Descartes' Bones

by Russell Shorto

  These battles—between Cartesians and the church, between Cartesians and state power, and among the Cartesians themselves—raged through the dying days of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth. There would be casualties among the Cartesians. People would be excommunicated and forced into exile. Rohault himself would be accused of heresy and banned from holding public lectures.

  More importantly, other thinkers—the German Gottfried Leibniz, the Amsterdam Jew Baruch Spinoza—would spin Cartesianism in new directions, broadening the scope of philosophical inquiry. Beyond the level of philosophy, the roots of Cartesianism—especially “the method” and Descartes’ mind-body dualism—would penetrate all aspects of culture, steadily bringing a new world into being, transforming views about everything from sex to education to the role of women to the relationship between humans and their environment, giving this first modern philosophy fresh life while at the same time pushing its founder farther into the recesses of the past.

  Unholy Relics

  OR A CENTURY AFTER THEIR SECOND BURIAL, IN Paris, Descartes’ bones rested undisturbed. But while they moldered and the church of Ste.-Geneviève, in which they were entombed, quietly crumbled into ruin (as it lost its long battles against both the French crown and the neighboring church of St.-Etienne, with which it shared a wall and ancient territorial rivalries), the world of the living transformed itself in unheard-of ways. If someone from any of the previous centuries could have revisited earth in the 1700s, it might reasonably have seemed that human beings had become drunk on invention. Nitrogen was discovered, electricity harnessed, the first appendectomy performed. The income tax came into being. The Hawaiian islands were discovered. The fountain pen was invented, and the fire extinguisher, the piano, the tuning fork, and the flush toilet. Clocks, microscopes, compasses, lamps, and carriages were refined. In the English city of Birmingham alone, the small group of men who called themselves the Lunar Society, epitomizing the passion for combining invention and industry, discovered oxygen, created the steam engine, identified digitalis as a treatment for heart ailments, and built the world’s first factories. Men caught in the grip of a mania for collecting and classifying roamed the earth and gathered spiders, minerals, fossils, and flowers. Museums, dictionaries, and encyclopedias came into existence. Surnames—Watt, Fahrenheit, Schweppe, Celsius, Wedgwood—became products or terminology.

  To state the above is to state the obvious: the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution are part of every school curriculum. What is perhaps less obvious is how threads from these events ran backward in time. We are used to thinking of the Enlightenment as an eighteenth-century phenomenon, in which intellectuals urged changes across society based on a commitment to reason. But recently historians have cleared paths back through the previous century, revealing how networks of events and personalities—inventors and the rippling consequences of their inventions, explorers who wielded sails, microscopes or quill pens—rooted the ideas of Jefferson and Rousseau in the program of Descartes.

  The link between Descartes and the ensuing decades of invention and discovery is not so apparent; less still is the link between Descartes and our own era of invention and discovery. Cartesianism isn’t exactly in the air these days. There are no university degrees in it. You don’t run into parents who say they want their children to grow up to be Cartesians. We tend to prefer “science” when we’re talking about a particular systematic way of exploring the natural world. Science—the word itself, coming from the Latin for knowledge—has been around since the Middle Ages, when it meant something like art or discipline, as in the science of war or the science of horsemanship. Its use in the sense that we mean today didn’t get fixed until around 1800. Meanwhile, “Cartesianism” faded away in the early 1700s.

  What happened to the Cartesians is one of the subplots of modernity. In a sense, they were engulfed by a great wave that swept over Europe in the late 1600s and early 1700s, which went by the name of Anglomania. The center of gravity of the “new philosophy” shifted from France to England. This was partly fad, but at its core was an appreciation of English practicality. The French approach to knowledge—ornate, rational, abstract—had elegantly suited the medieval, Aristotelian edifice. Descartes—with his grand system, his effort to construct a holistic view of reality based on reason and the cogito, which would encompass everything from salt crystals to God’s grace, from human emotions to Jupiter’s moons—was part of that. The British looked at the new thinking as more of a toolbox. They tinkered; they came up with improved metal alloys and ceramic glazes and watch springs. If the French created a new philosophy, the English invented applied science. While the French developed their salons into ornate social institutions, English craftsmen employed apprentices and made them sign hard-nosed contracts such as the one in which young Josiah Wedgwood promised that “at Cards Dice or any other unlawful Games he shall not Play, Taverns or Ale Houses he shall not haunt or frequent, Fornication he shall not commit—Matrimony he shall not Contract.”

  There was a political dimension as well. Where the French state tried to control the new thinking—in part by creating an academy of sciences that would officially bless or condemn proposed new avenues of study—the English were freelancers. They were thus more adept at innovation, so that inventors in Bristol or Birmingham, acting on their own initiative, raising capital and creating markets, became small-scale industrialists and began to reshape the way the world operated.

