The fate of Descartes'major philosophical contemporaries reflects another curious fact about posthumous reputations. Although genuine merit often survives the neglect and calumny of its own time, contemporary renown is equally as often taken by posterity to be a reason to praise also, while contemporary attacks on a reputation can unjustly block the applause posterity ought to give. This latter is also part of what happened to Bacon and Hobbes, the first because of a bribery scandal late in his life, the second because he was an atheist, and atheism was once regarded with flesh-crawling horror: for what depths of depravity, what murders and dalliances with evil, could an atheist not stoop to? Descartes' high standing with many of his contemporaries, by contrast, continued unabated with his successors, ensuring (despite Voltaire) a continuous reputation ever since.
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Although Descartes has been lucky with the judgement of time, he has had mixed fortunes as regards his biographers. The work on which all subsequent biography has principally depended is the too-often-unreliable but suggestive early account by Adrien Baillet, La Vie de Monsieur Descartes, published in two volumes in 1691. It makes use of much lost material, which we know Baillet does not always accurately employ or even quote, because we have occasional independent checks and can see that he trimmed and shaped his sources to give a slant—frequently a too-positive one—of his own. But it is the fullest of the early sources, and is indispensable.
Baillet's account, however, was not the earliest. Just three years after Descartes' death Daniel Lipstorp, a German savant, gave a brief biographical sketch in his Specimina, using extremely valuable firsthand material collected from among Descartes' Dutch acquaintances. The other contemporary biographer was Pierre Borel, who in his Vitae Renati Cartesii summi philosophi Compendium (the first edition of 1653 is lost; we have the second edition, published in 1656) gives a certain amount of information—perhaps more than is accurate—about Descartes' military career. Since much of Borel's information came from Descartes' friend Etienne de Villebressieu, scientist and engineer to the King of France, it is nonetheless a useful source.
In 1910 Charles Adam, one of the editors of Descartes' collected works, published his Descartes: sa vie, son oeuvre. He improved upon Baillet and the other early sources because of his intimate knowledge of Descartes' writings, especially the letters, and he had of course the advantage of longer hindsight, and of the nuggets of information embedded in several intervening centuries of gossip and legend.
Since Adam's book a few minor biographies have appeared, mainly French and almost all tendentious,5 but only one really significant one: Stephen Gaukroger's comprehensive and scholarly account, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (1995). Gaukroger devotes more space to surveys and assessments of Descartes' work—all of it, including a great deal of uncompromising mathematics—than to purely biographical matters, about which he is commendably circumspect given the uneven reliability of the sources. Consequently, his book is a biography for specialists, and he would himself, I am sure, agree that it makes heavily technical demands on its readers. To date there has not been a satisfactory non-specialist biography devoted to the general reader: a gap that the following pages, with due modesty, aspire to fill.
I have learned and profited from almost all the forerunners in the field, and came especially to appreciate the work of Adam and Gaukroger, together with an achievement worth praising again: the edition of Descartes' works translated into English and edited by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothof and Dugald Murdoch. My debts in the history of science and the general history of the first half of the seventeenth century are paid in the bibliography, but I should mention here an old classic which was thrilling and illuminating to re-read, and which gave me many clues to follow in pursuing an hypothesis about Descartes' early career. This is C.V. Wedgwood's The Thirty Years War, first published in 1938 as the clouds regathered over the legacy of that earlier epic struggle.
In light of the animadversions cast above (and in the endnotes) upon some of Descartes'less disciplined biographers, I feel a certain hesitancy in turning now to advance an hypothesis I formulated while researching Descartes' life. It is necessary to mention it here, right at the outset, because it applies to much that is puzzling and hidden in the first half of Descartes' adult life, approximately the dozen or so years between the completion of his formal education and the early part of his sojourn in the United Provinces (the free part of the Netherlands). As the sequel will report, at the outset of this period Descartes joined the armies first of Prince William of Nassau and then Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, taking part in some capacity in the opening events of the Thirty Years War and, while doing so and afterwards, travelling very widely in central, eastern and southern Europe. The details of Descartes' military service and travels are extremely scanty; he himself did not speak or write about them, except in the vaguest and most passing terms. In this, together with the manner of life he subsequently chose, lie the seeds of a mystery.
The year 1628 was pregnant with significance for politics and war in Europe. In that year Descartes, after a private audience with the notorious Cardinal Berulle—then one of the leading figures in French politics—decided to go into permanent, and apparently self-imposed, exile in the United Provinces, moving frequently from one address to another and for a long time keeping his whereabouts secret. The standard explanation of this is that he desired privacy and seclusion for his philosophical work, and chose the United Provinces because he found the climate, both meteorological and social, congenial for it. Some add or substitute the idea that he wished to keep hidden from his family, which disapproved of his choice of career.
