Artisans, Machines and Descartes's Organon

ARTISANS, MACHINES, AND DESCARTES’S ORGANON

Jean-François GauvinHarvard University

Descartes’s whole “project of self-instruction”, we learn in Part VI of the Discours de la méthode, “is suffering because of the need for innumerable observations which I cannot possibly make without the help of others [sans l’aide d’autrui]”.1 Scholars have investigated the epistemic role of observations and experiments in Cartesian natural philosophy, but few have considered these “others” fit to assist Descartes in his quest for truth.2 Yet Descartes is quite adamant as to from whom it is that he wants help:

True, as regards observations which may help in [natural philosophy], one man could not possibly make them all. But also he could not usefully employ other hands than his own, except those of artisans, or such persons as he could pay, who would be led by the hope of gain (a most effective motive) to do precisely what he ordered them to do. For voluntary helpers, who might offer to help him from curiosity or a desire to learn, usually promise more than they achieve and make fine proposals which never come to anything. In addition, they would inevitably wish to be rewarded by having certain difficulties explained to them, or at any rate by compliments and useless conversation, which could not but waste a lot of [the natural philosopher’s] time.3

Taken literally, this quotation from the Discours de la méthode establishes the status of artisans as a docile main d’œuvre, whose mechanical skills should help uncover, under the tutelage of natural philosophers, nature’s deepest secrets.4 Volontaires, or honnêtes curieux, are given even less credit here, perceived as a nuisance rather than the source and authority of knowledge — in contrast to Robert Boyle’s conception of gentlemanly science.5 Is it the whole story? Are Cartesian artisans coarse “invis-ible technicians”, the experienced hands of natural philosophers?6 Could artisans somehow encourage or inspire the latter?

Artisans and experimental practices have become in the last twenty years or so a hot topic of interest among scholars of early modern natural philosophy. Hardly any, however, have investigated what artisans really meant to so-called rational philoso-phers à la René Descartes.7 I hope to demonstrate in the first three parts of the article that artisans, at least for a short period of time, were more than rough and mindless helping hands for Descartes. I believe they held an important epistemic function that initially supported the very foundation of Cartesian knowledge, namely the mathesis universalis. Descartes, I explain, saw in the early 1620s an inherent order in the practice of simple métiers. Yet such order, unveiled in the Regulæ ad directionem ingenii, was not encountered in the hands-on practices themselves. Method was found beyond the specific gestes of artisans — beyond the uniqueness of each individual

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ars. Inspired by Pierre Bourdieu I argue that Descartes may have seen some sort of structured discipline within artisanal habitus. He discovered the unity of practice that explained theoretically — rationally — how artisans built machines and manufactured goods, assuming early in life that artisans were endowed with some sort of an âme réglée (orderly soul), an innate and orderly reason guiding manual work.

Descartes, however, started to question the artisan’s inherent structured order as soon as he landed in Paris in the mid-1620s. Before then, never once did he team up with artisans — although he examined how they worked. Theoretical assertions were based mostly on dialogues with natural philosophers (inclined towards the mechanical arts like Isaac Beeckman) and on idiosyncratic observations made during his European tour. When Descartes arrived in Paris and began to study optics in the company of real artisans, his opinion of them wavered. Artisans, including his protégé Jean Ferrier, did not demonstrate the intrinsic âme réglée he thought he had previ-ously contemplated. The artisanal trope guiding hitherto the notion of mathesis had to be replaced by something displaying even more order, i.e. machines in the form of automata. Following D. Graham Burnett’s insightful essay, I will show in the fourth part of the article that the Dioptrique was in fact a treatise written to put in order the activity of the mechanical arts. Machines, according to Descartes, ought to resemble natural philosophical ideas; their design, consequently, needed to be generated by the method. Systematizing the mechanical arts thus ensured that the artisan’s âme déréglée would never misconstrue the creation of an orderly soul.

The Discours de la méthode and its essays, I believe, sought to dominate both the mind and the body of early modern individuals. In the final section of the article, I conjecture that through the trope of machinelike order, Descartes’s method became an instrument of authority. The method aimed not only at the production of rational and mechanical knowledge, but perhaps more importantly at fashioning a new ideal Man, one that could serve adequately both the State and scientia. Descartes’s goal (not unlike Francis Bacon’s) was to forge a novum organum, a new kind of “instru-ment” to replace the old peripatetic one. The method was thus a conceptual organon, a multifaceted instrument of authority created to act on the socio-cultural as well as on the natural philosophical fields of knowledge. The method, in other words, was designed to create honnêtes hommes; it was Descartes’s timely response to the rise of French absolutism.

HABITUS AND DESCARTES’S LOGIC OF PRACTICE

Artisans and Cartesian rational knowledge give the impression of an unusual pair. The first rule of the Regulæ ad directionem ingenii in fact questions the very role artisans play in Descartes’s philosophy. Rule I opposes widening the established (and essentially artisanal) use of habitus to the realm of scientia. Habitus, i.e. the “bodily aptitude and practice” of artisans, first and foremost secures proficiency in individual arts; it is connected to the uniqueness of ars, each and every art requir-ing a set of bodily deftness and movements (gestes) ordinarily distinct from one artisanal practice to another.8 Yet Aristotle developed this conception of art into a

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habitus scientiarum, a notion to which Aquinas, Suárez, and Eustachius a Sancto Paulo’s philosophies adhered, fragmenting scientia into a multiplicity of independ-ent knowledge-components, each imposing its own special intellectual skills and training. Akin to the various arts, every science — knowledge — is created unique and is said to possess its proper system of principles in order to ensure logical and coherent deductive links between objects of a same genus.9 The Aristotelian model of an ideal science thus involved, by definition, a collection of principles that were non-transferable to any other science, just as habitus was exclusive to either the farmer or the cithara player in Descartes’s well-known example.10

Descartes argued forcefully in Rule I against the generalization of habitus because “the knowledge of one truth does not, like skill in one art, hinder us from discovering another; on the contrary it helps us”. Descartes instead gave credence in Rule I to the unity of scientia, i.e. to the idea of an interconnectedness of knowledge commensurate with the universal wisdom.11 Hence, to liken the artisan’s habitus to scientia was sterile and vain “since what makes us stray from the correct way of seeking the truth is chiefly our ignoring the general end of universal wisdom and directing our studies towards some particular ends”.12 Rather, it should be “acknowledged that all the sci-ences are so closely interconnected that it is much easier to learn them all together than to separate one from the other”. To seek true knowledge, therefore, one must avoid the study of particular sciences and try instead to “increase the natural light of his reason”, which will not only help solve this or that scholastic problem, but also show the will “what decision it ought to make in each of life’s contingencies”.13 In contrast to the multiplicity of arts there was only one science for Descartes, one universal knowledge guided by an all-encompassing wisdom. In other words, habitus was to the uniqueness of ars what wisdom was to the unity of scientia.14

Although the character of habitus is unequivocal in Rule I, I suggest it was not utterly useless and purposeless to the Cartesian method of knowledge production. Looking beyond the uniqueness of habitus, to the higher ground of methodology, one can witness how artisanal practices actually bring to light Descartes’s epistemology of rational knowledge, namely the concept of order underpinning the Cartesian method. The method is rarely described as a bona fide logic of practice. As such the method — not yet a metaphysics in the Regulæ — takes place prior to any theoretical or experimental activity of natural philosophy; it lies at the foundation of all Cartesian knowledge.15 Within the method are embedded a series of well-defined logical rules one has to learn and — more importantly — learn to follow; being familiar with them does not guarantee success on the path to true knowledge. Consequently one has to practise, to train in the method, because without practice it remains a mere jeu de l’esprit. Descartes wrote that the method consisted “more in practice than theory”, and that the ultimate aim of the Discours de la méthode was to uncover “a practical philosophy which might replace the speculative philosophy taught in the schools”.16 Accordingly, the four-rule method unveiled in the Discours — summarizing the Regulæ — was not to be taught but rather was to be continually exercised, Descartes himself being compelled to “practice [it] constantly ... in order to strengthen myself


more and more in its use”.17 This emphasis on practice was not merely rhetorical; through such a practical

philosophy the power and action of all things would be known “as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our artisans”.18 Although Descartes belittled habitus as a legitimate approach of knowledge production, he found an inherent logic beyond the observable gestures of artisans, an artisanal logic that could help natural philosophers to acquire a universal method. Descartes explained in Rules IX and X of the Regulæ “how we can make our employment of intuitus and deductio more skilful”, and by the same token “how to cultivate two special mental faculties, viz. perspicacity [per-spicacitas] in the distinct intuition of particular things and discernment [sagacitas] in the methodical deduction of one thing from another”.19 Perspicacitas is linked to intuitus, the certain experientia of Rule III, as the natural mental ability to concen-trate “upon the most insignificant and easiest of matters” and to focus intensively “to acquire the habit of intuiting the truth distinctly and clearly”. Descartes contended that “[s]ome people of course are born with a much greater aptitude for this sort of insight than others; but our minds can become much better equipped for it through method and practice”. Artisans, for instance, “who engage in delicate operations, and are used to fixing their eyes on a single point, acquire through practice the ability to make perfect distinctions between things, however minute and delicate”.20

Perspicacitas was not a bodily disposition acquired through time and hands-on practice: it was rather a mental faculty innate to every thinking being. Artisans were not the only people endowed with such a power of perception.21 However, according to Descartes, their habitus — the ability, for instance, to fix one’s eyes on a single point — illustrated best how to attune one’s own inherent perspicacitas. Echoing Renaissance humanists who urged natural philosophers to enter the craftsman’s workshops and study the practice of their trade, Descartes suggested that the capac-ity to distinguish the most minute and delicate of things — to intuit the common simple natures — is strengthened by the action of artisanal practices.22 The gestural knowledge of artisans could not lead by itself to the production of ideas, yet it could exhibit courses of action that guided the mind towards scientia.

Regarding sagacitas, Descartes’s other constitutive mental faculty, Rule X stipulates that in order to acquire it one should “methodically survey even the most insignificant products of human skill, especially those which display or presuppose order”. In line with perspicacitas, sagacitas — the mental skill to exercise deductio — can be aptly brought to light from the arts and crafts:

Since not all minds have such a natural disposition to puzzle things out by their own exertions, the message of this Rule is that we must not take up the more difficult and arduous issues immediately, but must first tackle the simplest and least exalted arts, and especially those in which order prevails — such as weaving and carpet-making, or the more feminine arts of embroidery, in which threads are interwoven in an infinitely varied pattern. Number-games and any games involving arithmetic, and the like, belong here. It is surprising how much all these activities exercise our minds, provided of course we discover them for ourselves


and not from others. For, since nothing in these activities remains hidden and they are totally adapted to human cognitive capacities, they present us in the most distinct way with innumerable instances of order, each one different from the other, yet all regular. Human discernment [sagacitas] consists almost entirely in the proper observance of such order.23

Sagacitas directly followed perspicacitas: it was the crucial mental faculty that put in series what perspicacitas had discovered. If perspicacitas, which aimed at “attentively noting in all things that which is absolute in the highest degree”, is truly the “whole secret of the art”, sagacitas was indispensable in figuring out the chain of inferences from the most absolute to the most relative of things.24 And to create flawless chains of inferences Descartes knew no better way “than by accustoming ourselves to reflecting with some discernment [cum quâdam sagacitate reflectere] on the minute details of the things we have already perceived”.25 Referring once again to the most unassuming of artisans reinforced the epistemic connection between what lay beyond habitus and the way minds should be disciplined.26

Descartes’s artisanal knowledge-making model diverged from the scholastic weap-ons of choice, syllogisms. To rid philosophy of unproven truth-producing premises, he created a new method inspired by a general and inherent logic of practice found within habitus. Although the School’s training in syllogism was better than nothing (given that it exercised the minds of the young — which without guidance “might head towards a precipice”), Descartes refocused the scholar’s attention on the artisanal practices, on the things that were “perfectly known and incapable of being doubted”.27 The method, Descartes explained,

cannot go so far as to teach us how to perform the actual operations of intuitus and deductio, since these are the simplest of all and quite basic. If our intellect were not already able to perform them, it would not comprehend any of the rules of the method, however easy they might be.28

The Cartesian method did not teach how to use intuitus and deductio, both being natural abilities. The method was rather created to instruct how mastery of these two innate powers could be achieved. This meant the introduction, use and continual exercise of matter-of-fact mental faculties such as perspicacitas and sagacitas, their proficiency drawing from basic mathematics and down-to-earth artisanal practices.

