Descartes

by A. C. Grayling

  No-one who has ever written about Descartes doubts that these dreams occurred, and in the way that he described them. But an intriguing, and indeed puzzling, fact is that Descartes' dreams closely resemble two accounts of dreams published not long before Descartes had his own dreams. The earlier accounts are connected to a crucial matter—the Rosicrucian furore of the years just before and after 1620. But the fact that accounts of dreams very like Descartes' own were published not long before he had them, has to prompt questions. Was it coincidence that Descartes dreamed as he did? Were his dreams prompted by those he had read about? Or were the "dreams" fictions, adapted from the published accounts to provide Descartes with a way of saying something that could not be said en claift.

  Descartes described the insights of the day preceding the dreams collectively as a "wonderful discovery," and they prompted him to try to write a treatise, perhaps a very early version of his Rules for the Direction of the Mind. But he abandoned the attempt after a couple of months.

  The emphasis Descartes himself placed on his discovery and dreams at the time they occurred is probably best understood as an expression of enthusiasm by a gifted young man with grand hopes, whose ambition was at that point greater in form than content, as all early ambition by nature is. Even so, it offers an interesting picture of the confident and independent-minded twenty-three-year-old military engineer and possible Jesuit agent, day-dreaming about being a great scientific discoverer, conceiving the beginnings of ideas and methods that would make them come true, and starting upon his first efforts to work them out and write them down.

  Such sentiments are familiar enough among the ambitious, but an example drawn from another philosophical biography might illuminate them further. In the early twentieth century, when manned flight was just beginning, the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann said that the new science of aeronautics required "heroes and geniuses" for its advancement—heroes to risk their necks in the flimsy new flying machines, geniuses to understand the principles of aerodynamics that sometimes kept them aloft. Inspired by this vision, the young Ludwig Wittgenstein conceived a passionate desire to be an aeronaut in order thereby to be a hero-genius. It is easy to imagine any ambitious individual enjoying similar sentiments appropriate to his or her time—and especially in the dawn of the scientific revolution. The youthful Descartes felt something like this. His night of dreams was evidently so significant a moment for his aspirations that, as already mentioned, he kept his record of them with him for the rest of his life. As events proved, they were not idle aspirations; under the impetus of the interest generated by Beeckman, he was conscious of his powers and their possibilities. Although he needed time for the latter to be realised fully, his day of discoveries and night of dreams evidently left him confident that their realisation would surely come.

  Above all, the day in the stove-heated room confirmed for Descartes the answer to Ausonius' question, "What way in life shall I follow?" In the Discourse he wrote, still as if referring to the deliberations of that significant day, "[I reviewed] the various occupations which men have in this life, in order to choose the best. Without wishing to say anything about the occupations of others,13 I thought I could do no better than to continue with the very one I was engaged in, and devote my whole life to cultivating my reason and advancing as far as I could in the knowledge of the truth, following the method I had prescribed for myself. Since beginning to use this method I have felt such extreme contentment that I do not think one could enjoy any sweeter or purer one in this life."14 It is striking that in a letter written just a few months before his death, he repeated his commitment to this aspiration.15

  The notes Descartes made in the aftermath of the day of insights and night of dreams show that the aspiration was fully formed even by then. And indeed they give evidence of a remarkable consistency in his outlook and ambitions. He began them by saying, "the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom." This marked his commitment, to which he unwaveringly clung, never to stray from at least the appearance of orthodoxy. He then said that he was going to advance upon the world's stage "masked," as actors do in order to conceal their flushed faces. He said that when he was young he was inspired by others' discoveries to wonder whether he could make discoveries on his own account, without the aid of books. And then he added that in answering this with an emphatic "Yes," he saw how it could be done by means of fixed methodological rules. Science, he wrote, is like a woman: she is respected if she remains modestly by her husband's side, but vilified if she gives herself promiscuously to everyone. The sciences are masked; when their masks are removed they will be seen in all their beauty. Whoever sees how the sciences are connected will find it as easy to grasp them all as it is easy to remember the sequence of numbers.16

  In writing of his discoveries in the stove-heated room, Descartes touched only briefly on the all-important question of method, but described the four general principles he vowed to observe in all his studies: "First, never to accept anything as true unless I had evident knowledge of its truth: that is, carefully to avoid precipitate conclusions and preconceptions, and to include nothing more in my judgements than what presented itself to my mind so clearly and so distinctly that I had no occasion to doubt it." Secondly, "to divide each of the difficulties I examined into as many parts as possible and as may be required in order to resolve them better." Thirdly, "to direct my thoughts in an orderly manner, by beginning with the simplest and most easily known objects in order to ascend little by little, step by step, to knowledge of the most complex." Fourth and lastly, "throughout to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so comprehensive, that I could be sure of leaving nothing out."17 Despite their generality, the rules are good ones. Descartes valued them; he claimed that his advances in geometry and algebra resulted from his strict observance of them.18

  Useful too are the rules-of-thumb Descartes sketched for himself as guides for living while he was undertaking his researches—also devised, so he said in the Discourse, while meditating in his stove-heated room. Apart from their intrinsic merits they have biographical interest too. Genevieve Rodis-Lewis reports that not long before her own account of Descartes was written, she learned that a collector in Neuburg had found a copy of a book famous, or rather notorious, in its time, Pierre Charron's Traite de la sagesse, which apparently had been given to Descartes as a gift in 1619.19 The copy found by the Neuberg collector is inscribed "to the most learned, dear friend and little brother, Rene Descartes." It is signed "Father Jean B. Molitor SJ," and it is dated "end of year 1619." Competent judges say they do not think the inscription is a forgery. Assuming it to be genuine, the inscription locates Descartes near Ulm at the close of that year, and more interestingly still places in his hands a book that anticipated some of his later ideas.

