Theological Origins of Modernity

178 chapter six
interpretations of his dream(s). Th e fi rst school believes that he faithfully
(and almost immediately) described what transpired that night. Even
among this group there are those like Freud who believe that there is little
to be learned from this account because no one can interpret the dream
except the dreamer. What we can know thus comes only from Descartes’
own interpretation of the dream. Other, more daring interpreters believe
that they can decipher the meaning of the dream symbols even if Descartes
does not explain them. For them the dreams reveal the deep intentionality
behind Cartesian science, not always clear even to Descartes himself.
A second school believes that the account of the dreams is invented
whole cloth or is such a complete reworking of the dream experience that
it needs to be treated as a literary creation. Watson has persuasively argued
that the specifi c details of the dream(s) were invented by Baillet and
that succeeding generations of Descartes scholars have accepted them
as genuine out of a burning desire to have some insight into Descartes’
real motives. 40 Others accept the details as Cartesian but believe that the
dream story is merely a method for Descartes to present opinions that are
either politically or theologically suspect. Scholars who support this reading
point to the fact that there was an existing tradition of using dream
accounts in this manner in both Latin literature and the Hermetic tradition.
41 Cicero’s famous “Dream of Scipio” is only the best known of these
examples and one with which Descartes was undoubtedly familiar as a
result of his Jesuit education.
In order to come to terms with the importance of the dream story
told in the Olympica, it is necessary to understand more fully the structure
of the Little Notebook of which it is a part. Descartes began the Little
Notebook aft er leaving Holland (imitating Beeckman who kept a similar
notebook). Its fi rst page is dated January 1, 1619, and it was written over
a number of months and contained many incomplete sections, but it was
clearly important to Descartes since he retained it for over thirty years,
and it was found among his papers when he died in 1650. Th e manuscript,
as Chanut describes it, is very complicated with diff erent texts on diff erent
sides of the page, some written upside down. As a result of the thoughtful
reconstruction by Cole (drawing on Gouhier), we now know that what
Descartes almost certainly did was write on one side of the paper until it
was full then turn the book over and write on the other side. Th e manuscript
thus contained seven parts. On one side there were four sections,
Parnassus (18 sheets of mathematical considerations), untitled considerations
on the sciences (2 pages), untitled algebra (1/2 page), and Democritica
(a few lines of text), and on the other side three sections, Praeambula