Abstract

In a letter to Mesland (1645), Descartes suggests that "a greater freedom" consists in a positive faculty to follow "the worse", although "we see the better". What does such freedom presuppose? A good illustration of this kind of excess of the will, as suggested by Beyssade, is Attila, the "black hero" in one of Corneille's tragedies. This article tries to relate the possibility of that freedom with the very nature of the cogito