he had handled
him before. He asks: where is it? Show me. The disciple complies, comes upon the engraved
portraits, and is once more embarrassed: the book is not the one he is familiar with; but, again,
he can supply new information: this is a different edition, but a much more beautiful one than
the one he intimately knows. This, too, is truthful. He did know the Corpus poetarum
intimately, since it had been the textbook from which he had studied poetry and rhetoric at La
Flèche. One recalls his judgment about this part of his studies, in the Discours of 1637:
beautiful and useless. The knowledge he is seeking was not in that kind of book. Nowhere in
the account of the third dream is there any suggestion that he knew that book from his years
of schooling; this information was dug up by modern scholars who studied the curriculum and
the books prescribed at La Flèche in Descartes's young years. The traumatic and oppressive
associations that La Flèche brought up in the first dream have vanished, but the school years
color the third dream through the veiled symbols of the Corpus poetarum and the Dictionary,
for it is in these years that he must have used or frequently consulted dictionaries. The
memory rose for good reason: the Dictionary and the Anthology of Poets stand for ideas
central to the dreamer's thoughts that led to the night of dreams. In his last answer he has
indirectly told the questioning master that what he now has in hand is a new edition of the
knowledge he had learned, and that it is more beautiful than the old one. And this knowledge
is his own: the disciple no longer needs the master. Obviously, this stranger, Descartes's
master, is Isaac Beeckman, who had decisively challenged Descartes to stretch his intellect,
and from whom Descartes later felt the need to break away.

He was at this point when the books and the man disappeared and effaced themselves from
his imagination, without, however, awakening him.

The third dream was over. The night of "dreams or visions" had furnished all the symbols he
needed, and it had moved him from where he had hitherto been to where he was destined to
be. The work of interpretation could begin; it had to begin, now that the blackboard had been
wiped clean.

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6. The Critical Juncture
A singular fact to note is that, doubting whether what he had just seen was a dream or a
vision, he not only decided, sleeping, that it was a dream, but even interpreted it before sleep
left him.

What is it to "interpret a dream"? The next sentence tells us:

He judged that the Dictionary meant nothing but all the sciences brought together and that the
Anthology of Poets in particular indicated . . .

The sleeping interpreter of his dream tells us what the dream symbols "meant," "indicated,"
"showed": what he "understood" them to mean, and finally, what all this signified, in the final
event. The interpreters have faithfully followed them; no one, to my knowledge, has ever
asked himself why he found it necessary to interpret Descartes's interpretation; they all
assumed, rightly (I think) that these interpretations are as enigmatic as the symbols they
interpret, as much in need of explication and thus as "mousterious," as prehistorically misty
and mysterious as the dream itself. ("Mousterious," let us remember, is one of Joyce's
portmanteau words in Finnegans Wake.) Why, then, do they begin to live again when they
read those weighty interpretive pronouncements, why do the best of them doubt or reject the
possibility that what has been told was a genuine account of dreams, remembered as one
always remembers dreams, retaining core images stripped of their polyvalent iridescence, a
roughhewn continuity partly remembered, partly constructed, but as yet un-"interpreted"? It is
because the "interpretations" that follow the close of the third dream toss out philosophical
words and conceptual clusters which can be regarded as static monoliths, standing in the
"dream" landscape like the giant heads on Easter Island, asking to be "explained" by linking
them to all one knows, all one can find out, about the mature philosophy of Descartes, about
the history of philosophical concepts and metaphors, and about everything else that might be
connected up with these monoliths, transporting them, as it were, to more populated places
where they will be in supposedly congenial company.

But the fact that stares the unerudite reader of the dream account in the face is that the flow of
images has been stopped and that, after a most puzzling interlude, the dreamer's mind erects
one such monolith after another. If one takes the process character of the dream work
seriously, this transition will have to be examined in minute detail. The results are star-

-30-
tling. (Passages in brackets are my reconstructions of Descartes's notes on the basis of
Baillet's text.)

[. . . though without awakening me. Doubting whether what I had just seen was dream or
vision, I decided that it was a dream and interpreted it before sleep left me.]

The "dream from above" led to the sudden vanishing of what had just been seen; this was
startling because the dreamer was in a position to experience this vanishing as an event, which
would not have been the case had he fallen into deep sleep. This experience was as startling as
the cracking sound that had awakened him before in the second "dream," but there was no
fright, only surprise. Surprise at what? He says it plainly: at knowing that the dream had
ended and knowing, now, that he was in his bed, just having witnessed a dream and its
ending.

[Doubting whether what I had just seen was a dream or vision . . .]

He had expected to receive "dreams or visions," and since he felt that they would come
through an agency other than his own, the word "vision" he used must have referred to
something one sees, something that is neither what one normally sees nor what dreams
"represent to the imagination," but something beyond waking and dreaming experience that is
shown, made visible, by some spiritual agency. In the text just quoted above, the word
"vision" shrinks down to the familiar. Why? Because the second "dream" has already
eliminated, once and for all, any doubt concerning the presence of a supernatural agency
producing sense impressions. One might say paradoxically, yet historically correctly, that the
illumination received through the second "dream" had "enlightened" Descartes in precisely
the sense in which the term "enlightenment," les lumières, became the name for the
philosophical posture and experience of the eighteenth-centuryphilosophes. The
"enlightenment" of the second dream consisted precisely in the substitution of the light of
reason for the divine light, a substitution that did not come through an otherworldly
"illumination" or "vision" but by having recourse to reasons of philosophy, that is, to the
power of scientific thinking.

Yet the dreamer is still alone in his dark chamber, still overwrought with "Enthusiasm," still
"seeing things," aware of being in some way "beyond himself." The question, "Dream or
vision?" is still before him, even though what he has seen had nothing terrifying. What, then,
was he in doubt of? The text answers: he was in doubt of his own state, except that it was no

-31-
longer his moral state "in the eyes of God." He was asking himself: Veille-je, ou si je
dors?"Am I awake or am I sleeping?" He was not questioning the natural or supernatural
origin of what he had seen; he had seen it, and that, at least, was beyond doubt. Whatever its
origin, the question had now turned upon himself, it had become the existential question. He
is not troubled about the possibility of a supernatural irruption into reality; what troubles him
is something else. If he cannot find out whether he is awake or asleep, then he does not know
whether he knows who he is; his faith in the existence of things is at stake, because the doubt
gnaws at the perceiving self. The question Veille-je, ou si je dors? is at the surface; beneath
lurks the Hamlet problem: "To be, or not to be, that is the question." The transition from the
first to the second "dream" is now reversed: the third dream has been so close to the surface
that upon its coming to an end, he is again between sleeping and waking, but still close
enough to sleep to be unable to find his way back to common reality. In this limbo, he does
something extraordinary:

. . . he decided, in his sleep, [en dormant], that it was a dream, but he even made the
interpretation of it before sleep left him.

Now, how does one decide that? Baillet felt that this was an extraordinary situation; one
would wish he had cited the Latin term in the margin. The term il décida could be his, but this
is most unlikely. Everywhere else we find expression like il jugea, il attribuoit, il estimoit, il
entendoit, il comprenoit-terms connoting judgment, understanding, surmise. The way in
which Baillet renders the text before him shows that it struck him as extraordinary, and the
term il décida is entirely in keeping with what he reports. For, indeed, the reality question, in
this state of affairs, cannot be judged or interpreted or solved by surmise; it must be solved,
and only a decision can solve it. An example will show why.

Consider someone driving an automobile and finding himself lost, not knowing in what
direction the road is taking him. The normal thing to do would be either to go on until he finds
out where he is, or to go back to the point where he last knew where he was, and then move in
the right direction. There is only one situation where he can decide where he is: the situation
where it does not matter whether he is on one road or the other.

Applying this to the dream situation, we must ask: under what conditions would it not matter
to him whether he is asleep or awake? The answer is obvious, once we understand the
existential depth of the dreamer's predicament. The Hamlet question leads directly to the
decision that it does not matter. For underneath the doubt: am I awake or am I dreaming? lies
the

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doubt: am I, or am I not? But the dreamer is aware of the fact that he is doubting.

Ergo:

Dubito, cogito. Cogito, sum.

Whichever way I decide, the question no longer matters. I am, I think; let me go on with the
task at hand. And so he goes on to interpret the dream "in his sleep," in the great calm that
pervades all that has happened since he was back in his chamber, sitting at his table, looking
at the book that had just appeared, seeing it because that chamber was light.

Looking back, the question: "Dream or vision?" reduced to the question: "Am I awake or
dreaming?" arises quite naturally. I am sitting in front of my fire. But how often have I been
sitting in front of my fire, only to find myself in my bed the very next moment? Was I sitting
at my table, seeing the book materialize, or was I lying in bed, dreaming that I sat at the table,
seeing the book materialize? Is my chamber really light, or is it really dark? The contact with
reality is momentarily broken, and this is no time for philosophical speculation. What rises
and passes, leaving no residue except the bare entry in the petit registre, is the sinking feeling
of being out of reality, and the typically Cartesian decision, quite in character, that removes
the doubt and allows him to go on unhampered. Descartes did not "invent" the cogito in this
swiftly passing interlude. He experienced the doubt, the existential threat it raised, and the
liberating power of the feeling of his own existence that somehow, unreflected, arose from the
decision he made, not knowing why it was so right and so inevitable. We are in 1619, after
all.

7. The First Interpretation


THE DRAMA ENACTED IN THE THIRD DREAM HAS REACHED AND PASSED ITS
high point, which did not come in the turbulent and perturbed opening act, but in the quiet,
shadowy dialogue with himself through which the dreamer glided from dream to
interpretation. He has already received all that "dream or vision" had to give him, and we can
now say what this work of a single night has done for him. The "years of apprenticeship," as
the Abbé Sirven had called them, are over. They ended with a probing rite of passage, which
not so much tested the powers he had acquired (they had begun to

-33-
show a year earlier and would need much time to develop to the full) as it put the whole man
and his whole life to the test, for a philosopher is not just a thinking thing, not a res cogitans,
but a persona cogitans; and persona, as Decartes knew, means a "mask" through which a
concealed self speaks:

As an actor, to conceal his blush of embarrassment, enters the stage masked, so I step forth
onto the stage of the world, masked.

Larvatus prodeo: so he says in that part of the petit registre that contains sundry general
observations, making a seemingly ill-assorted whole under the enigmatic title Olympica. The
first dream had told him of the abyss that separated him from others; it had brought home to
him that even if the weakness "on the right side" were cured, he would still be different from
those who stood around talking, knowing nothing, that he was an outsider-which is a hurtful
insight to gain. It had also told him of the inner cleft of which he had already become aware,
of the double life he was leading: his outer life that was irreproachable "in the eyes of men"
and an inner one that was of a far more dubious nature "in the eyes of God." And this insight
brought up that there was still another fissure within him: the gap between the "religion of his
nurse," the world of his childhood and adolescence, and the new world of hard rational
thought that had suddenly opened to him exactly one year earlier, when, meeting Beeckman,
he had been challenged to develop to the full the mental powers that were growing yet still
dormant in him because these powers did not govern and shape his life yet. He was still
"rolling around the world," as he would say in the Discours, beset with inner conflicts seeking
resolution. Beset by them, but by no means torn; he might have grown out of them, but "the
law under which he entered"--das Gesetz, nach dem herangetreten, as Goethe said, his
"character" as we would call it today--demanded another kind of resolution. He had to make
tabula rasa, he had to start with a clean slate, and this is not easily done. It could not be done
through ruthless rational thinking, the thinking he prescribes as the rite of passage from the
old philosophy to the true Cartesian one, because much more was asked for than tearing
himself away from the "prejudices," the beliefs, that had imperiously imposed themselves
upon the helpless mind of the newborn baby, the prejudices that were the environment in
which it developed, that atmosphere which the child, the adolescent, the mature man was
breathing in. The Descartes of the Meditations no longer knew as a living experience the
darker, deeper strata of human existence; what mattered was knowledge, hardened into
propositions that fulfilled the ineluctable demands of the physio-mathematico-

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philosophical mind that tolerates no contradiction, and therefore rules out any unexpressed
and unresolved conflicts.

