Descartes

by A. C. Grayling

  While this was going on, however, the Bohemian Estates were considering what to do with the throne vacated by Matthias's death and destined, if precedent were followed, for Ferdinand II. In the new circumstances created by the Defenestration they were intent on taking an independent path and voting themselves a Protestant king. They chose Frederick of the Palatinate. Thus, as one among very many consequences, was Descartes' destination after Breda determined. As with the coronation of Ferdinand and the Synod of Dort, the Bohemian crisis was the tense focus of all Europe's attention; and in all these cases Descartes was involved, on the margins, in some unnoticed capacity—but there.

  Deliberating whether to accept the offer of the Bohemian crown, Frederick sought the advice of his father-in-law, James I and VI of England and Scotland, and of his fellow-members of the Evangelical Union, and he consulted his own council. They all strongly advised him not to take the crown. In the face of such overwhelming discouragement a wiser man would have done the opposite of what Frederick chose to do. But there were two people who had a much nearer way to his heart: Elizabeth Stuart, his wife, and his chancellor Christian of Anhalt. Playing on his sincere Protestantism and, as became clear, relying on the prophecies and promises offered by the study of arcana in which Christian and Frederick both indulged, they encouraged him to accept. "It is a divine calling I must not disobey," he grandly announced.

  The revolt of Bohemia was accordingly complete; and the trigger for the Thirty Years War had been pulled. Ferdinand II regarded Frederick V's position and possessions as forfeit by the treason of his acceptance. He promised the Upper Palatinate and its associated Electoral office to Maximilian of Bavaria, and the Lower Palatinate (lying west of the Rhine, conveniently for the "Spanish road") to Spain. He offered Lusatia to its neighbouring prince, Elector John George of Saxony. In this way several armies—of Spain, of Maximilian, and of Saxony—became available to him. Descartes enrolled in the second of these, thereby taking (figurative) arms in Emperor Ferdinand II's cause.

  As these armies massed, Frederick V arrived in Prague with his German Calvinist entourage, to whom the Bohemian Lutherans immediately took a dislike. Sweden,Venice, Denmark and the United Provinces of the Netherlands had all recognised Frederick's accession to the throne of Bohemia as a way of thumbing a nose at Ferdinand II, but they had no intention of sending troops to help him. His father-in-law James of England and Scotland abandoned him. So Frederick's natural timidity and hesitancy, his Calvinism, his German followers, and his lack of international support, quickly combined to show the Bohemians that they had grievously erred in choosing him.

  Frederick is known as "the Winter King" because he enjoyed his new dominions for a very brief time, from the winter of 1619 to the autumn of 1620. This latter date is when the short campaign to overwhelm Frederick began. His Palatinate possessions fell without a struggle to the plundering armies of Spain and Maximilian. John George of Saxony helped himself painlessly to Lusatia. And on 8 November 1620, in a single easy morning on the White Mountain outside Prague, Maximilian's army of 20,000 men under their canny commander Count Tilly—Descartes somewhere among them— overcame the 15,000 soldiers of Christian of Anhalt. The two ignominious hours of Christian's defeat represented the last vestige of Palatinate-Bohemian resistance. Frederick fled into exile, and a savage repression of the Bohemian Protestants followed, together with a complete subjection of Bohemia and Moravia to the Imperial crown.

  Descartes was at the Battle of the White Mountain, according to Baillet, in some non-combatant capacity—Baillet said he was there as an "observer."6 How long he remained during the persecution of Protestants is hard to say. Many Bohemian leaders were executed, and Protestant clergy were outlawed and their chapels destroyed. The Jesuits flooded in, taking control of schools and universities. The whole country was returned to Catholicism at the edge of the sword. Baillet said that after the Battle of the White Mountain Descartes was with the Imperial troops commanded by the comte du Bucquoy when they captured and destroyed the town of Hradisch in Moravia; and likewise with other towns on Bucquoy's punitive progress. There was nothing pretty about these events: rape and massacre were commonplaces of them, as a strategy of terror and subjugation. Nothing in Descartes' writings recalls any of it; which of course tells us neither that he witnessed atrocities nor that he did not.

