The Meaning of “Olympica” in Descartes

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Notes

^1. Baillet, La Vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes, 81–86; also in Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes 10: 179–88; hereafter abbreviated as AT.

^2. O’Mahoney, “Christian Inspiration,” 371–84.

^3. Kennington, “Descartes’s Olympica,” 79–104.

^4. Ibid., 82.

^5. O’Mahoney, “Christian Inspiration,” 381.

^6. Descartes, AT, 10: 216. The notes were transcribed by Leibniz in 1676 during a sojourn in Paris, and preserved in his papers. The title Cogitationes Privatae was given by Foucher de Careil, and according to subsequent editors was more likely his own invention than one taken over from Leibniz.

^7. Ibid., 217.

^8. Ibid., 218.

^9. Ibid., 217.

^10. For a fuller treatment of the connection, see O’Mahoney, “Christian Inspiration,” 377, 379–80. Pneuma in Greek is both wind and spirit, and Greek anemos, “wind,” is behind Latin anima. The soul or life-force as breath or wind is a natural and common concept; Greek psuchē is related to psuchō, to blow or cool, and there are similar conceptions in Akkadian, Ugaritic and Hebrew. See West, The East Face of Helicon, 151.

^11. The Muses of course are associated also with Pieria, Helicon, and Parnassus. One may note in this connection that the Cogitationes belong to mostly fragmentary material composed from 1619 through 1620, the principal fragments of which, according to Baillet, belonged to a collection Considérations Mathématiques, totalling thirty-six pages—and which Pierre Borel dated to 1619—which bore the title Parnassus. Baillet, La Vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes, 51. The connection of Parnassus with poetry, specifically with poetry represented as a gift resulting from inspiration of the Muses, is longstanding. The identification is perhaps best exemplified in Raphael’s “Parnassus” mural in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican, where, among a quartet depicting the highest pursuits, it represents poetry. Its companions are “The Disputation of the Holy Sacrament” representing Theology, “Virtue and the Law” representing Jurisprudence, and of course most famously “The School of Athens” representing philosophy. Descartes could theoretically have known of the “Parnassus,” completion of Raphael’s series being dated to 1509–1511; but the connection of divine inspiration, poetry and Parnassus would have come naturally enough to him regardless.

^12. O’Mahoney, “Christian Inspiration,” 372, 379.

^13. Descartes, AT 10: 216.

^14. Ibid., 218. The three marvels issuing from God identified by Descartes prefigure, given Descartes’s conception in his ontological argument deployed in the Meditations of God as a necessary being, the first, third, and fourth of Kant’s antinomies of pure reason in the Critique of Pure Reason.