Long before Descartes arrived at the method for guiding the mind safely to certainty in all
questions that the mind is capable of solving, the inner conflicts that could not rationally be
resolved were wiped off the slate without any conscious effort of his own. This is what he had
expected to happen during the night of dreams and visions, and we can now say in plain
language what he tells us in the symbolic mode of that night. The "Spirit" that "aroused" his
"Enthusiasm" and "predicted" dreams and visions before he went to bed had indeed, as
Baillet's account suggests (whether as a surefooted surmise of his own or as an elaboration of
a text before him), been at work for several days, following a hard, exhausting, and in the end
inconclusive struggle to do from the top of the mind what only the subconscious mind could
do for him. This subconscious mind was getting ready for the work. Deep down he knew
already what the dream was going to tell him, but the knowledge could not rise to the surface
because the road was blocked by the debris of thoughts tried, discarded, broken off, by the
weariness that comes upon a thinker when he knows the solution to be just around the corner
without knowing what corner, and how to get around it. That these thoughts touched again
and again upon his condition, that the boldness of his search evoked resonances of existential
doubt ("Is it possible that I, a young unknown man, who has wasted his life, should be the
only one to see what none of my fellow men is even seeking for? Is it possible to eat of the
fruit of the Tree of Knowledge without drawing the thunder of heaven upon one's head?")--all
this is proved beyond doubt by the night of dreams, and not just by what the first dream
revealed and posed as a problem, either. For if these matters had risen to consciousness, if
Descartes had struggled with the problem of religious faith against rational knowledge, if he
had thought about the question why the great truth he almost had in his possession should
have been withheld from mankind since its inception, why an Aristotle or a Saint Thomas
should have failed to find what an insignificant young French officer in his winter solitude
was about to find--if all or any of that had entered his conscious thought, the night of dreams
would have been unnecessary.

He would have fallen into lassitude, giving up the unequal struggle, for a period long enough
to let his mind rest from its frustrated labors, long enough to allow the subconscious mind to
shift the bits and pieces of the puzzle around until a configuration was achieved that would
make another conscious effort of thought possible and more rewarding; in short, he would in
the end have arrived at the solution. But then he would have approached

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and entered the promised land with the inner conflicts still with him, and since a great
philosophy is the work of the whole man and not just the product of his great conscious mind,
his mature thought would have lacked that supreme confidence that his contemporaries found
ravishing or irritating, depending on whether they were hoping for a new contemporary
philosophy or fearing for the old one. Even this superb, bold confidence which will not be
denied was already there before the dream. Days before he had given up worrying his
overwrought mind any further, he felt that a decision was close at hand, that it would come to
him rather than being made by him, that it would come from some agency "moving him," and
that the event could not but end well. In fact, he expected the happy end to come without a
beginning, as the solution to a mathematical problem intuitively comes and is there. (It might
be a false solution, to be sure.) It is not surprising that he stated that, not at the beginning of
the dream account, but after having said everything he remembered and everything he had to
say about it, the statement being the last one he made:

He adds that the Spirit [Génie] which was exciting in him this Enthusiasm by which he had
felt his brain heated for several days, had predicted to him these dreams before he went to
bed, and that the human mind had no part in them.

He was right in all his anticipations except the last one: the solution did not fall in his lap.
First came the katharsis, the purge, plunging him back into the life he was striving to leave
behind. In the first dream, the conflicts were brought before his eyes in an oppressive,
frightening, all too patent symbolism, revealing no way leading to a resolution. Yet this brutal
confrontation, unexpectedly bursting upon him, was needed to make him experience the very
depth and power of the region from which he was to escape, and, by working out the
symbolic multiplicity of the dream images as we have done, we can recognize what linear
interpretation of this dream conceals: that the mathematical and philosophical mind of the
young man continued lines of thought that had preoccupied it before the event, despite the
sudden emotional uproar, injecting into the dream event elements that fused with the
emotional dream material and modified it in such a way that the threads of thought can still be
recognized in the physical, bodily experiences that impressed themselves upon the dreamer's
memory: the tourbillon, the whirlwind, imperiously imposing its motion even onto a large
body. One of the first problems Descartes discussed with Beeckman was the law of free fall,
which Beeckman had correctly found at about the same time as Galileo did, waiting nearly
thirty years before he enunciated it. Descartes had given the wrong solution, which Galileo,
too, had given, before realizing that

-36-
velocity in free fall was a function of time, not of distance. Even though for Descartes the
problem was a purely mathematical one, occupation with this problem of free fall would have
turned his thought upon the enigmatic force that made bodies fall, with a lingering suspicion
that there was something conceptually dubious about the Aristotelian answer. However
remote this problem might have been from the conscious work that engaged him in November
1619, a dream dominated by the symbolic fear of falling, of being unable to stand up straight,
of being "dragged down" and forced to crawl along the ground, as it were, of being assailed
by the physical force of a wind that plainly was a "spirit"--the word meaning "breath,"
"breeze"--such a dream would draw in anything connected with these symbols, and the
question of the physical constitution of the universe and the power forcing things down from
their heights could blend without difficulty into the emotional drama that was played out.

Similarly, the strange to and fro in the courtyard symbolizing the conflict between what he
wanted to do and where he wanted to be, as against the obstacles preventing him from getting
there, gave an opening to the far more important conscious effort to find, at the end of the
intellectual road, that certainty that the dream presented in the image of the church where he
would be safe and saved. The imagery welling up from the unconscious defined for him and
translated into a physical, bodily experience what was stirring in his conscious mind,
unrelated, unconstructible, in the form of seemingly incompatible stirrings rather than
formulations: the urge to attain certainty rather than accept the probable, however convincing
it might be; the feeling that the force that drove him toward that goal could not carry him to
that certainty, and the intimation that precisely this important force held the key to the
solution. How? Impossible to think it out at that point, and not only impossible but
unnecessary; for, so the conscious thinking mind argued, there is no sense in thinking about
getting somewhere unless you have the road under your feet, the safe methodos, the method
for solving answerable problems and for recognizing unanswerable ones as such. The
elements of the future solutions were there, uncoordinated, unrecognized except for the
element of method, not thought out at all, and the first dream took them up and welded them
with the primary emotional material into a sequence in which the system was symbolically
preformed, only one piece of it missing: the decisive last one, the recognition that ultimate
doubt leads, not to irremediable uncertainty, but to the church "where it was his first thought
to seek refuge and a cure for his ills."

There was no way out of the first dream, no way forward, no solution even dimly perceived
on the horizon. For this dream, despite the thought elements that had melted into it, kept the
dreamer caught in what he had to

-37-
break out of if the solution were to be attained. The symbolic play achieves the step toward
liberation in superb fashion. A loud crack, recognized for what it is and at the same time
identified, with some doubt, as the "thunder from Heaven," suddenly jerks the dreamer out of
the past dream and makes him open his eyes wide. No longer does he accept what is before
him: the fright of the first dream still besets him, but now the conscious mind takes command:
he has "recourse to reasons drawn from philosophy." Reason conquers the past, the emotions
are now far behind, resolved through having been brought up from the depth, faced, and
superseded by thought. From here on, calm and a feeling of well-being prevail; what was a
living drama in the first dream is reduced to the shadow play of the third, beneath which only
one emotional problem is worked out: the relation between the master and the disciple. The
third dream tells the dreamer what he now has. Significantly, this dream ends as suddenly as
the first one had done, and for the same reason: the ultimate key is missing. This key will
have to be found in the labor of a decade or more; but the dream work does not stop when the
images vanish; it goes on, as in the preceding sequence, by moving the dreamer the second
decisive step forward: from a "dream from above" to the state where he experiences his
fundamental problem of reality, and this in such a form that the experiential knot has to be
solved by forging, unconsciously, the general shape of that key.

It was necessary to lead up once more from the beginning of that night to the point where the
dreamer's interpretation begins, for only through such an assessment of what had been done
and what had been achieved is it possible to understand the striking fact that this
interpretation is very meager indeed. Far from containing the clues to the dream, far from
being the symbolic core in which the thought of Descartes is symbolically expressed, this
interpretation does not do much more than fix some points that must be retained, remove
uncertainties about the meaning of certain episodes or images, and draw conclusions from the
experience as a whole:

(He judged) that the Dictionary wanted to say (nothing other than) all the sciences collected
together; and that the (collection of poems called) [the words I have put in parentheses are
probably Baillet's] Corpus Poetarum showed in particular and in a more distinct manner
Philosophy and Wisdom [Sagesse] conjoined.

Abundant references have been established between the dictionary symbol and the idea of
Descartes that essentially all "sciences" are one, from which it follows that the central general
method to follow also is one for each and every one of them. This idea of the "unity of
science" was widespread at

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his time and indeed earlier; it still corresponded reasonably well to the state of the sciences at
the time, if by "sciences" we mean the natural sciences, which had hardly begun to
differentiate out. But the term "all the sciences collected together" takes on a far more
problematic meaning when we take it as referring to all disciplines that can properly be called
fields of knowledge, namely knowledge of problems that are amenable to rational solution. It
is in this sense that Descartes conceived of the "unity of science" and was already thinking
ahead toward a unified theory and method applicable to "all the sciences collected together,"
in modern terms, a "metascience."

His first interpretation adds nothing to what he had known before the dream; what he received
from the dream process was a certainty that he was sur le bon chemin, on the right, good,
path. So great was this sense of assurance that he had already forgotten the difference between
idea (appearance of the complete Dictionary) and execution (reappearance of it, in a
fragmentary state). Thinking matters out while following the memory of the third dream, he
feels compelled to assign meaning to the other book, the Corpus poetarum, although the
dream sequel shows that it was brought into the dream by the basic questions for which the
two poems of Ausonius had furnished the titles. A cross-reference to thoughts that had
occupied him earlier, as well as the lingering memory of La Flèche, the scene of the first
dream, enables him to identify this anthology as meaning "more particularly" the conjunction,
the essential identity, of "philosophy" and "wisdom." The title Olympica, referring to matters
pertaining to the Divine enthroned and ruling over the world of men, as well as a number of
aphoristic comments and maxims made either under that heading or possibly in other places
in the petit registre, testifies to his parallel concern with rigorously solvable and provable
problems on the one hand, with the area beyond "philosophy" on the other. In the context of
the "interpretation" he recognizes that there is no conflict between the two.

In this sense Henri Gouhier is right when, speaking of his own work on the thought of
Descartes, he likens the three major works he contributed to it to the letter "Y": the left upper
branch of the "Y" represents La Pensée religieuse de Descartes, the title of Gouhier's first
book on the philosopher's thoughts about religion; the right branch of the "Y" is La Pensée
métaphysique de Descartes, the title of Gouhier's masterly summing up and restatement of a
lifetime of critical interpretation of Descartes's philosophy; the rising stem of the "Y", then, is
Gouhier's small, rich book on Descartes's "first thoughts," Les Premières Pensées de
Descartes, from his encounter with Beeckman in November 1618, to the year 1620, in which,
Gouhier believes, Olympica was partly or even in its entirety written down in the petit
registre. In Cartesian terms, the events of 1618-19 were the trunk from

-39-
which the sagesse, the wisdom, and the philosophie, the scientific and philosophical work, of
Descartes's later life arose. Descartes maintained to the last what he says on the present
occasion, that "wisdom" and "philosophy" belong together and form a whole, and that they
stem from the same root, being in fact a particular instance of the unity of human knowledge
within the realm of human reason.

The foregoing analysis has shown the precise point where that trunk began to bifurcate: in the
brief course of the second "dream," which stands symmetrically between the first dream,
filled with fear of the Thundergod on high, and the third, "philosophical" one. At the point of
bifurcation stood the first decision made by the dreamer, the decision to have "recourse to
reasons drawn from philosophy." This reduced the Olympic heights suggested by the title
from the mysterious seat of the feared Father God to the snowy, solitary peak to which the
disciplined mind can ascend, must ascend, if it is to rise to wisdom, which "philosophy" alone
cannot give. This "wisdom" is the last remnant of the classical Greek conception of
philosophy leading man upward towards the ineffable, which draws his soul upward and
purifies it in the ascent.

