Descartes' Bones Read online

  BUT FOR ALL THE interest generated by the great scientific explorers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—Galileo, Bacon, Harvey, Kepler, Brahe, and others—their work was fragmented, so that the immediate effect of the endless experimenting, dissecting, peering, and analyzing was more confusion than clarity. Their results didn’t fit within the framework of knowledge that had existed for four hundred years. It wasn’t possible to use the ancient writers to explain them, and in fact the results threatened to undermine the pillars that had held up the edifice of meaning. It’s difficult for us to appreciate what this meant at the time, largely because, as a direct consequence of these men’s work, we live in a world with more than one meaning system. Of course, there are fundamentalisms now, too, but even fundamentalists today live with an awareness of relativism. They know there are other systems of belief, even if they are sure those are wrong. In the seventeenth century the challenge to what had been thought an absolute system of values and truths was so sharp and so disorienting that people of all walks of life, from popes to commoners with enough education to read pamphlets decrying the confusion, considered the situation a crisis. And no crisis is deeper than a crisis of belief.

  Then, in 1637, a book appeared on the streets of Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, and London. On its title page was an engraved image of a bearded man, dressed in tunic and tights, digging in a garden—the seeker after philosophical truth in the guise of a humble laborer?—above which appeared the full title, written not in Latin but in French so that, its author asserted, it could be read by laypersons (French laypersons, anyway), including, somewhat scandalously, women:

  DISCOURS

  DE LA METHODE

  Pour bien conduire sa raison, & chercher

  la verité dans les sciences.

  PLUS

  LA DIOPTRIQUE.

  LES METEORES.

  ET

  LA GEOMETRIE.

  Qui sont des essais de cete METHODE.

  Which is to say: Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. Plus the Dioptric, Meteors, and Geometry, Which Are Essays in This Method.

  The title page also listed the place of publication, the Dutch city of Leiden, and the name of the publisher, Jan Maire, who was at the time unknown but who would become famous because of this one volume. It was printed in an edition of three thousand copies. It would become one of the most influential books of all time.

  Conspicuously absent was the name of the writer, who had previously noted that he wished to stay “hidden behind the scene so as to listen to what was said.” But the authorship of the Discourse on the Method, or Discourse on Method as it became known, was identified almost at once.

  While he was still at school, Descartes had taken the increasingly apparent faultiness of the foundations for knowledge as a personal crisis. As he writes about it in the Discourse, this questioning of values comes off something like the sort of psychological or intellectual crisis that is common in people in their late teens and early twenties: “As soon as I had finished the course of studies which usually admits one to the ranks of the learned . . . I found myself saddled with so many doubts and errors that I seemed to have gained nothing in trying to educate myself unless it was to discover more and more fully how ignorant I was. . . . Nevertheless I had been in one of the most celebrated schools in all of Europe, where I thought there should be wise men if wise men existed anywhere on earth.” He cast about for moorings. He wasn’t going to be duped by “the promises of an alchemist, the predictions of an astrologer, the impostures of a magician.” Regarding the sciences as understood in the Aristotelian system, he judged that “nothing solid could have been built on so insecure a foundation.”

  Then, like many a college graduate since, he determined to leave books behind and explore the world: “I resolved to seek no other knowledge than that which I might find within myself, or perhaps in the great book of nature.” He traveled—for nine years. “I did nothing but roam from one place to another, desirous of being a spectator rather than an actor in the plays exhibited on the theatre of the world.” Europe then being caught up in the massive tangle of conflicts known as the Thirty Years War and the Eighty Years War (they ran concurrently), the natural thing for a young man was to learn about the wider world via warfare. He spent time serving in two armies, that of Maurice of Nassau, stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, then that of Maximilian I, elector of Bavaria. He managed to avoid actual combat, however, and instead assisted with solving military engineering problems.

  According to Cartesian legend, while he was garrisoned in the Dutch city of Breda he was attracted, one autumn day, by a mathematical puzzle posted on a public notice board. (In an era before newspapers, with their games and diversions, such puzzles were commonly posted in public places.) It was in Dutch, so he asked the young man next to him if he could translate. A fast friendship formed. It happened that Isaac Beeckman had also been distraught over the shaky state of the foundations of the intellectual world in which they had grown up. Both, it seems, had hit on the same new strategy for obtaining genuine knowledge of the natural world: by applying mathematics to physics. The friendship became a kind of competition in which, as Descartes continued to travel with the army, they sent each other problems and investigations, and their correspondence built to a fever of helter-skelter discovery across a dizzying range of topics: music theory, the acceleration of falling bodies, the pressure that fluid exerts on its container, geometry. At the start Beeckman, who was seven years older, was in the role of teacher, but Descartes quickly shot past him, outlining in one letter his discovery of analytic geometry—the use of algebra to analyze geometrical shapes and problems, which in turn would become the basis for calculus—and crowing that once he had worked out the details “there will remain almost nothing else to discover in Geometry. The task is infinite and could not be accomplished by one person. It is as incredible as it is ambitious. But I have seen a certain light in the dark chaos of this science.” Modesty was not a condition from which Descartes suffered.

  Shortly after, while stationed in Germany, his head teeming with ideas and his whole being straining to comprehend their totality, he spent a November night in a “stove”—a tiny room intensely heated by a ceramic furnace—and had a series of three momentous, hallucinogenic dreams. On waking, he felt that the dreams constituted a kind of vision: they were the distillation of all the lines of thinking he had been pursuing. The vision was of the natural world as a single system, with mathematics as its key. Pursuing this vision—a new way of seeing the universe and man’s relation to it—would be his life’s work. Descartes’ night of heated dreams has gone down in anecdotal history as one of the fulcrums on which the Western world has turned.