Artisanal practices, however, were not to be studied for their own sake, but as exemplary practices of the method. Take, for instance, blacksmithing. If first deprived of all the instruments of his trade, the blacksmith — like any artisan exercising a self-supporting mechanical art — initially uses either a hard rock or an unformed mass of iron as an anvil, a stone as a hammer, pincers made of wood, and other rudi-mentary tools he might need to begin working. Of course, he will not start making swords, helmets, and metallic artefacts immediately, but rather will fabricate an anvil, all sorts of hammers, pincers and metallic tools necessary to his trade. Only then will the blacksmith be in a position to undertake the production of commodi-ties. This example taken from Rule VIII teaches that unmethodical and inconsistent


operations should be proscribed for the creation of merchandise — or the solution of mathematical problems and the determination of philosophical disputes.29 Here Descartes did not emphasize the blacksmith’s bodily skills in making tools, swords or helmets — and he certainly did not try to improve those skills per se. Rather, he focused on the blacksmith’s working method and orderly approach towards the production of materials. The method, seen through the eyes of this mechanical art, becomes an unbroken “mechanical” thinking process, one that is methodical and intended for a specific goal. Nothing is left to chance, random practices or acciden-tal judgements.30 In this well-known example, producing Cartesian knowledge and producing artisanal goods look as though they fundamentally came from one and the same logic of practice, the function of an ordered thinking process.

ORDER AND THE MATHÉMATICITÉ OF MATHESIS

The question of order is undeniably one of the most important in the Regulæ and the Discours. In fact, it underlies the Cartesian logic of practice: “The whole method consists entirely in the ordering and arranging of the objects on which we must concentrate our mind’s eye if we are to discover some truth.”31 The above example of the blacksmith (forgeron in French) is by no mean random: if we cannot discern an apparent order, we have mentally to forge one (sed tamen aliquem fingemus, or forger un ordre) by the power of cogitatio.32 Rule IV of the Regulæ accounts for the full meaning of order, embedded in the concept of mathesis universalis and established as the bedrock of Descartes’s logic of practice. Since the study of Jean-Paul Weber, Rule IV is often divided into two parts.33 The rule is said to have been written at two different times and to bear two different purposes: the question and search for certainty through a method in IV-A (1619), and the establishment of an even more general mathesis as the universal — and mathematical — way to certain knowledge in IV-B (1628). Jean-Luc Marion, however, has convincingly shown that this dichotomy is merely apparent. What unites the methodical search for certainty to the mathematical model of knowledge is the more abstract notion of the mathématicité of mathematics, the intrinsic order of mathematics. The Cartesian mathesis, contrary to what is generally believed, is not grounded in mathematics per se, but rather in a universal abstraction articulated from the orderly nature of mathematics. Descartes in Rule IV is trying to stretch truth and certainty beyond the realm of mathematics, to the entire body of human knowledge (scientia). As he explained in the same rule, “When I considered the matter more closely, I came to see that the exclusive con-cern of mathesis [ad Mathesim] is with questions of order or measure and that it is irrelevant whether the measure in question involves numbers, shapes, stars, sounds, or any other object whatever”.34 Mathematics here “merely” served the purpose of acquiring this science of order: it did not epitomize it.35

Descartes was thus looking for a new way to establish on a solid philosophical foundation both non-mathematical (causal) and mathematical (intellectual) objects. This is the chief objective of Rule IV: to achieve the unity of knowledge.36 To do so he required more than mathematics: he needed to uncover the abstract notion of


mathématicité within non-mathematical objects. Rule II makes this exact assertion, claiming that “in seeking the right path of truth we ought to concern ourselves only with objects which admit of as much certainty as the demonstration of arithmetic and geometry”.37 I believe Descartes found the path towards the mathématicité of non-mathematical objects within the sphere of habitus.

Because Descartes wanted to deal with non-mathematical objects, he could not fully dispose of habitus. Habitus itself, for instance, meant the bodily disposition of artisans and musicians to produce specific knowledge. Habitus and its gestural knowl-edge, for Descartes, was unique to each ars. But as we have seen with the example of the blacksmith, the contemplation of mechanical arts permitted the revelation of a general built-in procedure, a structured discipline that was not pure rational think-ing, yet not a completely disorganized way of creation. He saw in this structured discipline orderly systems without specific ends, yet not at all chaotic or governed by the mere fortune of the hands.38 For example, Descartes witnessed in weavers and embroiderers something similar to “an infinite yet strictly limited generative capacity” emanating from some calculated regularities; as an explicit sign of order, they conditioned the artisan’s work habits.39 Artisans’ know-how was to some extent organized because it followed a structured discipline moulded by regulated practices. As long as it administered order — as in the case of blacksmiths and weavers — such a structured discipline could be drawn upon to invent a series of epistemic steps leading to the more fundamental mathesis. These steps in the field of the mechani-cal arts could be understood as structural exercises, an overall pedagogical strategy that went further than a trial-and-error training system. Descartes’s close attention to object-oriented structural exercises could well explain why the Cartesian notions of perspicacitas — to find the most absolute of things — and sagacitas — to put into series — designed to train the mind in the method were illustrated by both the mathematical disciplines and the mechanical arts.40

What Descartes dismissed back in Rule I was not habitus, per se, but rather the uniqueness of art, the fact that specific gestes must be learnt for each art. Looking beyond the bodily dispositions of habitus, beyond the uniqueness of the artisanal techniques, we find a structured discipline leading to one and the same internal logic of practice. Although each art has its own techniques, the structured discipline found within habitus is based on a unity of practice, a theoretical framework suitable for all matters of art. It is through this abstract and more general understanding of habitus — the mathématicité of non-mathematical objects — that Descartes fashioned to a certain extent the unity of practice found in the mathesis universalis. Ars and scientia are not as alienated in Cartesian knowledge as they are usually thought to be.

ÂMES RÉGLÉES AND THE IDEA OF ARTISAN

In La recherche de la verité Descartes points out that “enough truth can be known in each subject to satisfy amply the curiosity of orderly souls [âmes réglées]”.41 The pursuit of knowledge must be guided by an orderly soul, which ought not search for “those simple [and textual] forms of knowledge which can be acquired without any


process of reasoning, such as languages, history, geography and in general any subject which rests on experience alone” but should rather inquire into “ordinary facts about which everyone has heard” — and which artisans are thoroughly accustomed to.42 Taking a closer look at Descartes’s early writings, the artisan emerges under a more nuanced and fundamental light. In fact, I claim, the artisan in the Regulæ should not be seen as an amenable aide but rather as a powerful epistemic model to the produc-tion of rational knowledge. Remarkably enough, some of the most unassuming and mechanical artisans are converted into archetypal models of rational discipline and orderly thoughts. However, it is the concept of artisan and artisanal practices that characterizes the Cartesian method. The artisan as genuine homo faber is transformed in Descartes’s writings into an idealization, a disembodied epistemic metaphor compelled by order. The body techniques, the gestural knowledge of practices are completely dropped and superseded by an abstract rationalization, an âme réglée, which communicates a new theoretical understanding of the practice of natural phi-losophy.43 The Cartesian artisan becomes not so much “invisible” as “virtual”.

The chief characteristic of Cartesian artisans is unquestionably their condition of being “properly mechanic” individuals.44 Descartes (so far as I know) always used in French, in published and unpublished texts, the word ‘artisan’ rather than ‘artiste’ in identifying craftsmen. This distinction is clearly not arbitrary and denotes another epistemic dichotomy between forms of learning and, ultimately, the nature of knowledge ascertained. Socially and etymologically speaking, artisan and artiste meant essentially the same thing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (both derived from the Latin artifex).45 To Descartes, however, an ‘artiste’ was and remained someone who dealt with the Grand Art, or alchemy, one of these “false sciences” for which he knew enough about “to be liable not to be deceived” by their promises.46 Marin Mersenne believed that such artistes were in a position to assist natural philoso-phers, although his confidence they would eventually do so was low.47 Nonetheless, behind the substantive ‘artisan’, Descartes recommended we look specifically at the mechanical arts and their practitioners — not at alchemists and Paracelsians — in order to acquire an orderly soul.

The Cartesian artisan, therefore, was not guided by an “epistemology of the hunt”. Unconstrained by a pure perception of order, this “venatic methodology”, as described by William Eamon, is “a kind of practical intelligence based upon acquired skill, experience, subtle wit, and quick judgement: in short, cunning”.48 The venatic methodology was needed, it was believed, to chase the signs and clues, the signatures of substances and materials, so as to pick the scent and as a result uncover these secrets — the modern facts — “tucked snugly in under the blanket of scientia”. Cunning, or mêtis as it was known to the Greeks, supplanted orderly thoughts.49 In Descartes’s judgement, artistes rather than artisans possessed and exercised such a mêtis; one could say they were endowed with an âme déréglée. When Descartes contemplated artisans in the early 1620s he saw something completely different: no venatio, no conjectural knowledge, no cunning, only a pure and uncompromising order in their logic of practice.


The “idea of artisan” is of course not original to Descartes. In the Platonic tradi-tion the Creator of the world and man was symbolized by a craftsman — namely a Demiurge — imposing order onto Nature from the universal chaos. Socrates, in Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, asserted the relevance of artisans in enlightening such a tale of creation:

The craftsmen having their eye on their task do not select and apply to it at random what they apply; rather they see to it that their work comes to have a definite form [eidos]. For instance, painters, house builders, shipwrights, and all other craftsmen whomever you wish to choose, place all things in some order and compel one part to suit another and to harmonize with it until the whole thing as they fashion it has order and beautiful organization.

Artisans, trying to reach ideal Forms, systematized the mechanical arts as the Demiurge did with Nature’s matter. Order was thus inherent neither in the arts nor in Nature: it was imposed from outside, from an external cause, from a demiourgos. In the Aristotelian tradition, conversely, Nature herself followed an orderly purpose. Nature’s own innate craftsmanship turned into the attribute to which artisans were now referred: ars imitatur naturam. Whereas Aristotle used the artisan as a powerful analogy to illustrate, confirm, and justify nature’s modus operandi, Plato’s Demiurge qua craftsman was a full-blown epistemic representation of nature as a machine, orderly built like any other invention from the mechanical arts.50

For Descartes Nature could not act as a model leading to the mathesis. The mathesis was instead at the origins of the “grande mécanique de la nature”. Rediscovering the mathesis (suppressed “with a kind of pernicious cunning” from the writings of the Ancients, as artisans customarily do with their own inventions51) is to uncover how the universe was built and set in motion — the great Cartesian fables of Le monde and L’homme. Art did not imitate nature; art and nature were rather guided by a more general mathesis. According to Descartes, anyone endowed with this science of order would not have to struggle bodily with matter and ars. Such a struggle with reality was indicative of a disorder in knowledge-making practices. Artisans and artistes labouring, toiling in the workshops, manipulating and transforming matter through sweat, burns, grease, and heat “practised knowing … that constituted a bodily engagement with nature”. To Descartes, it merely gave them the illusion of acquiring a first-hand understanding of reality. This “artisanal epistemology”, epitomized by the practices of alchemy, and especially by the writings of Paracelsus, went against the approach of an orderly soul.52 The Cartesian âme réglée was concerned only with strategies inculcated by the mathématicité of the mathesis, which was not derived from the gestural knowledge of artisanal practices but from the inbuilt structured discipline of habitus.