A precious aphorism that Baillet draws into his narration at that point gives evidence of
Descartes's concern with the sources of creative thought, certainly in the wake of his
illumination, quite probably even before. A young man in search of the right road in the life
of mind will cast far and wide to be sure that he has not accidentally missed a trail that just
possibly might be the right one; he will critically sort out what is offered as wisdom and
knowledge from all sides; and there is no reason to doubt that Descartes was speaking
autobiographically when he said, in the Discours of 1637, that the philosophers were talking
against each other without having a common, irrefutable truth criterion, while mathematics,
the queen of the sciences, was used only for the most menial tasks in the household of man.
Baillet continues his account, which had ended with "Wisdom and Philosophy joined
together," as follows:

For he did not think it was all that astounding to see that the poets, even those who only fool
around [même ceux qui nefont que niaiser] were full of thoughts [sentences] more serious,
more sensible, and better expressed than those one finds in the writings of the philosophers.
He attributed this surprising fact [cette merveille] to the divinity [the divine nature of origin]
of Enthusiasm and to the power of the Imagination, which brings out the seeds of wisdom
(which can be found in the mind of all men, like fiery sparks in pebbles) much more easily
and even much more brilliantly than Reason can do in the philosophers.

-40-
The symbols fit neatly into the dream account--Enthusiasm, Imagination, wisdom--above all
those sparks that are scintillae conscientiae, sparks of conscience, knowledge, wisdom, and
fire at once. But what they say sounds archaic after all that had happened during the night.

Dutifully, Baillet returns to his text:

M. Descartes, continuing to interpret his dream in his sleep, judged that the piece of verse
about the uncertainty of the kind of life one has to choose and which begins with Quod vitae
sectabor iter? indicated the good advice of a wise man, or even moral theology. Thereupon,
doubting whether he was dreaming or meditating, he woke up without emotion and continued,
his eyes open, the interpretation of his dream on the same lines.

There was indeed nothing more to say about the theme of the right road to take in life except
that it was exactly the choice that a truly wise man would have recommended, or even
someone learned in pastoral theology, come to think of it. At this point he again doubted
whether he was awake or meditating, realizing that he had reached the outermost zone
through which he had passed, in the reverse direction, while meditating upon the first dream
he had had. There is no uncertainty left any more; he opens his eyes and continues in the same
vein, without stopping, merely opening his eyes. The vein he is following leads upward and
away. Moral theology had come to his mind hesitantly, but:

By the poets assembled in the Anthology he understood Revelation and the Enthusiasm that,
he made bold to hope, would continue to single him out [dont il ne désespéroit pas de se voir
favorisé]. The piece Est et Non, which is the Yes and No of Pythagoras, he understood to be
the Truth and Falsity in all human knowledge [dans les connaissances humaines] and in the
profane sciences.

At the end of the interpretation (for it is the end he is coming to), he once more acknowledges
the forces that were operative during this night; a revelatory force and a state of "Enthusiasm"
that lifted him out of the ordinary and, we can add, silenced his restlessly active mind long
enough to let the events of this night sink in deep, without resistance. And so, toward the end,
he explicitly acknowledges what he has received: the certainty that from now on all human
knowledge and all the profane sciences will be wide open to him. This is the last act in the
dream work; in the swift transition from revelation to human and profane knowledge, the
Spirit of God recedes and another Spirit takes its place:

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seeing that all these things worked out so well in keeping with his inclinations, he was bold
enough to convince himself that it was the Spirit of Truth that had wanted to open to him the
treasures of all the sciences in this dream.

This must have been the last note, concluding the running account of this night (again I put in
brackets phrases I have reconstructed from Baillet's text):

[The Spirit of Truth has opened up all the sciences for me.]

And so it was.

The narrative has stopped. Sometime later he returns to the account remembering the puzzling
engravings he saw in the Corpus Poetarum:

[The following day an Italian painter came to visit me. (This explains the copper engravings.)]

After this there is not the slightest lingering doubt about the meaning of that night. His
interpretation of it as an event beyond the purely human compass has been vindicated; the last
dream had foretold him what would happen the next day, in a form that he would not
understand until the confirmation came: that foreign painter with his portfolio of copper
engravings.

After that visit, the time has come to go over the whole night of dreams for the last time,
seeing it in retrospect, and drawing the final conclusion, for this is what they are: conclusions,
not interpretations; least of all a reinterpretation, as his modern interpreters are wont to say.

8. The Dream of Descartes


IN THE LAST SEARCH FOR INTERPRETATION, AS DESCARTES ONCE MORE
GOES over all the three dreams to make sure that he has not overlooked anything, he begins
by placing them in context. This context shows the degree of insight he has attained. The first
two dreams, he says, concerned the past, while the third one showed him his future. The first
two dreams had been des avertissements menaçans, threatening warnings, concerning his past
life, menacing because they raised the question of divine judgment over his

-42-
hidden sins--a repetition of what had already been said when he spoke of his thoughts upon
awakening from the first dream. Knowing Baillet's way of paraphrasing, I think it likely that
this repetition (his hidden sins "might not have been as innocent before God as before men")
was added by Baillet in order to spell out what Descartes meant by "threatening warnings
concerning his past life"; it is most unlikely that Descartes, in his terse account, had repeated
himself at the point where he was merely concerned with placing the three dreams into the
perspective of the logic of the dream work. The remark that follows: "And he believed that
this was the reason for the terror and the fright by which these two [first] dreams were
accompanied" is probably (though not certainly) by Baillet. Descartes is not in the habit of
spelling out the obvious.

But then come two new bits of information about episodes in the first dream:

The melon that someone wanted to present him with in the first dream signified, he said, the
charms of solitude, but offered by purely human enticements [mais présentez par des
sollicitations purement humaines].

In Baillet, clauses like disoit-il, "he said," amount to quotation marks; he is telling us that he
is rendering this text directly, not in paraphrase. The fact that Descartes, in his final
assessment of the nature of the three dreams, goes from the general characterization of the
first two dreams to just two episodes in the rich first dream, followed by two points
concerning the second one and none about the last one, indicates that these comments were
made while rereading the dream account, filling in what he had missed, reliving (as it were)
the event and jotting down what came afresh to his mind, in making brief notes. The idea that
he sat down to "reinterpret" his dreams, reconstructing them without even being aware that he
was falsifying or, at the very least, transforming them, is unwarranted. In the aftermath of the
dreams, Descartes is no longer the man who dreams, no longer the man who is anxious to
record what he dreamt. He had gone to the angustiae of the road, the dangerous narrows of it-
-angustiae means that, and it also means "anxiety"--and now he has found the road to take,
now he has firm ground under his feet. This does not change his recollections of the dreams; it
completes the dream work. Freud had seen that when he said that when a dream is so close to
waking consciousness that the dreamer himself is able to interpret it (in the sense of saying
directly what the dream had said symbolically), then we have every reason to accept his
explanation as authentic; we certainly cannot do better, unless the dreamer can be subjected to
psychoanalysis, a fate from which death preserved our dreamer. It was

-43-
Baillet who wove into a connected narrative the disjointed notes that followed the dream
account, notes plainly set down over a perhaps considerable period of time, thus inviting the
notion of a recasting of the dreams in the light of a late "reinterpretation." The most
impressive feature of the whole account is its precision and its obvious veracity, which strike
any reader who follows the dream work in sequence rather than going to it after having
painstakingly and painfully reconstructed what is not there, building hypothesis on hypothesis
and considering everything except the very process that unfolds in the account.

Let me repeat once more that these considerations do not invalidate the rich results of the
search for the meaning of the dream symbols through a study of Descartes's earlier and later
thoughts, of what he had or might have read, of the significance of these symbols from the
viewpoint of psychoanalysis, Jungian archetypes, Renaissance thought, etc. Symbols, once
again, are polyvalent. What characterizes the dream account, as it characterizes Descartes, is
the narrowness and directness of the dream symbolism. The dreamer is searching for the right
road in life, and everything he dreams and everything he learns from the dreams is anchored
in this fact. Nonetheless, the symbols thrown up by the dreams have their own independent
background in Western symbolism, in mythopoeic thinking, indeed in philosophy, which
itself is an exercise in symbolization. They also have personal associations for the dreamer of
which he may or may not have been aware. This is most particularly true of the first dream,
the "deepest" one, as Freud recognized, the one that came out of the dreamer's deepest
unconscious; Freud added that there is no way of probing into that layer, the book of
information being closed forever now. But it is equally true that what welled up from the
unconscious was channeled into the purposeful process of "finding solid ground under his
feet," to use the symbolic language of the dream. No matter how late and how remote from
the origin Descartes's last comments are, they still rise from the same inner need to become
clear about himself and his mission; and it is not only the dream process that guarantees their
being in line with the earliest account of the dream. For what governs this process is the
growth of the dreamer himself. There is absolutely nothing arbitrary in this process. We can
be sure on general grounds that whatever we may find difficult to understand was understood
by Descartes, consciously or unconsciously, as being related to the "Hercules at the
crossroads" problem he was facing. It is not just likely, but almost certain, that he "forgot"
and "transformed" a good deal when writing down his dream account, beginning with the
state in which he was ready to receive the dreams or visions he expected to have. But dream
work, as Freud has investigated it, is precisely a work of editing, eliminating, and
transforming:

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eliminating what is marginal or accessory, editing to bring out the main line, transforming as
the conscious understanding grows.

In the light of these considerations, I venture to reconstruct what Baillet found in the petit
registre at the end of the continuous dream account-disjointed notes that he drew together into
a continous narrative (again I put in brackets phrases that I have reconstructed from Baillet's
text):

[The following day an Italian painter came to visit me. (This explains the copper engravings.)]

[The third dream refers to my future, the two preceding ones to my past.]

The melon signifies the charms of solitude offered by purely human sollicitations.

A malo spiritu ad templum propellabar.

[The Spirit of God that had made me take the first steps toward the church did not permit me
to be carried off by the evil spirit.]

[The frightening second dream was my synderesis.]

[The thunder I heard signaled the descent of the Spirit of Truth taking possession of me.]

[I was perfectly sober that day and had not drunk wine for three months.]

[The genius that had excited my Enthusiasm had predicted the dreams before I went to bed.
The human mind had no part in them.]

This is Descartes's final word on the night of dreams.

What, then, does he mean by "the charms of solitude offered by purely human enticements
[sollicitations]"? The term "purely human" is a clue; Baillet sensed that when he translated:
"The charms of solitude, but offered by . . ." The memory of the dream episode lingers even
as he places the dreams in the perspective of the decisive turning from the bad way to the
right road, from a potentially dangerous past to a bright and certain future. He had puzzled
over the copper engravings; the unexpected visit of the Italian painter completes his
understanding of the dreams in an equally unexpected way: the copper engravings he saw in
the Corpus Poetarum in his third dream had announced that visit without his realizing it; only
the next day, le lendemain, was the meaning revealed to him--a configuration of what he had
felt but not dared to admit: that the whole event had been providential. For, surely, an Italian
painter seeking out a young French officer in a small Bavarian town or village in the midst of
winter on the very day after the dreams, as he was wondering about the copper engravings,
could not possibly be purely coincidental, certainly not for the young man still caught up in
his "Enthusiasm," which was turning into euphoria.

