It has to be acknowledged that most philosophical biographies, with honourable exceptions to be mentioned shortly, suffer one of a pair of shortcomings. Either they are reasonably well written, because written by professional biographers, but fail to give an adequate account of their subjects' philosophical achievements; or they succeed in doing the latter because written by philosophers, but fail to be well written, because their authors' literary stock-in-trade is the academic book or paper—scarcely a thing of beauty in most hands, now that the academy has been professionalised into a slough of recondite jargons and impenetrabilities.
Examples of the former include Ernest Mossner's copious 1954 life of Hume, still the standard work, and yet unsatisfying as an account of Hume's thought, especially given that philosophical understanding of Hume was impoverished before Mossner set to work, relative to the rich resource of scholarship and debate which has flourished since. Another example is Ronald W Clarke's 1975 biography of Russell; here the problem is that Clarke did not understand Russell's work in logic or philosophy, and had little sense of its provenance or of what it led to, and therefore of the significance of the problems Russell was addressing.
Examples now abound—it seems they multiply almost daily— of philosophers writing biographies encumbered by deficits in literary skill and the art of biography. Naming names makes invidious comparisons: but let us look at biographies nearly contemporary with the effort to which this is an appendix. One example is Terry Pinkard's life of Hegel. If one wished to get an overview of Hegel's thought—a large undertaking at best—there could be no better place to start than the helpful, accessible and well-organised account of it given by Pinkard. But the non-philosophical parts of his book do not make easy reading, and might fairly be said to do the opposite. This applies also to the otherwise excellent biography of Kant, already mentioned, by Manfred Kuehn, and although one might point a finger at restrained editing by the publishing house responsible for both, no publisher has a monopoly on philosophically sound biographies that required attention in literary respects. This matters; because no book can do its work, nor can it survive long, unless it is written well.
It is a pleasure to turn to philosophical biographies which are well written in addition to being well constructed and researched. By coincidence the two that spring to mind are both about Wittgenstein: Ray Monk's excellent Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius and—even more to the point—the peerless Young Ludwig by Brian McGuinness, the first of two projected volumes whose sequel, alas, seems destined never to appear.
Monk's biography of Wittgenstein is deservedly well known. Written with natural grace and clarity, and buoyed by Monk's admiration for his subject, it is also a useful introduction for the non-specialist to Wittgenstein's main ideas. It is better for a biography that its author feels at least a minimum of sympathy for its subject (best of all is reasonably tolerant objectivity), and Monk is an ardent Wittgenstein sympathiser. One result is that his Wittgenstein, who in reality was an egregiously unsympathetic character—he has variously been described as arrogant, resentful, unmannerly and pathologically egocentric, or all of these things together—comes out glossed as a tortured genius who should accordingly, in Monk's opinion, be forgiven much. Compare Monk's two-volume account of Bertrand Russell's life: Monk self-confessedly disliked Russell, and his biography of him detrimentally shows it.
By contrast, Brian McGuinness's beautifully written, deeply insightful account of the first half of Wittgenstein's life is the closest thing to a paradigm of philosophical biography in existence. It weaves life and thought seamlessly together, skilfully paints their setting and, with elegant dispassion, neither glosses nor distorts, but presents Wittgenstein as a creature of his place and time. No-one in Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century regarded Wittgenstein as unusual or notably clever, but when he arrived in Cambridge in 1911, one of the smuggest and most self-enclosed enclaves in the smuggest, most self-satisfied and complacent countries then in the world, he was a bombshell. Russell, who thought everyone he met either a fool or a genius and said so repeatedly, placed his strange-seeming little Austrian into the latter category, and Wittgenstein's reputation was made. Wittgenstein's career thereafter had much to do with resenting Russell's help—a common phenomenon. McGuinness shows where Wittgenstein's always unacknowledged ideas came from in the rich intellectual soup of German-speaking, and especially Viennese, culture of the nineteenth century—they included the repugnant Otto Weininger—and as one of the translators of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus he gives a brilliant and lucid rendition of that work's principal themes. His book is an irresistibly civilised read; the chapter on the First World War and its effects on Wittgenstein (who said of the war "it saved my life") begins in Virgilian mode: "Austria is now our theme, Austria and the last days of an empire and culture whose variety, whose failings, and whose charm mirrored human nature itself."