Take another of Descartes’s paradigmatic examples from the Regulæ, weaving. The choice of this craft is historically charged and once again not taken randomly. In France, after the devastation caused by the Wars of Religion, the Bourbon economic restoration instigated by Henry IV was wholly felt within the textile industry. In


Beauvais alone, 700 to 800 looms were continuously in operation, employing roughly half of the city’s population in the first half the seventeenth century. Dijon was even more important as a ville drapante, surpassed only by the several new manufactures opening at that time in the Parisian region.53 Interestingly enough, the technological design of the horizontal loom had not changed significantly since its introduction in the twelfth century. This technical revolution was significant for at least one medieval philosopher. Five centuries before Descartes’s birth, weaving became one of Hugh of St Victor’s archetypes of the mechanical arts, inspired from the trivium and quadrivium of the liberal arts. Hugh argued in his Didascalicon for a division between ratio (wisdom, order) and administratio (actual practices) in the mechanical arts, maintaining that a ratio of mechanical origins should also be regarded as an integral part of philosophy.54 Descartes, half a millennium later, similarly saw ratio — not just the actual gestes of administratio — behind the mechanical arts, what we associated with the structured discipline of habitus.

Weavers on their looms in fact did not bodily struggle with the machine and the fabric, as Descartes may have himself noticed. In fact, such bodily struggles would have resulted in a poor quality in the manufactured goods, since everything about mechanical weaving was governed by a strict order of procedure and the smooth, continuous and regular movements of the couple man/woman-machine (mostly women until the fifteenth century). (Notice here two fundamental concepts of the Regulæ: order [Rule IV] and regular and uninterrupted motion [Rule VII].) To achieve the best quality of draperies, weavers had to become one with the machine, as if they were just another link in the great chain (tela) driving the looms. (This body-machine symbiosis was so manifest that weavers were often called telier in old French and teler in old English.) The body or hands-on experience of weavers did not by itself guarantee excellence; one needed to look instead at the orderly and uninterrupted movements of the body-machine entity taken as a whole. Weavers in Descartes’s observation and contemplation became an abstraction of order owing to their symbiosis with a mechanical device. Their orderly souls thus emanated naturally from the technology of weaving.55

Although Descartes skilfully used the artisan as a rhetorical trope, there is no indi-cation he himself ever dabbled with crafts or worked with artisans before his optical days in Paris in the mid-1620s.56 We know that when he left the Collège La Flèche to travel around Europe, to find knowledge “in the great book of the world”, he mixed “with people of diverse temperaments and ranks [diuerses humeurs & conditions]”, which no doubt suggests some acquaintances with artisans and instrument makers.57 In Holland, particularly, the collective embarrassment of riches and the Baconian style of natural philosophy caught his eyes.58 There, during his well-known stay with Isaac Beeckman in 1618, he realized that scientia and ars should not be subordinated to one another; he recognized that both were needed in concert to reveal the true nature of the world.59 As the first “physico-mathematici” in Europe, Beeckman and Descartes claimed, they tried — in the hydrostatic manuscript for example — to unify the mathematical study of nature with true ontological, corpuscular-mechanical,


causes. Trained in the candle making and water-conduit laying trades, Beeckman was able to theorize his hands-on knowledge of the mechanical arts in order to raise to the realm of concepts the operations of artisans and machines. “What Beeckman was demanding in natural philosophy was the application of the criteria of mean-ingful communication between mechanical artisans — the appeal to a pictorial or imaginable structure of parts whose motions are controlled within a putative theory of mechanics.”60 Beeckman gave the initial impetus to Descartes’s later contention that the mechanical arts could function as a methodological guideline for the purpose of discovering the laws of nature.

Before leaving Holland, Descartes invented his proportional compass, this simple instrument that altered how he thought about mathematics.61 In Germany a few months later, he did more than remain in his “stove-heated room” and dream about a mirabilis scientiæ fundamenta: he sought the company of mathematicians such as Johannes Faulhaber and Peter Roth, and most probably conferred with the instrument makers and mathematical practitioners Benjamin Bramer and Jost Bürgi.62 Late in the 1610s Descartes adopted a mathematical practice that was by no means strange, nor unrewarding to those searching for the foundation of a new natural philosophy. It has been for the last twenty years Jim Bennett’s contention that the mechanical philosophy was not solely an intellectual construction, but something that was founded with the help of “mechanics”, those whose job focused on applying the mathemati-cal sciences. Bennett demonstrates how the practical mathematical sciences were transformed, through the use of instruments, into legitimate natural philosophical knowledge. In describing this contract between practice and knowledge, Bennett has recently drawn on the notion of ‘virtue’ to encompass both integrity and effec-tiveness of action. As he explains, “the integrity of the grounding of an instrument or of a practical technique in geometrical science ensures its efficiency as well as the certainty of its results”. In this context, both instrument and operator become grounded in the mathematical sciences. “In a sense”, Bennett continues, “mathemat-ics is ‘embodied’, in instrument and operator; it is founded on a science rendered applicable through virtuous instruments and through codes of practice mastered by the expert practitioner”. In other words, late sixteenth-century mechanics stood for an epistemic culture that comprised mathematical practitioners, their instruments and the scientia of geometry.63 Descartes’s idea of artisans endowed with orderly souls has to some extent a foundation in this late Renaissance epistemic culture.

Descartes employed to his advantage the trope of artisans (whether weavers or blacksmiths) because their ratio appeared universal, reaching the mathématicité of mathematics. Descartes’s few years spent in Paris in the mid-1620s, however, would significantly modify this methodological point of view. He soon shifted his portrayal of artisans; he began to see them as individuals possessing unreliable bodily dispositions, in serious need of a rigorous rational training in the logic of practice. This change of heart was due to Descartes’s direct dealings (at long last) with artisans.


THE DIOPTRIQUE AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF THE MECHANICAL ARTS

Descartes’s most celebrated achievement during his Parisian sojourn in the mid-1620s was the elaboration of the law of refraction, demonstrating that the anaclastic line was Kepler’s hyperboloid. How he discovered the sine law has been the subject of several conjectures over the past two decades.64 For our purpose we need only to emphasize the fact that Descartes was lucky enough to study with possibly one of the best Paris-ian géomètres and optical practitioners of the time, the bourgeois Claude Mydorge. Mersenne thought approvingly of Mydorge as a mathematician and draughtsman, praising the latter many times in the second book of his Questiones celeberrimæ in Genesim, dedicated to conic sections and the fabrication of mirrors.65 Optics and mirrors piqued Mydorge’s curiosity for intellectual reasons as well as for concerns regarding his social status. Mirrors of all kinds were a rare luxury before 1630, highly regarded and expensive objects for the aristocracy in contact with the French court. It is probably no exaggeration to say that Mydorge spent as much as 100,000 écus towards the manufacture of countless mirrors and lenses — considering it was not uncommon to hear of people who had ruined themselves buying richly decorated mirrors of all sizes.66 Besides natural philosophy, extravagance of that kind served well Mydorge’s noblesse de robe’s inclination towards social climbing contra blue-blood landed gentry. In fact, he became such a master at polishing mirrors that one of Mersenne’s early correspondents asked whether the Trésorier de France would agree to pass on the secret of his art. Although Mydorge was a genuine honnête homme — and thus not inclined to hide his expertise as would an artisan — a secret like this was too good to be shared, not so much for profit as for esteem and honour.67 Whatever Mydorge’s chief motivation, his effort at producing such fancy objects of high Parisian fashion was central to Descartes’s later formulation and proof of the sine law.68 Alongside Mydorge was an instrument maker well known in Mersenne’s circle, and who worked with the premier ingénieur du roy Jacques Aleaume in the early 1620s.69 It was, of course, Jean Ferrier, Descartes’s most famous artisan.70

According to Adrian Baillet, Ferrier was adroit and highly esteemed by Parisian scholars:

This Ferrier mentioned by M. Descartes, probably introduced to him through Mydorge, was not a simple artisan who only knew how to move his hands. He understood the theory of his occupation and knew optics and mechanics as well as any Collège Royal professor. He was not totally unfamiliar with the rest of mathematics, and in spite of his status he was welcomed in the circles of savants as if he were one of their own.71

Ferrier, Descartes and Mydorge drew, cut, and hand-polished lenses (hyperbolic included) as early as 1626. Their endeavour was reported by Mersenne to Robert Cornier, who replied that Ferrier’s ability as a craftsman would most certainly be tested.72 We know from a much later letter to Constantijn Huygens that Descartes, thanks to Mydorge’s draughtsmanship and Ferrier’s technical skill, shaped around 1627 a hyperbolic lens that provided proof of the law of refraction.73 Although


Mydorge’s drawing and mathematical proficiency were never doubted by either Mersenne or Descartes, Ferrier’s skills as a mécanicien were, as Cornier had antici-pated, thoroughly tested and eventually questioned.

Before Descartes landed in Paris, Mersenne had already criticized in Questiones in Genesim the ability of artisans to manufacture good mirrors and lenses.74 Des-cartes too became dissatisfied with the artisans’ craftsmanship, which did not meet his early expectations. Hence he allegedly trained in the art of lens grinding a few Parisian tourneurs, a know-how he seemed to have mastered, according to Baillet.75 Following the relationships between Descartes, Ferrier and other Dutch and French artisans in regard to the mechanized production of hyperbolic lenses, one can identify a significant break regarding the epistemic value previously attributed by Descartes to these same artisans. In a recent monograph, D. Graham Burnett persuasively shows that although the project of making telescopes may have itself initiated “a new form of cooperation” between artisans and savants, the mechanization of lens making “can be understood as an effort to end this new and interdependent relationship”.76 In Descartes’s mind the artisan — including Ferrier — changed from an ideal meta-phor of order to a down-to-earth and mundane Jacques Metius, the Dutch optician described at the beginning of the Dioptrique who stumbled upon the discovery of the telescope through sheer mêtis. Whether Ferrier’s failure as an instrument maker was due to psychological distress or to his ambition of becoming an honnête homme through a royal nomination at the Galerie du Louvre did not matter to Descartes in the end. What Descartes ultimately recognized in Ferrier and others was the simple fact that artisans in general were in need of a well-developed method.77

The invention and manufacture of a mechanized lens-making machine compelled Descartes to reconsider his conviction that the artisan was an epistemic metaphor exemplifying a logical and disciplined orderly soul: exit the inherently methodical artisan that guided his initial notion of mathesis. The “rational” artisan no longer was prevalent in his philosophical argument. He needed a new metaphor, one that would essentially be more structured and logical — like a machine. Burnett is here more relevant than ever when he claims that “In Descartes’s view the shortcomings of craftsmen lay in their being insufficiently mechanical: they were not entirely scrutable in mechanical terms, and therefore the path to perfected lens making lay in the mechanization of the craftsman, more automation, and the alienation of the hand of the artisan”.78

Because it was simply unbearable to think that an invention si vtile & si admirable as the telescope was solely due to naked cunning and hands-on experience, Descartes’s Dioptrique, which he began writing in the early 1630s, became the rational response to the artisan’s lack of method.79 Although the Dioptrique may look like a manual of technical instruction aimed at producing telescopes, it should be considered above all as a work inculcating the method.80 The essay, furthermore, was not intended for a hypothetical überartisan — as Bruce Eastwood argues — but was rather meant for artisans tout court, to those âmes déréglées populating the mechanical arts.81 The Dioptrique was written in such a way that it established precisely how the mechanical


arts should be carried out; it showed that building complex machines should no longer be a matter of one’s cunning or hands-on experience. The Dioptrique was meant to instruct in the mechanical arts Descartes’s new and universal logic — his method.

