Geulincx: "Miscellaneous Questions"

The philosophy of Arnold Geulincx is lately becoming somewhat better known, with English translations of his Ethics and Metaphysics now available. His two favourite mottos, which pervade his philosophy like a pair of refrains, Wherein you have no power, therein you should not will, and What you do not know how to do, is not your action, are not (as I have remarked elsewhere) doctrines to be set before persons of a nervous disposition - and this is as it should be. But in Quaestiones Quodlibeticae (1653), an early work, we find Geulincx in a much lighter mood.
The Quaestiones are not so much philosophy as exercises in cleverness. They are intended to display the fact that the author can argue for and against a thesis with equal facility, and in language whose changes of pace and verbal pyrotechnics seek to dazzle the reader. The one that I have chosen to translate here (no. 20) as Prose of the Month, under the title of The Tedium of Life, perhaps comes closer to philosophy than any of the others. And indeed, it contains some sound proverbial advice. Moreover, Geulincx was to rework some of its ideas in Treatise IV of the Ethics, in the sections on The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, where the Devil is daringly defined in an abstract way as the temptation to 'continue with what you have begun', a sentiment placed here in the mouth not of the Devil but of Melancholy.