Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Philosophers, Intellectuals, Novelists and Musicians

René Descartes

I have three letters of yours before me and all three require some elucidation. I think and think but can’t get anywhere. Perhaps you will say, “Make the mind silent”! But Descartes says, “Je pense, donc je suis.”

Descartes was talking nonsense. There are plenty of things that don’t think but still are — from the stone to the Yogi in samadhi. If he had simply meant that the fact of his thinking showed that he wasn’t dead, that of course would have been quite right and scientific.

9 September 1935