Descartes
Page 1
Descartes
By the Same Author
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The Refutation of Scepticism
Berkeley: The Central Arguments
Wittgenstein
China: A Literary Companion
(with Susan Whitfield)
Russell
Moral Values
The Long March to the Fourth of June
(with Xu You Yu as Li Xiao Jun)
The Quarrel of the Age: The Life and Times of William Hazlitt
The Meaning of Things: Applying Philosophy to Life
The Reason of Things: Living with Philosophy
What is Good?: The Search for the Best Way to Live
The Mystery of Things
The Heart of Things: Applying Philosophy to the 21st Century
Among the Dead Cities
As Editor
Philosophy: A Guide Through the Subject
Philosophy: Further Through the Subject
Herrick: Lyrics of Love and Desire
The Art of Always Being Right:
Thirty-Eight Ways to Win When You Are Defeated
Descartes
The Life and Times of a Genius
A. C. GRAYLING
Copyright © 2005 by A. C. Grayling
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
1. Who Was Descartes?
2. The Awakening
3. A Night of Dreams
4. The Mystery of the Rosy Cross
5. Nine Years of Travel
6. Animals on the Moon
7. Francine
8. The Shape of Snow
9. Descartes Contra Voetius
10. The Princess of the Passions
11. The Queen of Winter
Appendix I: A Note on Descartes' Philosophy
Appendix II: Biographies of Philosophers and Descartes' Biography
Notes
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
For much appreciated help of various kinds before, during and since the writing of this book, and not necessarily in connection with it, my thanks go to Alex Orenstein, Ken Gemes, John Cottingham, Susan James, Simon Blackburn and John Skorupski. Special thanks go to Naomi Goulder, Andrew Gordon, Edwina Barstow and Catherine Clarke. I am grateful to the staffs of the British Library and the London Library for their help, as always, and to the Dutch friends who pointed out Cartesian scenes among the tulips and canals of Descartes' adopted country.
I would also have added a word of advice concerning the way to read this book, which is that I would like it first to be read rapidly in its entirety, like a novel, without the reader forcing his attention too much or stopping at the difficulties which he may encounter in it, simply in order to have a broad view of the matters I have treated in it. And after that, if the reader judges that these matters merit examination, and is curious to know their causes, he can read the book a second time, in order to notice the sequence of my reasonings.
Descartes, "Letter from the Author,"
The Principles of Philosophy
Preface
This book is about the life and times of a genius: Rene Descartes, a proud, private, sometimes solitary and often prickly man, who had a large impact on the intellectual history of the Western world. Just how large an impact can be gauged from the fact that his writings have been in print for nearly four centuries, and remain to this day on the reading lists of almost every university in the world.
Because Descartes is important for the contribution he made to the development of modern thought, no book about him can fail to say what that contribution is. I do that in the appropriate places here. But my principal aim is to recount what is known of Descartes' life, and to situate his life in its tumultuous times—this latter being something that previous biographies have neglected, with the result that they miss what is possibly a significant aspect of his story. I stress the word "possibly," for my suggestions amount to no more than a guess. Exploring the guess has made writing about Descartes something of a detective adventure, adding to the illumination and pleasure involved.
As these remarks imply, this is not a specialist tome but a book for the general reader. I stress this for the benefit of my philosophical colleagues. Biographies of philosophers rarely meet with the approval of salaried professionals in the subject. This is because no two academics will always agree on what the right interpretation of this or the correct judgement about that should be, and when the discussion of someone's thought is summary—even when it is inevitably so as in a general biography—they think the worse of it. Hence the need for this reminder.
But I also remind my colleagues that we professional philosophers have a duty to explain ourselves, our enquiries, and the traditions of thought we spring from and react to; and that one way of doing so is to engage in conversation with nonspecialists about our tradition's great figures. Descartes is one of the greatest. To try to make him something more than a name on a book cover, or an item on a reading list, is therefore to try to show that the adventure of thought is a living, important, and consequential thing, and that he and we—and indeed all who read and think, including the readers for whom this book is written—are engaged in that adventure too.
Writing about someone at this distance of time—nearly four centuries—and relying on a highly partial and incomplete record, offers many temptations to speculate. In one respect, as noted, I frankly do this, though with suitable cautions always because, if I am even half right in my guess, I have stumbled upon an intriguing and unappreciated aspect of Descartes' story. It is an aspect that a richer understanding of his time both suggests and, if right, illuminates. For that reason I draw particular attention to Descartes' historical circumstances. In all other respects I adhere closely to the record, profiting from the work done by predecessors in the field, among the latest of them Stephen Gaukroger, Genevieve Rodis-Lewis, and Richard Watson; and of course the excellent scholarly work of John Cottingham, Robert Stoothof, and Dugald Murdoch, whose translations and editions of Descartes' work are indispensable. My thanks and admiration go to all these scholars.
