Journal of the History of Philosophy

In a recent poem, Vom Schnee, oder Descartes in Deutschland (On Snow. Or Descartes in Germany [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003]), German writer Durs Grünbein suggests that a snowy, white landscape inspired the young René Descartes to theoretically define nature. Indeed, Descartes's reduction of nature to extended matter (see Le Monde, chapter 7) composed of particles in movement and abiding by the laws of nature entails a reduction of all bodies' diversity to a mechanistic system in which all secondary qualities are mathematically framed. The description of colors in the Regulae ad directionem ingenii (rule 12) exemplifies this reduction of nature to a geometrical grid with no differences—Jean-Luc Marion (Sur l'ontologie grise de Descartes [Paris: Vrin, 1975]) brilliantly defined it as a "grey ontology." Undoubtedly, Descartes's natural philosophy deals with understanding the deep structural order of bodies, the nature of which is a mechanical arrangement of particles, and leaves no space for outward variety. In their engaging book, Deborah Brown and Calvin Normore challenge this interpretation, and explore what they call an "ontology of everyday life" in Descartes's work.

A major thesis of the book is that "Descartes . . . did not banish the animals (human and non-), plants, artifacts, landscapes . . . planets and other familiar terrestrial and celestial categories" (5), which is something we gather by reading Les Météores or the Principia philosophiae. Most importantly, the authors make the following crucial point. According to them, Descartes, in his metaphysics and his philosophical understanding of nature, in no way abandons the categories of ordinary experience. In contrast, the authors show the extent to which ordinary objects play a role in Descartes's very practice of science.

The book is divided into seven chapters and a final conclusion. In the first chapter, Brown and Normore outline the context into which Descartes "was thrown" (3). Uncovering "the [End Page 683] world as Descartes found it" (5), they mainly explore early seventeenth-century scholastic interpretations of nature, which Descartes set out to dispel. Yet, questions remain concerning Descartes's success in constructing a new world. If on the one hand Descartes skillfully does away with accidents and hylomorphism, on the other hand, while he defines body in general, he is unable to define the different categories of bodies, that is, to establish distinctions among them (for example, neither a definition of 'plants' nor of 'life' ever emerges in his work). In this sense, those interpreters categorizing Descartes as a hard reductionist or an eliminativist have some grounds for their claims. However, the authors address this issue in chapter 2. The problem they try to solve is to combine the indefinite divisibility of matter, the consequence of which is that bodies are simply aggregates of particles (unum per accidens), with granting unity and consistency to singular bodies (28). When differentiating bodies, Descartes tends to reduce differences to motion. Still, the authors claim that Descartes's argument of real distinction applies to singular bodies—a crucial passage is Principia II, art. 25, in what is the most important issue of the book (38–39). According to Descartes, ordinary objects possess "true and immutable natures and their natures will not be merely the natures of the substances they 'are,'" which "make an ordinary thing an ens per se and unum per se" (51), ultimately implying a reconsideration of the issue of unity in Descartes's philosophy. Accordingly, it "is one and the same animal which has bones and flesh" (53, quoting Descartes's Sixth Replies), meaning that the composition of diverse parts could be the same individual (an animal) that is counted among the things that populate the world.

Significant differences between nature and artifacts (chapter 3), life functions and ends (chapter 4), and living and nonliving things (chapter 5) surface in the book as the authors try to solve some inextricable problems of Cartesian scholarship—namely, finalism and the definition of 'living being.' Then, the last chapters of the book...