The Cartesian Spring — Part Five

David Proud
16 min readOct 3, 2020

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Pose the pen, man, way me does. Way ole missa vellatooth fust show me how. Fourth power to her illpogue! Bould strokes for your life! Tip! This is Steal, this is Barke, this is Starn, this is Swhipt, this is Wiles, this is Pshaw, this is Doubbllinbbay-yates. 2 This is brave Danny weeping his spache for the popers. This is cool Connolly wiping his hearth with brave Danny. And this, regard! how Chawleses Skewered parparaparnelligoes between brave Danny boy and the Connolly Upanishadem! Top. Spoken hath L’arty Magory. Eregob ragh. Prouf! 3

[Force Centres of the Fire Serpentine: heart, throat, navel, spleen, sacral, fontanella, inter-temporal eye. Conception of the Compromise and Finding of a Formula].

2 When the dander rattles how the peacocks prance!

3 The Brownes de Browne — Browne of Castlehacknolan.

- James Joyce, ‘Finnegans Wake’

In this passage from the ‘Night Lessons’ episode there features a combination of a writing lesson, (the letter being written is an expression of grief and desolation over the mother that the brothers Shem and Shaun have lost, within the context of the dream narrative that is, and of a desire to lay siege to the father), and of an argument. Shem the Penman, (Joyce himself), who created all ‘the caricatures in the drame’, in the Wake that is, with its caricatures rather than characters, agreeably explains to Shaun the Postman how to emulate him; he is the teacher offering examples to follow: ‘Steal’, ‘Barke’, ‘Starn’, ‘Schwipt’, ‘Wiles’, ‘Pshaw’; that is to say, he should take Sir Richard Steele, (1672–1729), Edmund Burke, (1729–1797), Laurence Sterne, (1713–1768), Jonathan Swift, (1667–1745), Oscar Wilde, (1854–1900), George Bernard Shaw, (1856–1950), and William Butler Yeats, (1865–1939), as models. Their full subversive import Shaun cannot quite comprehend but it does function to turn the situation from sibling rivalry, as they unite in forging together an anti-father alliance. They thus prepare to collaborate in the writing of an historical work upon subjects relating to the father’s life, and to his disgrace.

The ‘Force Centres of the Fire Serpentine’, or the four centres of serpentine fire, is probably a reference to D. H. Lawrence’s, (1885–1930), strange occult ramblings in such works as ‘Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious’, and ‘Fantasia of the Unconscious’, odd combinations of Theosophy and Yoga. For instance: ‘We bruise the serpent’s head: his flat and brainless head. But his revenge of bruising our heel is a good one. The heels, through which the powerful downward circuit flows: these are bruised in us, numbed with a horrible neurotic numbness. The dark strong flow that polarizes us to the earth’s centre is hampered, broken. We become flimsy fungoid beings, with no roots and no hold in the earth, like mushrooms. The serpent has bruised our heel till we limp. The lame gods, the enslaved gods, the toiling limpers moaning for the woman. You don’t find the sun and moon playing at pals in the sky. Their beams cross the great gulf which is between them. … So with man and woman. They must stand clear again. They must fight their way out of their self-consciousness: there is nothing else. Or, rather, each must fight the other out of self-consciousness’.

The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego, and Señor Xolotl, 1949, Frida Kahlo

I don’t know if Lawrence had read Georg Friedrich Wilhem Hegel, (1870–1831), but see ‘A World of Gods and Monsters — Part Three’ on the subject of two self-consciousnesses locked in conflict.

