If there is a solution to the dilemma of modernity, surely it lies in bringing the two wings into the middle, which is where most people live. Jürgen Habermas, the great German philosopher (who himself is not religiously inclined), has used the term postsecular to describe what he believes can be the next stage in the evolution of Western society. This stage, he argues, would involve “the assimilation and reflexive transformation of both religious and secular mentalities.”
Such transformation would presumably require convincing or teaching or cajoling or arm-twisting the radical partisans—the theologians and the radical secularists—into widening their picture of reality, getting both to acknowledge that they don’t have a lock on truth, that the world is too wild for our strategies to contain it. At the same time, it surely would mean finding a way to convince one of those wings—the billions of people who grew up in cultures without the legacy of Descartes’ bones—to recognize that we have, in the past few centuries, latched onto some fairly comprehensive ways of understanding the world and advancing humanity and that these must be taken by everyone as a foundation.
The task (which may be impossible to achieve, but is there any alternative but to try?) might be translated into Hiroshi Harashima’s terms: to move away from “line humanity” and put faith in the oldest of communication technologies. Then, maybe, members of opposing camps could meet anew, seeking out signs of trust in another person’s face.
Epilogue
N FEBRUARY 11, 2000, EXACTLY 350 YEARS AFTER the cold Stockholm night when René Descartes breathed his last, a group of about twenty men and women gathered in the stony chill of the church of St.-Germain-des-Prés in Paris at a Mass for the eternal rest of the philosopher’s soul. The priest performing the service was Father Jean-Robert Armogathe. Of all the “amoureux de Descartes,” as Philippe Mennecier, the current keeper of the skull of Descartes, refers to the small coterie of people whose interest in the philosopher carries over to his mortal remains, Father Armogathe was the one I saved for last to contact, not because I thought he would make a fitting end for this book but out of intimidation. Besides being a high official in the diocese of Paris who was once the chaplain of Notre-Dame cathedral, Armogathe is one of the preeminent Descartes scholars in the world, director of studies of the History of Religious and Scientific Ideas in Modern Europe program of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes at the Sorbonne, author of works on Cartesian science, on correlations between the Bible and seventeenth-century science, and on that issue at the heart of the Cartesian crisis of dualism, the transubstantiation of the Catholic host.
Others who helped me in my research—themselves prominent philosophers—said, when I inquired about him, that yes, indeed, I would be remiss if I did not seek out Père Armogathe. But they warned that he could be a forbidding presence. “Don’t be surprised if you don’t hear back,” said Richard Watson, probably the foremost American scholar of Descartes. Eventually I e-mailed the French philosopher-priest, telling him of my project, saying that I planned to be in Paris, and wondering about the possibility of meeting. Surprisingly, Armogathe replied at once, saying he was willing to talk; even more surprising was the way he closed his e-mail—“Looking forward to meet u!”—which certainly stripped away some of the veneer of austerity.
A few weeks later I stood before an ugly 1970s-era building directly opposite the Luxembourg Gardens, the headquarters of the Institut Bossuet, the Catholic boarding school of which Armogathe was the rector. I was shown into his ground-floor office. The windows looked across at the park, with its high iron gates topped with gold spearheads, through which I could see a pair of lovers on a bench and a class of art students, pads in hand, grouped around a statue of twisting Baroque figures. I studied the office while I waited. The desk was piled with stacks of papers. On the walls were a framed engraving of Descartes and one of Baillet, Descartes’ seventeenth-century biographer. On a bookshelf, propped against the complete works of Galileo in Latin, were snapshots of Armogathe with Pope John Paul II.