Back in 1626 Cornier believed that Descartes would never find the law of refraction if he did not reason out first how to make telescopes of all focal lengths.82 Descartes of course thought (and said) otherwise, and the explanation of refraction is found in the second discourse of the Dioptrique, right after the nature of light and well before the art of telescope making. His procedure thus reflected his entire philosophy of the order of reasons: from the nature of light to the law of refraction, he then proceeded to the working of the eye, the ability to see in general, how to perfect the latter with artificial lenses, and finally how mechanically to build telescope (and microscope) lenses free of spherical aberration. The lens-grinding machine — or any other machine for that matter — was the very last thing an artisan should worry about; without a comprehensive understanding of the problem at hand, artisans reverted back to a craftsmanship based on the dreadful mêtis — back, in other words, to the modus operandi of the Dutch Metius. What Descartes was trying to accomplish in the Dioptrique had nothing to do with late Renaissance engineering, whose famous yet mostly artistic theatres of machines depicted extravagant mechanisms and rarely offered theoretical guidelines on how to make and study them.83 The Dioptrique — not unlike Salomon de Caus’s Les raisons des forces movvantes (Frankfurt, 1615) — was a contrario an effort to bring to the order of discourse what ought to regulate and organize the artisanal practices. The telescope here became a powerful emblem of the necessity to carry out a thorough re-examination of the mechanical arts. The Cartesian telescope should consequently be understood as the by-product of a methodical mechanical art put to its perfection.

At the apex of the Dioptrique the lens-grinding machine bore the burden of the proof of the Cartesian method. If no one could make the machine work, no hyper-bolic lens could be produced; with no lenses the truthfulness of the Cartesian optical science could not be demonstrated; and without the latter demonstration, the whole Cartesian method was put in jeopardy. No wonder Descartes always held a defen-sive stance regarding the fabrication of this machine. Already in 1630 he believed his machine was conceptually sound and emphasized that building it came down essentially to Ferrier’s skills. In like fashion, towards the end of the Discours de la méthode he wanted his readers to understand and remember that if “artisans are not immediately able to put into operation the invention explained in the Dioptrique, I do not think it can on that account be said to be defective”. A year later he was again on the defensive when he learnt from Mersenne that Girard Desargues was discuss-ing with Cardinal de Richelieu the opportunity to exploit on a grand scale the part of Dioptrique pertaining to the mechanical manufacture of hyperbolic lenses. Flat-tered by the idea, Descartes nevertheless worried that if the artisans assigned to this task were not under his immediate supervision they would be unsuccessful and, in consequence, he could be held responsible for their failing.84 He knew that if artisans did not succeed in making hyperbolic lenses with the lens-grinding machine, this


failure would not be seen as a mere imperfection of the mechanical design: it would be acknowledged as a collapse of the Cartesian method.

Although no other instrument in the Cartesian corpus equalled the lens-grind-ing machine in authority, mechanical apparatuses were never far from Descartes’s mind.85 To Golius, for example, he described a measuring instrument of his invention to prove experimentally the authenticity of the law of refraction, giving sufficient details (a drawing included) to build it.86 Descartes also tried over time to improve weight-driven clocks, to assess an Archimedean screw invented by a Dutch engi-neer, and to perfect an apparatus he saw in Leucheron’s (Van Etten’s) Récréations mathématiques describing an arquebus shooting a lead ball vertically — which, after many trials, it was said, did not fall back on earth.87 Even the study of rainbows in the essay Météores rested heavily on the material culture of rainbow fountain making set in seventeenth-century courtly gardens.88 What made the lens-grinding machine distinctive came from the fact that Descartes used it to prove a simple truth: the strict organization of knowledge required to build this machine demonstrated the Carte-sian method. The artisan had been supplanted by another metaphor, encompassing this time the inbuilt order of levers and gears — the order of mechanism. Descartes was teaching a new and universal habitus, one based on the rational and mechanical attributes of the method. The lens-grinding machine became in this context more than an artisan’s tool: it became an epistemological instrument; better yet, an example of “thing knowledge”, an object fully embodying the Cartesian mechanization of knowledge.89

BODY, MACHINES, AND THE DISCIPLINE OF KNOWLEDGE

In a comment made on the motion of individual particles with regard to the overall structure of celestial matter, Descartes declares to Burman that although “the entire system [of the universe] is in a state of equilibrium”,

[it] is a very difficult thing to conceive of, because it is a mathematical and mechanical truth. We are not sufficiently accustomed to thinking of machines, and this has been the source of nearly all error in philosophy.90

By now, and for close to two decades, Descartes had abolished artisans as the epis-temic emblem of order and replaced them with the more visual and tactile mechani-cal order of machines. This “mechanical turn” was so compelling that, as Graham Burnett tentatively illustrates, a closer connection between the mechanically produced hyperbolic lenses of the Dioptrique and the mind’s eyes’ “metaphysical lens” — or hyperbolic doubt — found in the Meditations could be entertained without too much of a stretch.91 The machine in the end did not only supplant the artisan; it ultimately incarnated Cartesian metaphysics and natural philosophy. The concept of machine became that of an object of knowledge.

This, I believe, should be taken literally. In the Sidereus nuncius, for instance, Galileo did not mention the telescope by name, referring instead to “the instrument [organum] with the benefit of which [great things of nature] make themselves manifest


to our sight”.92 It is not unusual here for Galileo to speak of a mechanical instrument as an organon — a thing that serves a specific purpose — following the traditional Aristotelian definition of the word. Where Descartes distanced himself from Galileo and other natural philosophers, however, was in the explicit and epistemic connection he made between an artificial and a natural organon; between a mechanical instru-ment and a bodily organ.93

In the Dioptrique the correlation between mechanization and organon was firmly established. In the essay Descartes compared the same telescope to an “organe exterieur”, an organon or instrument that could be put over another external organ, namely the human eye.94 For Descartes it was a simple matter of joining together two mechanical organs, the telescope and the human eye — the latter, as claimed by Kepler already, being nothing more than another machine, a camera obscura.95 More mechanization here meant a sure path towards perfection, in this case the per-fection of vision. The telescope, moreover, was not unlike Descartes’s compasses found in the Géométrie. Both were mechanical extensions of corporeal organs (eye and hand) that served the purpose of achieving a kind of knowledge otherwise unat-tainable — heavenly phenomena and complex mechanical curves respectively. That knowledge could never be intuited with any other “natural” organ; it could not be made certain without these special mechanical prostheses. Instruments, or mechanical organa, could therefore be added to bodily senses in order to achieve clear and distinct knowledge.96 The telescope and compass were in this context mechanical addenda that could be likened to Ambroise Paré’s famous artificial hand: once attached to the body, they became whole with it — reminiscent of the weavers and their looms previously mentioned; they were fully integrated, incorporated, and acted as if they were an original part of the body, a “natural organon”.97

This multiplication of mechanisms — organa — was not a problem but a virtue in Cartesian natural philosophy. When Huygens reported to Descartes in Septem-ber 1637 that an Amsterdam tourneur could build the lens-grinding machine with fewer contrivances than depicted in the Dioptrique, Descartes was left unconvinced. Although such an outcome would be received with enthusiasm, he strongly believed his machine did not need less but more mechanical contrivances, things omitted in the original description but easy to discover with experience.98 Artisans’ and engi-neers’ habitus told them otherwise, however, i.e. fewer moving parts was better as regards applied mechanics. It was, for example, Salomon de Caus’s chief assumption. He criticized late Renaissance engineers like Besson and Ramelli for their overly mechanized machines: they may look good on paper, but in reality would simply not work (or be practical) because the operational ratio of time over the number of geared wheels had been extended too much.99 Yet for Descartes, more mechanization meant only one thing: one was approaching Nature’s perfection. The difference between God’s machines and human-built machines was no longer a difference in degree, but a difference in quantity; although His machines are composed of more parts, tinier parts and more intricate parts, the act of creation itself — and our mechanical understanding of creation — is identical to both our and God’s machines. Only the


incommensurable number of parts in God’s machines keeps the power of the summum Artifex beyond our reach and comprehension.100

The human body understood as a system of mechanical organa circles back to the notion of habitus. Habitus can be translated in both French and English as disposi-tion, and inasmuch as reason was Descartes’s sole universal instrument, the human body as a machine was composed and ordered according to the particular disposi-tion des organes, each organon properly positioned in the body and responsible for a specific task or action.101 This instrumental conception of the human body arose in the early 1630s in Descartes’s L’homme, at the same time he began to repudiate the artisan as his knowledge-making epistemic metaphor. In this treatise on man Descartes supposed our material incarnation to be nothing else than a statue or machine — and it was how Descartes meant it to be depicted.102 It was designed by God in such a way that “inside it all the parts required to make it walk, eat, breathe, and indeed to imitate all those of our functions which can be imagined to proceed from matter and to depend solely on the disposition of our organs”.103 The world on which this machine lived, Descartes’s Monde, written around the same time, was no different. All the particles were sorted out and reorganized from the original chaos into a perfectly pre-disposed order. And the motion of these particles, while given a rectilinear mouvemens by God, was repeatedly curved or irregular owing to “the various dispositions of matter”.104 The disposition of matter and organs in the world and in the human body respectively displayed the importance of organization (from organon) in Descartes’s natural philosophy. In other words, Descartes was organ-izing all of knowledge, scientia; he was imposing order on the universe.

Although automata (and particularly clocks) epitomized in early modern Europe the supreme qualities of regularity, order, and harmony, Descartes’s original impetus to mechanize the body in imitation of his well-ordered method may not have natu-rally occurred from the contemplation of automated figures in the grottoes of the royal gardens at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, as is usually assumed.105 One, I believe, has to look for a much broader picture, specifically the rise of French absolutism. In France, scholars such as Jean Bodin and Charles Loyseau wrote influential treatises emphasizing the socio-political and cultural advantages of a disciplined and well-organized state during and after the devastating Wars of Religion. “In all things there must be order, for the sake of decorum and for their control”, reasoned Loyseau in the very first sentence of his treatise.106 The clergy and royal authorities strove from the late sixteenth century onward to impose a sense of order over a chaotic popular culture by attempting to control the mind and body of the menu peuple. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s “political technology of the body”, Robert Muchembled describes how the state began a repression of the body centring on sexual conducts, the social mastery of one’s own body — how to become an honnête homme — and the penal system. Such disciplining of the body and personal behaviour became an essential element of the early modern “civilizing process” described in Norbert Elias’s cel-ebrated work. The clergy, in a similar fashion, came down hard on witchcraft, popular fêtes, and such credulous mentality as an effective way to shape and thus control the


mind of simple people. Religious morality and complete obedience to a father figure — family patriarch, king, God — became effective means of enforcing a measure of civil order. Mind and body were no longer the private property of beings in ancien régime France. Individuals became social bodies, inseparable from the royal and religious authorities of the kingdom.107

In the microcosm of artisanal life a similar fashioning of body and mind took place. One of Henry IV’s conseillers, Barthélemy Laffemas, maintained in the early seventeenth century that order actually reigned in the French manufactures before the disintegration of the state’s royal authority caused by the religious wars. To improve commerce the King needed to restore “to their past perfection” the drapery and dye manufactures.108 A discipline of labour was seen as essential to the success of any artisanal practice. Hence the key for master guildsmen was control over skill, both its meaning and its possession: skill had to be made synonymous with discipline and subordination. Training apprentices was not the only task of a master: the transmission of trade values was as important. Artisanal habitus was as much a result of hands-on training as it was indoctrination to the specific attitude of a community. To become a master an apprentice had to show his/her mind and body were appropriately moulded. Skill, as James Farr insightfully notes, “was as much a cultural construct articulating boundaries of a community defined by status and a sense of difference as an indicator of the economic capacity of a worker”.109 Discipline and subordination of skills, both for the body and the mind, facilitated the establishment of order within guild society. This is why the so-called “masters by letters”, individuals nominated by royal instances without producing a masterpiece — like the Galerie du Louvre’s artisans — were scorned by master guildsmen. Their displeasure was not so much built around the fact that masters of letters’ skills were often questionable, but rather that their socially-constructed authority as legitimate masters was undermined. The challenging and expensive process of creating a chef-d’œuvre was actually about value and skill subordination of future trade masters rather than skill credentials per se.110