Among the most notable contributors to the recent spate of philosophical biography is Rudiger Safranski, not an academic but a fine writer thoroughly grounded in philosophy. His intellectual biographies of Schopenhauer and Heidegger were well received, the latter not least because it gives a frank account of Heidegger's Nazism; and his more recent biography of Nietzsche followed suit. His skill lies in combining highly readable narrative with intelligent and perceptive accounts of his subject's work.
Safranski belongs to the school of thought which disdains spending too much time on a subject's sexuality, a topic hijacked by so-called "psychobiography" which tries to analyse while describing an individual's life. In a way this is a mistake, as the case of Nietzsche shows. Joachim Kohler's Zarathustra's Secret, published in German a decade before it became available in English, is a study of Nietzsche's erotic life, and it proves very illuminating. Safranski ignores it— except obliquely, in a few paragraphs accepting but downplaying the significance of Kohler's thesis.
In the absence of Kohler's book this would be a fault, for as Kohler succeeds in demonstrating, it is clear that Nietzsche's masochistic homosexuality explains much that he said and suffered. Nietzsche himself pointed to sexuality as the summit of an individual's spirituality, and his concept of an ideal existence embraced Dionysian orgiastic freedom as expressed in his own day by the life of the naked, sun-kissed youths of Sicily (which Nietzsche called "the isle of the blessed"), so lovingly photographed by Wilhelm van Gloeden. For Kohler, Nietzsche's attack on Christian morality is the product of this repressed erotic longing, and explains his ideal of the "Superman," who overthrows life-denying inhibitions in order to live passionately and supremely.
Safranski sees the erotic in these themes too, but is more concerned with a straightforward exposition of Nietzsche's ideas. Whatever their source, these ideas are revolutionary and subversive, for they challenge the morality Nietzsche sees as based on the enslavement and weakness suffered by the Jews in exile, and which gave rise to an "inversion" of values proclaiming that the feeble, the fearful, and those that weep and mourn shall inherit the Kingdom. Nietzsche poured contempt on this view. Man should instead "overcome himself," he said, by expunging the weaknesses in his nature, and aspire to live heroically and powerfully.
Nietzsche's life is a gift for the biographer, for it was undeniably an extraordinary one. A summary is instructive, as showing how little one ought to be surprised by anything in human lives that are egregious (in the non-pejorative, literal sense of this term), for it makes an instructive comparison with Descartes, who sought to remain personally orthodox even while introducing a revolution into thought. Nietzsche was a revolutionary thinker who disdained orthodoxies; and his revolution was not effected in the sphere of philosophy and science, as with Descartes, but in the psychology of an age.
Nietzsche had a start in life comparable to Descartes', in the sense at least of belonging to a class in society which ensured that he received an education commensurate with his talents. He was born in Saxony in 1844, the son of a mild-mannered pastor who died of 'so
ftening of the brain' when Nietzsche was five years old. He was a precocious child - everyone called him "the little pastor," an ironic label given his later views — and he easily gained entry to the distinguished Schulpforta school, and later the universities of Bonn and Leipzig. While at Leipzig he discovered Schopenhauer's thought and was for a time enthralled by it, although he later came to reject its pessimism. Even before he had completed his degree his brilliance earned him, aged just twenty-four, a professorship at the university of Basle. Soon after arriving in Basle he encountered the other great influence of his life: Wagner, first his master and ideal, and later his enemy.