  These events looked very much like a triumph for Ferdinand II and the Catholic cause, and must have seemed so to Descartes at the time. But in truth it was the beginning of the opposite. France could not stand by while Habsburg strength waxed, and in the far north of Europe the burgeoning and ambitious power of Sweden was growing uneasy at the danger to its Protestant co-religionists— and at the same time saw opportunity in this danger: opportunity to extend its own empire. Ferdinand II had in effect stirred the hornets against himself by these victories; so instead of reasserting Catholic dominion of Europe, he had set in train the events that would, over the next three decades, eventually and permanently lose it.

  While these excitements were brewing in military and political affairs, others no less momentous were happening inside Descartes' head. There is no incongruity here, between the endeavours of armies and the collapse of nations on the one hand, and on the other hand the growing seeds of ideas in a philosopher's mind; for these latter not only have as much power as the former to change history, but—in sober truth—usually much more power. Which has had the greater effect on the world: the new Europe of "nation states" forged by the Thirty Years War that began at the Battle of the White Mountain, or the scientific revolution—a revolution Descartes played a significant part in—which occurred even as that war raged? Of course, the two things cannot be separated, just as Descartes' story cannot be told without reference to both.

  Almost exactly a calendar year before "assisting" (as the French expression would have it) at the Battle of the White Mountain, Descartes had what he later described as an intellectual epiphany, a vision of a scientific and philosophical method which, he thought, would unlock all knowledge. According to Baillet this event took place on 10 November 1619, and it consisted of a day of meditation in a stove-heated room, followed by a night of extraordinary dreams which so impressed Descartes that he wrote them down in a notebook he subsequently carried wherever he went.

  The meditations of that luminous day began, Descartes himself observed, with the reflection that the best works are those devised and carried out by a single individual, rather than those put together from the endeavours of many. Evidently Descartes had in mind something akin to the point of describing a camel as a committee-designed horse. The same, he thought, must be true of the sciences; knowledge "made up and put together piece by piece from the opinions of many different people never comes as close to truth as the simple reasoning that a man of good sense naturally applies to whatever he encounters." To free our minds from the influence of our appetites and what others told us as we were growing up, therefore, we must make a clean sweep of our existing notions and begin to build again from the foundations.7

  These thoughts mark a significant moment in the history of thought. They encapsulate a realisation that methods of enquiry need to be placed on a scientific basis. Like Francis Bacon in England some years before him, but with large differences in emphasis, Descartes was in this way recognising that to sort the sheep from the goats among methods of enquiry—that is, to ensure that each in the pairings of chemistry and alchemy, astronomy and astrology, medicine and magic, are kept apart by right methods of enquiry— some work needed to be done to identify what those methods were. In his classic Meditations on First Philosophy written twenty-two years later, Descartes described the task in these terms: "Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based upon them. I realised that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if
I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last."8 In the Discourse, written five years before the Meditations, he alluded to this realisation, but instead of proceeding to undertake the difficult foundational task it described— a task left to the Meditations itself—he listed a set of rules to live by while he carried that task out.

  As noted, Baillet dated the day of insights and subsequent night of dreams to 10 November 1619. In his notebooks exactly a year and a day later, effectively the anniversary of this momentous date, Descartes wrote in the margin next to his record of the dreams: "11 November 1620. I began to understand the foundation of the wonderful discovery." The dates are intriguing. If the momentous day was indeed 10 November 1619 then Descartes was recalling it just three days after the Battle of the White Mountain, presumably still in the vicinity of Prague and, if so, then in the midst of the tumult and confusion of the city's fall and the victorious army's seizure of control over it.