-45-
Nonetheless, Descartes is sober enough to stay away from superstition. It is his destiny that
has been revealed to him without the agency of the human mind, as he will finally have to
say. In this context, the term "purely human" is significant. The melon episode is definitely
not a part of the deep meaning of his dreams. The text before us thus confirms our first
interpretation of it as an obstacle in his advance toward the church where he hopes to be
secured from evil. The term sollicitations is more difficult. It means "solicitations,"
"enticements," "requests for assistance," "pleas." The offer of the melon, a sexual symbol,
represents such a "purely human" solicitation or enticement, and the "charms of solitude"
connect up with the hidden sins he might have committed unknown to all but himself and
God. He will seek solitude (he has been seeking it already in this Bavarian town where he did
not break his isolation by walks or company), but the solitude he will seek from here on will
not be that of concealment, it will be the solitude he needs to think his solitary thoughts
without distraction and he will seek it for this reason, not for the "charms" it may offer. The
insight gained, that which permitted him to set down these words, is that no "melon" and no
"charm of solitude" is to be accepted henceforth by the thinker, who has received his
mission.The next episode that has remained on his mind is that of the wind that pushed
against him when he turned away from the church. Now he identifies it:

A malo spiritu ad templum propellabar.

"I was propelled to the church by the [or: an] evil spirit." The text allows two equally possible
readings.
1. It may refer to what he has already said: that this wind attempted several times to turn
him around toward the church and that it became much feebler in the end.
2. It may mean: "I was being driven [note the imperfect propellabar] to the church."

Baillet translates unhesitatingly: Le vent qui le poussoit vers l'Eglise du collége, "the wind
that pushed him toward the college church," and he immediately identifies the episode: "when
he felt pain on the right side." And, fortunately, he gives the Latin text he translates in the
margin, recognizing its importance. One would wish he had quoted what immediately
follows, too. It is certain that the statement about the Divine Spirit making the dreamer take
the first steps toward the church is a translation. Baillet says expressly: quoy qu'il fût trés-
persuadé que c' eût été l'Esprit de Dieu. . . Whether the text said "that had made [him] take
the first steps toward the church" or "made him proceed" toward it in the first place is

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undecidable; Baillet may have translated with the sequence of the episode in mind. But we
have to take his translation as it stands. There is little doubt that much of what precedes the
direct quotation has been supplied by Baillet, who wanted to be sure that the implications of
the statement are that God did not permit him to advance farther by being carried off against
his will, even to a holy place, by a spirit He had not sent. Why does he say "to advance
farther" when the dreamer was not advancing at all, but standing, his back to the church, in
the midst of people who were talking with each other? Either he was "just writing,"
embroidering as usual and saying "to advance farther and to be carried off" where the second
expression would have done; or there is a contraction: "to advance farther in the wrong
direction and to be carried off . . ." Whatever the case may be, the message comes across
clear, and it comes out of the text he had before him. There was a struggle between the Spirit
of God and the malus spiritus, and the Spirit of God prevailed. At the end of his rethinking,
Descartes will identify this "Spirit of God" and give it its right name, calling it "the Spirit of
Truth," l'Esprit de la Vérité. This marks the last step: the acknowledgment of his mission as a
service to Truth--philosophy--rather than to God--the Church. Eighteen years later, in the
Discourse on Method, he will make this clear: sacred theology requires assistance from on
high, since it deals with revealed matters beyond the grasp of reason; the philosopher's task is
to confine himself to those verities that the human mind can discover by its own powers. In
his conversations with Francis Burman, he will add that these verities must not be in conflict
with revealed truth, but that proving these revealed truths is none of the philosopher's
business.

The Evil Spirit, then, is the spirit that wants to drive him toward the church, throwing him
"violently into a place where he intended to go voluntarily," as Baillet explains (it might well
be a translation, but we cannot be sure). Why did the dreamer fail to identify the wind as the
Evil Spirit immediately or in the writing of his first account? Let us remember that this whole
first dream was intensely personal and that it came up from as deep down in the unconscious
as the dreamer's strongly intellectual cast permitted. We do not know what personal memories
and associations arose from these depths, except for the one that an accident permitted us to
identify. But this much is clear: not until he passes the man he had forgotten to greet (a man
he knew) do other persons enter the dream. He is in their company to the very end of the
dream. And the fact that upon awakening his thoughts turn to his past life and the hidden sins
that might rise against him confirms the personal character of the dream and the associations
it brought up.

The first two dreams he now identifies (correctly for the first one, wrongly

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as concerns the second one) as referring to his past life, a life not guided by the "Spirit of
Truth." The first dream made him symbolically go through a struggle with his life, reaching
the point where he already knew which way to turn, but was not yet able to do it. No "Evil
Spirit" was needed to explain that. It was a struggle against himself that was enacted before
his own eyes, the struggle of the man he was against the man he wanted to be. And since he
did not yet know what kind of man he wanted to be, he could not possibly have identified that
violent but abating wind as an evil spirit. This identification became inevitable only after he
knew who he was going to be, having found out by virtue of an event in which the human
mind had no part. Until then, there was no Evil Spirit; there was merely wind blowing through
that dream, as it were. This wind caught the disabled dreamer, lifted him off the ground, made
him spin helplessly "on his left foot" while sweeping him along. Then there is the calm of the
college courtyard. The dreamer is walking toward the church; he retraces his steps to do
obeisance to the acquaintance he had passed without greeting him. The wind violently throws
him back on the path to the church; the dreamer could not make a stand against it. But he once
more turns back and walks up to the man, who greets him by name; a general conversation
develops as people gather around the group; the wind repeatedly tries to turn him around to
move him toward the church, but its power abates considerably. At this point, the dreamer's
unique condition is cruelly revealed; he alone has no ground under his feet and no power to
stand up straight, although the wind had greatly abated. The weakness is within him, as
distinct from the strength of those around him, as distinct also from the power of the wind that
can push a body around or carry it off. This is the message left by the dream.

But the dream has left something else, as we have seen before--indeed, in connection with the
wind: there remained the memory of a singular physical experience, no less vivid for having
been dreamt. It is a memory of motion, and the first dream is played out in a counterpoint of
the dreamer being in motion, against the static condition of his being disabled. This motion
begins as he finds himself on the road, moving without knowing where. It continues with his
finding a place of refuge and salvation, entering it, and moving painfully toward the church,
the symbol of refuge, salvation--and certainty. For the dreamer's disability is not only moral;
he is also intellectually disabled since for him the question of his way in life is also--and
indeed first of all--the question of the right way to knowledge. But this implication, present in
the symbolism of the first dream, will not come into focus until the second dream occurs.
Here, for the first time, the dreamer will do something instead of suffering or succumbing.
This turns the tables, and the third dream will mirror the stages of his victory.

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Looking back at the first dream in full possession what has been conquered, and imbued with
his new sense of mission, Descartes not only identifies the wind in the first dream as malus
spiritus, but also tells us what that evil spirit did to him:

A malo spiritu ad templum propellabar.

He brings to its proper end the story that so abruptly ended with his standing debilitated
among the healthy, and it does not matter much whether he remembered what he had
forgotten to say when writing down the first account, or whether, writing down his last
comments when it was all over, he put down how that story would have ended, had he not
awoken before it did end. One way or the other, his reconstruction completes the symbolic
action.

Ad templum propellabar: I was being driven toward the church all the time by the Evil Spirit.

We thus have three forces operating on him:


1. His "first thought" of getting to the church.
2. His succumbing to distraction and turning away from it.
3. The wind (Evil Spirit) trying to hurl him into the place toward which his "first thought"
made him go anyway.
If we add that he succumbed and turned back twice, we get his movement across the
courtyard in the following sequence:
1. Forward movement toward the church, then a spinning by the tourbillon.
2. Forward toward the church again, past the man not greeted, followed by a turning back
toward the man.
3. Forward toward the church again, with a second turning back for the melon episode.
4. Forward motion again.
This forward motion, governed by the desire to reach the church, reversed by two attractions,
the reversal counteracted by the "Evil Spirit" which wants to hurl the dreamer into the place
where he wants to go (but which proves to be powerless), is the precise itinéraire of the First
Meditation of Descartes. This, not the first appearance of the Evil Genius, marks the
connection, though that appearance is not fortuitous. The itinerary of the First Meditation can
be summed up as follows:
1. The urge to ascertain certainty, to find the Archimedean point on which to stand safely.

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2. To move toward certainty, the philosopher turns his back to it and goes in the opposite
direction: the universal doubt.
3. Having suddenly reached certainty as the very end point of that doubt, the question of the
veracity of God throws him back into the doubt.
4. Having proved that God is not a deceiving God and wanting to move back to certainty,
the malin génie--the Evil Spirit--again throws him into doubt: it could be that he is so
constituted that all his thinking is necessarily false. But this argument merely strengthens
the power of the doubt: "the more he deceives me, the surer I am that I doubt, that I
exist." The Evil Spirit thus is in fact driving him toward certainty (the Church) but the
Evil Spirit is powerless, not only because in "blowing him away from certainty" the Evil
Spirit is driving him into it, but because it is the veracity of God and not the Evil Spirit
blowing that brings Descartes finally and irrefutably into the "Church" of certainty.

At this point, one can only add Baillet's remark: "This is why God did not permit him to be
moved on and he allowed himself to be carried off, even to a holy place, by a spirit that He
had not sent: although he was very certain that it had been the Spirit of God who made him
take the first steps toward that church"--and voluntarily, as Baillet said earlier. Henri Gouhier
said the same thing in "Le Malin Génie dans l'itinéraire cartésien," 11 a brilliant essay on the
Deceiving God and Evil Spirit arguments of the Meditations.

We must, then, conclude that in the first dream the dreamer experienced physically the
philosophical itinerary, the Gedankengang, the train of thought that he developed nine years
later at the earliest, in the wake of another crisis in which self-criticism forced him to rethink
his whole position from the ground up. Lüder Gäbe in Descartes' Selbstkritik,
Untersuchungen zur Philosophie des jungen Descartes, 12 has devoted a detailed study to this
crisis; his chapter on Descartes in Ulm, during the winter of 1619-20, gives in eight compact
pages a documented account of Descartes's intellectual interests and problems, and finds at
the heart of them the question of the limits of purely human knowledge, the question that in
1628 leads to the breakthrough to "Cartesianism" in the thought of Descartes.

To say that in his dream Descartes anticipated what would happen nine or more years later as
a necessity of rigorous philosophical thought would be absurd. The same applies to any
identification of the Evil Spirit of the first dream with the malin génie of the Meditations.
Natura non facit saltum. But the parallelism between the physical motions of the dreamer in
the conflict between three forces, one of them driving him in the right direction but proving
impotent, and the philosophical movement of thought of the First Meditation is striking. What
we can say, legitimately, is that Descartes

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physically experienced that movement at a time of extreme exaltation in the course of an
event that marks his first decisive breakthrough. It could very well have happened that the
second breakthrough might have led to a quite different final construction, although the logic
of this breakthrough and the firmness of that final construction make this a hard thing to
conceive. But when, in or after 1628, he did arrive at the final construction, he had, as in the
case of the vortex theory, a memory of having gone through precisely this before, not
intellectually, but physically. This, then, makes the connection between physical experience
(or the living memory of it) and thought structure: Descartes anticipated in his physical
experience what he was later to experience in moving from the search for certainty into the
opposite direction of denying the certainty of all he knew, with the result that the
countermovement threw him into the place where it had been his intention to go in the first
place, as Baillet suggests. The only thing missing in this dream scenario was that last
experience of the wind throwing him against the church instead of trying, with diminishing
force, to do so. We know from the dream account why, as viewed from the standpoint of the
Meditations, this first dream ended prematurely: Descartes was not ready for that yet; he
would not be ready for almost another decade. But it is well to recall what, after the
publication of the Discourse on Method, he wrote to Father Vatier on 22 February 1638: that
what he had said in the unpublished treatise De Lumine concerning the creation of the world
would, he then thought, sound incredible. "For only ten years back [in 1628] I myself would
not have wanted to believe that the human mind could rise to such knowledge of the divine
creation of the universe, if someone else had written it." Another decade earlier, in 1619, he
could not believe that such understanding as the night of dreams had given him could be
gained by the unaided human mind, least of all by a systematic intellectual effort.