And ‘fontanella, inter-temporal eye’ may refer to René Descartes’ belief that the interaction of mind and body occurred in the pineal gland, from which in various reptiles, for example, the lamprey, a third eye develops. And later in the passage we read ‘…while retorting thanks, you make me a reborn of the cards’, (see ‘The Cartesian Spring’ — Part Two), a definite reference to Descartes, (‘the cards’, the allusions aren’t always easy to spot), and his pineal gland theory. Having made mind and matter two distinct substances Descartes had to account for how they could interact; and so he selected, quite arbitrarily, the pineal gland as the principal seat of the soul; that is to say, the soul is joined to the body by ‘a certain very small gland situated in the middle of the brain’s substance and suspended above the passage through which the spirits in the brain’s anterior cavities communicate with those in its posterior cavities’, (so it has been translated, I am too mature to make a comment concerning posterior cavities). It would have better not to have separated mind and matter in the first place; but be that as it may, ‘Meditation 5’ in his ‘Meditations on First Philosophy’ is entitled ‘Concerning the Essence of Material Things, and Again Concerning God, That He Exists’.

He begins with a discussion of how material objects might be known, alongside God and the self, knowledge of which he believes he has already established. But prior to inquiring whether such objects exist outside of himself he considers the ideas of these objects as they exist in his thoughts in order to discern which are clear and which are confused; for he divides external objects into those that are clear and distinct and those that are obscure and confused. Those that are clear and distinct are to be found among the geometrical ideas of extension, duration and movement; it is impossible that such ideas could be misconceived or united in such a manner as to render them false; if for instance the idea of a creature with the body, tail, head and back legs of a lion, and the head and wings of an eagle was constructed and the question asked if such a creature had an enormous schwanzstucker, (this isn’t Descartes example), an answer could be, indeed, would have to be, fabricated; but no amount of mathematical re-arranging of a triangle could ever permit its three internal angles to add up to anything other than 180 degrees; and so it is that truths may well have a nature or an essence in themselves, and which is independent of the mind that is considering such truths.

Gustave Moreau, ‘Deva and Griffin’, 19th century

We can discover within ourselves countless ideas of things which, though they may not exist outside of ourselves, cannot be said to be nothing; they have at least the being of thought, and while we have some control over our thoughts concerning such things, they do not emerge out of our fantasies; they have their own actual and unchangeable natures or essences. Suppose that you were to have a mental image of a triangle; it is feasible that never has such a figure of this kind existed outside of your thought, but by virtue of the very fact that the figure has a fixed nature, or essence, or form, eternal and immutable, the figure has not been produced by you, nor is it dependent upon your mind. And from the independence of such ideas of external objects, Descartes concludes that he is every bit as certain about God as he is about these mathematical ideas; and such is quite natural, for the ideas of God are the only ideas that imply God’s existence. In the case of the idea of a mountain and the idea of a valley, while we might be incapable of picturing a mountain without a valley, it is nonetheless possible that neither have existence; but the fact that one cannot conceive of God without existence intrinsically eliminates the possibility of God’s non-existence; and this is the so-called ontological argument for the existence of God, which may be summarized as follows:

1. God is an infinitely perfect being, by definition.

2. Perfection includes existence.

3. Ergo, God exists.

Descartes believed that he had proven God’s existence in his third meditation (see ‘The Cartesian Spring’ — Part Three); but the ontological argument, he supposes, eliminates any uneasiness he might have had concerning his distinct and clear criteria for truth; for with God’s existence confirmed, all doubt that what one previously thought was real and not a dream can be expunged; and upon such a realization Descartes can now contend that in the absence of this certain knowledge of the existence of a supreme and perfect being, assurance of any truth is simply not possible:

‘Thus I plainly see that the certainty and truth of all my knowledge derives from one thing: my thought of the true God. Before I knew Him, I couldn’t know anything else perfectly. But now I can plainly and certainly know innumerable things, not only about God and other mental beings, but also about the nature of physical objects, insofar as it is the subject-matter of pure mathematics’.

Having got thus far, in the sixth and final meditation Descartes will address the existence of material things and the real distinction between the mind and body. …

‘Morpheus’, 1771, Jean-Bernard Restout

As I explained in ‘The Cartesian Spring’ — Part Four, in the fourth meditation Descartes had argued that though we are the creation of a perfect divine being we are still capable of error, on the grounds that we are in possession of perfectly created faculties each of which is perfectly created, one of which is the will, or ability to choose between various options; and another one of which is the understanding or intellect that reflects our ability to know things. But whereas the will is unlimited, we can will anything we choose, the understanding is limited, we can only know that of which we have clear and distinct perceptions.