  Pierre Charron was a theologian and philosopher who used scepticism about the possibility of science and human knowledge to privilege faith in their place, thus promoting strict adherence to Catholicism. He was a celebrated preacher, and from 1594 served as chaplain to Henri IV's wife Margaret. He was a close friend of Montaigne, another employer of scepticism as a weapon of enquiry. He died in 1603, and his Traite was put on the Index of Prohibited Books by the Church in 1606. But it was still in circulation when Descartes was given a copy, though the fact that the person who gave it to him was a Jesuit raises an eyebrow: why would a Jesuit priest give a young protege a book proscribed by the Church?

  Charron began from the claim "I do not know," premising a form of ignorance and doubt which is, he wrote, "more learned and certain, more noble and generous, than all the knowledge and certainty" of would-be savants and scientists, for it opens the path to true knowledge by faith, in that it leaves one's mind clear for God to "engrave the truth upon it."20 If Descartes read this it must have given him a large hint for later constructing his own answer to the question, "What can be known with certainty?," for he did so by doubting everything that admitted of the least possible doubt, in order to see what such doubting would lea
ve behind—for any residue would by definition be indubitable, which is to say: certain. This is exactly the strategy he carried out most fully in his Meditations on First Philosophy.

  In addition to demonstrating a method of seeking truth from sceptical beginnings, Charron offered guidance on the great question of how best to live. His advice was "to follow and observe the laws, customs and ceremonies of the country in which one finds oneself."21 This is echoed in Descartes' own first principle. "I formed for myself a provisional moral code consisting of just three or four maxims, which I should like to tell you about. The first was to obey the laws and customs of my country, holding constantly to the religion in which by God's grace I had been instructed from my childhood, and governing myself in all other matters according to the most moderate and least extreme opinions."22This last thought is a version of Charron's injunction "never to act against God or Nature" in following the customs of a given country.

  Charron also enjoined submitting judgement and faith to the tutelage of reason, and employing an "internal reserve" in carrying out obligations. Descartes' other maxims differed in content but not in spirit from these. They are: to be firm in following a chosen course of action, "to master myself rather than fortune" (a principle of Stoic ethics, of which Descartes later showed himself a votary), and—as noted earlier—to "cultivate my reason, and to advance as far as I could in the knowledge of the truth."

  Descartes, in short, followed Charron's lead both in devising a personal code of ethics and in employing the methodology of scepticism as a starting-point for enquiry. The parallels offer an intriguing glimpse into the formation of his thought, a significant enough gain in its own right. But the circumstances also provide another glimpse into his life, showing him in Ulm in the winter of 1619, on intimate terms with the Jesuit community, called a "little brother" by one of them, and again admired, as Beeckman had admired him, for his powers of intellect.

  Yet one can still ask why Descartes was in Ulm at that time, making such leisurely efforts to "rejoin" the army of Duke Maximilian. What was he doing with the Jesuits there, those busy commandos fighting for the cause of Catholicism and the Habsburgs? One possibility is that Descartes' interests, and perhaps even duties as an agent of pro-Habsburg Jesuit endeavours, had something to do with a movement associated with Frederick of the Palatinate: the mysterious and more than half-legendary "Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross."

  4

  The Mystery of the Rosy Cross

  Forming a picture of Descartes' doings in the significant period between the time he left Breda in the spring of 1619 and his presence in Prague at the end of 1620 requires considering a subject that, until now, biographers and commentators have mentioned only in passing. It concerns the matter of the Rosicrucian furore of the years between 1612 and 1623, and it has particular relevance to the hypothesis that Descartes might have been a servant of the Jesuit interest in the unsettled circumstances of the age.

  Thoughts about Rosicrucianism would have had no relevance to Descartes were it not for two striking facts: that he himself implied an interest in it, and that many of the people he dealt with then and later, including some of his closest friends, were likewise interested. It would be too much to call any of them, or indeed anyone, "Rosicrucians," because an organised or formal Rosicrucian movement never seems to have existed as such. Rather, many people were stimulated by Rosicrucian ideas, and many among these felt sympathy with its tenets and goals. Yet only in this courtesy sense did a "loose and self-selecting fraternity" exist, though for convenience those who expressed sympathy for or solidarity with Rosicrucian ideals might as well be called Rosicrucians.