An orderly soul structured around the Cartesian method required above all an organized body, one that acted as a material instrument, a suitable organon. Through methodical order, Descartes sought to incorporate a new (absolute) way of know-ing into early modern bodies. His organon — his method or knowledge-producing instrument — generated a logic of practice in both natural philosophy and the mechanical arts, ordering mental and manual skills of philosophers and artisans towards the act of creating ideas and machines. I have argued that the method as exhibited in the Dioptrique was the key in bringing forth a rational foundation for the mechanical arts, and therefore in building exact instruments and machines. Owing to the method, instruments (or “bodily” parts) could be designed and built in such a way as to enhance natural abilities, skills, and habitus of living organs; instru-ments, organa, were mechanically upgrading the human body to a higher degree of perfection.111 The method had a foot in both the realm of rational philosophy and in the machine world. It was neither pure thought nor vile méchanique alone:


it was both at the same time. Descartes desired to reorganize thinking and hands-on practices, and consequently

to oversee how natural philosophers created ideas and artisans manipulated matter. He wanted to ensure, more exactly to control the acquisition of knowledge. Yet the method was not only beneficial to natural philosophy. Matthew Jones has convincingly shown that Descartes’s Géométrie — the essay that best epitomizes the Cartesian method — was a sophisticated system of “spiritual exercises” aimed at cultivating one’s self, at finding a better — and orderly — way of life through the practice of higher mathematics (to examine oneself geometrically Mersenne would say).112 As a universal generator of orderly souls the method thus suggested one fundamental socio-cultural outcome: based on the inherent bon sens of mankind, Descartes’s method became a constraining yet multifaceted pedagogical instrument, a pedagogical tool or organon that could shape any individual into an honnête homme.113 According to Peter Dear, Descartes used the notion of mechanization to establish the criteria of intelligibility in natural philosophy, and from the latter, to observe how it constrained bodily behaviours. Governing one’s own passions came down to exerting control over one’s own body. Descartes wanted in short to understand in mechanical terms the movement involved in the civilizing process of absolutism.114 In this context, the man-machine concept was an attempt to embody the Cartesian method into the emergent early modern social body.

Consonant with Francis Bacon’s novum organum, Descartes’s organon can ulti-mately be understood as an instrument that “more or less equalises intellects, and leaves little opportunity for superiority, since it achieves everything by most certain rules and forms of proof”.115 By fully ordering and constraining knowledge-making processes (both body and mind) anyone, embracing the right method, could become a lord and master of Nature — in other words an honnête homme. Descartes, reach-ing to a wide-ranging audience, made sure no one would be left out of his natural philosophical civilizing process.116 In the end, Descartes’s most famous opus was, among many other things, a universal book of civilité.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my warmest thanks to all who were willing to share ideas with me in the course of the several draftings of this article, especially Ann Blair, Lorraine Daston, Daniel Garber, Dániel Margócsy, and Alison Simmons. I am particularly grateful to Mario Biagioli and Rob Iliffe for their insightful comments and encourage-ments ever since I offered ill-defined thoughts at the Harvard University Workshop on Instruments and Material Culture of Early Modern Science, 17 April 2004.

REFERENCES

Quotations from Descartes are taken from Œuvres de Descartes, ed. by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, new edn (11 vols, Paris, 1996), and are cited in the form: AT vi, 33–45. English translations are taken from The philosophical writings of Descartes, transl. by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (3 vols, Cambridge and New York, 1984–1991), and are cited in the form: CSM i, 123–35.


1. Descartes, Discours de la méthode, AT vi, 75; CSM i, 149.

2. On the role of observations and experiments, see Daniel Garber, “Descartes and experiment in the Discourse and Essays”, in his Descartes embodied: Reading Cartesian philosophy through Cartesian science (Cambridge, 2001), 85–110; Ralph M. Blake, “The rôle of experience in Descartes’ theory of method (I)”, The philosophical review, xxxviii (1929), 125–43; Blake, “The rôle of experience in Descartes’ theory of method (II)”, The philosophical review, xxxviii (1929), 201–18; Alan Gewirtz, “Experience and the non-mathematical in the Cartesian method”, Journal of the history of ideas, ii (1941), 183–210; Desmond M. Clarke, Descartes’s philosophy of science (Manchester, c. 1982); Spyros Sakellariadis, “Descartes’s use of empirical data to test hypotheses”, Isis, lxxiii (1982), 68–76.

3. Descartes, Discours de la méthode, AT vi, 72–73; CSM i, 148.

4. Money sometimes was not a good enough incentive to hold artisans in check. When the time came, for instance, to engrave the plates for the Discours and Essais, Descartes and his printer made sure the engraver would not leave without giving an address or procrastinate for too long. The only way to enforce their wish was to keep this engraver (Franz Schooten the younger) “under house arrest”: “Celui qui les taille [the plates] me contente assez, et le libraire le tient en son logis, de peur qu’il ne lui échappe”, Descartes to Constantijn Huygens, 30 October 1636, AT i, 614.

5. Steven Shapin, A social history of truth: Civility and science in seventeenth-century England (Chicago and London, 1994). I have contended elsewhere that volontaires, although unhelpful in producing knowledge per se, were Descartes’s vectors of knowledge dissemination; they were the ones who Descartes trusted would make his philosophy known. J.-F. Gauvin, “Volontaires and artisans in Descartes’s natural philosophy”, unpublished manuscript presented at the History of Science Society annual meeting, Cambridge, MA, 21 November 2003.

6. Shapin, A social history of truth (ref. 5), chap. 8.

7. J. A. Bennett, “The mechanic’s philosophy and the mechanical philosophy”, History of science, xxiv (1986), 1–28. Pamela O. Long, “Power, patronage, and the authorship of ars: From mechanical know-how to mechanical knowledge in the last scribal age”, Isis, lxxxviii (1997), 1–41; Long, Openness, secrecy, authorship: Technical arts and the culture of knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore, 2001), esp. chaps. 6–7; Paula Findlen, Possessing nature: Museums, collecting, and scientific culture in early modern Italy (Berkeley, 1994); Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the order of nature, 1150–1750 (New York, 1998); Deborah Harkness, Neighborhoods of science: Knowledge and practice in Francis Bacon’s London, 1560–1620 (forthcoming); Pamela H. Smith, The body of the artisan: Art and experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago and London, 2004). On the latter see the essay review by Bruce T. Moran, “Knowing how and knowing that: Artisans, bodies, and natural knowledge in the Scientific Revolution”, Studies in the history and philosophy of science, xxxvi (2005), 577–85.

8. As Descartes explains, “for one man cannot turn his hand to both farming and harp-playing [cithara], or to several different tasks of this kind, as easily as he can to just one of them”. Descartes, Regulæ ad directionem ingenii, AT x, 359–60; CSM i, 9.

9. “Habituum autem varia sunt genera, alii enim sunt animi, alii vero corporis.” Eustachius a Sancto Paulo, Summa philosophica quadripartita (2 vols, Lyons, 1609), ii, 121. See Etienne Gilson, Index scolastico-cartésien (Paris, 1912), s.v. habitus. Descartes, Règles utiles et claires pour la direction de l’esprit en la recherche de la vérité, ed. and transl. by Jean-Luc Marion (The Hague, 1977), 90–91.

10. “Arithmetical demonstration and the other sciences likewise possess, each of them, their own genera; so that if the demonstration is to pass from one sphere to another, the genus must be either absolutely or to some extent the same. If this is not so, transference is clearly impossible, because the extreme and the middle terms must be drawn from the same genus: otherwise, as


predicated, they will not be essential and will thus be accidents.” Aristotle, Posterior analytics I.7. The Internet Classics Archives (classics.mit.edu, accessed on 3 August 2005). A very good discussion is found in Peter Dear, Discipline and experience: The mathematical way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago and London, 1995), 36–46.

11. On the interconnectedness of knowledge as one of the central components of Descartes’s project, Daniel Garber, Descartes’s metaphysical physics (Chicago and London, 1992).

12. Descartes, Regulæ, AT x, 359–61; CSM i, 9–10 for the quotes.

13. Descartes, Regulæ, AT x, 361; CSM i, 10.

14. On the uniqueness of ars and unity of scientia, Jean-Luc Marion, Sur l’ontologie grise de Descartes: Science cartésienne et savoir aristotélicien dans les Regulæ, 2nd edn (Paris, 1981), 25–30.

15. Marion suggests that the Regulæ contain the seeds of the Cartesian metaphysics as found in the Meditations, but it does not then unfold because Descartes was unable properly to order the intellectual simple natures with the common simple natures. Jean-Luc Marion, “Cartesian metaphysics and the role of the simple natures”, in The Cambridge companion to Descartes, ed. by John Cottingham (Cambridge, 1992), 115–39.

16. Descartes to Marin Mersenne, March 1637?, AT i, 349. Descartes, Discours de la méthode, AT vi, 61; CSM i, 142. In a very insightful analysis of Descartes’s famous anaclastic line, Daniel Garber shows how the programmatic statement of the method can be reconciled with a theory of practice. Following this example closely, Garber explains that what the method gives is a “workable procedure for discovering an appropriate path” between the reductive steps the knower has to take from a question asked to the actual intuitus, in this case, of a potentia naturalis. From there, the constructive steps (deductions) take us back to the question asked, for which we are now in possession of certain knowledge. Garber, Descartes’s metaphysical physics (ref. 11), 35–36 (emphasis in original). For a very helpful diagram, see Garber, “Descartes and experiment in the Discourse and Essays”, in Descartes embodied (ref. 2), 85–110, p. 100.

17. Descartes, Discours de la méthode, AT vi, 22; CSM i, 122. Descartes emphasizes the same point a few pages later: “Moreover, I continued practising the method I had prescribed for myself. Besides taking care in general to conduct all my thoughts according to its rules, I set aside some hours now and again to apply it more particularly to mathematical problems” (AT vi, 29; CSM i, 125). See also Descartes, Règles utiles et claires pour la direction de l’esprit (ref. 9), 208. A more detailed and somewhat similar analysis is given in Peter A. Schouls, Descartes and the possibility of science (Ithaca and London, 2000), 63–91.

18. Descartes, Discours de la méthode, AT vi, 61–62; CSM i, 142–3.


20. Descartes, Regulæ, AT x, 400–2; CSM i, 33–34.

21. Descartes, Regulæ, AT x, 371; CSM i, 16. Descartes maintains that “the power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false — which is what we properly call ‘good sense’ or ‘reason’ — is naturally equal in all men”. Descartes, Discours de la méthode, AT vi, 2; CSM i, 111.

22. The classic reference remains Paolo Rossi, Philosophy, technology, and the arts in the early modern era, transl. by Salvator Attanasio (New York, 1970). A more sophisticated analysis has recently been published by Smith, The body of the artisan (ref. 7).




26. According to Jean-Luc Marion, Descartes would have used in French the word ‘adresse’ — and not ‘sagacité’, which is close to ‘perspicacité’ — to designate this mental faculty, a word the natural philosopher happily applied to both mechanical and mental skills. For instance, “il faut de l’adresse et de l’habitude pour faire et pour ajuster les machines que j’ai décrites”, and “savoir


joindre l’adresse de la main à celle de l’esprit”, Descartes, Discours de la méthode, AT vi, 77 and Descartes to Huygens, 1 November 1635, AT i, 330, respectively. Descartes, Règles utiles et claires pour la direction de l’esprit (ref. 9), 208–9.

27. Descartes, Regulæ, AT x, 362–4; CSM i, 10–11. In the Discours Descartes mentions that he did not “cease to value the exercises done in the Schools”. Descartes, Discours de la méthode, AT vi, 5; CSM i, 113.



30. The “continuous and wholly uninterrupted sweep of thought” refers to Rule VII and is part of Descartes’s theory of order. On the mechanical thinking process, this could explain some of Descartes’s strange assertions like: “Ce qui cadre beaucoup avec ma manière de philosopher, et qui revient merveilleusement à toutes les expériences mécaniques que j’ai faites de la nature à ce sujet”, Descartes to Villebressieu, summer 1631, AT i, 217. See also Descartes to Froidmont, 3 October 1637, AT i, 420–1. Descartes, Règles utiles et claires pour la direction de l’esprit (ref. 9), 204.