This is Hegel’s response to that idea (from his ‘Lectures in the Philosophy of Religion’):

‘It is frequently said that in his will man is infinite; while in his understanding, his power of knowledge, he is finite. To say this is childish; the opposite is much nearer the truth…. In willing, a man confronts an Other, he isolates himself as an individual, he has in himself a purpose, an intent with regard to an Other, he behaves as if separated from that Other, and thus finitude comes in. In his acts man …. has an end before him, and such action essentially requires that the content, the end, should exist, should lose the form of an idea, or in other words, that the end in view being, to begin with, subjective, should have this subjectivity taken away from it, and thus at length attain to objective existence’.

That is to say, an act of will requires the self to make itself particular; and this denies the will being infinite, for we cannot will anything we like; to will something requires having a particular objective and to have a particular object requires that the self in addition take up a particular position; during which process the thing that is willed loses the formal nature that makes it universal. I can will to get a lover; the moment I will towards a particular lover I cease to will an idea that is universal but rather I will a particular thing. Such is the character of the will’s activity; once the will engages in acts of willing, it always does so by selecting an object and thereby restricting itself; the will is by definition finite. But one’s self is infinite Spirit, and it can attain this unlimited and infinite nature only in knowing the infinite; and we can know the infinite specifically as God, though a mistake is made through knowing God as a particular (and God is not a being, as explained in part three of this series); in which process the self as thinking Spirit is at one with the object of Spirit, as opposed to being set over against an object as it is in the case of particular acts of a finite will.

Jean Renoir, ‘The Promenade’, 1870

Hegel considered the ontological argument to be successful; though he did not much elaborate on why so; although perhaps his entire body of work could be said to constitute an ontological argument for the existence of the Absolute. And Bertrand Russell, (1872–1970), during his early Hegelian phase, (yes he did have one), accepted the argument; apparently he once exclaimed: ‘Great God in Boots!- the ontological argument is sound!’; although he did later criticize the argument, claiming that ‘the argument does not, to a modern mind, seem very convincing, but it is easier to feel convinced that it must be fallacious than it is to find out precisely where the fallacy lies’; and he then proceeded to draw a distinction between existence and essence, arguing that the essence of a person can be described and their existence still remain in question.

The ontological argument was initially formulated by Saint Anselm, (1033/34–1109), whereby he defines God as a being related to whom nothing superior can be conceived; he then inquires upon the possible existence of such a being in ours mind only, that is, simply as an object of thought; the answer he gives is no, for such a being would be one related to whom a superior could be conceived. Descartes ontological argument is essentially an updated version of Anselm’s argument; but as David Hume, (1711–1776), has pointed out, (and modern religious apologists take note), nothing can be proven to exist using only a priori reasoning:

‘… there is an evident absurdity in pretending to demonstrate a matter of fact, or to prove it by any arguments a priori. Nothing is demonstrable, unless the contrary implies a contradiction. Nothing, that is distinctly conceivable, implies a contradiction. Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent. There is no being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction. Consequently there is no being, whose existence is demonstrable’.

Ontological arguments are arguments for the conclusion that God exists, from premises which are supposed to derive from some source other than observation of the world, for example, from reason alone; arguments from what are taken to be analytic, a priori and necessary premises to the conclusion that God exists. There are, however, three versions of the ontological proof, representing three ways by which God relates as subject with objectivity, for with the ontological argument much hangs on our idea of God, but how, in what manner, does the trademark, to use Descartes’s metaphor, that which signifies we are God’s handiwork, appear in us. Do we have any such conception at all? First, St. Anselm’s way, whereby the unity is presupposed; second, Immanuel Kant’s, (1724–1804), way, whereby the unity is denied. Kant’s refutation of the ontological argument was primarily directed at Descartes’ version of it, an argument stating that from the concept of a being containing every perfection it is possible to infer its existence; but as Kant pointed out:

‘In whatever manner the understanding may have arrived at a concept, the existence of its object is never, by any process of analysis, discoverable within it; for the knowledge of the existence of the object consists precisely in the fact that the object is posited in itself, beyond the (mere) thought of it’.