Suddenly the man himself burst in. He was small, stoutish, compact, gray-haired, almost comically vigorous for such a serious person. He was in constant motion, darting or lunging. I asked about his past and he told me a story that seemed right out of The Da Vinci Code. “In the 1980s when I was chaplain of Notre Dame I actually had my lodging there—in the cathedral itself,” he said. “In the nineteenth century they had built lodgings for the custodian of the cathedral up in a kind of loft, which were reached by a pseudomedieval corkscrew staircase. It was the most dramatic apartment you could imagine. I had this huge dining room looking over the Seine on three sides. My kitchen window opened out onto the southern rose, where I had my own private terrace. Now the apartment has been destroyed, but I lived there for five years, and I loved it.” Armogathe took to hosting barbecues on the terrace, and it became a thing in 1980s Paris to get an invitation to the soirees of the chaplain of Notre-Dame.
He changed the topic and talked about his work. For five years, he told me, he had been studying vision and optics from the seventeenth-century to the present day. His argument was that from its beginning science took its ideas about vision from medieval and Renaissance Catholic notions of spiritual visions and inner light. The thesis he was formulating was that our scientific understanding of the sense of vision is built around spiritual metaphors. “I’m against the idea that there is a clear cut between the Renaissance and the modern ages,” he said. “I think modern thinking gets its patterns from the theological realm. Biblical concepts allowed science to progress.”
From 1996 to 2000, Armogathe had been pastor of the church of St.-Germain-des-Prés, the site of the last burial of Descartes. During that time, as the 350th anniversary of Descartes’ death approached, he had had the idea to conduct a special Mass. What had motivated him to do so? I wanted to know about the event in itself, but really I was interested in a deeper point. Armogathe was both a priest and an authority on Cartesian science. It occurred to me that if anyone alive had insights into bridging the modern divide between body and soul—if anyone alive had perspective on both current science and contemporary spiritual concerns as they relate back to the birth of modernity and the so-called father of modernity himself—it must be him.
“In Catholic tradition,” Armogathe said, “it is not only prayer for the soul of the departed. There is also the belief in the resurrection of the body. For Catholics, mortal remains mean something. Churchyards are not urban repositories for garbage but places of sleep and waiting. It’s like there are seeds under the ground, waiting for spring to come.”
As was the case during the Middle Ages, the heyday of relics, the Catholic Church still places special value on human remains. There is nothing surprising in the fact that Catholicism—or any other spiritual tradition—has the mind-body problem sorted out to its satisfaction. Somehow, faith dissolves dualism, unites body and soul.
But a theological answer wasn’t satisfying. I posed the question differently, asking specifically about Descartes as the father of dualism and the modern mind-body problem. Like one of the first-generation Cartesians in late-seventeenth-century Paris who brought Descartes’ bones from Stockholm, Armogathe was ready to defend the master. He disputed the idea that Descartes had invented dualism. Expressions of mind and body existing in different realms, he reminded me, go back to the ancient Greeks. This was a good point, and it could be taken further still. A word like dualism suggests an abstract puzzle, but it is grounded in the everyday. We are all philosophers because our condition demands it. We live every moment in a universe of seemingly eternal thoughts and ideas, yet simultaneously in the constantly churning and decaying world of our bodies and their humble situations. We are graced with a godlike ability to transcend time and space in our minds but are chained to death. The result is a nagging need to find meaning. This is where the esoteric “mind-body problem” of philosophy professors becomes meaningful to us all, where it translates into tears and laughter.
; Dualism is thus in a sense universal, and philosophers have puzzled over it forever; yet Descartes’ statement of it, I suggested to Armogathe, is the one that stirred a historic commotion in the Western world. His dualism is the legacy we live with.
In response, Armogathe pointed me in a new direction—toward what is perhaps the most meaningful “solution” to this puzzle for all of us. Late in life, he noted, Descartes tried to deal with the separation of mind and body. “In his last book, Descartes states that in effect there must be a third substance, which is not really a third substance but a compound of both mind and body,” Armogathe said. “I should treat it as a code, an encoding, which allows mind to react on body and body on mind.” Philosophers have devoted endless hours of thought to the mind-body problem, but there is a real-world way in which we all transcend it. This “encoding” is one of the commonest parts of our lives, and also one of the most precious. Its importance was what Descartes hit on near the end of his life.