32. Descartes, Regulæ, AT x, 404; CSM i, 35, where it is translated as “to invent an order”. For a complete discussion see Marion, Sur l’ontologie grise de Descartes (ref. 14), 71–78.

33. Jean-Paul Weber, La constitution du texte des Regulæ (Paris, 1964). See also John Schuster, “Descartes’ mathesis universalis, 1619–1628”, in Descartes, philosophy, mathematics and physics, ed. by Stephen Gaukroger (Brighton, 1980), 41–96.

34. Descartes, Regulæ, AT x, 377–8; CSM i, 19. Marion, Sur l’ontologie grise de Descartes (ref. 14), 55–69, is by far the most sophisticated and persuasive analysis of the mathesis universalis.

35. This point is made in Rule XIV of the Regulæ: “For the Rules which I am about to expound are much more readily employed in the study of these sciences [arithmetic and geometry] (where they are all that is needed) than in any other sort of problem. Moreover, these Rules are so useful in the pursuit of deeper wisdom that I have no hesitation in saying that this part of our method was designed not for the sake of mathematical problems; our intention was, rather, that the mathematical problems should be studied almost exclusively for the sake of the excellent practice which they give us in the method”, Descartes, Regulæ, AT x, 442; CSM i, 58–59. The science of order produced by the mathesis universalis represents Michel Foucault’s seventeenth-century shift of épistémè. Foucault acknowledges that order does not necessarily mean an all-out mathematization of knowledge. Foucault, Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris, 1966, 2001), 71.

36. Rule IV should be understood as Descartes’s response to the intellectual clash between the Jesuits Benito Pereira and Christopher Clavius regarding the epistemology of mathematics. Descartes’s mathesis universalis is neither Pereira’s philosophia prima nor Clavius’s attempt at defending the philosophical status of mathematics. The mathesis is a highly developed philosophical blend between two traditions found within the Society of Jesus. Edouard Mehl, Descartes en Allemagne, 1619–1620: Le contexte allemand de l’élaboration de la science cartésienne (Strasbourg, 2001), 243–61. Dear, Discipline and experience (ref. 10), 32–46.

37. Descartes, Regulæ, AT x, 366; CSM i, 12–13. Marion, Sur l’ontologie grise de Descartes (ref. 14), 42: “L’apparente contradiction ... du privilège préalablement reconnu aux seules mathématiques, plus qu’une incohérence, traduit le coup de force et l’intention profonde des Regulæ: mettre au jour, à l’encontre de la constante aristotélicienne, où certitude et ‘physique’ restent inversement proportionnelles, des objets non-mathématiques (et donc ‘physique’) propres à fournir le même degré (voire un plus grand) de certitude, que n’en fournit l’objet des mathématiques; considérer comme certain un objet non-mathématique: telle est la tâche que se fixent les Regulæ, au terme de la seconde [règle].”


38. I follow here the theoretical idea of structures structurées et structurantes of Pierre Bourdieu, Le sens pratique (Paris, 1980), 88–89.

39. Bourdieu, Le sens pratique (ref. 38), 92. Regarding weaving and other simple arts, “they present us in the most distinct way with innumerable instances of order, each one different from the other, yet all regular”, Descartes, Regulæ, AT x, 404; CSM i, 35.

40. On exercices structuraux Bourdieu, Le sens pratique (ref. 38), 126. Interestingly enough, perspicacitas and sagacitas as exercices structuraux for the mind find a correspondence in the mechanical arts that not even Francis Bacon dared contemplate. To him “The human mind is misled by looking at what is done in the mechanical arts, in which bodies are entirely changed by composition and separation, into supposing that something similar also happens in the universal nature of things”, Francis Bacon, The new organon, ed. by Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge, 2000), aphorism LXVI, 53.

41. Descartes, La recherche de la verité, AT x, 500; CSM ii, 402.

42. Descartes, La recherche de la verité, AT x, 502–3; CSM ii, 403–4.

43. The literature on this topic is rich. See, for instance, Marcel Mauss, “Body techniques”, in Sociology and psychology: Essays, ed. by Ben Brewster (London, 1979), 97–135, and Otto Sibum, “Reworking the mechanical value of heat: Instruments of precision and gestures of accuracy in early Victorian England”, Studies in history and philosophy of science, xxvi (1995), 73–106.

44. Charles Loyseau, A treatise of orders and plain dignities, ed. and transl. by Howell A. Lloyd (Cambridge, 1994 [1610]), 179–81. Some tradesmen such as “apothecaries, goldsmiths, jewellers, haberdashers, wholesalers, drapers, hosiers, and others like them”, gained some prominence because their crafts involved commerce. The latter artisans, who called themselves “honourable men” and “bourgeois”, were morally superior to other tradesmen whose métiers “consist[ed] rather in physical labour than in commercial activity or in shrewdness of mind”. Mere manual labourers were almost by definition the basest artisans of them all since “there is no worse occupation than to have no occupation”. To qualify as a honnête homme an artisan had to leave the manual labour almost entirely to others, thus transforming himself into a merchant.

45. See Jean Nicot, Thresor de la langue française (1606), where one can read under artisan: “Artisan, ou Artiste, Artifex, Opifex”. L’Académie Française made the distinction we are accustomed to use today only in 1762: “artiste, celui qui travaille dans un art où le génie et la main doivent concourir (un peintre, un architecte sont des artistes); l’artisan est un ouvrier dans un art mécanique, un homme de métier”, Le Grand Robert de la langue française, ed. by Alain Rey, s.v. artisan. For an historical analysis of this significant shift, Larry Shiner, The invention of art: A cultural history (Chicago and London, 2001), 99–120. Jean de La Fontaine, for instance, in one of his fables — Le lion abattu par l’homme — used ‘artisan’ to describe a painter.

46. Descartes, Discours de la méthode, AT vi, 9; CSM i, 115. In the Furetière and Académie Française dictionaries, ‘artiste’ is used especially to portray alchemists. In the Middle Ages, it became common to name “artistes” (or sometimes artiens) those who studied the liberal arts — scholars en devenir — and “artifex” those who practised the mechanical arts. Shiner, The invention of art (ref. 46), 30.

47. “Ce que l’on pourroit desirer d’eux [Peripateticiens] (au cas qu’ils voulussent ayder à establir la vraye Philosophie) consiste seulement à dresser des memoires fidelles des leurs obseruations, & de leurs experiences: ce qu’il ne faut pas esperer iusqu’à ce que les honnestes hommes s’employent à cet art, & iusques à ce que les Artistes & Operateurs ayent quitté l’imagination de la poudre de projection, de la Magnesie des sages, & de la pierre Philosophique”, Mersenne, Qvestions inovyes, ov recreation des sçavans (Paris, 1634; facsimile Stuttgart, 1972), Question xxviii, 126–7.

48. William Eamon, Science and the secrets of nature: Books of secrets in medieval and early modern culture (Princeton, 1994), 281.

49. Eamon, Science and the secrets of nature (ref. 48), 284. On the concept of mêtis more generally,


Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Les ruses de l’intelligence: La mètis des Grecs (Paris, 1974).

50. Friedrich Solmsen, “Nature as craftsman in Greek thought”, Journal of the history of ideas, xxiv (1963), 473–96 (Plato, Gorgias, 503e, quoted on p. 484). See also Bertrand Gille, Les mécaniciens grecs: La naissance de la technologie (Paris, 1980). On Aristotle and his legacy, Smith, The body of the artisan (ref. 7).

51. Descartes, Regulæ, AT x, 375–7; CSM i, 18–19.

52. Smith, The body of the artisan (ref. 7), esp. chaps 4 and 5 (quote on p. 142).

53. Pierre Goubert, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 à 1730: Contribution à l’histoire sociale de la France du XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1960), 281–2, 585. Pierre Deyon, “Variations de la production textile aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles”, Annales: Economies, sociétés, civilisations, xviii (1963), 921–55. James R. Farr, Hand of honor: Artisans and their world in Dijon, 1550–1650 (Ithaca and London, 1988). Henri Heller, Labour, science and technology in France, 1500–1620 (Cambridge, 1996), chap. 6.

54. Roger Baron, Science et sagesse chez Hugues de Saint-Victor (Paris, 1957), 60–87.

55. Dominique Cardon, La draperie au Moyen Âge: Essor d’une grande industrie européenne (Paris, 1999), 416–17, 539–63. See also Giorgio Israel, “Des Regulæ à la Géométrie”, Revue d’histoire des sciences, li (1998), 183–236, where he discusses the role of weaving in Descartes’s thinking.

56. According to Adrien Baillet, if Descartes had been raised in a condition allowing him to become an artisan, he would have been a skilful one because, we learn, he had in his youth a particular inclination for the arts. Like so many other such claims made by Baillet this one could be utterly wrong, or at best a misinterpretation. Adrien Baillet, La vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes (2 vols, Paris, 1691), i, 35. Geneviève Rodis-Lewis believes Baillet has his chronology wrong here, and that this remark should be associated to a much later phase in Descartes’s life: Rodis-Lewis, “Descartes’ life and the development of his philosophy”, in The Cambridge companion to Descartes (ref. 15), 21–57, p. 26. Descartes himself often contradicts Baillet’s assertion. He said, for instance, that he was born without any manual abilities: “pour moy … i’estois venu au monde sans mains.” Descartes to ***, [Nov.–Dec. 1638?], AT ii, 452.

57. Descartes, Discours de la méthode, AT vi, 9; CSM i, 115. On the role of travel during the early modern period, see the remarkable opus by Daniel Roche, Humeurs vagabondes: De la circulation des hommes et de l’utilité des voyages (Paris, 2003).

58. Simon Schama, The embarrassment of riches: An interpretation of Dutch culture in the Golden Age (New York, 1997). On Dutch Baconianism, Svetlana Alpers, The art of describing: Dutch art in the seventeenth century (Chicago, 1983), esp. chap. 1. Smith, The body of the artisan (ref. 7), esp. chaps. 5 and 6.

59. This is first thing Beeckman writes down in his Journal:“Quæritur cur artes inter se non sint subordinatæ....” On the importance of both scientia and ars, he also writes down on the first page of the Journal: “Ad excitandum artium studium illud maximè faceret, si immunitates alicujus vectigalis etc. ijs qui Euclidis Elementa intelligerent, promitterentur. Quibus bene intellectis, pauci cætera studia negligerent, etiam in medijs occupationibus mechanicis.” Isaac Beeckman, Journal tenu par Isaac Beeckman de 1604 à 1634, ed. by Cornélis de Waard (4 vols, The Hague, 1939–53), i, 1.

60. Stephen Gaukroger and John Schuster, “The hydrodynamic paradox and the origins of Cartesian dynamics”, Studies in the history and philosophy of science, xxiii (2002), 535–72, p. 552. For a general appraisal of the Beeckman–Descartes relationship, Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An intellectual biography (Oxford, 1995), chap. 3; Klaas van Berkel, “Descartes’ debt to Beeckman: Inspiration, cooperation, conflict”, in Descartes’ natural philosophy, ed. by Stephen Gaukroger, John Schuster, and John Sutton (London, 2000), 46–59. The classic work on Beeckman remains


Klaas Van Berkel, Isaac Beeckman (1588–1637) en de mechanisering van het wereldbeeld (Amsterdam, 1983), see pp. 217–35 for the role of technology in Beeckman’s thinking.

61. Gaukroger, Descartes (ref. 60), 92–103. John A. Schuster, “Descartes and the scientific revolution, 1618–1634: An interpretation”, Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University, 1977, i, 117–27. Henk J. M. Bos, “On the representation of curves in Descartes’ Géométrie”, Archives for the history of exact sciences, xxiv (1981), 295–338. Michel Serfati, “Les compas cartésiens”, Archives de philosophie, lvi (1993), 197–230.

