Abstract

In his book A History of the Culture of the Modern Period, the eminent scholar Egon Friedell wrote concerning Descartes's influence in seven-teenth-century France that all the efforts of the great philosopher's critics notwithstanding, "his school inexorably extended its influence not only through the ‘occasionalists,’ as his closest disciples and followers in philosophy were called, and through the remarkable logic of the Port-Royal school The Art of Thinking and Boileau's tone-setting work The Poetic Art: rather, all of France, headed by the "Sun King," who at one time had banned Descartes's works, became his school. The state, economy, theater, architecture, religious affairs, strategy, and the art of gardening all became Cartesian. Descartes reigned unrestricted, as a sovereign, in all things: in tragedy, where the passions struggled with one another; in comedy, where algebraic formulas were devised for human characters; in the area around Versailles, dominated by the abstract symmetry of gardens; in the analytic methods for waging war and running the economy; and in the so to speak deductive ritual of hairstyles and manners, dances and genteel conversation. One can even say that to this day every Frenchman is a born Cartesian."