  Baillet and most subsequent biographers locate the momentous day and night of 10 November 1619 as occurring at Ulm, a town in the state of Neuberg on the road between Frankfurt and Vienna. Descartes himself told us in his Discourse, written seventeen years later, that he was travelling from the Emperor's coronation in Frankfurt to rejoin (note "rejoin") the army in Bohemia when he was detained in quarters by "the onset of winter." The winter of 1619 must have been an early one indeed, for Ferdinand II was crowned on 9 September. Descartes' own words are: "At that time I was in Germany, where I had been called by the wars that are not yet ended there. While I was returning to the army from the coronation of the Emperor, the onset of winter detained me in quarters where, finding no conversation to divert me and fortunately having no cares or passions to trouble me, I stayed shut up alone in a stove-heated room, where I was completely free to converse with myself about my own thoughts."9

  The famous series of dreams Descartes had on the night following this day of insights are intriguing to consider. Our knowledge of them is derived from an early notebook, now lost but known to Baillet and the philosopher Leibniz, which contained passages of fascinating autobiographical reminiscence that has not only mesmerised subsequent biographers, but even provided material for psychoanalytic speculation.10 Fragments of the notebook survive because Leibniz transcribed several passages from it, impressed and perhaps amused by their content: for the series of dreams seemed so deeply portentous to Descartes that he wrote them down very carefully, and analysed them for their meaning.

  There were three dreams, or—more accurately—two dreams with a peculiar intervening event which no-one has previously explained but which can now be understood, thanks to the advance of medical understanding in neurology. All day Descartes had been in a state of high enthusiasm—so he told us in the notebook entry, somewhat different from the meditative version given in the Discourse— thinking about method as the key to all knowledge, and believing that deep truths about it were within his grasp. As his notebook revealed and as his peculiar "second dream" confirmed, he went to bed in an exhausted, excited and feverish state, and soon after falling asleep had the first dream.11

  In it Descartes "felt his imagination struck by the representation of some phantoms, which frightened him so much that, thinking that he was walking in the streets, he had to lean to his left in order to reach his destination, because he felt a great weakness in his right side and could not hold himself upright. He tried to straighten himself, feeling ashamed to walk in this fashion, but he was hit by turbulent blasts as if of a whirlwind, which spun him round three or four times on his left foot. Even this was not what alarmed him; the difficulty he had in struggling along made him feel that he was going to fall at every step. Noticing a school open along his route he went in, seeking refuge and a remedy for his problem. He tried to reach the school chapel, where his first thought was to pray. But realising that he had passed an acquaintance without greeting him, he sought to retrace his steps to pay his respects, but was violently repulsed by the wind blowing into the chapel. At the same time he saw another person in the school courtyard, who addressed him by name and politely told him that if he wished to find Monsieur N he had something to give him. Descartes took it that the thing in question was a melon from a foreign country. What was more surprising was that the people clustering around that person in order to talk with him were straight and steady on their feet, although he himself was still bent over and unsteady on the same ground. Having almost knocked him over a number of times, the wind had greatly lessened."

  Then, Baillet recounted, Descartes woke and found that he had a real pain in his side, which made him think that the dream had been caused by an evil spirit sent to seduce him. He turned over immediately onto his right side—having slept and dreamed while lying on his left—and asked God to protect him from any evil effects of the dream, and to preserve him from the miseries he might suffer in punishment for his sins, which he acknowledged were great enough—though he had lived a life largely blameless in the eyes of men—to merit thunderbolts from heaven falling on his head.

  After nearly two hours of meditation on the vicissitudes of this life, Baillet continued, Descartes fell asleep again, only to have an instant new "dream" which woke him with a fright. "He thought he heard a sudden, loud noise, which he took for thunder. Terrified, he immediately woke. Upon opening his eyes he noticed sparks of fire scattered about the room. He had experienced this phenomenon many times before, and it did not seem strange to him that when he woke in the night his eyes sparkled enough for him to see objects close to him." After a little while his fears faded away, and he fell back into sleep, only to dream again—a peaceful dream this time, with nothing fearful in it.