9. Summary Conclusion
1. First Dream
AS FREUD NOTED, THIS DREAM IS RICH IN PERSONAL REFERENCES THAT ARE
lost forever. Only occasional conjectures are possible. The main setting is the Collège de La
Flèche in the early seventeenth century: a large courtyard, the main entrance at one end, the
college church at the opposite end. The mood of the dream is uncertainty, fear, and a sense of
guilt.

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Driven by demons, the dreamer is clearly not in control as the dream opens with his attempt to
find refuge in the college (not identified), the church of which promises safety from the
demons. But this part of the dream was already largely forgotten when the dreamer awakened;
the events in the courtyard, however, are described in great detail. We can sum up: the church
now stands for certainty--existential certainty. The dreamer is helplessly driven by the wind,
the ground is giving way under him, the wind whirls him around as he stands on one leg (his
left side is weak!), while all the other people stand firm and safe around him, noticing
nothing. This is alienation, existential uncertainty, and the physical experience of the vortex
motion, long before the invention of the vortex theory.

One episode in the movement from the entrance to the church may show the nature of the
symbolization. This is the famous melon episode, clearly a personal one, with strong sexual
undertones and even stronger paradisiac and holistic overtones. My explanation is that
Descartes never mentioned (in extant writing) any of his fellow students at La Flèche, with
one exception: he inquires about M. Chauveau, who came from Melun.Melun-Melon sets the
complex symbolic sequence going.

The burden of this sequence becomes clear when we plot the dreamer's motion as he traverses
the long courtyard. The main direction is toward the church, but the fierce wind is against
him. He then turns around to walk toward the entrance, away from the church, when the wind,
also changing direction, catches him and hurls him forcibly toward the place "where he
intended to go" of his own accord. The dreamer's itinerary in the courtyard therefore
corresponds precisely to the itinéraire of the First Meditation: walking away from certainty
(the hyperbolic doubt), the doubter is hurled against his intention into the only indisputable
certainty: existential certainty.

The chief result of the interpretation is that basic philosophical concepts (vortex) and trains of
argument (from doubt to cogito) can be physically experienced and thus be engraved in
memory long before rational argumentive development produces the thoughts of them.

2. The Second Dream


The first dream is followed by a long period of meditation and prayer, during which the
dreamer considers the sins he may have committed, although they were not sins in the eyes of
others: the guilt of a secretive life, refuge sought in the religion of the (Jesuit) college and of
the dreamer's nurse.

The most obvious fact about the second dream has been noted by very few interpreters,
although this fact is stated in the plainest words ( Marie-Louise

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von Franz being a notable exception): the second dream is not a dream at all, it is an
awakening. No interpreter has to my knowledge identified this kind of awakening as a special
one. In his Principles of Psychology, William James 13 spoke of this type of reaction as
"subsultus tendinorum or jerking of the muscles . . . when we are on the point of falling
asleep." Today it is properly called "myoclonic awakening" from the state between waking
and sleeping. It is accompanied by those extraordinary magnifications of weak sense
impressions that James treats as examples of hallucination.

There was no second dream, even though Descartes calls the awakening just that: the dreamer
had no way of knowing whether what he heard and saw (thunderclap, sparks filling the room)
was reality or not. The awakening therefore poses the problem whose resolution marks the
peripety in the dream sequence.

After the guilt meditation, thunder and sparks put all the fear back into the dreamer's heart, for
if the sparks really were in the room, then he would be in the presence of a supernatural
phenomenon--a manifestation of the avenging godhead announcing its rejection of the sinner
(or a threat for the future) in a dream. But this time the dreamer does not collapse and seek
refuge in the church where certainty and salvation come together. Now he draws his reasons
"from philosophy" (that is, science, natural philosophy); he has experienced the phenomenon
before, he recalls, and, instead of praying, he makes an experiment.

He opens and closes his eyes repeatedly and is so satisfied with the result that he goes back to
sleep in great calm.

The experiment was to answer the question whether the sparks were in the room or in the eye;
beyond this lay the unacknowledged and probably unconscious question: Veille-je, ou si je
dors?--the dream-reality problematic.

If he still sees the sparks when he closes his eyes, their origin was not in the optical nerve; if
they disappeared when the eyes were closed, then they were supernaturally in the room. But
they did not disappear, and the dreamer was spared the horrifying consequences of the
alternative.

The second "dream" thus marks the dreamer's turn from religion to philosophy, from faith to
argument and experiment, to the search for truth within the confines of human reason: his first
step toward the road to take in life.

3. The Third Dream


[Mostly from a 30 December 1979 letter to Eric Voegelin]

The three dreams during the night of 10-11 November 1619 are recognized by the dreamer as
decisive and--in his exalted state--as coming from

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above. Ultimately it is the Spirit of Truth that descended upon him to give him his mission to
philosophize. The third dream develops the interpretation of the sequence. The key symbols
are the lines (titles) from Ausonius: Sic et Non (the doubt), Quod vitae sectabor iter?

The third dream begins with a kind of shadow play. Suddenly the scene vanishes, but the
dreamer continues to sleep. Wondering whether what he had seen was a dream or a vision, he
decides that it was a dream and interprets this dream in his sleep. The first interpretation ends
with the identification of Quod vitae sectabor iter? as the good counsel of a personne sage or
"even moral theology." Thereupon, "doubting whether he was dreaming or meditating," he
awakens without emotion and "continues his interpretation with his eyes open"--in fact, he
raises the results already obtained to the point where the Spirit of Truth had come to open all
the treasures of knowledge for him. This second interpretation is then followed by a third one
that evidently was undertaken while he was fixing the whole dream sequence in his mind by
mentally repeating it.

Existential doubt and its resolution pervades the whole sequence. The question "Vision or
dream?" occurred already in the second "dream" in somewhat different form. The second
"dream" was in fact a myoclonic awakening from a state of total immobility between sleeping
and waking. Seeing the room filled with sparks and hearing a thunderclap, the question was
whether these phenomena were a "vision," in this case a manifestation of supernatural origin,
or whether they were the physiological manifestations he had experienced before. The
dreamer thereupon did not "decide" the question. He made an experimentum crucis, opening
and closing his eyes repeatedly. If the sparks disappeared when he closed his eyes, then the
phenomenon was supernatural, and he had every reason to tremble; if, however, the sparks
were seen even with his eyes closed, then they were in the eye and had a bodily, natural
origin. After the experiment he could calmly go to sleep again, which tells us what the
outcome had been.

In the third dream, the doubt is not one concerning the natural or supernatural origin of the
dream he had just had; the doubt is whether this was "dream" or vision. The dreamer knew
that he was asleep; he had no way of reaching certainty through an experiment; he could not
reason the matter out, either. What, then, was the question and how was it "decided"? Dream
and vision are not as incompatible as physiological or supernatural phenomena. The dreamer
is conscious of the extraordinary nature and origin of the "dream" as a whole. If the whole
sequence came "from above," it mattered little whether any part of it came in the form of a
dream or of a vision. But beneath this question is another one that surfaces at the end of

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the interpretation made in his sleep, when, being in doubt whether he was dreaming or
meditating, he "awakens without emotion" and "continues" to interpret his dream open-eyed.
This is the underlying question.

Applied to the earlier situation, the question "Dream or vision?" leaves the sleeper helpless,
since he has no way of determining the answer. This helplessness is a throwback to the first
dream, where it is the overriding factor. The seeker for the Truth cannot make out what kind
of reality he is encountering. He literally does not know where he is. The third dream moves
inexorably toward the triumphant interpretation that gives the dreamer the certainty of his
mission and the feeling that he already has the keys to the truth -- although the "dictionary" is
no longer "complete" when it reappears. But the deeper doubt (which accounts for the
increasingly reckless interpretation that compensates for it) is an existential doubt, first about
the reality encountered, second about the reality of the dreamer himself. How, then, can such
a doubt be resolved by way of a decision -- a decision overtly about the nature of the reality
just encountered, more deeply about the reality of the dreamer's existence?

If there were criteria available and applicable, the question could be resolved by determining
what is the case. But a decision (and in one's sleep!) can be arrived at only when it does not
matter how the decision comes out, that is, when it is the decision and not the outcome that
matters. Now, there is only one existential situation where it does not matter whether the
reality encountered is natural or supernatural, whether something experienced was dream or
vision, whether one is asleep or awake, dreaming or meditating. In this situation, the choice
between the alternatives does not matter because the true doubt underlying the choice, the
existential doubt, has already been resolved. It is the situation in which the doubter is aware
that he is in doubt, and therefore knows that, whatever he has experienced, he, the doubter,
exists. He can therefore postpone all else and go on with the business at hand, in this case,
with the interpretation of the dream. But this certainty that the awareness of being in doubt, of
being uncertain concerning the status of reality, is irrefutable evidence of the existence of the
person tested by the doubt -- this certainty is that of the cogito ergo sum.

Let us note that in the dream, as in the Meditations, nothing further follows from that
certainty. The painful search for criteria of evidence is merely postponed while the existential
certainty is established. But this certainty must be established, since without it the most
brilliant, most successful, irrefutable philosophy would founder on the rock of the existential
doubt that cannot be dispelled except by the experience of the cogito.

The end of the Sixth Meditation brings back the third dream, with the

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surprising choice of a dream example that is not fantastic, as one would expect, but simply the
return of the unnamed but well known awakener ( Beeckman) whom the awakened sent off to
oblivion by proving that he knew a much more beautiful poem that the awakener was
unaware of. As in the third dream, this anamnestic dream scene is produced in the context of
the question now explicitly asked as it had been asked in the Recherche de la vérité: Veille-je,
ou si je dors? This time the question is explicitly posed, but since, this time, the dreamer is
wide awake and in possession of the saving cogito, he cannot answer it.

A final comment on the nature of the cogito experience in the dream: the "decision" was made
while asleep; there was no procedure leading to it. Neither was there any awareness that this
"decision" was the key to the truths that the dreamer suspected were contained in the
Dictionary. In keeping with the shadow-play character of the third dream, this vital
experience passes swiftly and seemingly without a trace. But something has happened.
Subconsciously the situation of existential Angst and its resolution by the calming certainty of
the existence of something that experiences Angst has been registered. As in the case of the
first dream, a capital piece of conscious philosophizing has been anticipated in the form of an
experience, symbolized in this case not by physical movement prefiguring a mouvement de la
pensée but in the form of a sinking feeling that by its very nature produces the relief, the calm,
the certainty, and the ability to go on.

In conclusion, the dream analyses demonstrate that extremely subtle and difficult meditative
and ratiocinating structures can be prefigured by symbolic experiences of a physiological or
emotional kind. The cogito was achieved almost exactly nine years after the dreams of 10-11
November 1619. Descartes must have been convinced that until then this philosophoumenon
had never occurred to him, just as he was convinced that nobody before him had ever
invented it, that is, had never come upon it. In this he may well have been right; the
construction of the cogito has a respectable ancestry, but there is reason to doubt that anybody
before Descartes had found this construction while beset by the crushing and ultimately
invincible doubt as to whether the reality experienced and the experiencer, himself, was real
or only a dream.

10. Notes
1. Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14 ( London: Imago, 1948), pp. 558-60; also in Maxime Leroy ,
Descartes, le philosophe au masque, 2 vols. ( Paris: Rieder, 1929).
2. Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 8 ( 1970), pp. 251-62.

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3. Paris: J. Vrin, 1958.
4. Archives Internationales de l'Histoire des Idées, no. 5 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1964).
5. Paris: Horthemels, 1691.
6. Social Research, vol. 28 ( 1961), p. 176.
7. Zeitlose Dokumente der Seele ( Zurich: Rascher, 1952), pp. 49-119.
8. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol. 28 ( 1947), pp. 11-18.
9. Adam Charles, and Paul Tannery, eds. Oeuvres de Descartes, vol. 3 ( Paris: Cerf, 1899),
p. 296.
10. Social Research, vol. 28 ( 1961), p. 175.
11. Essais sur Descartes ( Paris: J. Vrin, 1937), ch. 4.
12. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1972.
13. Vol. 2 ( New York: Henry Holt, 1890), p. 126 f.