For a long time, scholars thought that after the death of his young daughter, Francine, who was born out of wedlock, Descartes parted company with the girl’s mother, Helena Jans. It was assumed that his attachment to Helena, the only woman with whom we know him to have been intimate, was only through their child and that he cast her aside after the girl was gone. But a few years ago a Dutch historian named Jeroen van de Ven did some inspired archival digging. Descartes lived at at least twenty addresses in Holland, and sometime after Francine’s death he moved to the coast, a place of dunes and lashing winds called Egmond-Binnen. In the notary records of the city of Leiden, Van de Ven discovered a marriage contract, dated four years after Francine’s death, between one Helena Jans and a man from Egmond named Jan Jansz van Wel. Could it be the same woman? A kind of dowry was required—one thousand guilders, a considerable sum—and in a separate record Van de Ven discovered that the man who provided it was Descartes. Clearly, the couple stayed linked for four years after their daughter’s death. Social standing prevented their truly being together even if Descartes would have wished it; he did, however, feel responsible, and in the end he provided a future for her.
During this time, the philosopher was being attacked mercilessly by Dutch theologians who were outraged at the implications of his work. Finally, he had had enough. “As for the peace I had previously sought here, I foresee that from now on I may not get as much of that as I would like,” he wrote. “A troop of theologians, followers of Scholastic philosophy, seem to have formed a league in an attempt to crush me by their slanders.” He would soon accept the offer of Queen Christina and go off to Sweden. He would leave behind not only the fury over what his work had unleashed but the mother of his child.
At this same time he began what would be his final work, and it may not be a coincidence that the book was a treatise on “the passions of the soul.” Descartes had long before realized that there was a difficulty with his division of reality into mind and body—the difficulty being to figure out how the two substances interacted—and he was now moved to work on that confounding problem. His conclusion was that there is a connective tissue between the two, or, as Armogathe put it to me, “an encoding.” The seventeenth-century terminology for this encoding was “passion.” We might call it heart. This became the subject of Descartes’ final work. Heart, he decided, was the interface between mind and body. Love, joy, anguish, remorse: we experience these in both body and mind, and somehow, Descartes became convinced, these passions link our two selves. He thus anticipated another modern field—psychology—in concluding that emotional states are tied to physical health and also to, as he would put it, “the soul.”
But it was to be a purely philosophical exercise. His child was dead; he had married off the woman with whom he had been intimate. He seems to have given up on the “passions” personally. For him there was nothing ahead but cold and ice and death.
Even as he went off to die, however, Descartes gave Helena Jans a future, and the records of the little village of Egmond paint an evolving picture: Helena and her husband, Jan, live their lives at the inn that his family operates; in time, Jan dies and Helena inherits the inn; she remarries, and she and her new husband have three sons. There is no room in the records for all the life that must have been packed into the years, but somewhere in its density—the bustling of the inn, clanking tankards of Dutch beer, pipe smoke, leers and tears, song and suffering—lay the solution to Descartes’ puzzle, which each of us solves, if we are very lucky.
Illustration Credits
Musée de l’homme, Paris
Photo by author
Alexandre Lenoir (1761–1839) opposing the destruction of the royal tombs of the French monarchy in the Church of Saint-Denis, 1793 (pen & ink and wash on paper) (b/w photo) by French School (eighteenth century) © Louvre, Paris, France/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library Nationality/copyright status: French
Portrait of René Descartes (1596–1650) by Frans Hals (c. 1582/83–1666)/SMK Foto/Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.
Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris.
Portrait of René Descartes (1596–1650) c. 1649 (oil on canvas) by Frans Hals (1582/83–1666) (after) © Louvre, Paris, France/Lauros/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library Nationality/copyright status:Dutch
New York Times
Japanese National Science Museum, Tokyo
Notes
Preface
“You have a triangle”: Guardian, February 26, 2007.
