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 99 1. Sensibility: The Indeterminacy of the Imagination 1. Descartes to Mersenne, 18 March 1630, in René Descartes, Œuvres, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, Correspondance (Paris: Vrin, 1974–89), 1:132–33. English translation in René Descartes, Philosophical Letters, trans. and ed. Anthony Kenny (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970), 7. 2. See Descartes to Princess Elizabeth, May or June 1645, in Descartes, Correspondance (n. 1), 4:220; translation in Philosophical Letters (n. 1), 162. Cf. the chapter “Le jeu sensible des couleurs,” in Pascal Dumont, Descartes et l’esthétique: L’art d’émerveiller (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), 44–62. 3. Cf. René Descartes, Compendium of Music, trans. Walter Robert (n.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1961). Descartes quotes from this (then unpublished) work in his letter to Mersenne; cf. also the concept of the senses in this text (ibid., 11–13). 4. Cf. Dumont, Descartes et l’esthétique (n. 2), 71–102 passim. See also the definition of the “aesthetic regime” in Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 21–23. 5. The Philosophical Writings of René Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–85). The following abbreviations refer to Descartes’s writings: Rules = Regulae ad directionem ingenii—Rules for the Direction of the Mind, 1:7–78; Discourse = Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la vérité dans les sciences—Discourse on the Method, 1:111–51; and Meditations = Meditationes de prima philosophia—Meditations on First Philosophy, 2:3–62. 6. Catherine Wilson, “Discourses of Vision in Seventeenth-Century Metaphysics,” in Sites of Vision: The Discursive Construction of Sight in the History of Philosophy, ed. David Michael Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 129. For the following cf. Dennis L. Sepper, Descartes’s Imagination: Proportion, Images, and the Activity of Thinking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Sepper examines in great detail the differences with respect to this question among the various phases of Descartes ’s philosophical thought. 7. But how are we to conceive of something entirely haphazard as being subject to any sort of control? Not, in any case, after the model of political authority, for that is not e s 100 ‡ notes to pages 6 –10 authority over subjects who exercise self-control. Cf. Georges Canguilhem, “Machine and Organism,” in Knowledge of Life, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 86. 8. Descartes to Princess Elizabeth, May or June 1645, in Descartes, Correspondance (n. 1), 4:220; translation in Philosophical Letters (n. 1), 162. 9. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, no. 162, ed. Léon Brunschvicg (Paris: GarnierFlammarion , 1976); trans. F. W. Trotter, introd. T. S. Eliot (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1908), 48. Cf. Erich Köhler, “‘Je ne sais quoi.’ Ein Kapitel aus der Begriffsgeschichte des Unbegreiflichen,” in Köhler, Esprit und arkadische Freiheit: Aufsätze aus der Welt der Romania (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1966), 230–86. 10. Baruch de Spinoza, Ethics, in Complete Works, trans. Samuel Shirley, ed. Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), 213–382, quote in part I, appendix, 240. For a similar description of the tendency to misuse, in the senses, “the order of nature,” cf. Meditations, VI.15; 57. 11. Thus David E. Wellbery with regard to Wieland: “Die Enden des Menschen: Anthropologie und Einbildungskraft im Bildungsroman bei Wieland, Goethe, Novalis ,” in Wellbery, Seiltänzer des Paradoxalen: Aufsätze zur ästhetischen Wissenschaft (Munich: Hanser, 2006), 77. The “subreption” of the imagination constitutes its “pathology ” (ibid., 79). 12. Thus Carsten Zelle, Die doppelte Ästhetik der Moderne: Revisionen des Schönen von Boileau bis Nietzsche (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995), 25ff. 13. Cf. Robert Sommer, Grundzüge einer Geschichte der deutschen Psychologie und Aesthetik von Wolff-Baumgarten bis Kant-Schiller (Hildesheim: Olms, 1975), 10ff. and 168ff.; Alfred Baeumler, Das Irrationalitätsproblem in der Ästhetik und Logik des 18. Jahrhunderts bis zur Kritik der Urteilskraft (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft , 1974), 38–43. Regarding this interpretation of aesthetics based on the difference between Leibniz and Descartes cf. Ernst Cassirer, Leibniz’ System in seinen wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen (Hildesheim: Olms, 1980), 458–72; Cassirer, Freiheit und Form: Studien zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994), 48–66. 14. G. W. Leibniz, Monadology, ed. Nicholas Rescher (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991) [= Monadology], §11, 68. The notion of a “principle” is already articulated by Pascal with respect to the “esprit de finesse...

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