Descartes's Fictions: Reading Philosophy with Poetics by Emma Gilby (review)

Emma Gilby offers a refreshing new take on the nexus between philosophy and literature in the early modern period by way of her study of how the work of a few key literary thinkers of the day paralleled and may have even influenced Descartes's thinking and writing. Gilby is methodologically very careful in her approach and this is a welcome caution. She is explicitly not reading Descartes's work as literature and, equally importantly, she is not reading the literary texts as philosophy. Rather, she asserts that much is to be gained by a study that recognizes how thinkers in these two domains were grappling with very similar questions, particularly about the nature of free will in light of an infinite God (which in tragedy translates to questions of fatalism and free choice), the question of how apparently good people make bad choices, and the possibility of learning from moral error. The book is divided into three sections. The first, 'Debating Poetics', sets up, by way of the work of Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac (a contemporary and intellectual interlocutor of Descartes), many of the key questions of poetics in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries around believability and judgement, particularly 'what it is to judge well, and forestall ambiguity' (p. 39). The second section, 'Discourons', then draws a link more explicitly between the thinking of Guez de Balzac and Descartes. It gives us a strikingly lucid discussion of Descartes's famous 'morale par provision' that touches on the central question of whether really anything can be 'provisional' for Descartes. The final section, 'Changing Minds', focuses closely on Descartes's writings and ably shows how several questions being asked in literary spheres—'the relations between action and responsibility, judgement and fault, and imagination and the passions' (p. 20)—are taken up in Descartes's work and complicated by it. In the seventh chapter, for example, Gilby skilfully traces Descartes's reasoning on differentiating between those ideas which we perceive clearly and distinctly (about which there can be no ambiguity or uncertainty) and those ideas which require judgement and discernment by way of continued attention. Her reading of the subtleties of Descartes's thinking on how continued attention is required to judge well is especially helpful and insightful when she later ties it, in the final chapter, to the literary interest in admiratio and marvel (which, when properly engaged, should spur sustained attention and further enquiry). Because of the subtlety of Gilby's topic and approach, it takes quite a few pages to get to her sustained reading of Descartes. In its early chapters, the book invokes a wide array of arguments and thinkers; as a result, it will be best appreciated by advanced graduate students and specialists in early modern literary history. With that said, Gilby's argument builds steadily and meticulously. Once she gets to Descartes's work in the final section, the payoffs are significant for those interested in deepening their historical contextualization of Descartes's thinking on morality, judgement, and epistemology more broadly.