My suggestion is rather different. It is that Descartes was a spy. More circumstantially put, my suggestion is that he was in some way engaged in intelligence activities or secret work during the period of his military service and travels. Because of this, I further suggest, Cardinal Berulle warned him that he was no longer welcome in France. The thought is by no means far-fetched and, if correct, goes a long way to explain some of the many curiosities and inexplicabilities of Descartes' life and doings.
The case for this tentative hypothesis rests on evidence that emerges as the story unfolds. But a background point to it is as follows: many intellectuals and clerics at this period engaged in intelligence activity because they were well fitted for the task by their command of languages, especially of the universal language Latin, and the fact that they corresponded widely and travelled more than any other class apart from aristocrats and merchants (but these latter did not have nearly as good access to political circles as scholars and clerics did). Some well-known examples support the thesis. Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death in Deptford in 1593 because, it is thought on good grounds, he was engaged in espionage of some kind. The celebrated Huygens family engaged in intelligence for the British and the House of Orange throughout the seventeenth century. Peter Paul Rubens was an agent for the Habsburg interest in the Spanish Netherlands. Other examples could be cited, but the point is sufficiently made by these.
If Descartes was an agent of some kind, he was by far most probably so in the Jesuit interest. The Jesuits were on the side—more: were instigators and coadjutors—of the effort by the Habsburg rulers of the Holy Roman Empire (the misnamed and complex empire of mainly German states) to reclaim for Roman Catholicism those parts of Europe lost to Protestantism as a result of the Reformation in the preceding century. That, in large part, was what the bloody and terrible Thirty Years War (1618-48) was about, and its chief prosecutor, Emperor Ferdinand II, had a Jesuit confessor and advisor, Wilhelm Lamormaini, who was the conduit between the throne and the Jesuit Order.
For various reasons of their own, both France (chiefly because of its hostility to Habsburg Spain, and anxieties about the European balance of power) and intermittently the Papacy were opposed to the Holy Roman Emperor's endeavours, and indeed the former opposed them with arms; which means that if Descartes was an agent in the Jesuit-Habsbu
rg interest, he could not have been comfortable with the policy adopted by his own country. As an unwavering and orthodox Catholic, educated by the Jesuits and always anxious for their approval and protection, and yet living as an independent layman, Descartes was a natural candidate for employment by them. Moreover, even though Descartes came into a share of his mother's estate in early adulthood, his income from it cannot have matched the level at which he lived, which makes one wonder where the extra money came from.
I do not know for sure whether Descartes was indeed a spy or agent, and I would not bet my house on the notion. So I am neither asserting nor claiming that it is so; I am merely mooting the possibility, in the chapters to follow, pointing out how this hypothesis helps to explain gaps and puzzles in Descartes' story. At least it is a plausible hypothesis, and merits its place in his tale.
Descartes was once actually accused by some of his enemies in the United Provinces of being a spy. But although this might be taken as evidence of a contemporary suspicion that strengthens the case, I suspect that, in that instance, mere malice was the motive (see the account of Descartes' quarrel with one Gisbert Voetius in Chapter 8 below). Still, smoke requires fire, and I happened to come across these allegations only after beginning to wonder about the full meaning of Descartes' chosen motto, "The hidden life is best."
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The Awakening
The world Rene Descartes entered on 31 March 1596 was not a peaceful one. Europe was convulsed by religious conflicts, yet at the very same time mankind's greatest and most powerful achievement—science—was in the process of being born. Whereas the religious conflicts represented the death throes of one epoch in history, the scientific revolution marked the birth of another— the period we call modern times. Because the Reformation and Counter-Reformation were tearing holes in the certainties of religious belief, the scientific revolution could begin, by allowing the light of secular reason to shine through the gashes; and once people started to see by that light it became inextinguishable. Despite the terrors of intolerance, persecution, and recurrent bitter war, the turn of the seventeenth century was therefore a time rich in promise. Descartes entered it just at the right moment, because his interests and gifts tallied exactly with what was required for the longer-term intellectual revolution then beginning to happen.
Descartes did not write an autobiography, but in his seminal Discourse on Method he reminisced about his education, which, when he looked back on it, seemed to him not as good as it might have been. He thought this despite having been a pupil at the best and most famous school of the day, the Jesuit college of La Fleche in France's Anjou province, now part of the Pays de la Loire. In the Discourse Descartes described his education in equivocal terms to provide a foil for his own mature views about how enquiry should be conducted in mathematics, science and philosophy. He believed that he had discovered a powerful method for finding the truth about everything, and his Discourse was written both to describe and to demonstrate that method. The question of method was an important one in his day. Most thinkers, including Francis Bacon in England and the Rosicrucians scattered about Europe, were eager to find an easy, direct and infallible way of discovering the truth about things. Some of them wished to help the advancement of learning, others wished to turn common metals into gold or to find the secret of longevity, and most desired a combination of both—including Descartes.
