Descartes was qualified to move on from Aristotle and the medieval scholastics, for, like Bacon, he was trained in them from his earliest years. He was born into the noblesse de robe in Touraine, where his father was a lawyer and a judge. His mother died when he was only one, and he was raised by a nurse to whom he remained devoted all his life. At eight he was sent to the newly opened Jesuit college at La Flèche, which soon became noted for its intellectual distinction. There he received the best Jesuit education based on Aristotle and Aquinas and polished with the gentleman’s social graces of riding and fencing. Ten years as an industrious student prepared him to assess the extent and the limits of the conventional Catholic learning, and he acquired a Catholic faith that he never lost. He was sent to the University of Poitiers to fulfill his family’s hope that he would become a lawyer.
When he had already decided “to abandon the study of letters,” a lucky inheritance left him free for a vagrant, restless way of life. And he determined to give up scholarly books for what he called “the book of the world.” His first adventure was in the military life, not hard to find in seventeenth-century Europe. In Holland he joined the army of Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange, against the Spanish forces seeking to recover Holland for Spain. Though a Catholic, he saw no incongruity in joining the Protestant forces of a Protestant prince. But he received no pay and probably never saw action. The idle, debauched life of the barracks did not please him, but did provide leisure for his scientific pursuits.
In Holland “the book of the world” opened for Descartes in surprising ways. He was awakened by a casual encounter with a Flemish doctor, Isaac Beeckman, who shared his mathematical interests and would remain a lifelong intellectual companion and catalyst. In March 1619 Descartes went to Middelburg to visit Beeckman, then returned to Breda, where he spent six days with his compass working out mathematical problems. Beeckman had stirred his creative urge. “And so as not to hide anything from you about the nature of my work,” Descartes wrote, “I would like to give to the public not an Ars brevis but a completely new science which would resolve generally all questions of quantity, continuous or discontinuous.” But before he could fulfill his promise, he had another inspiration.
“Where will destiny lead me? Where shall I come to rest?” he asked himself. His unlikely answer was to seek “repose” in another military assignment in the armed forces of Duke Maximilian of Bavaria. So, too, he was plunged into the religious maelstrom of the Thirty Years War. When he found that Maximilian was fighting against the Protestant cause, he took another military assignment that brought not action but enforced leisure, which he spent at Neuberg on the Danube.
There he lodged not in barracks but in a rented room that would become famous as the site of his life’s crisis. He called this room his “poêle” (stove). At the age of twenty-three, according to his own account, locked in this heated solitude, he reflected on his knowledge and on his mission to create a single universal science. With melodramatic irony, his mission as founder of modern rationalist philosophy came to him on the night of November 10, 1619, in a mystic experience. His three dreams on that Saint Martin’s Eve have aroused much scholarly speculation. Some uncharitably attribute them to heavy drinking or indigestion. Descartes himself took the trouble to note that he had had no wine for three months. For Jacques Maritain the experience had “a divine origin . . . a holy intoxication . . . like a Pentecost of Reason.” Descartes claimed now to possess “everything at once” as the “foundations of a marvelous science” were revealed in his three successive dreams.
First was a nightmare in which he was lame and bent over, driven by a whirlwind against a church. A strange person told him to go in search of a Monsieur N. who would give him something, which proved to be a melon from a foreign country. Turning from his left to sleep on his right side, he prayed for protection from the ill omens of the dream. His second dream frightened him with loud noises like thunder, and he was awakened by sparks all around the room. Falling asleep once more, he had a less frightening and more explicit third dream. In it he saw a book on his table entitled Corpus poetarum, which he opened to the line “Quod vitae sectabor iter?” (What path of life shall I follow?) A stranger handed him some verses beginning with “Est et non” (Yes and No). Descartes identified the verses in the Idylls of Ausonius, a fourth-century Latin poet and Roman official of Bordeaux. When this book mysteriously disappeared it was replaced by a dictionary. In his dream Descartes was beginning to wonder whether what he saw was only imagined, when he awoke.
In those pre-Freudian days, Descartes sought meanings elsewhere than in his childhood experience. Instead he found revelations for his future path: Perhaps the first two dreams were parables of punishment for his sins, and his need for remorse. Perhaps the book of poets signified the incorporation of wisdom in the works of poets. Then the Est et Non (from Pythagoras) could be the divisions between truth and error in human knowledge. And the melon stood for the charms of solitude. But the third dream carried omens of his future. The dictionary that replaced the poems of Ausonius augured the unifying of all the sciences.
Descartes himself appeared to have thought his dreams were the divine inspiration for what would be his “marvellous invention.” To show his gratitude, and his hope for more guidance from the Holy Virgin, he vowed to make a pilgrimage to the church of Notre Dame of Loretto in central Italy. He promised—if he had the strength—to travel there on foot from Venice. Some years later he did fulfill his vow.