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APPENDIX 1
What is "History of Philosophy"? The
Historiographic Problem
IN 1910, E. T. WHITTAKER PUBLISHED HIS MASTERLY A HISTORY OF THE
Theories of Aether and Electricity from the Age of Descartes to the Close of the Nineteenth
Century. Its last references are to work published in 1909. Across this story of unexpected
discoveries and brilliant theorizing, of astounding transformations and painstaking detail
work, we discern a line of development leading with inner necessity up to the point where the
book, not the problem, ends. The historian sums up the status quo in a few sentences. "The
hypothesis of atomic electric changes has been, to all appearances, decisively established,"
while the hope of "discovering an aether by reference to which motion might be estimated
absolutely" has been equally decisively destroyed. What next? The historian cannot tell. In an
earlier chapter he had noted "the foundation of another branch of experimental science," the
study of radiation ( Roentgen, Becquerel, the Curies), dropping the matter at that point
because its subsequent history fell "outside the limits of the present work." The future is
clouded. All he can say is that "in some recent writings it is possible to recognize a tendency
to replace the classical aether by other conceptions which, however, have been yet indistinctly
outlined." Four decades later, in 1951, Whittaker brought out a new edition, adding a second
volume, Modern Theories, 1900-1926. Between the two editions lies the scientific revolution
that has created these "modern theories." The breakthrough had in fact come during the last
ten years covered by the first edition ( Planck 1899-1900, Einstein 1905). These were indeed
"some [of the] recent writings" that, as he had said as late as 1909, "indistinctly" outlined a
"tendency" toward replacing the classical theories by "other conceptions." So profound had
been his uncertainty about the future that he refrained from identifying these "recent writings"
and the new conceptions that had already been established.

In 1951, he had quite a different story to tell. These "other conceptions" had given physics an
entirely unforeseen turn; one wonders what surgical operations were necessary to make the
volume of 1910 fit the new situation.

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Close comparison of the two editions shows, surprisingly, that practically all of the old text
has gone into the new volume unchanged. Almost nothing has been dropped, very little
needed to be rewritten. But the "another branch of experimental science" has now become the
subject of a whole new chapter called "Modern Theories of Radiation," and the period
dominated by the genius of J. J. Thompson reappears now as "The Age of Lorentz." One other
addition has become necessary: the "recent writings" have acquired a respectable ancestry
going back to Wollaston ( 1802) and to Fraunhofer ( 1814-15), whose name did not appear in
the first edition. Again, the science moves forward with the same inexorable logic, from
Descartes to Dirac and Heisenberg; nothing has changed, except the direction. This
extraordinary consistency is not as surprising as it may appear. In 1910, Whittaker had
recorded failures only if they had forced research into ultimately more successful directions;
he did not record successes unless they had taken the problem a step farther. In the light of the
revolution, some of the historical material that had appeared irrelevant to him at the time
suddenly acquired significance, without altering the status of what he had included. We must
ask: Can history of philosophy be written this way? Does the history of philosophy have the
same logic, the same culmulative character, as the history of science? Or is philosophy a field
where the dead live forever?

These questions cannot be brushed aside by pointing to certain obvious facts. Surely there are
some corpses buried in the field of philosophy. Surely it is possible to write a history of
epistemology where, as in Cassirer's first three volumes, the lay of the land eventually forces
the most unruly rivulets to join the streams that will flow together into the great river rolling
toward Kant. Surely philosophy has built up an ever-growing store of knowledge and
understanding. But when all this has been said, it still remains true that despite the fact that
philosophy has been practiced for well over two millennia by the most outstanding minds,
"there is not one thing in it which is not disputed and which therefore is not doubtful," as
Descartes noted. No philosophy has ever proved to be so demonstrably superior to its
predecessors that it could not but supersede them. This is why, generally speaking,
philosophies never die. Philosophies explore Denkmöglichkeiten, alternative cognitional
models, and while the philosopher must take a position, the historian cannot do so without
blocking himself off against current and future development. Nothing in the historical picture
entitles him to consider the horizon of philosophical history closed. If he nonetheless accepts
one philosophical position as the only valid one, he does so as a philosopher and on
philosophical, not historical, grounds. His own discipline, historiography, requires him to be
neutral.

Such neutrality must not be confused with relativism, a philosophical

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position. Historical neutrality does not require the historian -- it does not even entitle him -- to
consider all philosophies as equally valid or invalid. It does demand of him that he give every
philosophy, every philosophical "idea," an equal chance to be heard and to be considered in
its own right. In this respect his position differs from that of the historian of science who
knows ex post facto who has been right and who was wrong, subject to future revision. The
very science whose history he writes tells him that. Philosophy tells its historian nothing of
that kind; it is the philosophers who do so, in unending conflict with each other. This is how
Kant saw philosophy before Kant. The question is whether the history of philosophy has
changed since then; if it has not, we must find the reason for it.

2
Ob die Bearbeitung der Erkenntnisse, die zum Vernuftgeschäfte gehoren, den sicheren Gang
einer Wissenschaft gehe oder nicht, das lässt sich bald aus dem Erfolg beurteilen.

Whether the "business of reason" does or does not go the safe way of a science is easily seen
from the outcome. With this first sentence in the "Preface to the Second Edition," Kant goes
to the very heart of the historian's problem. His purpose is philosophical, but the position he
takes is resolutely historical. In the next sentence Kant does what historians of philosophy
rarely do. He pays no attention to doctrinal history; instead, he develops formal criteria for
judging the character of the philosophical enterprise from the way in which it has historically
behaved. The first criterion of a science is its ability to bring its laborious preparatory work to
a conclusion; philosophy, he finds, either gets stuck at that point or has to backtrack and
change direction. The second criterion concerns the ability of a science to secure agreement
among its practitioners, not indeed about the results obtained, but about "the manner in which
the common purpose (die gemeinschäftliche Absicht) is to be pursued"; and philosophers have
never agreed on that "safe way of a science."

Kant's conception of a true science, so different from what the history of science has
subsequently revealed, has significant implications. For Kant, the progress of such a science
essentially linear. It is strictly cumulative: what has once been proved true remains true,
unless the proof is later found to have been defective. This linear progress begins when the
science has found its method; it will never have to go back again and seek other roads,
groping in the dark. The road is laid out "for all times and [toward] infinite

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horizons" because, as Neo-Kantians later said, the method constitutes the Erkenntnisobjekt (
Kant gemeinschöftliche Absicht), which in turn differentiates this science from all others.
When this purpose and method are established, the results previously reached separate out
into grain and chaff: it may be necessary to discard much that had been "contained in the
earlier unreflectively adopted goal" of that science. Earlier self-definitions and findings of the
discipline thus stand or fall depending on their agreement with the properly reflected
recognition of its true goal. It follows that there must be one -- and there can be only one --
scientific revolution in any field: the discovery, through proper reflection, of its true goal and
method. This discovery reveals ex post facto what is alive and what has been dead; and the
dead do not rise again. Kant sicherer Gang einer Wissenschaft precludes any possibility that
equipollent thought structures may exist, that a thought scheme that was abortive in its time
may yet become fertile when it enters a different constellation later, that the history of a
science may, at least in part, be one of exploring alternative, potentially viable speculations,
some of which may be waiting in the wings for their historical moment while the seemingly
unidirectional science follows its supposedly royal road. But all this is of course only the
overture to a new philosophical space opera: Kant's Copernican Revolution, in One Act.

Kant's astronomical metaphor is anything but innocent. It masks his switch from historical
analysis to philosophical argument, proclaiming the death of philosophical history and the
birth of scientific philosophy. This revolution was indeed Copernican in one sense: it turned
the relationship between mover and the moved upside down. But metaphors are treacherous.
They betray their maker. What, "cosmologically" speaking, was the position of the
philosopher before Kant? Using Kant's own metaphor, one could say that each philosopher
had orbited through the philosophical universe on his own path, alone or as part of a system,
as a sun, a planet, a moon, a comet, a meteor -- and accordingly had seen the universe in a
different way. Kant resolutely pinned the philosopher down to earth, put his feet on
unmovable ground, and thus imposed one and only one perspective on all. At the command of
the new Joshua the earth stood still, the sun rose in the East and set in the West, and what
really happened was forever hidden in the inaccessibility of the Ding an sich. Kant's
revolution was Copernican in reverse.

This was the high point of the age of closed systems, systems closed in two directions. They
closed philosophy off from the partially and the wholly unknowable, and they closed it off
from history. This age of closed systems began with Descartes's discovery of the
Archimedean point and ended with the picture gallery in Hegel Geisterreich. Now that this
age has ended,

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philosophers again orbit freely through the philosophical universe, and Kant is not even a
fixed star for most of them. We are back where we were, and if we are to learn a lesson from
the history of philosophy, we must learn it from the history of that science that was Kant's
model for philosophy.

For Kant, the period of blind groping ( Herumtappen) in the sciences ended when "the
admirable nation of the Greeks" put mathematics on the sure road of a science, belatedly
followed by Bacon and Galileo doing the same thing for the empirical disciplines. In the
current view, there is an alternation of development and revolution in science, and nothing in
its history authorizes us to assume that the latest revolution is the last. Yet Kant was
profoundly right when he saw the determinant of science qua science not in its ever-widening
and deepening findings but in its Absicht, its purpose and goal. This purpose, the explanation
of natural phenomena, holds the history of the natural sciences together without yet setting
them on Kant's unidirectional track. Why has philosophy failed to develop this kind of unity
in diversity?

The first difficulty with this question stems from the broad range and the definitional
uncertainty of what is commonly called philosophy. One can always find something "which is
also philosophy" to contradict any answer. A more serious argument is made by those who
explain basic disagreement among philosophers by accusing them of overreaching themselves
and raising unanswerable questions, that is, pseudo-questions. Their answer to the problem
consists in reading metaphysics out of philosophy. And indeed, metaphysics (in Kant's terms:
"wholly isolated speculative rational cognition") is the heart of the problem, if we take the
term widely enough. Cutting metaphysical questions off because they obstruct the business of
getting answers to nonmetaphysical ones is useful enough, but when the thing is done on
principle, the historian can merely classify such efforts as antimetaphysical positions
concerning metaphysics. He has neither the right to choose sides nor the qualifications for
setting himself up as a judge over the philosophers who make philosophical history. But he
cannot throw up his hands either and simply record the quarrels in the house of philosophy.
For how can he write the history of a discipline unless he knows how it differs from others?
The very broadness of the common notion of philosophy, the very fact that philosophers do so
many things that are also done in other disciplines, forces him to fasten upon the one area
where philosophy differs most clearly from the others. He must try to understand the nature of
these ultimate disagreements to find out what drives philosophy into them. For this purpose it
will be convenient to begin with the common if somewhat lazy definition of philosophy as the
most general science or the science of first principles.

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3
Whether the stress falls on generality or on first principles, philosophy so defined is clearly
not a field but a process, a movement of thought rising up from the empirical manifold toward
highest generality. Is there an upper bound to this movement? The notion of generality leaves
the question open; the reference to first principles seems to answer it in the affirmative: first
principles are end points. But how would one know whether a principle is a "first" one?
Surely not by recourse to another principle. This difficulty is usually evaded by defining a
first principle as an irreducible one. But that which is irreducible in one thought model need
not be irreducible in another. It looks as if philosophy, too, has its foundation problem. But
unlike other sciences, the most general science cannot turn this problem over to a still more
general science. Steadily and irresistibly, reason moves from the answerable toward the
unanswerable. The higher philosophy reaches up, the more marked is its difference from other
disciplines, the more plainly does its specific character emerge. What the historian sees in this
millennial striving is a turbulent flow of speculation, a relentless exploring of the ultimate
possibilities and impossibilities of thought, a marvelous mixture of uninhibited daring and
cold, disciplined, critical argument. It is not difficult to see certain kinds of order in this
development, as well as a driving logic in the pursuit of specific problems over very long time
spans. But the ultimate problems of philosophy remain its ultimate enigmas. Why then this
restless striving toward the questions that, as Kant said, reason cannot refuse to entertain
"because the nature of reason itself imposes them on it" and that it cannot answer "because
they transcend every faculty of human thought"? In a grim text he spoke of this urge as a
"visitation" that could well shake our confidence in reason, which deserts us at the crucial
point, putting us off with false hopes again and again, only to cheat us in the end. Self-
denying ordinances (this is what the modern "revolutions" in philosophy amount to) cannot
end the quest, for no such ordinance can change that which Kant has called "the nature of
reason itself." And so the most general science is still that science that cannot be stopped in its
upward movement except by fiat.