The autobiographical details in the Discourse (and occasionally in Descartes' letters) are very sketchy, but they are of course useful for subsequent biographers, and highly characteristic of Descartes' way of doing things, for he always believed that if his readers could see things through his eyes, thus retracing the path he had taken to his insights, they could not possibly disagree with him. In Descartes' other famous work, the Meditations on First Philosophy—the book on which almost all students of philosophy in the Western world still cut their teeth—the argument is set out from the point of view of an "I," ostensibly Descartes himself, reporting his doubts, reasons and conclusions; but in fact this is a device in which each reader is himself or herself the "I" of the adventure, seeing things from a vantage point inside Descartes' mind, and thus from the outset sharing his perspective.
Although what Descartes says about his early intellectual development is fascinating, it has to be treated with the usual amount of caution required by all autobiography. Autobiographies are frequently unreliable documents, a fact that biographers enjoy because they like discovering independent information which shows that autobiographers have been sculpting their lives into shapes either more agreeable than the truth, or perhaps closer to what they felt was (so to speak) the real reality, which only they could see because only they had lived it. Then again, autobiographies are generally written by people who have reason to believe that the story of their lives will interest others, and such people—most of them achievers, succeeders, discoverers or creators—have personalities to match; which is another reason (to paraphrase Bing Crosby's famous "Mister In-Between") why they might "accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative" too far.
Descartes does a certain amount of accentuating and eliminating in his various autobiographical remarks, for example stating that his mother died a few hours after his birth, whereas in fact she died fourteen months later. But what he says in the Discourse about his education and mental development is almost certainly accurate, though sketchy; and it is the basis of most of what we most solidly know about his early life.
But of course that life began before Descartes went to La Fleche, and it is pertinent briefly to note something of his origins.
In the year Descartes was born Shakespeare's Richard II and A Midsummer Night's Dream were first performed, El Greco's famously bleak and stormy View of Toledo was painted, and three other births took place of people whose lives were to have an impact, directly and otherwise, on Descartes' own: Frederick V, Elector of the Rhine Palatinate and briefly King of Bohemia (the "Winter King" of 1618-19); Frederick's wife Elizabeth Stuart of Scotland (Frederick was born on 16 August 1596 and Elizabeth on 19 August); and the poet and scholar Constantijn Huygens, who thirty years later became Descartes' friend and protector in the free Dutch lands of the United Provinces, today called the Netherlands or Holland.
If the language of the English class system were used to describe Descartes' family background, he would be said to come from well-off upper-middle-class stock comprised mainly of doctors and lawyers, a number of them holding senior official positions in the regional civil service of the royal government. One of Descartes' recent forebears had been mayor of Tours, another had been treasurer of that city's cathedral. A third (on Descartes' mother's side) had even for a time been physician to Queen Eleanor, wife of King Francois I of France. And a fourth, still more grandly yet, had been physician to Catherine de Medici, mother of all the last three Valois kings of France. This medical ancestor later became physician to the due de Montpensier, and dedicated a little book about fevers to him; so authorship and science as well as law and medicine were in the family genes.
The Descartes family and their relations were thus well established and flourishing, with money, position and property in those beautiful stretches of France known as Touraine and Poitou. Descartes was born and raised there—born in Touraine at La Haye (now, in the interests of the tourist industry, renamed Descartes)—and brought up across the provincial border in Poitou at his great-uncle's house in Chatellerault. In France at that time people of Descartes' class were regarded as minor nobility, and if they owned property they could give themselves a title—which Descartes himself for a time did, calling himself "sieur du Perron" because he inherited from his mother a small farm at Perron. Like the equivalent expression "lord of the manor," which in English usage is a description rather than a title of nobility, such appellations could be bought and sold along with the corresponding property. When he entered his inheritance Descartes exchanged both his parcel of land and its associated title for cash to meet his needs.
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As this suggests, Descartes did not share the dynastic interests of his father Joachim or his older brother Pierre. Joachim was a distinguished lawyer whose own father had been a successful doctor well known in provincial circles, and at the time of Descartes' birth he held an official position in the high court for Brittany at Rennes. (Such courts had multiple functions; as well as being courts in the usual sense, they oversaw administration of the law for their region and heard petitions to the crown. They were called "Parlements," misleadingly for English speakers.) Joachim expected his sons Pierre and Rene to follow him in the family tradition, adopting respectable professions, marrying well, and by both means adding to the family's portfolio of dignities and properties. Rene, the younger son, disappointed him; Pierre obliged handsomely by becoming a replica of his father. There were other children too, only one of whom—a daughter called Jeanne—survived infancy.
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