Academic life did not suit Nietzsche, any more than it would have suited Descartes. His first book was regarded as so bad by the scholarly community that it was inevitable he would resign. There followed a life of solitary wandering in Switzerland and Italy, writing and thinking, publishing increasingly provocative and controversial books, until at last he produced his masterpieces, Thus Spake Zarathustra and The Genealogy of Morals. In the first, he gave a full statement of what he regarded as his greatest philosophical insight: the doctrine of "eternal recurrence," which says that everything that happens will happen again, exactly as it happened before—and therefore one must live so that one will not mind repeating one's life endlessly.
No-one could wish to reprise Nietzsche's own life in actuality: he went irrecoverably mad ten years before his death, probably as a result of syphilis, and in the twilight of his sanity suffered as much agony as euphoria.
The lives of Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, Locke and Descartes, with their wars and wanderings, and in the first two cases their personal struggles, could not seem to be more contrasted to the externally eventless existence of the great Immanuel Kant. But Kant's biography is every bit as gripping in its own way. Moreover, the second half of Descartes' life was only marginally less removed from the centre of things than Kant's life, and it was as deliberately quiet.
It might smack of hyperbole to say that Kant is one of the greatest philosophers of all time, but it is nevertheless true. He was also, arguably, more right about many things than most philosophers succeed in being, which adds genuine importance to his greatness. He is not an easy read; his forbiddingly entitled works—The Critique of Pure Reason, The Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals—some of them massive, are not the kind of thing you read in the bath or in bed. But they are extraordinary and powerful works, monuments of the mind of man, which greatly repay attentive study.
Kant did not have the advantages of a Descartes or Locke in the matter of his birth and family circumstances. He was the son of a harness-maker, and was brought up in poor but not indigent circumstances. His parents were adherents of Pietism, a form of fundamentalist Christianity which Kant himself was too intelligent to accept. His gifts ensured that he had the best education Konigsberg could offer, but he was not a prodigy, and had to leave university before his Master's degree in order to work as a tutor in various private families. After six years he returned to Konigsberg University to satisfy the academic requirements for becoming a "privatdozent" or untenured lecturer, dependent for his living on students' private fees because only fully appointed professors received a salary. He was thirty-one years of age when he began his academic career, and forty-six before he finally secured a salaried position. And it was another ten years before he produced the first of the great works by which he is now remembered, making him a late developer indeed—and therefore a heartening model for all those who feel (as Saintsbury put it in speaking of Dryden) "too gifted to find their way early in life."
But the long years of preparation were not unproductive. Kant lectured and published much on a wide variety of subjects, from physics to cosmology, from geography to anthropology. In part it was a requirement of lecturers' hand-to-mouth existence that they were jacks of all intellectual trades in this way, but in Kant's case it was also a product of large interests and unappeasable curiosity. This wide reading, thinking and teaching fed into his mature work, not as its subject-matter but as the background to the abstract reflections they embody.
In the first of his great "Critiques" Kant argued that the world we experience is in part determined by our cognitive faculties, which shape the way the world appears to us by contributing very general structural features to it—such as its spatial and temporal character, and the fact that experience is always governed by such fundamental concepts as (for example) causality. These concepts are not learned from experience, but are supplied by the mind; and they are what make experience possible.
Kant's moral philosophy builds on this basis an austere ethics of duty, in which the obligations by which we must live are identified by reason. On the great questions of metaphysics as he identified them—the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the freedom of the human will—Kant argued that we cannot prove any of them, but that we need to assume them to make sense of morality, so that people can be persuaded that evil-doing will be punished in a posthumous state. This view is somewhat reminiscent of Plato's contention that although religious beliefs are false they are useful as a means of controlling the unlettered.
The austerity of Kant's views and his bachelor life give a misleading impression of him. He was not a withered pedant but a sociable being who enjoyed the modest pleasures of dining out and playing billiards. Tragically, in the last years of his life Kant suffered progressive dementia, ending as a helpless child. It was almost as if the immense intellectual effort of his later years had burned away the volatile spirit of his genius; but if so, it was a wonderfully worth-while sacrifice. By the time he died he was already famous and controversial; since then his works have become classic of philosophy along with those of Descartes, Plato and Aristotle.
