Descartes in Modern French Philosophy

Abstract This chapter examines the role of Descartes in the histories of philosophy of Victor Cousin and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and concludes with a look at the mid-twentieth-century Descartes of Jean-Paul Sartre. Establishing Descartes as a national figure and as the beginning of modern philosophical history itself, both Cousin and Lévy-Bruhl convey a problem wherein ‘Descartes’ comes to operate as an ‘illusion without an owner’ and represents a concept so powerful it both exceeds the necessity of reading and undergirds the schemata of both figures’ later work. The chapter examines how these later authors furnish a voluntary ‘belief’ in ‘Descartes’, held apart from his seventeenth-century texts. After showing how Descartes’ illusory function extends to philosophy in the epoch of its own redistribution into other disciplines, the chapter looks to the limits of Cartesian freedom in Jean-Paul Sartre’s continuation of the ‘Descartes’ of ‘Frenchmen’.