One thing all biographers seek is a sense of the person they write about. One listens for a tone of voice, one strives for a sense of the prevailing mindset: the humour or irritation, the warmth or coldness, that reveals something about the individual's inner character. Having lived biographically with Descartes for some years I can say with a deg
ree of assurance that if, by some miracle of time-travel, I were to find myself in the same room with him, I would instantly recognise him. He was secret and proud, had a good opinion of himself-—justly so, as his work testifies—and in all but his religious outlook was strongly independent-minded. He lived at his own pace always, which was by no means a hectic one. He might give the impression that he was timid in religious matters and, in particular, afraid of appearing heterodox, whereas in fact it was not timidity but an unswerving faithfulness to his Jesuit-trained Catholic roots. He had a sense of humour, which no truly intelligent mind can lack. When provoked to enmity he was a combative, indeed vituperative, opponent, and was not very good at governing his temper. If his life had not been cut short by illness, he would probably have devoted a proportion of his energies to attaining office and advancement in his social status, having for a long period lived as quiet and retired a life as he could. He was just beginning to get more interested in this surprising direction when he died.
These characteristics make themselves salient in Descartes' doings and his correspondence. Anything more private is hard to glimpse through the thick veils of time, though we see tenderness towards his daughter and, occasionally, to one or other of his friends. These glimpses are attractive and significant. Given the privacy, even secrecy, in which he cloaked himself always, it is certain that the domestic man was considerably less proud and closed, less rebarbative and quarrelsome, than the public man seems.
He was very small in build, perhaps a mere five feet one or two inches in height. He was neither athletic nor graceful and, with his low brow, big nose and long upper lip, none of his various portraits succeed in making him even halfway handsome: but they all picture large, luminous eyes and a steady gaze. Reputation and influence supply all the rest of Descartes' stature in the history of the world: there the lustrous gaze remains, and he stands tall indeed.
1
Who Was Descartes?
The fumes which rise from the bottom of a swamp produce frogs, ants, leeches, and vegetation . . . Cut a groove into a brick, fill it with crushed basil, and put another brick on top to seal the groove. Within a few days the vegetable matter will have turned into scorpions."1 So claimed a seventeenth-century savant called Jean-Baptiste Van Helmont. But although Van Helmont lived in the seventeenth century, he belonged far more to its past than its future, for he was one of those whose understanding of the world relied on ideas developed centuries before his own time. The ideas in question belonged to an intellectual tradition that encouraged belief in miracles, spontaneous generation, and phoenixes rising from ashes. In this tradition it was an unquestionable fact that the sun and stars go round a stationary earth, with God's heaven above and hell-fire at the earth's centre. Yet even as Van Helmont premised these notions in his writings, a new world of ideas was coming into existence around him. One of the chief of those bringing about this change was Rene Descartes.
The world-view containing most of the elements on which Van Helmont relied, and which Descartes helped to demolish, had taken its start in late antiquity and gathered embellishments as it grew older. Closely associated with the Christian church, it adopted, adapted and assimilated the legacy of classical and, especially, Aristotelian thought, forming itself during the Middle Ages into the elaborate structure of Scholasticism, which was still dominant when the seventeenth century began. So firm was its grip that when the Jesuits formalised their educational policies in their Ratio Studiorum of 1586 they could simply state, "In logic, natural philosophy, ethics and metaphysics, Aristotle's doctrine is to be followed."
This reflected the instruction issued two decades earlier by Francisco Borgia, head of the Jesuit order, in a memorandum stipulating that "[no one must] defend or teach anything opposed, detracting, or unfavourable to the faith, either in philosophy or theology. Let no one defend anything against the axioms received by the philosophers, such as: there are only four causes, there are only four elements, there are only three principles of natural things, fire is hot and dry, air is humid and hot. Let no one defend such propositions as that natural agents act at a distance without a medium, contrary to the most common opinion of the philosophers and theologians . . . This is not just an admonition, but a teaching that we impose."2
But as Van Helmont and thinkers like him spun their theories from the comfort of their armchairs, reaching deep into Scholasticism's resources for their inspiration and the premises of their reasoning, the revolution in process around them was sweeping those very resources aside, in the same breath therefore challenging the official teaching of the church on matters of faith and philosophy alike. The two key documents of that revolution—documents that shaped Western thought for at least three hundred years afterwards— were the Discours sur la methode de bien conduire la raison et chercher la verite dans les sciences, published in 1637, and the Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, published in 1687. The first was by Descartes, the second by Isaac Newton.