Existence is neither a predicate, according to Kant, nor a perfection, it cannot be inferred from the concept of the most perfect being beyond its concept; Kant objects to the passage from the logical to the ontological; and as for the concept of an existing infinite Being, Kant conceives as distinct what previous philosophical thought had conceived as united, proceeding to do so through referral to an example taken from finite beings:

‘A hundred real thalers do not contain the least coin more than a hundred possible thalers. For as the latter signify the concept, and the former the object and the positing of the object, should the former contain more than the latter, my concept would not, in that case, express the whole object, and would not therefore be an adequate concept of it. … For the object, as it actually exists is not analytically contained in my concept, but is added to my concept … synthetically; and yet the conceived hundred thalers are not themselves in the least increased through thus acquiring existence outside my concept’.

The third version of the ontological proof, after Anselm’s presupposition and Kant’s denial concerning the ways by which God relates as subject with objectivity, is, of course, the Hegelian way, in which the relation is established as the result of a process; and with this we can at last make some headway. As with Descartes and the infinite will, Hegel is once again scornful, this time with Kant’s naive statement that being and concept are different in finite beings; for of course concept and being cannot be united in finite beings; but the ontological argument refers to the infinite Being. Kant should either argue against the philosophical postulation of an identity that no person would admit, namely, that of being and concept in finite beings, or, while denying existence to be a predicate of finite beings, should in addition deny existence to be a predicate of the concept of any being, including an infinite Being. Kant’s refutation of the ontological argument pays no heed to the fact that existence is stated as a predicate of the infinite Being only, and not of a hundred thalers or some other finite being.

But although existence is not a descriptive predicate of a finite being, it could be so when we talk about the infinite Being, that than which nothing is greater; but in accordance with the principles of the Hegelian method to understand the concept of an infinite Being is to know that the infinite Being is more than a mere concept. Everything is an object, there is nothing that is not related to thought, to the subject; the Absolute is object; God is absolute object; but for this to be considered in abstraction, whereby God as object is disunited from subjectivity, gives rise to the view of God as ‘a dark and hostile power’ over against the subject, confronting him or her as something completely alien to his or her own life and subjectivity, a mere external power that has nothing in common with him or her, an object to be feared but which it is impossible to love; the very perspective of superstition and servile dread. But God is not only object but subject, though it first comes before us as an abstract idea divested of subjectivity; and yet the process of the object within itself is a graduated return to subjectivity, the subject goes out of itself into its opposite the object and returns into itself in the unity of subject and object (thus the logical passes to the ontological, via Hegelian logic that is).

And by surmounting Cartesian simplicity and Kantian naivety, steps can then be taken to further a metaphysical inquiry, towards the knowing, and towards the proving, of the Absolute.

Salvador Dali, ‘Vision of Hell’, 1962

If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him?

If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future?

If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers?

If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him?

If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses?

- Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘The Necessity of Atheism’

To be concluded ….

Notes to ‘Finnegans Wake’ quotation:

1. pose = to lay down, put forth (an assertion, allegation, claim, instance, etc.).

2, vellatooth = Yellowtooth, Queen Victoria; and ‘Ulysses’, 44: ‘Drumont, know what he called queen Victoria? Old hag with the yellow teeth’.

3. fust = dial. and U.S. dial. var. of first; and fust (obs), fustic, a kind of wood used as a yellow dye.

4. Fourth power to her illpogue = more power to one’s elbow, may you (he, etc.) succeed (in a laudable enterprise); and pogue (Anglo-Irish), kiss; and mathematical power.

5. sacral = sacral vertebra.

