
Contents
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Making Doubt Work Making Doubt Work
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Cartesian Circles Cartesian Circles
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Cite
Extract
All that we need to doe to make all our Perceptions evident, is only to look for such Means as can increase the Attention and Extent of the Mind.
Nicolas Malebranche1Close
one might ask: even if we accept that “Death be not proud” ends with a victory over distraction and hence over Death, what exactly is the extent of this victory? How far does it extend beyond Donne’s poem, if at all? Does it apply to Donne’s other poems? Does it remain relevant beyond Donne’s poetry? Perhaps beyond poetry?
The first answer to these questions is just a reminder that the purpose of “Death be not proud” as a figure of the spiritual body is to prove only that mortality could be overcome if an entirely undistracted, holy attention were sustainable. This qualifies not only what the poem proves but what kind of proof the poem is: it is a proof only if and insofar as it is being attended to. From an aesthetic point of view, this means that the poem comes to life as an experiential proof every time a reader dedicates to it the extent and quality of attention the poem requires. This, perhaps, isn’t particularly surprising. What is probably less expected is that this notion of a proof depending on being attended to by the subject isn’t exclusive to Donne’s poem, poetry, or even devotion, but reappears in early modern philosophy as well. Of course, to claim that there is continuity between Christian devotional practices and early modern philosophy is nothing new; the influence of spiritual exercises on Descartes’s system, for instance, is well documented.2Close My point in the following isn’t to add further support to the argument for historical continuity but to indicate how the early modern projects of devotion, devotional poetry, and philosophy had a shared interest in holy attention. Before turning to Descartes and Malebranche, then, let me show that although “Death be not proud” is a particularly complete exercise of attention, what it tries to achieve is by no means incompatible with Donne’s other, seemingly less self-assertive poems. Indeed, understanding how markers of ambiguity and doubt are part of the poems’ exercises will also help us recognize the ways in which Donne’s poems anticipate early modern philosophy’s methodological concern with attention.
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