62. Baillet, La vie de M. Des-cartes (ref. 56), i, 67–70 on meeting the two mathematicians. On Bramer and his instruments, Descartes, Cogitationes privatæ, AT x, 241–2. The best analysis of Descartes in Germany and the significance of this sojourn is Mehl, Descartes en Allemagne (ref. 36). See also William R. Shea, The magic of numbers and motion: The scientific career of René Descartes (Canton, MA, 1991), 103–7.

63. Bennett, “The mechanics’ philosophy and the mechanical philosophy” (ref. 7); J. A. Bennett, “Geometry in context in the sixteenth century: The view from the museum”, Early science and medicine, vii (2002), 214–30, pp. 229–30. On epistemic culture see Karin Knorr-Cetina, Epistemic cultures: How the sciences make knowledge (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1999).

64. The best accounts are Gaukroger, Descartes (ref. 60), 135–86; John A. Schuster, “Descartes opticien: The construction of the law of refraction and the manufacture of its physical rationales”, in Gaukroger, Schuster and Sutton (eds), Descartes’s natural philosophy (ref. 60), 258–312; Shea, The magic of numbers and motion (ref. 62), 149–63. See A. I. Sabra, Theories of light from Descartes to Newton (Cambridge, 1981), 93–135 for Fermat’s criticisms.

65. Drawing accurate parabolic mirrors held no secrets for Mydorge, judging from a letter sent by Robert Cornier to Mersenne, one of the Minim’s early correspondents: “I do not know of any other means of making parabolic mirrors beyond those with which you are acquainted, especially since you have the paper of Mr. Mydorge who knows all that can be known on the matter. I can only tell you that Mr. [Guillaume] Le Vasseur says that he has found an absolutely certain way by the sines. But I cannot say more since I do not yet know how he goes about it.” Cornier to Mersenne, 18 August [1625], in Correspondance du Père Marin Mersenne, religieux minime, ed. by Cornélis de Waard (17 vols, Paris, 1933–88), i, 260–1; quoted in Shea, The magic of numbers and motion (ref. 62), 150. This Le Vasseur was an instrument-maker from Rouen, well-known in the region for his work in navigation and map-making. Cornier to Mersenne, 16 January 1626: “Je vous envoie le billet tel que Le Vasseur me l’a envoyé pour responce à ce que vous me demandiés des longitudes et latitudes”, Correspondance du Père Marin Mersenne, i, 332; see also ibid., 242–3. His method of drawing parabolic shapes “by the sines” most likely has nothing to do with Descartes’s (and Mydorge’s) later determination of the sine law for the refraction of light. Snel (in the 1620s) and Harriot (c. 1598) found the same law of refraction, but both were unknown to Descartes.

66. Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, Histoire du miroir (Paris, 1994), 31–39. At the end of the century mirrors became common objects of consumption for the noblesse and bourgeoisie alike. On Mydorge’s disbursement, Baillet, La vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes (ref. 56), ii, 326.

67. Cornier to Mersenne, 16 January 1626: “Ce que vous me mandés de l’excellence des miroirs de Mr Midorge, me faict souvenir de vous prier de me mander si c’est de sa façon et, si ainsi est, quelle en est la matiere et la dose.” Cornier to Mersenne, 27 Jauary 1626: “Je vous remercie de toute mon affection de la peone que vous prenés à m’expliquer les miroirs de Mr Midorge et ses opinions. J’euse bien desiré scavoir son poli, mais puisqu’il se le reserve, il n’en fault point parler. J’en scay quelques uns qui sont bons et dont j’ay veu l’effect qui, je croy, se peut conduire à une grande perfection.” Correspondance du Père Marin Mersenne (ref. 65), i, 331, 354.

68. On Mydorge’s importance for Descartes as an instrument maker cum natural philosopher, Baillet writes: “Rien au monde ne luy fut plus utile que ces verres pour connoître & pour expliquer,


comme il a fait depuis dans sa Dioptrique, la nature de la lumiére, de la vision, & de la réfraction. M. Mydorge luy en fit faire de paraboliques & d’hyperboliques, d’ovales & d’élliptiques. Et comme il avoit la main aussi sûre & aussi délicate que l’esprit subtil, il voulut décrire luy-même les hyperboles & les éllipses. C’est ce qui fut d’un secours merveilleux à M. Descartes non seulement pour mieux comprendre qu’il n’avoit fait jusqu’alors la nature de l’éllipse & de l’hyperbole, leur propriété touchant les réfractions, la maniére dont on doit les décrire; mais encore pour se confirmer dans plusieurs belles découvertes qu’il avoit déja faites auparavant touchant la lumiére, & les moyens de perfectionner la vision.” Baillet, La vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes (ref. 56), i, 149–50.

69. When Aleaume passed away late in 1627, Peiresc feared for his manuscripts (some of which written by Viète) and instruments. Peiresc thus suggested on 8 January 1628 that “l’instrument [the compass] que luy avoit faict Ferrier pour descrire la ligne necessaire à la convexité desdictes lunettes et miroirs convexes, et les verres et miroirs qu’il en avoit essayez ... il faudroit que cela passast par les mains de Mr Midorge, tresorier de France ... lequel seul je cognois en ce pais le plus approchant de la curiosité de feu Mr Alleaume et de sa doctrine et prattique aux mathematiques et mechaniques.” Quoted in Mersenne, Correspondance du Père Marin Mersenne (ref. 65), i, 617. See also Cornier to Mersenne, 24 December [1627]: “Je croy que Mr Midorge ne se sera pas oublié dans la venduë de Mr Alleaume”, ibid., 613.

70. Ferrier’s first name is sometimes questioned. Maurice Daumas (Les instruments scientifiques aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1953), 98) suggests it is Guillaume, basing his assertion on the nineteenth-century French instrument maker Camille Sébastien Nachet. Yet Jean-Baptiste Morin in a 1634 publication refers to Ferrier as “D. Ioannes Ferrier, instrumentorum mathematicorum sollertissimus et accuratissimus fabrefactor”. I use this latter information in naming Ferrier. Morin is quoted in Correspondance du Père Marin Mersenne (ref. 65), i, 516.

71. Baillet, La vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes (ref. 56), i, 151.

72. Cornier to Mersenne, 16 March 1626, in Mersenne, Correspondance du Père Marin Mersenne (ref. 65), i, 420. This part of the letter refers, according to the editors of the Correspondance, to a letter sent by Mydorge to Mersenne regarding the hyperbolic or elliptical shape of the anaclastic line. Mydorge to Mersenne, [February–March 1626?], in ibid., i, 404–15. For a discussion of the dating of this letter, Gaukroger, Descartes (ref. 60), 438–39 (note 26). Regarding Ferrier and parabolic mirrors, Cornier continues: “Il [Ferrier] dict une chose merveilleuse, qu’une si petite partie de parabole brusle avec effect si loing. Car d’ordinaire, pour brusler de loing, estant necessaire d’avoir une portion d’une grande circonference, cela est si plat en petit volume qu’il demeure avec très peu de force”, Correspondance du Père Marin Mersenne (ref. 65), i, 420. Descartes will later say that it is impossible for a miroir ardent to burn at a distance of one league (lieue) unless the mirror is over twelve metres (“plus de six toises”) across, even if it had been the work of an Angel. Descartes to Mersenne, January 1630, AT i, 109–10. Mersenne discusses this topic in Qvestions inovyes (ref. 47), Question xxxv. On the history (legend) of Archimedes’s great burning mirrors, D. L. Simms, “Archimedes and the burning mirrors of Syracuse”, Technology and culture, xviii (1977), 1–24.

73. Descartes to Huygens, [December 1635], AT i, 335–7.

74. “Quid ita, nunquid hujuscemodi operibus utilissimis caremus, quia multi, qui has lineas repererunt, eas aeterno silentio involvunt, ne quando alicui proficiant.” Quoted in Correspondance du Père Marin Mersenne (ref. 65), i, 299.

75. “[Descartes] devint luy-même en trés peu de têms un grand maître dans l’art de tailler les verres: & comme l’industrie des Mathématiciens se trouve souvent inutile par la faute des Ouvriers dont l’adresse ne répond pas toûjours à l’esprit des Auteurs qui les font travailler, il s’appliqua particuliérement à former la main de quelques Tourneurs qu’il trouva les plus experts, & les mieux disposez à ce travail. En quoy il eut la satisfaction de voir le succez de ses soins avant


que de sortir de la France pour se retirer en Hollande”, Baillet, La vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes (ref. 56), i, 150.

76. D. Graham Burnett, Descartes and the hyperbolic quest: Lens making machines and their significance in the seventeenth century (Philadelphia, 2005), 36. On Descartes, Ferrier and artisans, see also Shea, The magic of numbers and motion (ref. 62), 151–8, 191–201; Giulia Belgioioso, “Descartes e gli artigiani”, in La biografia intellettuale di René Descartes attraverso la Correspondance, ed. by Jean-Robert Armogathe, Giulia Belgioioso, and Carlo Vinti (Naples, 1999), 113–65.

77. Descartes is not insensitive to Ferrier’s problems, which he associates with some sort of psychological unrest: “Aprés tout, ie plains fort Mr. Ferrier & voudrois bien pouuoir, sans trop d’incommodité, soulager sa mauuaise fortune; car il la merite meilleure, & je ne connois en luy de deffaut, sinon qu’il ne fait jamais son conte sur le pié des choses présentes, mais seulement de celles qu’il espere ou qui sont passées, & qu’il a vne certaine irresolution qui l’empesche d’executer ce qu’il entreprend. Ie lui ay rebattu presque la mesme chose en toutes les lettres que ie luy ai écrittes; mais vous auez plus de prudence que moy, pour sçauoir ce qu’il faut dire & conseiller”, Descartes to Mersenne, [18 March 1630], AT i, 132. Ferrier’s lack of mechanical skills may have been caused by a too strong inclination towards pure mathematics: “[L]a douceur qu’il [Ferrier] avoit trouvée dans la méditation, & dans les entretiens des Mathématiciens, avoit beaucoup diminué en luy l’habitude du travail [manuel]”, Baillet, La vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes (ref. 56), i, 186. In a letter Ferrier sent to Descartes, he mentions indeed how much he wants to “taste” and “comprehend” the “true foundations of science” from scholars such as Descartes “tant i’ay d’ambition de me faire connoistre par quelque chose au delà du commun”, Ferrier to Descartes, 26 October 1629, AT i, 51.

78. Burnett, Descartes and the hyperbolic quest (ref. 76), 36.

79. Descartes to Golius, [January 1632], AT i, 234–5, where Descartes mentions he will send the first part of his Dioptrique that deals with refraction, without the philosophy.

80. Philippe Hamou, La mutation du visible: Essai sur la portée épistémologique des instruments d’optique au XVIIe siècle (2 vols, Villeneuve D’Ascq (Nord), 1999), i, 239–88.

81. Bruce Stansfield Eastwood, “Descartes on refraction: Scientific versus rhetorical method”, Isis, lxxv (1984), 481–502.

82. “Au surplus je ne croy pas que vostre mathematicien [Descartes], quelqu’habile homme qu’il soit, puisse bien donner des raisons des refractions jusques à ce qu’il ait enseigné de faire des lunetes de Hollande par raison et reglement en telle longueur que l’on vouldra. Car en cela git un des plus grands secrets des refractions à mon advis…”, Cornier to Mersenne, 16 March 1626, in Correspondance du Père Marin Mersenne (ref. 65), i, 420.

83. It is interesting to note that the theoretical portion of Jacques Besson’s Theatrum instrumentorum machinarum (Orleans, 1569) was never published, yet is developed in the manuscript version (British Library) of the work. Alex Keller, “A manuscript version of Jacques Besson’s book of machines, with his unpublished principles of mechanics”, in On the pre-modern technology and science: Studies in honour of Lynn White, Jr., ed. by B. S. Hall and D. C. West (Malibu, 1976), 75–95.

84. Descartes to Ferrier, [2 December 1630], AT i, 185. Descartes, Discours de la méthode, AT vi, 77; CSM i, 150. Descartes to Mersenne, [25 January 1638?], AT i, 500–1; Daumas, Les instruments scientifiques aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (ref. 70), 99; Baillet, La vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes (ref. 56), i, 320–1.