  In this third dream Descartes found a book on his table, without knowing who had put it there. He opened it, and found that it was a dictionary, which pleased him greatly, as promising to be very useful. At the same moment he noticed another new book, again without knowing where it had come from. It turned out to be a collection of poems by different authors, called Corpus Poetarum. Curious to read some of it, Descartes opened it and chanced upon the line, quod vitae sectabor iter? "What way in life shall I follow?"

  Just then he noticed a stranger, who gave him a piece of poetry which began with the words "Yes and No," recommending it as an excellent poem. Descartes said that he recognised the line as coming from one of the Idylls of Ausonius, and that it was included in the large poetry anthology lying on the table. To show the poem to the stranger he began leafing through the anthology, boasting that he knew its order and arrangement perfectly. While he searched for the poem the stranger asked where he had acquired the anthology. Descartes replied that he did not know, but that just a short time before he had been leafing through another book which had since disappeared, and there too he neither knew who had brought it or taken it away. He was still searching for Ausonius's "Yes and No" when he saw the first book—the dictionary—reappear at the other end of the table; but he noticed that this time it was not as complete as when he had looked at it earlier.

  At last he found Ausonius's poems in the anthology, but "Yes and No" was not among them. Never mind, Descartes told the stranger, I know a better poem by Ausonius, beginning "What way shall I follow in life?"The stranger begged to see it, so Descartes set about searching the pages again. As he did so he came across several portraits engraved in copperplate, which made him remark that the book was very handsome; but before he could find the poem both book and stranger suddenly disappeared.

  This third dream did not waken Descartes, Baillet reported, but even as he slept he wondered whether it was a dream or a vision, and he began to interpret it. "He judged that the dictionary could only mean all the sciences gathered together and that the anthology of poets entitled the Corpus Poetarum represented, in a more particular and distinct way, the union of Philosophy and Wisdom."

  And then, on waking at last, Descartes proceeded to interpret his dreams fully. The poetry anthology he understood to repres
ent Revelation and Enthusiasm, "for the favours of which he did not despair," said Baillet. By "Yes and No" he understood Truth and Falsehood in human enquiry and science. "Seeing that the interpretation of these things accorded so well with his inclinations," Baillet continued, "he was so bold as to believe that the Spirit of Truth had wished, by means of this dream, to open to him the treasures of all the sciences." (The "Spirit of Truth" was presumably God.)

  And then Baillet hinted that Descartes took the dreams to be prophetic, for he added: "It remained only to explain the little copperplate portraits he had seen in the second book. He looked for no further explanation of them following the visit, later that same day, of an Italian painter." This suggestion—that Descartes believed that the future could be foretold—is an intriguing one, because although Descartes was devout enough in his ostensible commitment to Catholic Christianity (he was faultless in avowed orthopraxy—that is, orthodox behaviour and observance—and gave no reasons for anyone to think differently about his orthodoxy), belief in prognostication sits ill with the otherwise robust rationality of his scientific outlook. Perhaps, though, the early date of the notebook from which Baillet extracted this account is sufficient explanation.

  One final point about the dreams is that the second of them, the bang that woke Descartes and the sparks that floated in the darkness about him when he opened his eyes, have by turns puzzled and excited commentators. Neurology now recognises a harmless event which it labels (obviously feeling no need for a Latinic formulation) "exploding head syndrome." As this frank appellation suggests, it involves a subject "hearing" a loud noise like an explosion or a pistol-shot inside his head soon after falling asleep, an event which naturally wakens him. No pathology precedes, or harmful sequelae attend, such events, which seem to occur mainly when the subject of them is tired or stressed. They are some sort of neurological discharge, similar in cause perhaps to what produces the sense of tripping just as one falls asleep. In the margins of sleep a variety of curious subjective neurological phenomena occur, and it is easy enough to see how they might be interpreted as significant events, until one learns how common they are and how little they mean.12