The examples of Kant, Nietzsche and Althusser, with their descents into madness or dementia at the last, are untypical of the general run of philosophers, who tend to live long and enjoy an alert old age, as exemplified by Thomas Hobbes and Bertrand Russell. Hobbes sang every evening into his nineties, convinced that it cleared the lungs. Russell, by contrast, smoked a pipe into his nineties, convinced of nothing but the folly of mankind.
Descartes is among the more surprising of his kind in that, during the last years of his life, he turned his attention to seeking worldly honours, attracted by the glamour of the Court and the prospect of material advancement. In this endeavour he was cut short by the unlucky accident of pneumonia; but he might well have ended his days as a minor nobleman on a royal pension, or even on an estate— not in Sweden, given the weather problem and the fact that Queen Christina abdicated, not long after his death, to become a Catholic— but in his beloved Netherlands, or even perhaps France.
In this respect Descartes was merely human, though it has to be said that not many philosophers have much cared for what the world has been able to give. But in the essential thing—-the fact that he made a major contribution to the progress of thought— Descartes' stature is unquestionable, and with it his place in history. To show that he was also a man of his time, and played a part in it, is to do no more than to complete the picture as it should be completed. That has been the intention here.
Notes
Chapter 1: Who Was Descartes?
1. Les oeuvres de fean-Baptiste Van Helmont, French trans. Jean Le Conte (Lyon, 1671), Part I, ch. XVI, "On the Necessity of Leavens in Transformations," pp. 103-109.
2. Quoted in Roger Ariew (1999), Descartes Among the Scholastics, pp. 13-14 and here adapted. The concepts in play are all Aristotelian. The four causes are given in Aristotle's Physics, Book II, chs. 3—4 as material, formal, efficient, and final. For example: the material cause of a table is the wood and nails from which it is made; its formal cause is its design; its efficient cause is the labour of the carpenter; and its final cause is the aim or purpose for which it is made, e.g. to serve as a dinner table. The four elements are given by Aristotle in De Caelo, Books III and IV, and are earth, water, fire, and air. The first two have a natu
ral tendency to move downward towards the centre of the earth (which is the centre of the universe), the latter two a natural upward-moving tendency, towards the periphery of the region of the universe below the sphere of the moon. Each is an appropriate mixture of the qualities hot and cold, dry and wet. So, fire is hot and dry, air is hot and wet, water is cold and wet, earth is cold and dry. The "three principles of natural things" are matter, form, and privation (Aristotle, Physics, Book I). Note that the full details of Borgia's memorandum by these rules outlaw the tenets of other philosophical schools, notably the Stoics and atomists, and also engage in the internecine quarrel between certain Augustinian and Franciscan doctrines, e.g. about the nature of man and the soul, thus taking sides in Scholastic disputes over "substantial forms" and related matters.
3. As its first discoverer, Willebrord Snell now has the distinction of having the law of refraction named after him (Snell's Law).
4. Hazlitt,W.,"Locke A Great Plagiarist," Collected Works (ed. P. P. Howe).
5. Elizabeth Haldane's 1905 biography follows Baillet uncritically, but is good on the historical context. A rash of minor French biographies came later: Samuel Silvestre de Sacy's Descartes par lui-meme (1956) has some good illustrations; P. Frederix in M. R. Descartes en son temps (1959) portrays the philosopher as a bumptious and mistaken clever-clogs; while in Descartes, c'est la France (1987) A. Glucksman sets out to rescue the French mind from being malignly over-branded as "Cartesian." Even as a French cultural hero Descartes is not immune to attacks by Frenchmen. Neither Frederix nor Glucksman go the lengths of Dimitri Davidenko's Descartes le Scandaleux (1988), in which the philosopher is portrayed as a drunken whoring gambler ("I drink therefore I am" indeed) who infested the margins of the intellectual world of his day to (says Davidenko) little real effect.
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