Descartes' Discourse on Method—to give this book its standard English title—was an important instrument in providing impulse and direction to the new enquiries, today called the "natural sciences," by which mankind ultimately gained greater understanding and control of nature. Part of the contribution made by Descartes' Discourse was to restore human reason to a status which allowed it to address questions until then regarded by religious orthodoxy as dangerous. In this respect Descartes is to the modern world what Thales, the so-called "Father of Philosophy," was to the ancient world. The comparison is an illuminating one. Thales asked questions about the nature and origins of the world, and formulated answers that relied solely on reason and observation, making no appeal to supernatural explanations—to gods, legends, myths, or ancient scriptures. He assumed that the world is a place that makes sense, and that the human mind is capable of understanding it. His example unleashed a brilliant epoch of free thought in classical antiquity, which gave birth to the Western tradition.
What Thales achieved for the human mind in ancient times, Descartes contributed to achieving for the human mind at the beginning of the modern age. He is therefore sometimes aptly described as the "Father of Modern Philosophy" to mark the comparison. He played a key role in helping to rescue enquiry about sublunary things from the stifling and long-frozen grip of religious authority. He did it not by rejecting that authority, for by his own testimony he was a devout Catholic all his life, but by separating things of heaven from things of earth, so that scientific reason could investigate the latter without anxieties over orthodoxy. This left the things of heaven untouched and unthreatened—so Descartes thought and hoped—by what scientific enquiry discovered.
But Descartes had a seminal impact well beyond his ideas about method. His Discourse included three essays, one of them about optics, in which the law of refraction was first published (it had been independently discovered by the Dutchman Willebrord Snell fifteen years earlier3), another on meteorological phenomena, including the first satisfactory explanation of rainbows, and the third on geometry, in which Descartes presented to the world the foundations of analytic geometry, thereby contributing to the crucial growth of mathematical understanding which, in turn, helped the later progress of the seventeenth-century's scientific revolution.
Thus history remembers Rene Descartes because he made permanently important contributions both to mathematics and philosophy, thereby counting as one of the major figures in the epoch that gave birth to modern times. He was aware that his achievements in these respects were significant: he had neither reason nor desire to underestimate them. But he also thought of himself as a physicist and a medical scientist, and devoted just as much of his intellectual energy to these spheres of enquiry. One of his abiding hopes was that use of the method of enquiry he had announced in the Discourse, and which he believed offered a key to all knowledge, would unlock the secrets of health and long life. Later, in response to the promptings of two royal admirers, he ventured into ethics and moral psychology too. But i
t is his mathematical and earlier philosophical legacy for which his name now endures, placing him in a pantheon which includes Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Galileo Galilei, William Harvey, Blaise Pascal, Pierre de Fermat, and other philosophical and scientific luminaries of the first half of the seventeenth century.
Descartes was born in Touraine, France, in 1596, and after living most of his adult life in the United Provinces of the free Netherlands, died in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1650. His life therefore falls, chronologically and geographically, within the scope of that vast and momentous complex of events which the history books inadequately call "the Counter-Reformation" and the "Thirty Years War." In these events he was, in ways to be discussed, not just a spectator but a participant. The legacy of these events still blights the world, in more and less indirect ways; but Descartes' intellectual work transcended them.
Given that Descartes' fame is so richly merited, it is odd now to think that it suffered a temporary eclipse among some of the philosophes of his own country in the eighteenth century, when Voltaire and others regarded him as outmoded by Newton and Locke. Philosophical fame, it is true to say, is to some extent the function of fashion, as exemplified by the fact that Descartes' two greatest philosophical contemporaries, Bacon and Hobbes, have retained less than their due in the university curricula which are chiefly responsible for sustaining philosophical reputations. When I was an undergraduate, courses in the history of modern philosophy were typically labelled "From Bacon and Descartes to Kant"; now Bacon has gone from the syllabus, to become undeservedly a footnote in the history and the philosophy of science. Likewise, Hobbes appears to retain interest only for political theorists, whereas his views in metaphysics and epistemology are effectively the inspiration for Locke's philosophy, to such an extent that the latter was even charged with plagiarism4. Descartes, by contrast, stands so firmly in the curriculum that he is often the first philosopher studied in detail by undergraduates, and his celebrated Meditations on First Philosophy is a classic both as an introductory text and as a focus of scholarly discussion.