June 21, 2023
info:eu-repo/semantics/OpenAccess
Guillaume Delean, « Ethics and Mathesis : The Question of Salvation during the Reign of the Mathesis Universalis. From Descartes to Spinoza, the Hidden Coordinates of Modernity », HALSHS : archive ouverte en Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société, ID : 10670/1.6fg1pq
The mathesis universalis occupies a unique place in the development of Cartesianism and, through it, in the movement of modern ideas, notably thanks to its Heideggerian reception, which contributed to conferring a central role on it in the constitution of the metaphysical project and to discern the joint root of science and technology. However, beyond this generic "monumental" approach, as D. Rabouin put it, it is necessary to circumscribe its conceptual identity and, while avoiding the pitfalls that surround its reception, to identify the founding choices that preside over the radicality of this enterprise. By retracing the path that leads Descartes from the departure from La Flèche to the years 1628-1629 and the writing of the Regulae ad directionem ingenii, we show that mathesis is first and foremost a practice that engages the imagination, opening up to a novel ontology that we identify with a form of mathesis anarchism. The recovery, even the repression, of this disposition from 1630 onwards, with the theory of eternal truths, and then in the Discourse on Method, with the introduction of the foundational doubt figure, leads Descartes to fail in his project to think a genuine mathetic ethics and engages modernity in the path of the will to power, even the will to will, with the aporias of nihilism associated with it. Spinoza's effort then appears as a consistent attempt to resolve the tensions arising from such a disposition of knowledge and a total commitment to its ontological, anthropological, logical, and epistemological consequences, with a view to thinking an ethics for mathetic times. This journey from the Regulae ad directionem ingenii to the Ethics allows us to situate Spinoza's Cartesianism as the exploration of an unthought of Descartes and to open up to an understanding of the Ethics as the truth of the Mathesis Universalis.