6. fontanelle = fontanella (Italian), (OF., little fountain) one of several membranous spaces in the head of an infant which lie at the adjacent angles of the parietal bones.

7. temporal = of, belonging to, or situated in the temples.

8. bould (Irish Pronunciation) = bold; and Mrs Centlivre: ‘Bold Stroke for a Wife’ (a play, 1717).

9. Steal = Steele, Sir Richard (1672–1729), English writer, born in Dublin.

10. Barke = Burke, Edmund (1729–1797), Irish writer.

11. Starn = Laurence Sterne (1713- 1768), Irish born English novelist,best-known for his novel ‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy’.

12. Schwipt = Jonathan Swift (1667 -1745), Irish cleric, satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for Whigs then for Tories), and poet, famous for works like ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ and ‘A Modest Proposal’; and schwips (German), stroke with a twig.

13. Wiles = Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Irish playwright, novelist, poet, and short story writer primarily known for his novel ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’.

14. Pshaw = George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), Irish dramatist, literary critic, and socialist. He is best remembered for his play ‘Pygmalion’.

15. Yates = William Butler Yeats, (1865–1939), Irish poet, dramatist, and mystic who signed his works W B Yeats (always run together without stops after initial letters); and Dublin Bay.

16. dander = ruffled or angry temper; and gander, the male of the goose; a dull or stupid person, a fool, simpleton; and thunder.

17. rattle = to scold, rate, or rail at, volubly.

18. peacock = the male bird of any species of the genus Pavo or peafowl, especially of the common species P. cristatus, a native of India, now everywhere domesticated, and well known as the most imposing and magnificent of birds; from this and its strutting gait it is treated as a type of ostentatious display and vainglory.

19. prance = to move or walk in a manner suggestive of a prancing horse, or (more generally) in an elated or arrogant manner, to swagger; to dance, gambol, caper.

20. Daniel O’Connell = byname THE LIBERATOR (1775–1847), first of the great 19th-century Irish leaders in the British House of Commons.

21. reading; and ‘This is hiena hinnessy laughing alout at the Willingdone. This is lipsyg dooley krieging the funk from the hinnessy. This is the hinndoo Shimar Shin between the dooley boy and the hinnessy. Tip’.

22. spache (Irish Pronunciation) = speech; and dispatch.

23. poper = (?) (Hazlitt suggests ‘a papist’); and papers.

24. Connolly, James = one of leaders of Easter Rising in Dublin, 1916.

25. hearth = arse.

26. skewer = to fasten (meat, etc.) with a skewer (a long pin for holding meat in position while it is being roasted).

27. Charles Stewart Parnell, (b. June 27, 1846, Avondale, County Wicklow, Ire. — d. Oct. 6, 1891, Brighton, Sussex, Eng.), Irish nationalist, member of the British Parliament (1875–91), and the leader of the struggle for Irish Home Rule in the late 19th century; and par (Latin), equal; and para (Greek), beside, along.

28. Londonderry Air (song): ‘Danny boy’.

29. Upanishad = any of the speculative texts that contain elaborations in prose and verse of the Vedas, the most ancient Hindu sacred literature; and Upanishad (Sanskrit), confidential ; and ‘Up, guards, and at them!’ (motif).

30. Mohammed ben Musa al-Khwarizmi — (780 -? 850), Arabian mathematician who wrote a treatise. The part dealing with arithmetic begins: ‘Spoken has Algoritmi’, the name Khwarizmi having passed into Algoritmi. Letters of ‘L’arty Magory’ are the same as ‘Algoritmi’, if i = y (Glasheen, Adaline, ‘Third census of Finnegans Wake’).

31. Erin go bragh (Anglo-Irish) = Éire go bráth (Irish), Ireland until Judgement Day, Ireland for ever (slogan); and erege, heretic.

Phoenix Park, Dublin, photo by me.

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David Proud
David Proud

Written by David Proud

David Proud is a British philosopher currently pursuing a PhD at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool, on Hegel and James Joyce.

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