Descartes

by A. C. Grayling

  The first reason doubtless might have a measure of truth in it; Descartes was himself on record saying as much, despite the fact that his first choice of place and occupation in the Netherlands suggests otherwise—for he registered to study at Franeker University and then, after a stay in the bustling city of Amsterdam, at Leiden University. But events in the larger world suggest an additional, or perhaps the real, reason for Descartes' leaving France. Most biographers assume that when he settled in the Netherlands in 1629, he had decided to do so permanently; but his registering as a student at Franeker and Leiden universities suggests that at first he planned to spend only a couple of years there, attached to intellectual communities while he wrote, and waiting on events in France to see whether a return might be feasible. It proved not to be, and as a result Descartes spent all but six months of the rest of his life there—the next twenty years: the most productive years of his life, as they proved.

  The accepted story of Descartes' removal to the Netherlands is of course based on Baillet's account, itself pieced together from anecdotes told by Descartes' friend Clerselier and his earliest biographer Pierre Borel. It goes as follows. In the autumn of 1628 Descartes went with a number of friends, among them Mersenne and Villebressieu, to hear a talk given by a chemist called Chandoux at the home of the Papal Nuncio to Paris, Guido Bagni. Chandoux's talk was aimed principally at refuting Aristotelianism, and it attracted much applause—from everyone (says Baillet) other than Descartes. Present at the talk was the great Cardinal Berulle, founder of the Oratorians and minister of the Crown, who noticed Descartes' reticence and asked him to state his opinion. This Descartes did. According to Baillet, Descartes praised Chandoux's eloquence and his rejection of Aristotelianism, but said that it was not right to accept that mere probability is good enough when truth should be the aim. "He added," said Baillet, "that in the presence of people happy enough to accept probabilities, as with the illustrious company he was honoured to address, it was easy to pass off what is false for what is true, and conversely to make the truth seem to be falsehood." Descartes proceeded to demonstrate this, asking anyone in the audience to propose what he took to be an evident truth, which he then showed by probable steps to be false, and vice versa for a supposed evident falsehood. "The assembled company was astonished by the power and extent of genius displayed by M. Descartes in his reasoning; but they were even more surprised to find how easily their minds could be duped by probability."14

  Rendered anxious by this demonstration, the company appealed to Descartes to say whether there was a method that would insure against falling prey to such sophisms, and Descartes of course replied that indeed there was: his own method. And he added that here was a small number of clear and certain principles in terms of which all nature could be understood, contrary not only to the Scholastic philosophy derived from Aristotle, but from what Chandoux offered in its stead—which anyway was, Descartes argued, really much the same as Aristotelianism.

  Cardinal Berulle was so impressed by Descartes, according to Baillet, that he asked him "to talk to him again another time privately on the same subject. M. Descartes, conscious of the honour he had received from such an obliging proposal, visited the Cardinal a few days afterwards, and explained to him about his first philosophical ideas, on the basis of which he perceived the futility of the way philosophy is commonly treated. He showed the Cardinal what the applications of his ideas would be, if well conducted, and how useful they would be to the public if applied to medicine and mechanics, from the former recovering and conserving health, and from the latter lessening and lightening man's labours."15

  In response, Baillet continued, Berulle "used the authority he had over Descartes' mind" to encourage him to proceed without delay in this important work. "He even made it an obligation of conscience for Descartes to use his God-given power and penetration of mind for illuminating nature, a gift He had not vouchsafed to others." This adjuration, together with the encouragement given by his friends, finally made up Descartes' mind to leave the bustle and distraction of Paris, and the heat of its climate, and to seek "perfect solitude in a moderately cold land where no one would know him."16

  Thus Baillet's version; and even if he had not demonstrably constructed it out of Borel, Clerselier and bits of Descartes' own published works, it smacks heartily of fiction. Descartes' latest biographers agree in suspecting as much, Watson chief among them; as he puts it, "This long story is what Clerselier, Baillet and Lipstorp think should have happened. Descartes did go away from France more or less forever—and wrote all his published works in the United Provinces—and this is difficult to explain for anyone who wants to write a panegyric about France's greatest philosopher. So there must have been a strong impetus coming from very high up—if not from God, then from Cardinal Berulle, who was known to talk to God every day"17

  The larger events of the time, however, suggest that although Cardinal Berulle might well have provided the impetus for Descartes to leave France, this did not occur in quite the way Baillet would have us believe.

