L'HARMONIE DES ORGUES. SUONI, CORPI E SENSAZIONI NEL PENSIERO MUSICALE DI DESCARTES

The importance of René Descartes's (1596-1650) metaphysics, physics and methodology is common knowledge in the Humanities: the author of the revolutionary Discours sur la méthode (1637) is universally celebrated as the father of modern Rationalism. Therefore, since the second part of the XVII Century, all cartesian interests and studies were focused on the Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641) and the Principia philosophiae (1644), the most philosophically pregnant Descartes's works. On the contrary, his ideas about music and sound theory, developed in the Compendium musicae (1618) and in the Correspondence (mostly in the letter exchanges with Marin Mersenne in the 1630's), were generally considered a back burner research area. In 1907 the author of the first monography on this subject, André Pirro (A. Pirro, Descartes et la musique, Paris 1907), actually accused the french philosopher of carelessness about sonorous and auditive phaenomena. The historical studies on cartesian music dramatically increased in the last decades of the XX Century mainly thanks to Fréderic de Buzon's survey (F. De Buzon, Descartes, Beeckman et l’acoustique, «Archives de philosophie», 4 BC X, 1981; Sympathie et antipathie dans le Compendium Musicae, «Archives de philosophie», XLVI, 1983; Fonctions de la mémoire dans les traités théoriques au XVII siècle, «Revue de musicologie», 76/2, 1990). These researches highlighted the prominent role played by the music theory in the constitution of the Descartes's greatest philosophy. Moving from these studies, recently revived in Bologna by Paolo Gozza (author of the crucial article Una matematica rinascimentale: la musica di Descartes, «Il saggiatore musicale», II/2, 1995), my PhD thesis has two principal aims: (i) To reconstruct the Descartes's musical thought, scattered in a disorganic way, throught his whole production; (ii) To utilize the conception of human being that emerges from Descartes's music theory as a test for the anthropology described in the metaphysical works. Descartes's music theory offers a theorical direction to clarify this problem and suggests a potential answer. Since the early Compendium musicae, the music creation and perception are described as homogeneous actions that implicate a mind-body cooperation. The human being can play an instrument, sing, listen music, dance only because he is deeply unitary: it is composed by a third nature (different by mind and body too) that upsets the dualism rules. Cartesian music depicts an organic anti-dualist and anti-rationalist man in a rigid sense. Therefore and lastly, I claim that this research on Descartes's music thought is useful not only to enrich the studies on cartesian anthropology, but also to definitively eject the common mismatch on the René Descartes philosophy as a monolithic and ingenuous rationalism.