  The individual most responsible for this change—the person who, it could be said, single handedly pushed Descartes into the past—was Isaac Newton. Newton’s laws of motion, work in optics, and development of the principles of gravitation formed a hard, practical base on which the scientific revolution would be built. The French themselves lauded Newton as the herald of a new age. Voltaire, the godfather of the French Enlightenment, wrote of “ la supériorité de la Philosophie anglaise” and praised Newton as “the destroyer of the Cartesian system”—that is, the man who brought science down out of the clouds of theory. This sort of nationalistic divide between thinking and doing crystallized in philosophy departments in the terms rationalism and empiricism. In this neat compartmentalization, Descartes is not only the father of modernity but the inventor of the “school” of rationalism, which perceives reality from a starting point in the human mind and whose leaders were all continental figures, and that of empiricism, whose main thinkers—John Locke, David Hume, and George Berkeley, English, Scottish, and Irish, respectively—began instead with the reality of the external world.

  While there is truth in the shorthand, it is also misleading. Descartes’ career, his lifelong focus on medicine and dissection and observation, belies the rationalist label. More to the point, he was foundational to both the rationalist and the empiricist traditions, as well as to the Enlightenment’s political ideas. Beneath Newton’s principles and Voltaire’s maxims is the cogito. As a discipline, philosophy itself tends to forget this. As the present-day British philosopher Jonathan Rée puts it, Descartes “was the founder of the ‘new philosophy,’ whose work was carried on by Newton and later scientists. . . . The principles of the ‘new philosophy,’ and the theory of knowledge and the theory of human nature which go with it; the concepts of an idea, of mathematical laws of nature . . . are so fundamental to modern consciousness that it is hard not to regard them as part of the natural property of the human mind. But, in fact, they are a product of the seventeenth century, and above all the work of Descartes.”

  Thus the essence of Cartesianism—its philosophical kernel, which encompassed much more than science—not only lived on but expanded into virtually every corner of human life, evolving and adapting and spawning new generations, each with its own characteristic traits but all of them linking back to their ancestor, even as the original Cartesians flickered into extinction.

  “REASON VERSUS FAITH” may be the chronic fever of modernity, but if the Western world caught it in the period of the Enlightenment the div
ision was not as clear as some today might like to believe. There seems nowadays to be an ingrained notion that people of that era set reason firmly against faith and the two have ever since been locked in a death struggle. Maybe this idea comes from our desire to simplify things, our hunger for sound bites and text crawls. Maybe it gives clarity to both hard-core believers and the antireligion faction, both of which are very much alive today. People who want to drive society and politics via the motor of their religious views—whether they are Muslims, American evangelicals, Roman Catholics, members of India’s nationalist Hindu party—have been particularly vocal in recent years. But the other side—political atheists, you might call them—are voicing themselves, too, as evidenced by the titles of recent books: The God Delusion, The End of Faith, God Is Not Great. The root of these atheist manifestos is the belief that society woke up three or four centuries ago to the realization that God doesn’t control the universe, that rather the blind forces of nature do, but that many people around the world are still caught in the trap of religion and are threatening, with violence and intimidation, to drag humanity down the drain. If the hard-core faithful have their ancient texts to rely on for foundations, the new atheists have the Enlightenment.

  But the situation was never as simple as that. The fighting was more of a three-way affair, for the new philosophers were themselves split into two camps, each of which would have an enormous impact on modernity and each of which still exists, with representatives continuing their clashes on cable talk shows and in op-ed columns. The split began, as we have seen, with the first-generation Cartesians, with Malebranche et al. adapting the new philosophy to Catholic teaching while Rohault, Arnauld, and others kept the two apart. Over the next generations, the “moderates” continued to believe that reason would function alongside faith to increase human happiness and life span, end disease, reduce suffering of all kinds, and give people greater power over nature and greater freedom in their lives. These moderates worked with the church and within governments: many literally worked in either the church or the state apparatus. The moderate camp includes some of the most well-known figures of the Enlightenment: Montesquieu, Newton, Locke, Jefferson, Hobbes, Voltaire.

  Then there was the other element. Two present-day historians of the period—Margaret C. Jacob of UCLA and Jonathan Israel of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton—have written nearly identically titled books giving a name to this more shadowy secularist camp. Jacob’s The Radical Enlightenment, which appeared in 1981, and Israel’s Radical Enlightenment, published in 2001, focus attention on thinkers of the period who looked to reason as a kind of new faith, who insisted that a necessary object of the thinking that followed from Descartes was to bring about the end of traditional religion—to end what they believed was the tyranny of superstition in which humanity had existed for millennia, a tyranny that, they argued, those in power, in church and state, had maintained for their own benefit. What’s more, in many respects these early Enlightenment radicals didn’t just pre-figure what was to come but fully developed the ideas that would lead to the world-historic changes of the later era. As Israel puts it, “It may be that the story of the High Enlightenment after 1750 is more familiar to readers and historians, but that does not alter the reality that the later movement was basically just one of consolidating, popularizing, and annotating revolutionary concepts introduced earlier.”

