English Science and Literature club🤓✍️📖

294.

November 20, 2024 (14264)
Here is what Descartes says about why he wrote the Discourse in French: “If I write in French, which is the language of my country, rather than Latin, which is that of my teachers, it is because I hope that those who use only their unalloyed natural reason will be better judges of my opinions than those who swear only by the books of ancients.”
Is he looking for “better judges of his opinions,” or is he trying to undermine the power of Latin in psychopolitics? Did he have a “clear and distinct” idea of “unalloyed natural reason”? There is no such thing as “unalloyed natural reason.” There are mutually incomprehensible languages that lie in the foundations of different societies developed more or less consistently over the past dozen millennia in the struggle for power over nature. All these languages try to impose their narratives on nature as a whole. All these languages try to make themselves “the masters and possessors of nature.”
Living throughout the Thirty Years’ War, Descartes must have understood that the days of Latin’s hegemony over international, scientific, religious and other types of discourse were numbered. Italian, Polish, German, Spanish, English, French, etc. great thinkers stopped paying tribute to Latin and advanced their own languages as the best guides of “unalloyed natural reason”, making fun of the monolingual Latin thinkers who still believed in the universal (unipolar) supremacy of their language in psychopolitics. Descartes has mastered both French and Latin to the degree that he could see no rivals in either of them. After Galileo’s condemnation in 1633, which made clear that scientific progress in Latin was no more than a dream, Descartes put off the publication of his book on the universe and wrote a discourse about his personal history, explicitly saying that his French was superior to Latin as a guide of “unalloyed natural reason.” But then he seemed to change his mind, and a few years later published his Meditations in Latin. Did he change his mind whenever there was a shift in the balance of power throughout the Thirty Years’ War?

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4 viewsVladimir Svetashev, Nov 21 at 10:46

294.

November 20, 2024 (14264)
Here is what Descartes says about why he wrote the Discourse in French: “If I write in French, which is the language of my country, rather than Latin, which is that of my teachers, it is because I hope that those who use only their unalloyed natural reason will be better judges of my opinions than those who swear only by the books of ancients.”
Is he looking for “better judges of his opinions,” or is he trying to undermine the power of Latin in psychopolitics? Did he have a “clear and distinct” idea of “unalloyed natural reason”? There is no such thing as “unalloyed natural reason.” There are mutually incomprehensible languages that lie in the foundations of different societies developed more or less consistently over the past dozen millennia in the struggle for power over nature. All these languages try to impose their narratives on nature as a whole. All these languages try to make themselves “the masters and possessors of nature.”
Living throughout the Thirty Years’ War, Descartes must have understood that the days of Latin’s hegemony over international, scientific, religious and other types of discourse were numbered. Italian, Polish, German, Spanish, English, French, etc. great thinkers stopped paying tribute to Latin and advanced their own languages as the best guides of “unalloyed natural reason”, making fun of the monolingual Latin thinkers who still believed in the universal (unipolar) supremacy of their language in psychopolitics. Descartes has mastered both French and Latin to the degree that he could see no rivals in either of them. After Galileo’s condemnation in 1633, which made clear that scientific progress in Latin was no more than a dream, Descartes put off the publication of his book on the universe and wrote a discourse about his personal history, explicitly saying that his French was superior to Latin as a guide of “unalloyed natural reason.” But then he seemed to change his mind, and a few years later published his Meditations in Latin. Did he change his mind whenever there was a shift in the balance of power throughout the Thirty Years’ War?

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