Descartes and Classicism

Abstract

This article seeks to answer the question of Descartes’s relation to seventeenth-century French literary theory: what role did Descartes play in the formation of classical doctrine in France? To this end, it shows that it is mistaken to identify Descartes’s philosophy with classicism, since, unlike classical aesthetics, in which beauty is an objective property of things, for Descartes beauty is not located in the object but rather in relation to it. In this way, the article makes clear that many elements run counter to the idea of Descartes’s influence on Classicism. At the same time, however, it shows that, when it is a matter of thinking well to write well, Descartes is the first of the classics.