The greatest philosophical error is to count as philosophers only philosophers proper when every man of some greatness must have shaped their own philosophy; and the reason for their not technically uttering or specifying it in the technical language of acknowledged philosophy may be their feeling that their philosophy was all the more philosophically true when it remained unstated. True, that is, used and applied—verified . . . .
The general idea of things and man and Problems that had shaped itself in Caesar, Leonardo, and Galileo, . . . an idea that was quite certainly related to their works and objects and observations, must have had the cost, range, function, intensity, and hidden usefulness of a thought that was tried by the demands and adventures of their particular genius. Descartes knew this well.
“Discours en l'honneur de Goethe,” Oeuvres, 1: 537‑38.
The foremost character of this life change, which consists in organizing it according to numbers and size, is objectivity, impersonality, as unadulterated as possible, so much so that to us moderns the true, precisely connected with our power for acting on nature, seems increasingly to be contrasted with what our imagination and feelings would like to be true. Yet, . . . at the source of this prodigious change of the human world, we find one Self, the strong and reckless figure of Descartes, whose philosophy we may set less value on than our view of his magnificent and memorable Self.
“Seconde vue de Descartes,” Oeuvres, 1: 843‑44.
Descartes—as an antiphilosopher—since in everything he would think of applications. The purpose of his Cogito is to have done once and for all with philosophy. His God is a fundamental assumption that sweeps away obstacles. Then his real great ideas: a universe that is completely representable in mathematical terms, which constrains him to the then novel idea of conservation—since his system of total unity of reference had to be expressed through an equation—hence the idea of the form Product, MV—error but—truth.
Cahiers, ed. Judith Robinson, 2 vols. (Paris, 1974), 1: 717.
Adorno on Paul Valéry & Cartesian Rationalism & Irrationalism in French Philosophy
What is especially apparent in such formulations but in fact defines the rhythm of Valéry’s thought in general is what the official history of philosophy would call the opposition of rationalist and irrationalist motifs. The status of those motifs, however, is the opposite in France of what it is in Germany. In Germany it is customary to class rationalism with progress, and irrationalism, as a legacy of Romanticism, with reaction. For Valéry, however, the traditional moment is identical to the Cartesian rationalist moment, and the irrationalist moment is Cartesianism’s self-criticism. The rational-conservative moment in Valéry is the dictatorial civilizing moment, the autonomous ego’s avowed power to control the unconscious. [ . . .] Now as ever, such domination is justified in Cartesian terms, on the basis of clara et distincta perceptio. (pp. 151-2)
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