  In 1628, the year Descartes decided to quit his native country, the government of France in the capable, not to say ruthless, hands of Cardinal Richelieu was just turning its attention from home matters to foreign affairs. France's intervention in the matter of the Val Telline had been interrupted by Huguenot problems at home, requiring the return of the French army. Recognizing that he needed to restore government control over all France, then in a fractious mood, rather than confront Habsburg power elsewhere in Europe, in 1624 Richelieu had astutely written, "Physicians hold it for an aphorism that an internal weakness, however small in itself, is more to be feared than an external injury, however large and painful. From this we learn that we must abandon what is to be done abroad until we have done what must be done at home." By 1628 that necessary task had been completed to Richelieu's satisfaction, and he was turning his attention to the Habsburgs again—and this time in a strong position to do so.

  Opportunity offered in the form of a crisis over Mantua, important not for itself but because its dukes controlled two strategic frontier towns between Milan and Savoy, namely Casale and Montferrat. The duchy of Mantua had fallen vacant and been claimed by a Frenchman, the due de Nevers. The prospect of a Frenchman having control of geographically sensitive towns alarmed the Habsburgs, for the usual reason that it threatened connections between the various reaches of their domains. Accordingly, Emperor Ferdinand II sent an army to seize Mantua while his Spanish cousin laid siege to Casale. Richelieu, after seeing to it that the German states would not actively support Ferdinand II, took an army into Savoy to relieve Casale, and then proceeded to occupy another crucial frontier town, Pinerlo. By the time that the Treaty of Cherasco was signed in 1631, Richelieu had gained Mantua for the French duke and Pinerlo for France itself-—a most satisfactory outcome.

  Moreover, while preparing these actions against the Habsburgs in their northern Italian backyard, Richelieu laid the ground for another formidable constraint on Habsburg ambitions. He did this by encouraging the German princes, including the redoubtable Maximilian, to be more robust in resisting Imperial policies. And he also made an alliance with Gustavus Adolphus II of Sweden, just then about to make himself a powerful factor in northern Europe and the eastern and southern Baltic. In the end this proved a less successful ploy from Richelieu's point of view, because Gustavus's successful invasion of northern Europe prompted the German princes to temporise their opposition to the Emperor in case they needed his help. Still, Richelieu's general aim of weakening Habsburg power proved largely successful from 1628 onwards, and that year and the next were the crucial periods when his plans for doing so were laid.

  Richelieu was a protege of Cardinal Berulle, who had been instrumental in bringing him into court circles early in his career. Although in 1628 Berulle had only a year of life left, he was still a major figure in French life and government. Two decades beforehand he had been a counsellor to Henri IV, and more importantly still he
was the founder of the Oratory, which he had set up specifically to be an alternative to the Jesuits as a source of religious and educational inspiration; for Oratorian schools educated the children of the French ruling class, which was always at odds with the Jesuits both in internal and foreign affairs. Further, Berulle was the spiritual teacher of St. Vincent de Paul, and he was hotly opposed to the Huguenots. As a senior religious figure in the French establishment, close to the Crown, and opposed to Habsburg and Jesuit interests, he therefore made an interesting figure for Descartes to have a private interview with, just as France was about to resume active opposition to Habsburg power. For if Descartes was involved in some way with pro-Habsburg Jesuit interests, or until a couple of years beforehand had been so involved, the fact that he was interviewed by Cardinal Berulle and immediately afterwards emigrated permanently to the Netherlands, comes to have an altogether different significance. These thoughts prompt the surmise—no more than that—that Descartes' departure for the Netherlands had more to do with the troubled state of affairs in Europe than what is claimed in the unlikely tale told by Baillet.