  The changes taking place in the late 1600s and early 1700s weren’t confined to gears and pulleys. Something more than mere inventiveness was involved. The idea of making reason the ground to thought and behavior had almost immediate consequences in the social sphere. As early as the 1660s, the Dutchman Franciscus van den Enden was advocating a radical new approach to society that included equal education for people of all classes, joint ownership of property, and democratically elected government. Van den Enden actually drew up a charter for a utopian community that would be based in the Dutch New World colony of New Netherland, with its capital of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. A group of settlers went so far as to establish a base for the community on Delaware Bay, but within months the English took over the Dutch colony (changing New Amsterdam to New York) and the scheme—perhaps the first attempt to enact a society based on the modern principle of democracy—ended. In the 1720s, Alberto Radicati—an Italian nobleman turned radical philosopher—similarly argued that natural philosophy showed that democracy was the only proper form of government. He also dismissed most biblical teaching and said that people should enjoy the pleasures of life but that, if life was really awful, suicide was reasonable. (As a true radical, he could only have been pleased when Italy’s chief law officer called his principal work “the most impious and immoral book I have ever read.”)

  Even among the first generation of Cartesians the idea had arisen that, strictly based on reason, there was no justification for social rules subordinating women. Particularly in Paris, women began taking an active part in salons and advancing philosophical discussions. As if to confirm the worst fears of those who criticized such attempts to level society based on sex, erotic literature—novels as well as instruction manuals—began to appear. The thinking behind them, according to one of the most enthusiastic promoters of the new sexual freedom, was that society had denied women the right to understand and express their sexual pleasure as a way to keep them under control. The writer, Dutchman Adriaan Beverland, altruistically devoted himself—both in his personal life and in his work—to freeing women of their sexual inhibitions.

  This sexual enlightenment mirrored the path of the wider Enlightenment, with a small number of books in the late 1600s gradually growing into a full literature, of which the marquis de Sade’s works—in which sex is a vehicle for exploring notions of radical individual freedom—are the ultimate expression. Indeed, just as much as Jefferson or Rousseau, de Sade was a figure of the High Enlightenment; you might think of him as the Thomas Jefferson of sex. The connection to the new philosophy was also right on the page. Much of the literature of sexual freedom that came out of the post-Cartesian decades had a frankly philosophical cast, with authors undergirding their scenes of women masturbating and cloistered nuns in coital embrace with references to Descartes, Spinoza, Ovid, and Petronius.

  As transformative as the threatened sexual revolution promised to be, it was minor compared to the impact of the new philosophy on religious institutions and the religious beliefs of individuals. Before Descartes, religion was the language in which the most basic ideas about life and the world were discussed. Philosophical debates were religious debates: they took place between Catholics and Lutherans, or Lutherans and Calvinists, or Catholicism and Protestantism, or they were doctrinal disputes among members of a particular sect. Beginning around the time of the reburial of Descartes’ remains in Paris, the emphasis shifted. Reason applied outside the boundaries of theology—“free thinking”—caught fire and swept across the Continent with a speed and force that bewildered churchmen. As far as the radical philosophers were concerned, Christianity sat on one side of the scale and secular thinking on the other. An English philosopher named Anthony Collins sounded the trumpet of the new thinkers, stating in his best-selling (but anonymous) 1713 treatise, A Discourse of Free Thinking: “By Free-Thinking then I mean, The Use of the Understanding, in endeavouring to find out the Meaning of any Proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature of the Evidence for or against it, and in judging of it according to the Seeming Force or Weakness of the Evidence.” And he declared expansively that “if I vindicate Man’s Right to think freely in the full extent of my Definition, I not only apologize for my self, who profess to think freely every day de quolibet ente, but for all the Free-Thinkers who ever were, or ever shall be.”

  Philosophers held real sway in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They wrote in newspapers, manned presses and printed their own tracts, thundered in parliaments and councils, debated church leaders, and otherwise molded popular opinion. As a result, the new secularism
began to make inroads among ordinary people, and quite soon after the time of the first Cartesians. In the early 1700s, travelers to the Low Countries noted that, as a people, the Dutch seemed to have lost the popular belief in witches and demons; Anthony Collins reported that “the Devil is intirely banish’d [in] the United Provinces, where Free-Thinking is in the greatest perfection.” The modern French scholar Michel Vovelle studied eighteenth-century archives in southern France and found that starting right around the time of the first Cartesians French people began giving less money to religious organizations and the use of pious language began to drop off in wills and other official writings. Where wills were once replete with pleas to the Virgin Mary and local saints to look after the soul of the departed, by 1750 as many as 80 percent contained no religious references. Of course, Europe remained Christian, but secularism was now a force in society. Gysbert Voetius—who had so vigorously opposed Descartes in Utrecht, saying that his philosophy would lead to atheism and wanton individualism—was right.

  In the early 1700s, writers in every European country made names for themselves by advancing the argument that magical thinking—believing in the powers of amulets, in warding off evil, in Satan himself—was nonsense. Some veered toward the forbidden territory of atheism, though almost no one actually espoused it, since professing that God didn’t exist was a crime throughout Europe. What arose instead was either deism—belief in God based on reason rather than religious tenets—or “materialistic pantheism,” which holds that God and the world, meaning all the physical forces in the universe, are one. Radicati outlined such a view in 1732: “By the Universe, I comprehend the infinite Space which contains the immense Matter. . . . This Matter, modified by Motion into an infinite Number of various forms, is what I call NATURE. Of this the Qualities and Attributes are, Power, Wisdom, and Perfection, all of which she possesses in the highest Degree.”