Chapter 1 The Man Who Died
“He who saves someone”: Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres, vol. 5, pp. 477–78. Translated for the author by Jane Alison.
“devote what time I may still have”: Descartes, Discourse, p. 96.
“The preservation of health”: Descartes, Philosophical Writings, vol. 3, p. 275.
The life expectancy of a child: Data from chapter 5 of Clark, A Farewell to Alms.
“most men die of their remedies”: Molière, The Imaginary Invalid.
“What says the doctor”: The page’s reply, meanwhile, seems to mock the practice: “He said, sir, the water itself was a good healthy water; but, for the party that owed it, he might have more diseases than he knew for.”
“dote not upon, nor trust”: Sym, Lifes Preservative Against Self-Killing; quoted in Andrew Wear, “Puritan Perceptions of Illness in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Porter, Patients and Practitioners, p. 80.
the flexor digitorum superficialis: Masquelet, “Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson.”
“hidden behind the scene so as to listen”: Roth, Descartes’ Discourse on Method, p. 14.
“As soon as I had finished the course of studies”: Descartes, Discourse, p. 5.
“nothing solid could have been built”: Descartes, Discourse, p. 8.
“I did nothing but roam”: Descartes, Discourse, p. 59.
He spent time serving in two armies: A. C. Grayling, in his 2005 biography, speculates that Descartes was working as a spy for the Jesuits, which would explain how he came to be in so many places of military and political significance; Grayling acknowledges, however, that there is no actual evidence for this.
“there will remain almost nothing else”: Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres, vol. 10, p. 158. Quoted in Gaukroger, Soft Underbelly of Reason, p. 93.
“the father not just of modern philosophy”: Schouls, Descartes and the Possibility of Science, p. 3.
“the dividing line in the history of thought”: Roth, Descartes’ Discourseon Method, p. 3.
“The best way of proving the falsity”: Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres, vol. 9B, p. 18. Quoted in Schouls, Descartes and the Possibility of Science, p. 9.
“the lords and masters of nature”: Descartes, Discourse, discourse 6.
“The single design to strip one’s”: Descartes, Discourse, p. 49.
“that I am in this place”: Ibid., p. 119.
In this way, Descartes became: A sampling of cogito riffs through the ages: “I think, therefore I spam” (blogger Amitai Givertz). “I blink,
therefore I am” (slogan of the Cartesian Reflex Project at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst, which is devoted to the study of involuntary blinking, a subject Descartes wrote about in 1649). “Cogito, ergo Cartesius est” (Saul Steinberg). “I am because my little dog knows me” (Gertrude Stein). “Cogito, ergo spud./I think, therefore I yam” (Internet graffito). “Coito, ergo cum” (poet Gustavo Pérez Firmat). “I stink, therefore I am” (many iterations). And my favorite: “I think, therefore I am. I think” (George Carlin).
“Doubt is the beginning”: Verbeek, Descartes and the Dutch, p. 39.
Shortly after, Regius penned a letter: The letter is in Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres, vol. 2, p. 305. I am relying on the commentary in Bos, Correspondence, pp. 3–9.
The chattering classes: Regius, in Bos, Correspondence, p. 3.
“greatest of all philosophers”: Heereboord, in Verbeek, Descartes and the Dutch, p. 40. The next quote is from Anton Aemilius, in Bos, p. 18, and the quote about the method is from Regius, in Bos, p. 3.
He delved into details: Bos, Correspondence, pp. 214–20.
“A Sponge to Wash Away”: Gaukroger, Descartes, p. 359.
“learned ignorance”: Verbeek, Descartes and the Dutch, p. 18.
“neither in public nor in private lessons”: Quoted in Verbeek, Descartesand the Dutch, p. 83.
“There are certain newfangled philosophers”: Ibid., p. 49.
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