“In period terms, the ingenium was one's individual, inborn nature, that is, the temperamental and cognitive specificities of one's embodied mind” (1). The term expresses a Renaissance equation of natural individuality with the “lineaments” (195) of embodied cognition. The combination of Descartes and ingenium is not arbitrary. This volume poses the central importance of ingenium and the “corporeal imagination” (3) for discovery and invention, as a truer alternative to supposed Cartesian dualism. Meanwhile, Raphaële Garrod maintains that this reconsideration of Descartes points toward a reassessment of the âge classique as an age of imaginative ingenuity rather than universally shared reason. The persuasive angle, variety of topics broached, and striking intellectual diversity of contributors make this volume a new starting point for future study of Descartes.
The volume's contributions explore what ingenious cognition looks like, how ingenium could be trained, and the implications of embodied, hence individualized, cognition for the “human variety” (158) of minds and Descartes's “anthropology” of souls (109). Garrod has grouped the contributions in two: focused studies of ingenuity in particular aspects of Descartes’ work (in math, medicine, method, morals, etc.), and contextual histories of ingenuity that situate Descartes in older Scholastic and pedagogical traditions. This organization allows for an unusual diversity in contributors’ methods, aims, and uses of evidence: the first half of the volume has a more philosophical flavor, while the second is more historical, and contributors across the volume seem eager to go beyond traditional accounts. The so-called Rules for the Direction of the Mind—which Richard Oosterhoff reads as Descartes's effort to bring mathematics to bear on a longstanding tradition of treatises for training the ingenium (182)—figures prominently in both divisions.
One philosopher, quoted as a chapter epigraph, declared that “what the ingenium is, and what it consists of, is as obscure as it is clear that it exists” (139). This continues to be true here: accounts of the term have a family resemblance but do not coincide. For instance, ingenium as the “basic unity of application, reflection and invention” (25) leads Denis Kambouchner to associate the term with rhetorical industria; David Rabouin, meanwhile, shows ingenium at work in the mathematics of the Rules as “figurative imagination” (65). An outstanding contribution (bearing the epigraph in question) is Igor Agostini's history of ingenium, which helpfully delineates the Scholastic descent of the term's four meanings: as “inborn nature,” as “capacity of the soul to discover,” imagine, and remember (of rhetorical, not Scholastic descent); as “rational faculty”; and as differentiator between individuals (142).
The mix of scholarship from anglophone and francophone communities showcases the intellectual thickness of Descartes's writings, which respond well to careful reading of various types, from the technical-philosophical to the erudite-historical. I wanted more direct confrontation of these approaches. How does Oosterhoff's account of “method” as an outgrowth of Jesuit pedagogy compare with Kamboucher's emphasis on Cicero? How does Roger Ariew's claim that Descartes ultimately offers a “logic” (itself seemingly consistent with a Jesuit view that mathematics derives its soundness from logic) sit with Rabouin's account of imaginative mathematical practice? How does Garrod's emphasis on Descartes's literary decorum relate to Dennis Sepper's call to study Descartes's “psychological anthropology,” and how does it sit with widespread emphasis, in the first half of the volume, on technical interpretation?
The contributors may agree on the importance and, broadly, the character of ingenium for Descartes; they do not seem to agree on how to read him. Garrod's culminating contribution about the politesse de l'esprit—esprit was the French translation of ingenium—arranges for this confrontation, arguing that Descartes's views on ingenium shaped his writing.
The realization that politeness is “recognition of the diversity of human wits” and that one's own ingenium gives rise to a “singular cognitive style” (187, italics in original) might lead to dissimulation as a kind of ingenious condescension. Instead, Garrod argues, Descartes looks to politeness as the political prerequisite of an intellectual community characterized by natural difference rather than universally shared reason (200). Garrod's own politesse is on display in her deft treatment of other contributions: it is clear enough that she has thought through the contributions’ coherence.