  Once the picture of Descartes' life at this period is allowed to include Rosicrucianism, it becomes complex in an intriguing way. This is because Rosicrucianism, and other movements associated variously with Protestantism, esoteric knowledge, the occult, alchemy and magic, were enthusiastically supported by Frederick, Elector Palatine, and suffered a devastating blow with his defeat at the White Mountain in 1620. Thereafter the Catholic church, with Jesuits leading the way, was indefatigable in demonising Rosicrucianism and anything to do with magic, Hermeticism, the Cabala, and the occult in general, fomenting unease about alleged nefarious activities involving some or all these things in the early 1620s to such an extent that, after the great 1623 panic over Rosicrucianism in France, these "movements" (insofar as there were any such in the first place, to survive in any form), and especially Rosicrucianism, vanished underground.

  Moreover, one of the leading hammers of Rosicrucianism was Marin Mersenne, the man who made Descartes famous by publicising his genius, and who remained not only his friend but in effect his secretary, keeping him in touch with the whole scientific and philosophical world from the late 1620s onwards. So vehement was Mersenne's assault on Rosicrucianism that his very public battle with Robert Fludd kept the entire intellectual world of Europe agog for years.

  The questions that crowd round in light of these considerations are: what was Descartes' involvement with Rosicrucianism? Was he perhaps briefly tempted by it in 1618—19, but then rejected it? This might be a plausible scenario given that although he could have been initially curious about what it promised—a key to the secrets of Nature—he was later the principal architect of a style of thought that opposed and (largely) defeated everything represented by interest in Freemasonry, the Cabala, Hermeticism, and other styles of pseudoscience like them.

  Or was Descartes' interest in Rosicrucianism professional, in the sense that he was investigating it and its votaries as an agent (if so, doubtless just one of many) of the Jesuit interest? Was he, this is to ask, spying on the Rosicrucians he met? For the documents which set the Rosicrucian furore going were not only Protestant in orientation, but expressly anti-Jesuit, and indeed offered themselves as manifestos for a brotherhood that would constitute an alternative to the Jesuit movement.

  The proximate source of the Rosicrucian excitements of the decade or so after 1612 was the publication of three books, the Fama Fraternitatis published in 1614 but known in manuscript for some years beforehand, the Confessio Fraternitatis published in 1615, and The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz published in 1616—all years when Descartes was a senior pupil at La Fleche, or studying law at the university in Poitiers. But the ideas and aims of the Rosicrucian manifestos had long roots back into the Renaissance, almost all of them passing in one way or another through the intellectual cincture of a very remarkable man, the English polymath Dr. John Dee.1

  In the later Renaissance a heady mixture of notions, beliefs and practices from cabalistic, occult, astrological, alchemical, hermetic and magical sources had thrived, promising aficionados gains of almost Faust-like proportions in knowledge of the mysteries of nature and Heaven, if only they could find the Method, the secret, the code or technique for unlocking the gates of wisdom. Because this ebullition of ideas was exceedingly non-orthodox in religious terms, it was strongly opposed by the Catholic church, whose storm troops, the Jesuits, took the lead in combating it. When the intoxicating pot-pourri of "magia, cabala, alchymia" reached a head in the Rosicrucian documents on either side of 1615, a definitive clash with the forces of orthodoxy was inevitable. It came; and within a decade Rosicrucianism had been so discredited and demonised that, insofar as it survived at all as an idea among an informal coincidence of people inspired by its ideals, it went underground and turned into a rumour, a memory, and a legend.

  But Rosicrucianism never fully died away, at least in the attenuated sense of a belief in secret pathways to knowledge. When Isaac Newton, decades later, devoted more time trying to fathom what he believed must be the numerological code of the Bible than he spent on physics, he was following close to well-trodden footprints. In the eighteenth century and subsequent interest in arcana and the occult, and with the proliferation of Freemasonry, supposed Rosicrucian themes revived.

  The Fama Fraternitatis and Confessio Fraternitatis are invitations to join an allegedly n
ewly revived Fraternity or Order founded by "Brother Christian Rosencreutz," who (so these books claimed) had travelled in the East and brought back from it all manner of arcane wisdom. The Fama and Confessio were anonymous tracts, but The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz has been securely attributed to a gifted Lutheran pastor from Wurttemberg called Johan Valentin Andreae, the author of a number of other works, including plays and an autobiography.

  Andreae's home state of Wurttemberg was ruled by an Anglophile duke, Frederick I, who had been awarded the Order of the Garter by Elizabeth I, and who was intensely interested in alchemy and the occult.2 After Elizabeth's death James I and VI continued her pro-German Protestant policy, which was aimed, as was that of Henri IV of France, at countering Habsburg power. Wurttemberg neighboured the Palatinate, whose Elector Frederick married James's daughter Elizabeth in 1613 with enormous pomp and fanfare, occasioning plays, pamphlets and songs. When Elector Frederick took his bride home to the Palatinate a company of English actors and musicians went with them, performing at the celebrations arranged for the journey and the homecoming at Heidelberg. The significance of the family alliance between James and Frederick - the latter being head of the Protestant Union—was obvious to all Europe; though in fact it turned out to mean nothing, for James abandoned Frederick when the latter needed help following his ill-starred acceptance of the Bohemian crown.