The historian has to accept that, with a proviso: this is Western philosophy with all its
conceptions, one of which is the Kantian notion of "the nature of reason itself." In other
words, what he accepts is an historical fact, not a truth claim. And this fact does not stand
alone. The radical historian admits nothing as evidence that has not yet come into being;
neither does he exclude, on any principle other than the definition of his specific purpose,
what has already come into being. "Philosophy" -- meaning Western phi-

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losophy -- has come into being; hence there is "before philosophy" as well as "philosophy"; at
the point of origin, the Western conception of "the nature of reason" arose in a still
undifferentiated way; "philosophy" has been one -- perhaps the most significant one -- of the
differentiated enterprises of "reason" that have grown out of that common root. The
phenomenal differentia specifica of "philosophy" has been, and still is, its structural character
of rising above any given upper cutoff point. It is not an axiological but an open-ended
discipline, from the radical historian's viewpoint. The truth claims of the philosopher are what
the historian studies, not what he must accept or reject; to him they are historical phenomena,
no more and no less. This is the insight that liberates the historian of philosophy from his
shackles. He can now see what lies beyond doctrinal analysis and doxology.

This does not affect his traditional tasks. History, like philosophy, operates on many levels. In
doctrinal analysis and in doxology he must accept philosophies at their face value; how else
could he give a reliable, useful explication des textes together with a critical analysis of the
validity of their truth claims? On this level he is what Kojève has so beautifully characterized
as the Raisonneur, dernier avatar de l'Intellectuel. The Raisonneur is "a caricature of Hegel,"
that is, of the Philosopher: Il remplace l'Action par la Pensée et il pense logiquement. Hence:
D'une part, tout est acceptable pour le Raisonneur; de l'autre, rien ne l'est. We might call this
the philosophical view of historical neutrality in philosophy, in the ironical sense of Kojève,
one of the historians of philosophy who came close to the heart of the historical problem.
Kojève also exemplifies the deeper problem confronting the historiographer who rises above
the Raisonneur stage. What choice does he have, other than becoming a committed
philosopher himself, as Kojève did, with dire consequences for the philosophers and
philosophies he is committed against? The answer is, of course, that he must remain the
historian he was, even when ceasing to be the Raisonneur. But this is not an easy answer. For
here the foundation problem of history opens up for the historian of philosophy, with a
vengeance.

The problem arises when the historian goes beyond doxology and tries to understand the
history of philosophy as a whole, as an evolution, the way the historian understands the
history of science. This evolution, as we saw, is characterized by its incessant search for
answers to ultimate, unanswerable questions, a search that produces conflicting and
undecidable truth claims. The historian can take the liberating step of accepting these answers
as historical fact, recognizing that they take the form of truth claims, and try to find the
substance that manifests itself in this particular form. This means that he must transcend
philosophy as it offers itself for study. Inevitably he

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finds himself confronted with the question of what is "behind" these ultimate truth claims,
what kind of "reality" they attempt to grasp, to use philosophical terminology because no
other is available. Here as elsewhere, self-denying ordinances are no way out of the difficulty.
The historiographer has a great deal to learn from the therapeutic philosophers who tell him
what he means when he says what he thinks he is saying, who also tell him what he can say
and what he cannot say. This blocks him from entering a legitimate field of historical inquiry,
but it does not eliminate that field. He cannot fully understand what happened in philosophy
unless he can answer the question what philosophy has "really" been doing all this time. His
answer to this question will determine what kind of history of philosophy he writes. In this he
does not differ from any other historian. The ultimate determinants of any given
comprehensive piece of historiography are metahistorical. This is the foundation problem of
history.

To the historian of philosophy this foundation problem must seem intractable. Any other
historian can stop at the boundaries of this problem, declare himself unqualified to enter
metahistory, and turn to that science that deals with foundation problems. The historian of
philosophy cannot do that because this science is philosophy--the very science whose history
he is to write. At this point the question: "How is history to be understood?" is inseparable
from the question: "How is philosophy to be understood?" They are still different questions,
but he cannot answer either of them without answering the other pari passu. And since there
is no superscience to which he can turn with regard to either question, it would seem that the
impasse is final. But it is not. The historian who thinks this way has asked the right question
and he has pushed it to the limit, as he must. But he has pushed it in the wrong direction and
as a result he ends up in a false position. Imperceptibly he has turned from an historian into a
speculator. There is nothing wrong with being a speculator, but the historian just does not
have the wings to carry him on these speculative flights. If he is to solve his problem, he must
stay down on historical ground. If he does, the problem will become manageable and indeed
capable of solution. What he needs to do is some historical work: he must go back to the
origin, the archē, where both history and philosophy began. This turns the speculative
question into an answerable historical one. The historian knows that foundation problems are
latecomers in history. They were unknown before the rise of philosophy. This suggests that
they can arise only within, and not before, philosophy. The same is true of the rise of what we
now call disciplines or sciences. They, too, are products of the process of differentiation that
began when a new kind of fundamental experience and thought arose with the Greeks. The
historian also knows, or ought to know, that he is not an ethereal Geist

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looking down on history from an abstract Nowhere and wondering how to understand it.
Neither is he an ancient Egyptian scribe or a medieval town chronicler. The history that is his
concern is his own history; it is in his bones, in his blood, in his brain. Whether he wants to or
not, whether he knows it or is innocent, he is a "philosophical" historian, a product of what he
investigates. His language, his technical terms, his ideas, his self-understanding as a human
being and as a scholar have been preformed by philosophy in its widest sense as the new
Western enterprise of rational inquiry. And what he contributes to his own discipline,
advancing and transforming what he has inherited, becomes itself part of that heritage.

How, then, does his foundation problem look in the light of such awareness? For him,
philosophy and history are still two different disciplines. But he now sees them related to each
other the way Heidegger's Holderlinian metaphor relates Dichten and Denken. They are like
two trees that stand next to each other, rooted in the same soil, and know each other not. Only
when the foundation problem is invoked does their self-questioning reach down into that
common soil. Here the two disciplines meet, disclosing the hidden relationship between the
cognitional problems of the philosopher and the historian of philosophy. Eric Voegelin's
precise formulation holds for both of them: "The model of the subject of knowledge [the
knower] confronting an object [of knowledge] is inapplicable where the cognitional act itself
is part of the process which is to be recognized." The "drama of history," being unfinished, is
not a thing about which a philosopher can speak, the way he can speak of a thing complete in
itself, since "by philosophizing he becomes an actor in the [unfinished] drama of which he
wants to speak." This also fits the historian who wants to speak about philosophy, an equally
unfinished "drama." By speaking about it, he too becomes an actor in that drama--assuming
that he speaks of it at the highest level he can attain.

Voegelin, who is an out-and-out historian as well as an out-and-out philosopher (he has to be


both, given his understanding of the relation between philosophy and history), has gone back
to the origin in order to investigate the minimum historical configuration in which philosophy
could arise anywhere, in which indeed Western philosophy as well as the less radical
philosophical departures outside the Western tradition have arisen. He finds three minimum
elements that must join up to form this historical configuration: first, a period of geistige
Ausbrüche, spiritual eruptions that change the fundamental experience of order in the
societies affected; second, the rise of the ecumenic empire as the new image and goal of
political society; and third, the rise of historiography. This historiography is

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of course not the kind that is practiced in our day. This early historiography responded to the
sense of uniqueness created by the "spiritual outbursts" and the political upheavals, events
that divided the flow of time into a "before" and an "after." Philosophy, as Voegelin has said
elsewhere, opened the horizon of history; the experience of man's existence in history was at
the origin of both philosophy and history. And when historiography became a differentiated
discipline, its conception of history, being comprehensive, pulled philosophy itself into its
field. Millennia separate the historian of today from these origins. They also separate him
from philosophy. But as he descends to the roots, he finds that the fundamental experiences
from which philosophizing springs are human experiences that are not foreign to him, even if
the painstaking study of a philosopher and his thought may be needed to make such an
experience vicariously his own. But the reverse is also true. What a great historian creates is
not a scientific photograph of his subject. It is a disciplined formulation of a way of seeing, an
expression of a fundamental experience capable of organizing the empirical manifold of
events into an intelligible whole. And if this empirical manifold is that of philosophizing, then
the historian's work becomes part of the unfinished "drama" of philosophy by contributing to
the self-understanding of the science whose history he writes.

Such considerations are so far removed from the daily business of the historian of philosophy
that he may well doubt whether they make any difference to the way he conducts this business
and ask to be excused from having to entertain such speculations. It is his good right to refuse
to give up what he considers his professional neutrality. But when such seemingly farfetched
and speculative thoughts open up a vista of concrete historical problems beyond the
accustomed range of his field, then these problems are his professional concern. He may deny
on historiographical grounds that they are genuine or legitimate historical problems, but he
cannot do this without examining them. And there is no reason for the belief that history of
philosophy can never be anything else and anything more than what is traditionally and quite
commonly done under that title today. In fact there is a good deal being done already under
this title that no longer fits the traditional frame. The analytical approach through doctrinal
analysis, explication des textes, and superb, sophisticated doxography has reached a level that
is not easily surpassed. It is one of the great achievements of our time. What lies beyond?
Before going into that it will be well to put the view with which we started to the empirical
historical test, to be sure of the ground we stand on.

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4
Let us be clear about what exactly we want to test. The fact that philosophy has in its
historical course produced a vast, ever-growing fund of knowledge and understanding is not
in question; the question is about the type of knowledge and understanding it has produced.
The view to be tested is that philosophy has never been a "Kantian science," but is instead an
upward movement of thought that is open-ended. From this characterization two corollaries
follow:
1. Any part or branch of philosophy that turns out to be capable of producing rigorously
testable knowledge will eventually drop out of philosophy and become a science in its
own right.
2. Contrariwise, that part of any rigorous science that raises ultimately unanswerable
questions will cease to be part of that science and tend to become a branch of philosophy.

Both tendencies have worked themselves out in the history of philosophy: the contraction of
philosophy from the universal science to "the most general" science, and its expansion toward
increasing universality. Let us begin with the drop-out phenomenon.

However dim the earliest Greek origins of Western philosophy may be because of the paucity
of sources, this much is certain: what came into being there was not an array of differentiated
disciplines but a new way of thinking: en archē ēn ho logos. What came to be known as
philosophy began as the universal science; more properly it began as a general movement of
thought, not as a materially defined field of inquiry.

The first area within philosophy to establish itself as a rigorous science was mathematics.
Kant rightly characterized the event as die Revolution dieser Denkart. What remained within
philosophy was not mathematics as a science but the conception of a mathematical structure
or substructure of reality. The exodus of mathematics took time. A mathematician could still
head the Academy in the Platonic succession, but once mathematics had become a rigorous
discipline it had no room for and no use for speculation. Henceforth the union of mathematics
and philosophy could never be more than a personal union: two disciplines practiced by one
man.

The second case is curious because the discipline that dropped out was a philosophical
invention: theology. What took theology out of philosophy was an act of God. When God
revealed the Word to man, theology received what philosophy lacks to this day: the supernal
source of Truth: Revelatio locuta, causa finita. As a consequence, the mother became the
daughter's servant. She stayed in this role until philosophical doubt began to corrode the belief
that Holy Scripture was the Word. And now we have three

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conceptions where Plato had only one: theological theology, philosophical theology, and
philosophy of religion.