  Just how doubtful these matters are, though, is illustrated by the fact that some commentators take a different view of Berulle's place in French political life at the time, suggesting that as advisor and confessor to Louis XIII's mother Marie de Medici, he was in fact opposed to Richelieu's anti-Habsburg policy. The line of thought goes as follows: Marie de Medici was in perennial opposition to her son, sympathising instead with the Habsburg interest. When in September 1629 the court debated Richelieu's plans for a campaign in Italy over the Mantuan question, Berulle opposed them in line with Marie's preferences. A few weeks later he was dead—poisoned, say the conspiracy theorists, by Richelieu, although official history says that he died of a stroke while saying mass.18

  The problem with this story is that Berulle and Richelieu were too like-minded on matters of policy. In 1625 Berulle went to London to arrange the marriage of Louis XIII's sister Henrietta to Charles I of England, cementing an alliance much desired by Richelieu, who hoped—unsuccessfully, as it transpired—to prevent England from aiding the Huguenot cause. (Always a strong opponent of Protestantism, Berulle had to leave England early because he was suspected of conspiring in favour of the Catholic interest there.) The fact that Berulle disagreed with some aspects of policy does not signify hostility to the point of assassination; the councils of all kings and governments obviously see debate, differences of view, and the offering of alternatives, as a matter of course. Moreover, Berulle had in effect been in government with Richelieu—his protege—since the early 1620s when the first chapter of Richelieu's anti-Habsburg policy was being written, and he was still with him in government when he died in 1629. Of course, alliances and friendships often change; but in this case we would need evidence that they had changed to the point where Richelieu had to murder Berulle.

  A clincher in this argument is the unity of view that bound Richelieu and Berulle over the Huguenot question. Both detested the Huguenots, though when Richelieu was appointed Louis XIII's chief minister in 1624 he was initially prepared to tolerate them. They were, however, difficult to tolerate, at least from the court's point of view, because they had their own army and they controlled eight "circles" in southern France, in effect constituting a state within a state. When Richelieu was occupied with contesting Habsburg tenure of the Val Telline, the Huguenots sought to profit by strengthening their position in La Rochelle, the coastal town that was their de facto capital. Richelieu brought his army home to dissuade them, and the Treaty of La Rochelle was signed (with English prompting) to defuse the situation. But the treaty only gave the Huguenots time to strengthen in preparation for outright rebellion, which erupted in 1627. England gave them help, but not for long; Richelieu quickly expelled the forces sent by Charles I under the Duke of Buckingham, and the infamous siege of La Rochelle began. By blocking the town's harbour Richelieu starved to death 20,000 of the 25,000 population, and then (in a coup de theatre) on 28 October 1628 sent Louis XIII into the town at the army's head to "capture" the remnant of its dazed and enfeebled defenders.

  Berulle was an enthusiastic supporter of this policy. He received his cardinal's hat in 1627 because of his credentials as a champion of the Church and the Catholic cause, a fact that Richelieu and Louis XIII consciously exploited. In his last years, coinciding with these events, Berulle wrote works on Mary Magdalene and the life of Jesus, maintaining his reputation as one of the leading "devots" of Catholicism in France. This was a significant help to the legitimacy of Richelieu's domestic policy in the eyes of Catholic France itself. Berulle may have been Marie de Medici's confessor, but it is hard to see him as an opposition figure in the France of the day. If he interviewed Descartes on matters other than philosophical method, it was certainly not to encourage him to help damage French interests by aiding the Habsburg cause.

