Turning a fatality into a problem

Descartes held that a problem, however daunting, becomes solvable once you divide it into parts and proceed in order, from the simplest to the most complex: the method by which he hoped to make us « masters and possessors of nature ». This exercise applies it to something you have resigned yourself to as a plain fact: it treats the limit not as a fate, but as a problem with a first step. Today it counters the discouragement that freezes us before what seems immovable.