The third defection is so well known that it merely needs to be named: the exodus of science
during the age of systems in philosophy.

This leaves us with the fourth, last, and most intriguing case: the case of logic. If our thesis
holds, logic should have separated out of philosophy in the wake of Aristotle. Why then did it
stay within philosophy for well over two millennia? For Kant, the question had to be put the
other way around: Why did philosophy fail to do in his own day what logic had been able to
do two thousand years earlier? For logic, he found, was the perfect science-almost too perfect.
It had sprung from the head of the philosophical Zeus fully grown and fully armed, and there
was still barely a spot of rust on its armor. All it ever needed was a little cleaning and taking a
few small bumps out, a matter of elegance rather than certainty, as Kant said. Never had logic
been forced to take the smallest step back or to change direction, however slightly. But then
Kant found it no less curious that logic had been equally unable to take the smallest step
forward: logic "gives the appearance of being complete and perfect." The reason he found in
logic's inherent limitation. Unconcerned with the whole phenomenal world, unconcerned also
with all material questions, logic was simply reason's self-exploration, seeking and finding
within itself all that it needed: the forms and rules of right reasoning. All these Kantian
suggestions offer us the clue to the historical puzzle. Reason's self-exploration produced a
rigorous, nonmetaphysical discipline that by rights should have dropped out of philosophy.
But this was a philosophical science in a peculiar sense: it fashioned the philosopher's tools
and handed them to him, not from the outside but within the philosopher's own head, so to
speak. And what is in the philosopher's head, surely, is "philosophy." What kept this
nonphilosophical part of philosophy within the field was its character of being an auxiliary
discipline, the only Hilfswissenschaft required for philosophizing. Once Aristotle had
invented logic, the philosopher merely needed to learn it and use it as his tool. He did not
have to think about it because there was nothing more to be discovered. This Kantian notion
is of course historically untenable. There have been efforts to rethink and reformulate
Aristotelian logic; there were also genuinely philosophical, that is, speculative, attempts to
draw metaphysical substance from logical form--or to infuse logical form with metaphysical
meaning. But these were side efforts. On the whole Kant was right: Aristotelian logic was and
remained a monolithic block. But not for long anymore. Once new possibilities were
discovered, the static auxiliary discipline became a dynamic science. It remained non-
speculative and rigorous but it no longer saw itself as Kant had seen it: as a self-exploration of
reason. It

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became a purely formal science, foreign to philosophy and close to mathematics. As a
consequence it began to move more and more clearly away from philosophy and closer and
closer to a symbiosis and to possible unification with mathematics. Its final exodus from
philosophy is now no more than a matter of time and managerial reorganization.

The history of the great defections thus confirms our first corollary. The second corollary can
be dealt with briefly. The universal science has become the most general science by way of
losing one vast field after another. But with this radical contraction goes a quite peculiar
expansion that takes two forms. The first form can be characterized by saying that anything
and everything except perhaps philosophy itself can be made a field of philosophy by calling
it "The Philosophy of . . ." Thus we now have a philosophy of money, the theater, evolution,
hope, mass media, or what have you. This is merely an articulation of an ancient and
fundamental situation; the speculative approach is not materially limited. It can, and does
increasingly, range over the whole phenomenal field, right down to lower and lowest levels of
generality. This type of extension does not change the structure of the philosophical
enterprise, although it may tend to confuse it.

The other type of expansion, however, does have structural implications. Philosophy has been
gaining new ground because of the growing urgency of foundation problems arising in the
most rigorous sciences. The natural sciences, especially physics, furnish the classical
example. "Natural philosophy" died long ago. There is no more painful philosophical reading
today than Hegel on electricity, magnetism, and crystals. Yet the ultimate problems of physics
are philosophical problems, and so we have now a philosophy of science, filling the need for
rigorously disciplined speculation where everything else fails. What characterizes these new
fields of philosophy is their cooperative character. Despite their title, they are not the
philosopher's own preserve. They are a joint enterprise of scientists, logicians, philosophers,
and historians of science as well as of philosophy; one could almost say: in this order. In fact,
an empirical study of the precise role played by the pure philosopher in these enterprises
might turn up interesting and significant results bearing on the structure of contemporary
philosophy. The historian will certainly note that beyond the confines of the quite technical
contemporary philosophy of science, the old ultimately unanswerable questions are beginning
to be faintly visible again. In the light of this type of expansion, the most general science may
be said to be on the way of becoming the universal science once more--in the realm of the
unprovable.

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5
What lies beyond doxology as a bundle of challenges to the historian can be grouped into two
classes of problems. First, there is the task of writing the history of Western philosophy--the
traditional task that we might call intraphilosophical. The second group of problems arises
when the whole course of Western philosophy is considered as a unit to be placed in the
course of civilizational history as a whole. I will begin with the first area and lead into it by
considering, as an example of what we already have, five outstanding treatments of Hegel:
those of Hippolyte, Lukacs, Kojève, Voegelin, and Marcuse. Hippolyte is the Raisonneur type
at its most impressive best; Lukacs is the historian committed to a philosophy outside his
subject; Kojève, as an incarnation of Hegel, has the inside commitment; Voegelin's [the
manuscript ends here, because, Sebba explains in a 19 January 1971 letter to Richard H.
Popkin, he was "plagued by intolerable headaches" of which he goes on to say "my doctor
thinks it is a belated result from an undiscovered neck injury during the war (a bad parachute
landing)"; what follows is from an undated separate outline of the paper, probably from the
1970s] philosophy of history is historical and philosophical in one; for him, philosophy is a
phenomenon in the field of history, and a constituent of it. Voegelin's philosophy of history
contains a repertoire of questions, method, and answers to be tested out.

6
I have proceeded with the following in mind. The first problem for the historian of philosophy
is that if philosophy is a phenomenon in the field of history, there is "philosophy" and "before
philosophy." The second problem comes from the fact that philosophy "happened" at one
point in time and in one place. Are "philosophies" that arose elsewhere and at other times
"philosophies" in the same sense? Why is "philosophy" not a universal phenomenon?

Remember that "history" is not "one damned thing after another." It is a state of
consciousness.

Philosophical consciousness involves perennial preoccupation with the problems of "mind"


(whose?) and has all but blocked the experiential aspect of philosophizing and the experiential
roots of historical consciousness. One result is that the writing of history of philosophy has
become confused with the study of arguments and their validity. But there is also the

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experiential history, reflected in symbols, some of which have become philosophical terms.
Philosophy's perennial headache has two roots:
The inevitable striving for knowing as much about the unknowable as can be known,
given the time, circumstances, and capabilities of the thinker.
Deformation and loss of knowledge already attained. The question is not: "What is
philosophy of history?" but: "What can, what should be done, beyond what is being
done?" Here are a few private suggestions of (relatively virgin) topics (la recherche de la
paternité est interdite):
Do not study the "bias" of past historians of philosophy; "bias" is a biased word; it
presumes knowledge of what "straight" is. Make comparative studies to find out how
radically different, equally well documented accounts originate; for example, the
Hegel of Hyppolite, Lukacs, Kojève, Voegelin, and Marcuse.
Consider the age of "systems," for example, closed vs. open philosophies.
Consider the age of epistemology, its conceptual and experiential roots, and its
consequences.
Study myth and philosophy; myth against philosophy; etcetera ad infinitum.

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APPENDIX 2
Descartes Against Scepticism Philosophy
Against History?
"This I proposed to do in a longish essay."
[ Gregor Sebba to Richard H. Popkin,
25 August 1984]

FIRST: SCEPTICISM, IN THE FORM OF A CONFRONTATION WITH NIETZSCHE, the


only radical sceptic ever, not counting those who never wrote; then what this means for the
metaphysical view of philosophy.Second: History, beginning with Nietzsche and Whitehead;
the problem of history from the sceptical viewpoint (mine, too). I made a new sceptical
argument against all history, found out that this is in fact the second trope of Agrippa thought
out to the bitter end.Third: Descartes, showing that his assurance preceded the so-called
Pyrrhonic crisis. This assurance--Gouhier: un homme plein d'assurance--was definitely
established in 1619, in the wake of the real sceptical crisis. Popkin's date of 1635 for the
sceptical crisis is untenable, but not incorrectable. This would have been the unveiling of the
crucial part of my Dreams interpretation. [The above is from the letter to Popkin; what
follows is from an undated outline from the late 1970s.]
Introduction
Richard H. Popkin History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes and E. M. Curley
Descartes Against the Sceptics. The questions: What is (and what is not) history, especially of
philosophy? Forces vs. arguments and proofs. What are the consequences of arguments or
proofs being found invalid? Larger questions: the nature of history, and the sceptical
argument from history which the sceptics never made.
1 History: The Sea-God Glaukos in Plato's Republic
1. The ultimate argument against certain knowledge of empirical "fact." Its cosmological
aspect. What the sceptics never made of it.

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2. The present view of it in classical and quantum physics. Note on Watanabe on the
impossibility of prediction and retrodiction.
3. History defined as being only retrodictive, not predictive. Distinction between history in
this proper sense, and "pastness." Brief critique of Curley & Co. (footnote to, or inclusion
of, a Sebba book review of Curley?).
4. Nietzsche, 1887, on the moment when it happens. Anticipation of Whitehead, 1927.
Novelty. Its cosmological ( Whitehead) and "moral" character ( Nietzsche). Example:
Nietzsche Antichrist vs. Renan.
5. Historiography: Ranke--the statue of the sea-god Glaukos. Nietzsche and Whitehead: the
moment of transformation. Back to "Forces vs. Arguments and Proofs."
6. The historical character of Popkin's work specified.
2. Scepticism
1. Brief comparison between Brochard and Popkin.
2. The negative, antiproductive character of scepticism. Cicero, Melanchthon, et al.
3. Popkin's melioristic interpretation ( Encyclopaedia Britannica article).
4. Popkin's view of the destructive nature of scepticism. Scepticism in philosophy, religion,
and its connection with apocalyptic notions of reality.
5. Why the true sceptics combined their scepticism with the principle primum vivere,
deinde philosophari.
6. The sterility of epistemological scepticism in contemporary philosophy.
3. Descartes
1. Three views of Descartes's crise pyrrhonienne: a) Popkin: the battle with the dragon; b)
Gouhier: the hyperbolic doubt not sceptical doubt; c) Kruger: self-consciousness (
Selbstbewusstsein) and doubt: the radicality of attacking mathematical certainty.
2. Confrontation of these three "historical" views with the static attempts to verify or falsify
the system, arguments and proofs of Descartes.
3. Descartes, un homme plein d'assurance ( Gouhier): where did he get his confidence
from?
4. Is the doubt of Meditation I the doubt of Descartes himself? The nature of his retraction
in the response to Gassendi.

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5. Is the hyperbolic doubt convincing as an argument, or is it needed as an experience
resulting in conviction? Correction of Popkin's comment on Descartes's "once in one's
life, at least."
6. Therapeutic vs. demonstrative doubt. The true meaning of Santayana's "histrionic" doubt
and his "animal faith" as applied to Descartes and scepticism.
7. Resolution of the problem: "In the case of Descartes, the experience preceded the
argument by ten years; the argument was invented ex post facto; the crise pyrrhonienne
was experienced, and overcome, in the night of 10-11 November 1619
Conclusion
The role of experience in the formation of philosophies, as against the technical formulation
of the arguments. ( Descartes on the ars inveniendi vs. the ars demonstrandi.) The sources of
philosophical experience. Philosophical (and scientific) "intuition" distinguished from
philosophical (and scientific) construction. Scepticism as the anti-inventive force in modern
philosophy.

Epilogue
Crise pyrrhonienne, doubt, and cogito in the Dreams of Descartes. Brief analysis of Baillet's
transcription of dreams 1 and 3. The appearance of the cogito in dream 3, from the
monograph on the dreams now in preparation [published herein as The Dream of Descartes].

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