  One thing that Baillet's tale tells us, though, is how Descartes was viewed by the intellectuals of 1620s Paris, and here there is little reason to doubt him. We know already that he was valued and admired by Mersenne, informally the president of the circle of savants gathered in that city. He was at the centre of Mersenne's group, and it is very likely that its members indeed urged him, as Baillet recorded, to commit more of his ideas to paper, though they assuredly saw some of his mathematical work in manuscript—and perhaps drafts of his Rules. In 1628 Descartes was aged thirty-two, feeling his powers in philosophy, though probably with most of his mathematical discoveries behind him, at very least in germ—for mathematics is on the whole a youthful sport of the intellect—and ready to settle to further study and endeavour. One way or another, Cardinal Berulle did him a favour; his life after leaving Paris and settling in the Netherlands was an immensely productive one.

  There is little personal detail available about Descartes in his Paris period apart from these general hints, save for one rumour: that he fought a duel over a lady. But he also said at about this time that he had never met a woman who could compete in beauty with the truth. If ever he did meet such a woman, he did so in his new home in the sea-pressed, windmill-bedecked marshes occupied by the energetic and flourishing free Dutch, then enjoying their Golden Age.

  6

  Animals on the Moon

  Descartes was in the Netherlands by the beginning of 1629, and there he remained for the next twenty years, leaving only for his last few months, when he travelled to Sweden at the bidding of its queen, and where, in that northern chilly darkness, he caught the disease that killed him.

  By leaving France for permanent residence in the Netherlands, Descartes was stepping out of the history of Europe and into the history of ideas. The bitter tumult of the Thirty Years War continued for virtually the whole time that he lived in the Netherlands, but almost exclusively in the German territories and northern Italy, and Descartes played no further part in it of the kind hypothesised here—and indeed was scarcely affected by it in any other way either.1 He had chosen his place of refuge wisely, for despite continuing theological disputes and sometimes lively internal politics, the United Provinces of the Netherlands were largely peaceful, tolerant, and growing rapidly richer by the year. By contrast, things were very different in the great central swathe of German Europe. There the long war's effects were terrible; estimates are hard to make, but some historians put the death toll from conflict, starvation, displacement of populations, disease and general calamity, in many millions. The German centre of Europe was devastated, and did not recover for a hundred and fifty years afterwards.

  Ultimately the war was a defeat for the Habsburg interest, but for that ensuing century and a half it seemed like a Pyrrhic victory for central Europe itself. Consider also the then powerful kingdom of Sweden under its great king Gustavus, who took his people into the war on the Protestant side dreaming of a Baltic empire; and consider likewise the once powerful kingdom of Spain, even by then living on past glory alone. For both these great kingdoms the bloody conflict was their fi
nal scene in starring roles, for neither has since stood at front stage in world history.

  But the history into which Descartes fully stepped during the balance of his life—the history of science and philosophy—was an equally potent matter, for this was the point at which the modern mind was being shaped, and Descartes' part in the process was a major one. Gifted, combative and proud, he by now fully had a sense of his intellectual powers, and felt ready to respond to the repeated requests of his friends and acquaintances to commit his discoveries and theories to paper.

  In his twenty Dutch years Descartes wrote the works that immortalised his name. This suggests that at last, after the excitements and travels in the years since he had left Poitiers University, he had settled down and found the tranquillity and stillness commonly believed necessary for intellectual work. But this was not the case. For some of the time, it is true, he found tranquillity, but he also found controversy; and as if in proof of the questionable reasons he had for quitting France, he kept changing his address, begging Mersenne in a letter to tell no one where he lived.2 His other biographers and commentators attribute this secrecy to his desire to work undisturbed, and without paradox they attribute his frequent changes of residence to the same motive, even though few things are more disturbing than often changing residence. But other anxieties might have weighed on Descartes; it is striking that his need for secrecy diminished after some years, and indeed for the last part of his Dutch sojourn his whereabouts were no secret to anyone.