Descartes declared that this revelation of reason was “the foundations of a marvelous science” (mirabilis scientiae fundamenta). But not until eighteen years later did he sketch the outlines of that science. This sense of a higher authority behind the operations of his human reason never left him. During the next years he kept up his vagrant life, having his last taste of military experience with the imperial army in Hungary, before traveling in Germany and France. At a meeting of Catholic theologians in Paris exploring alternatives to Aristotle, Descartes gave hints of his own method and the wider use of mathematical reasoning. Cardinal de Bérulle (1575-1629), leader of a Catholic renaissance, was there and was much impressed. He invited Descartes to visit him privately and he urged Descartes that it was his divine duty to benefit the human race by applying his (still undefined) techniques to medicine and mechanics.
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In 1628 Descartes settled in Holland, where he would stay for the next twenty years. Though he changed his residence almost every year, he used the opportunity for solitary reflection and writing. While his frequent moves rescued him from trivial social activities, he kept up a wide correspondence, much of which has survived. And he studied at the universities of Franeker and Leiden. His insatiable curiosity about “the book of the world” led him after 1630 to wide-ranging self-assigned research in the physical and natural sciences—on the nature of light, in optics, meteorology, physics, and biology.
By 1633 Descartes finally had his Le Monde (The World), his work of marvelous unified science, ready for publication. But just as he was about to send off the finished manuscript to his friend Marin Mersenne, he had a piece of shocking news. For his own research he had sought a copy of Galileo’s Dialogue of the Two Chief Systems. He shared Galileo’s view that the earth did move and that the earth was not the center of the universe. Now he learned that though Galileo’s work had been published in 1632, all copies had been burned and the author had been sentenced by the Inquisition to an indefinite term of imprisonment. To Mersenne, Descartes explained:
I was so astounded that I quasi resolved to burn all my papers or at least not to show them to anyone. I cannot imagine that an Italian, and especially one well thought of by the Pope from what I have heard, could have been labeled a criminal for nothing other than wanting to establish the movement of the earth. I know that this had been censured formerly by a few cardinals, but I thought that since that time one was allowed to teach it publicly even in Rome. I confess that if this is false, then, all the
principles of my philosophy are false also. . . . And because I would not want for anything in the world to be the author of a work where there was the slightest word of which the Church might disapprove, I would rather suppress it altogether than have it appear incomplete—“crippled,” as it were.
Leading Dutch and French scholars in Holland had taught Galileo’s view of the solar system, but that did not satisfy Descartes. “I have decided to suppress my treatise entirely and thus lose almost all of my labor during the past four years in order to render entire obedience to the Church. . . . I am seeking only rest and tranquility of spirit which are gifts which cannot be had by those who harbor either animosity or ambition.” Le Monde and Descartes’s other earlier philosophical works were not published till after his death.
Although Descartes had been experimenting, writing, and researching all his life, not till he was forty did he publish. Then his Discourse on Method (1637), a slim volume, gave him his claim to be the first modern philosopher and one of the first modern scientists.
Everything about this work expressed a modern emphasis. The focus on “Method” itself revealed the Seeker rather than concern for the Sought. Descartes begins with autobiography, and the aura of personal experience overcasts it all. He aims to free the reader from the burden of ancient erudition (Aristotle and the scholastics), to allow exercise of the individual intelligence. “Thus my design here is not to teach the Method which everyone should follow in order to promote the good conduct of his Reason, but only to show in what manner I have indeavoured to conduct my own.” He opens with a reminder that “Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed.” “And if I write in French which is the language of my country, rather than in Latin which is that of my teachers, that is because I hope that those who avail themselves only of their natural reason in its purity may be better judges of my opinions than those who believe only in the writings of the ancients.” And “Truths are more likely to have been discovered by one man than by a nation.” Every self must make its own discoveries “because no one can so well understand a thing and make it his own when learnt from another as when it is discovered for himself.”
Having recounted his personal experience and how he came to distrust the traditional resources of philosophy—“Seeing that it has been cultivated for many centuries by the best minds that have ever lived, and that nevertheless no single thing is to be found in it which is not the subject of dispute”—and seeing so many conflicting opinions all supported by learned people, he “esteemed as well-nigh false all that only went as far as being probable.” So he ended by “resolving to seek no other science than that which could be found in myself, or at least in the great book of the world.” A restless Seeker, he was committed to years of reflection, travel, and personal experiment.
This explained why, as he told Mersenne, what he wrote was not a “Treatise” but a Discourse, with a plainly practical purpose explicit in his title “On the method of rightly conducting the reason and seeking for truth in the sciences.” His emphasis on Method told all, for it betrayed his greater interest in the process than in the product of seeking. That the rules of his method (in Part II) seem so obvious nowadays simply confirms the extent to which his self-centered search has come to dominate the modern consciousness. Ever since Descartes, Western philosophers have been preoccupied with theories of knowledge, and modern philosophers have been challenged by his questions but not impressed by his answers. Instead of the many precepts of the Aristotelian logic, he proposes his simple rules that have the charm of common sense and the familiarity of the commonplace. First, “to accept nothing as true which I did not clearly recognize to be so.” Second, “to divide up each of the difficulties which I examined into as many parts as possible.” Third, “to carry on my reflections in due order, commencing with objects that were the most simple and easy to understand.” And finally, “to make enumerations so complete and reviews so general that I should be certain of having omitted nothing.”