85. Descartes is fully aware that precise instrument making is of the utmost importance to natural philosophy. Instruments can be used, for instance, to ascertain the number, velocity, and shape of sunspots and to know how the air refracts the light from the stars, and whether it also affects the light from the Moon. Descartes to Mersenne, January 1630, AT i, 113: “Mais ces choses là requierent des instrumens si iustes ….”


86. Descartes to Golius, [2 February 1632], AT i, 236–40. “Ie ne doute point que vous ne puissiés trouuer plusieurs autres inuentions meilleures que celle cy pour faire la mesme experience, si vous prenés la peine d’en chercher; mais pource que ie scay que vous aués beaucoup d’autres occupations, I’ay creu que si vous n’y auiés pas encore pensé, ie vous soulagerois peut-estre d’autant …” (ibid., 240).

87. Arthur H. Schrynemakers, “Descartes and the weight-driven chain-clock”, Isis, lx (1969), 233–6. On the Archimedean screw, Descartes to Huygens, 15 November 1643, AT iv, 761–6. According to Leucheron, the experiment was done many times with the same result. Descartes does not doubt the outcome per se, but still believes it is worth exploring further. Mersenne asked someone to do the experiment with an arquebuze, giving again the same result as in the Récréations mathématiques. Descartes, however, is not convinced and does not judge it sufficient to draw certain knowledge from it (quelque chose de certain). He therefore suggests doing the experiment again with an instrument of his own design, using a cannon always kept in the upright position by a system of pulleys. Descartes to Mersenne, [April 1634], AT i, 287; Descartes to Mersenne, 15 May 1634, AT i, 293–94. The choice of a cannon that could support a cannonball of 30 to 40 pounds is better because the iron from which it is made does not melt as easily as the lead ball from the arquebus; and moreover such a big ball would be found more easily if it came back to earth.

88. Descartes uses these fashionable machines to investigate the phenomenon, as well as to relocate wonder from garden engineers to natural philosophers, thus displacing a “science of miracles” from simple technical achievements to the knowledge of mathematics and mechanical philosophy. Simon Werrett, “Wonders never cease: Descartes’s Météores and the rainbow fountain”, The British journal for the history of science, xxxiv (2001), 129–47.

89. Davis Baird, Thing knowledge: A philosophy of scientific instruments (Berkeley, 2004). Burnett, Descartes and the hyperbolic quest (ref. 76), 132, for the association of the lens-grinding machine to an “epistemological instrument”. On the philosophy of instrumentation, Hans Radder (ed.), The philosophy of scientific experimentation (Pittsburgh, 2003).

90. Descartes to Burman, AT v, 174. English translation in John Cottingham (ed.), Descartes’ conversation with Burman (Oxford, 1976), 44, §73.

91. Burnett, Descartes and the hyperbolic quest (ref. 76), 125–32.

92. Galileo Galilei, Sidereus nuncius, in Le opere di Galileo Galilei, ed. by Antonio Favaro (20 vols, Florence, 1890–1909), iii, 53–96, p. 59. For the English translation, Galileo, Sidereus nuncius or The sidereal messenger, transl. by Albert van Helden (Chicago and London, 1989), 35.

93. A very good analysis of organon qua instrument is given by Don Bates, “Machina ex Deo: William Harvey and the meaning of instrument”, Journal of the history of ideas, lxi (2000), 577–93. See also Dennis Des Chene, Spirits and clocks: Machine and organism in Descartes (Ithaca and London, 2001), 89–95 for an analysis of Suárez’s notion of instrument.

94. “Si bien qu’il ne nous reste a considerer que les organes exterieurs, entre lesquels ie comprens toutes les parties transparentes de l’œil, aussy bien que tous les autres cors qu’on peut mettre entre luy & l’obiet”, Descartes, Dioptrique, AT vi, 148.

95. Descartes, Dioptrique, AT vi, 114–17.

96. Matthew L. Jones argues somewhat similarly when he writes that Descartes’s compasses “offered the crucial heuristic, a material propaedeutic, for Descartes’[s] revised account of mathematics freed from memory and subject to a criterion of graspable unity. A simple mathematical instrument became the model and exemplar of the knowledge of Descartes’s new subject, the one supposedly so removed from the material”, Jones, “Descartes’s geometry as spiritual exercise”, Critical inquiry, xxviii (2001), 40–71, p. 61.

97. Ambroise Paré, Les œuvres de M. Ambroise Paré conseiller, et premier chirurgien du roy (Paris, 1598), chap. 22, “Des moyens & artifices d’adiouster ce qui defaut naturellement ou par accident”.

98. Huygens to Descartes, 8 September 1637, AT i, 395–96: “Mais comme il [le tourneur d’Amsterdam]


est homme industrieux en matiere de mouuemens mechaniques, il presume de venir a bout de vostre inuention a beaucoup moins de façon. En effect, il produit des choses si estranges par des petites machines de deux liards, que si ce n’estoit vous, Monsieur, i’espererois qu’il abregeroit de quelque chose ce que vous auez desseigné pour arriuer a la perfection de ces verres; nous verrons ce qui arriuera, & vous en rendrons compte.” Descartes to Huygens, 5 October 1637, AT i, 433: “Mais puisqu’il vous plaist en sçauoir mon opinion, ie vous diray franchement que tant s’en faut que i’espere qu’il en viene a bout, auec des machines qui ayent moins de façon que la miene, qu’au contraire ie me persuade qu’on y doit encore adiouster diuerses choses, que i’ay omises, mais que ie croy n’estre point si difficiles a inuenter que l’vsage ne les enseigne.”

99. “[M]ais pour reuenir à ceux qui ont eu cognoissance des Machines mouuantes & Hidrauliques, peu en ont escrit de nostre temps, bien est vray, que Jacob Besson, Augustin Ramelly, & quelques autres ont mis en lumiere quelques Machines par eux inventees sur le papier, mais peu d’icelles peuuent auoir aucun effect, & ont creu, que par vne multiplication de roües dentelees, lesdites machines auroient effect, selon leur pensee, & n’ont pas consideré, que ladite multiplication est liee auec le temps, comme il sera monstré en son lieu ...”, Salomon de Caus, Les Raisons des forces movvantes Auec diuerses Machines tant vtilles que plaisantes Aus quelles sont adioints plusieurs debeings de grotes et fontaines (Frankfurt, 1615), n.p., Epistre au Lecteur. De Caus gives an example (Theoresme XVI) of a machine to raise weights made of six geared wheels of increasing size. Although, theoretically, multiplying the number of wheels can expand infinitely the load a machine can lift, in this theorem de Caus calculates that a worker would have to turn the crank 2,985,984 times to cause the sixth and biggest wheel to make a single revolution. Assuming this worker could turn the crank 10,000 times a day, it would still take 298 days for the sixth wheel to complete one revolution!

100. Des Chene, Spirits and clocks (ref. 93), 101–2.

101. Descartes, Discours de la méthode, AT vi, 57; CSM i, 140. See also Descartes, Règles utiles et claires pour la direction de l’esprit (ref. 9), 89–91.

102. On the representation of bodily parts in Descartes’s first two posthumous editions of the treatise on man, Rebecca M. Wilkin, “Figuring the dead Descartes: Claude Clerselier’s Homme de René Descartes (1664)”, Representations, lxxxiii (2003), 38–66.

103. Descartes, L’homme, AT xi, 120; CSM i, 99.

104. Descartes, Le monde, AT xi, 34–35, 46–47; quotation, CSM i, 97.

105. Gaukroger, Descartes (ref. 60), 63–64. Werrett, “Wonders never cease” (ref. 88). On clocks see Otto Mayr, Authority, liberty & automatic machinery in early modern Europe (Baltimore and London, 1986), and Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, The history of the hour: Clocks and modern temporal orders, transl. by Thomas Dunlap (Chicago and London, 1996), esp. chap. 8.

106. Loyseau, A treatise of orders and plain dignities (ref. 44), 5.

107. Robert Muchembled, Culture populaire et culture des élites dans la France moderne (XVe–XVIIIe siècle), 2nd edn (Paris, 1991), 225–85. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris, 1975), esp. 159–227. Norbert Elias, The civilizing process: Sociogenetic and psychogenetic investigations, rev. edn (Oxford and Malden, MA, 2000). An interesting criticism of Elias’s thesis is found in Hans Peter Duerr, Nudité et pudeur: Le mythe du processus de civilisation, transl. by Véronique Bodin and Jacqueline Pincemin (Paris, 1998). Such a radical rationalization of the state and social life can only be understood in the light of the disorders created by the Wars of Religion. See, for instance, Denis Crouzet, Les Guerriers de Dieu: La violence au temps des troubles de religion, vers 1525–vers 1610 (2 vols, Seyssel, 1990), ii, 624, and Mack P. Holt, The French wars of religion, 1562–1629 (Cambridge, 1995), 210–16. One of the most interesting sociological studies on this topic is Pierre Bourdieu, Méditations pascaliennes, rev. edn (Paris, 2003), 185–234: “Les injonctions sociales les plus sérieuses s’adressent non à l’intellect mais au corps” (p. 204).


108. Barthélemy de Laffemas, Reiglement genéral pour dresser les manufactures en ce royaulme (Paris, 1603), where he wrote: “Le defaut de nos polices a perverti l’ordre qui s’observoit, tant a la fabrique des manufactures qu’à l’effet de tout ce qui en dépend ….” Hence the King had to reestablish the “manufactures de draperie et de teintures en leur légalité, bonté et perfection anciennes”. Quoted in Emile Levasseur, Histoire des classes ouvrières et de l’industrie en France avant 1789 (2 vols, Paris, 1900–1), ii, 155. Contemporary to Laffemas, Antoine de Monchrestien comes to an identical conclusion in 1615 when he says that “Le plus Royal exercice que peuvent prendre Vos Majestés c’est de ramener à l’ordre ce qui est détraqué. De régler et distinguer les Arts tombez en une monstrueuse confusion”, Monchrestien, Traicté de l’œconomie politique, ed. by François Billacois (Geneva, 1999), 66.

109. James R. Farr, “Cultural analysis and early modern artisans”, in The artisan and the European town, 1500–1900, ed. by Geoffrey Crossick (Aldershot, 1997), 56–74, p. 67.

110. For “masters of letters”, Loyseau, A treatise of orders and plain dignities (ref. 44), 226. For how “unfair” was the production of masterpieces, Levasseur, Histoire des classes ouvrières et de l’industrie en France avant 1789 (ref. 108), ii, 141.

111. Neil M. Ribe pointedly argues that nature in the end “is not a source of standards but is itself subject to the higher standard of Cartesian rationality”, Ribe, “Cartesian optics and the mastery of nature”, Isis, lxxxviii (1997), 42–61, p. 53.

112. Matthew L. Jones, “Descartes’s geometry as spiritual exercise” (ref. 96). Mersenne, Qvestions inovyes (ref. 47), Question xii, 45–46.

113. Descartes’s universal bon sens is the very first assertion he makes in the Discours de la méthode. On Descartes’s philosophy of education in general, Daniel Garber, “Descartes, or the cultivation of the intellect”, in Descartes embodied (ref. 2), 277–95.

114. Peter Dear, “A mechanical microcosm: Bodily passions, good manners, and Cartesian mechanism”, in Science incarnate: Historical embodiments of natural knowledge, ed. by Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin (Chicago and London, 1998), 51–82.

115. Bacon, The new organon (ref. 40), Aphorism CXXII, 95.

116. On Descartes’s audience generally, Jean-Pierre Cavaillé, “Descartes stratège de la destination”, XVIIe siècle, clxxvii (1992), 551–9; Cavaillé, “‘Le plus éloquent philosophe des derniers temps’: Les stratégies d’auteur de René Descartes”, Annales: Histoire, sciences sociales, 1994, 349–67.

Artisans, Machines and Descartes's Organon

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