Between Imagination and Vision: Descartes’s Creation of Nature in Le Monde

René Descartes’s Le Monde envisions an unconventional physics, sharply diverging from the science of his contemporaries in pursuing its own unusual path. The text opens with a traditional theme in Western philosophy–the human-nature divide and the troubles of perceptions, later formalized in Cartesian dualism. Yet Descartes’s early physics attempts to bridge this gap, in articulating an innovative conception of nature. In Le Monde, a rational enterprise constructs nature, reducing it to a geometrical order that is utimately consistent with Descartes’s identification of nature and artifacts. However, in Le Monde nature also appears as an autonomous entity, unfolding under the attentive observation of humans but operating by itself. In this article, I examine Descartes’s creation of nature as both an object of intellectual operation and as a necessary object of human visualization, however autonomous and independent it may be. This marks Le Monde as an original and important contribution to pre-modern philosophical ecology of nature.