Descartes further shows his practical concern by providing us with his “code of morals for the time being”—not daring to tear down what was there until he could provide better. This meant obeying the laws and customs of his country, and staying with the “truths” of its religion. His morality, too, sets him on the path of “Cartesian doubt.” For he resolves “to try always to conquer myself rather than fortune, and to alter my desires rather than change the order of the world, and generally to accustom myself to believe that there is nothing entirely within our power but our own thoughts.” His ruthless quest for certainty leads him “to reject as absolutely false everything as to which I could imagine the least ground of doubt.”
So by starting with doubt as the catalyst of his philosophy he makes the doubter the center of his universe. More basic even than the maxim that became so famous, Cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”), would have been the axiom “I doubt, therefore I am” (Dubito, ergo sum). For his way of seeking aimed not at reaching for transcendent empyrean truths, but at allaying personal doubt and satisfying the ego. It is no wonder that his way of seeking led him toward a private world that never intersected with the world of universals out there.
“If I had only ceased from thinking . . . I should have no reason for thinking that I existed. From that I knew that I was a substance the whole essence or nature of which is to think, and that for its existence there is no need of any place, nor does it depend on any material thing; so that this ‘me’; that is to say, the soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body.” Lest it appear that this focus on self should leave out God, Descartes ingeniously makes the imperfection of the doubter a basis for his belief in God. “Reflecting on the fact that I doubted, and that consequently my existence was not quite perfect (for I saw clearly that it was a greater perfection to know than to doubt), I resolved to inquire whence I had learnt to know of anything more perfect than I myself was . . . it could but follow that it had been placed in me by a Nature which was really more perfect than mine could be . . . —that is to say, to put it in a word, which was God.” Thus Descartes founded his belief in God not in the wondrous order of nature, but in the superiority of God to the imperfect doubting self.
The rest of his Discourse applies his Method to questions of physics and medicine (especially the movement of the heart), and the difference between the soul of man and that of the brutes, and finally offers a prospectus for the future of the sciences. Having “never remarked that by means of the disputations employed by the Schools any truth has been discovered of which we were formerly ignorant,” he hopes “to attain knowledge which is very useful in life, and that instead of that speculative philosophy which is taught in the Schools, we may find a practical philosophy by means of which, knowing the force and the action of fire, water, air, the stars, heavens and all other bodies that environ us, as distinctly as we know the different crafts of any artisans, we can in the same way employ them in all those uses to which they are adapted, and thus render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature.”
The exhilarating conclusion is “that all that men know is almost nothing compared with what remains to be known.” And as a token of his hope for those vistas of the unknown, he ends his Discourse by declaring his resolve not to spend his remaining life “in any other matter than in endeavouring to acquire some knowledge of nature, which shall be of such a kind that it will enable us to arrive at rules for Medicine more assured than those which have as yet been attained.” Descartes was plainly not frightened by paradox. His declaration of the independence of the self by no means prevented him from seeking the forces that shaped the outer world.
Descartes hoped to share discoveries to improve the condition of the human race, and yet not disturb the state or dissent from established religion. Appending Essays in This Method “to show that this method is applicable to all sorts of investigations,” he included a section called Dioptric on the eye, vision, and optics, Meteors on the winds,
weather, and colors of the rainbow, and Geometry on his method for solving unsolved problems. No mere speculations, each added substantially to man’s mastery of nature.
Here he formulated the law of refraction, related the weather to changes in barometric pressure, and offered the momentous new techniques of analytic geometry, applying algebra to the problems of geometry. Descartes’s faith in mathematics as a means to certainty in the solution of problems was reinforced by his own system of mathematics, of which his analytic geometry was the most widely known. Incidentally, he invented much of the basic vocabulary of algebra and mathematics. This included the form of the equation, the use of a and b for knowns, of x and y for unknowns, of numerals (instead of words) to express powers, and the form of the square-root sign. He had simplified algebraic notation by substituting letters for numbers to designate quantities, and numbers for arbitrary symbols to indicate powers. He made it possible to represent a point by a pair of numbers and to represent lines and curves by equations. So his Cartesian coordinates had made possible his analytic geometry, which reduced all geometric problems to the formulas of his new algebra, and opened unimagined new opportunities for the sciences. It is hard to enlist modern physical sciences without the use of this vocabulary. And it is not so surprising that Descartes himself harbored extravagant hopes for applying mathematical techniques to all problems.
While Descartes believed that “there is nothing entirely within our power but our own thoughts,” he gave his thought a wonderful centrifugal character. Perhaps no other great philosopher except Aristotle spent so much time or was so versatile in experiments. Among these were studies of anatomy, dissection of embryos of birds and cattle, observations on the weight of air, the vibrations of strings, optical phenomena, and the reproductive generation of animals and men.
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