  The Discourse on the Method, which appeared seventeen years later and summarized the work he had done in that time, was his first published book. To be precise, it was four short books packaged together. The last three were essays devoted to light and optics, geometry and geological and weather phenomena. They included the first or among the first credible accounts of the law of refraction, near- and farsightedness, the nature of wind, cloud formation, and rainbows, as well as the elaboration of analytic geometry.

  But it was the introductory essay, the “Discourse on the Method” itself, a mere seventy-eight pages, that gave this small, vain, vindictive, peripatetic, ambitious Frenchman a status among his contemporaries and those who followed unequaled since Aristotle. He was not the greatest mathematician of the seventeenth century (Isaac Newton, a generation older, would surely win that title), or the most influential scientist (here there might be a tie between Newton and Galileo), and one could argue that both Spinoza and Leibniz were more refined philosophers. But Descartes could be considered, as one current philosopher puts it, “the father not just of modern philosophy but, in important respects, of modern culture—of modern Western culture and later, through export of its ideas, of much of modern world culture,”
and the Discourse on the Method is the first reason why. This little essay has been called “the dividing line in the history of thought. Everything that came before it is old; everything that came after it is new.”

  AS FAR BACK AS his school days Descartes had concluded that the place where the traditional approach to knowledge was flawed was at the base: its method of going about the business of understanding. There was no end of brilliance and subtlety in the ancient writers, but if they were starting from a swampy foundation their edifices weren’t supportable. Take Aristotle’s elemental building blocks of nature: why earth, air, water, and fire? What is the rationale for supposing that what is simply most evident to the senses is necessarily the base of reality? Or consider Thomas Aquinas, the finest of the Scholastic thinkers, who devoted his razor intellect to such things as an elaborate “proof” of the existence of angels, which included an analysis of their numbers, varieties, substance, intelligence, and origin and resolved such questions as whether, in moving from one place to another, an angel passes through intermediate space. How could one of the greatest minds in history get itself into such convoluted alleys of reasoning? Or Plato, with his theory of forms, according to which the tree out the window is not itself real but merely a reflection of the eternal form “tree” and the keyboard on which I type is actually an imperfect approximation of a perfect nonmaterial form—call it “keyboardness”—that was created by God and exists in eternity.

  Layers of tradition had built up around such categories for understanding reality. Centuries of robed scholars and scribes had bent in tallow-tapered light over parchment sheets and leather-bound manuscripts, mouthing words, quill-scratching, rubricating, memorizing, parsing and analyzing and adding levels to the hoary infrastructure that had these categories as elements and that was applied as an increasingly unwieldy tool to explain natural phenomena, human behavior, history, the universe. But on what ground did they stand, these classifications? How could one trust them? How do we know they aren’t nonsense? Or, if they were true, couldn’t we expect that great things would have arisen from knowledge built upon such bases? As Descartes put it, devastatingly, “The best way of proving the falsity of Aristotle’s principles is to point out that they have not enabled any progress to be made in all the many centuries in which they have been followed.”

  What kind of method, then, would yield progress? Descartes was clear as to his ultimate aim. Unlike philosophers of later eras, who would devote themselves to questions of the order of “Why is there something rather than nothing?” he was full-blooded in his inquiry: he was after the kind of philosophy that would take the world by the throat, that would make people “the lords and masters of nature.”

  At first glance, his way of proceeding doesn’t seem to make sense. For a universal measure one might reasonably look outward, like a navigator with a sextant: to the stars, to the distant horizon. Instead, his break from tradition is signaled, first, stylistically: the Discourse on the Method is written in the first person. A byproduct is that one of the world’s great works of philosophy is also one of the most readable. And it serves as an appropriate launching point for a new era in which the focus is on the individual. The Discourse begins not with mathematical formulas or scientific propositions, not with the lining up of outside authorities, but with a living human being—Descartes himself—sitting alone, thinking. There is atmosphere in the text, snugness: you can almost hear the crackling of the fire in the background. The realm we’re in is familiar: it’s that of the novel, the narrative, the play, and the film. It’s human and, yes, modern.

  All of these modern art forms involve, in addition to a personal focus, a central crisis on which the story turns, and so does this first work of modern philosophy. The crisis is a loss of meaning, and the quest is a search for truth, for something to believe in. Descartes’ strategy was to assume that Aristotle’s entire approach to nature, to reality, is wrong and then to assume the same for Aquinas, Plato, Duns Scotus, William of Occam, and all the revered writers. He ceremonially placed the Bible—from Adam and Eve to the Hebrew prophets to the resurrection of Jesus Christ—in the same dustbin. He continued slashing every such thought and idea until he came to a proposition that was impossible to deny. It was both a philosophical and a psychological undertaking, and to it he appended a “don’t try this at home” caution: “The single design to strip one’s self of all past beliefs is one that ought not to be taken by every one.”

  Maybe grand abstract writings needed to be dismissed in this way, but what about the things that are right in front of me? What about, as Descartes put it in Meditations on the First Philosophy, the simple fact “that I am in this place, seated by the fire, clothed in a winter dressing-gown, that I hold in my hands this piece of paper”? Even these things fell by the wayside. The senses can’t be trusted either. The senses deceive. I might be dreaming, or drugged, or deceived by a malicious deity. If we are being serious about this project, then sights and smells and tastes, no matter how self-evident, must also be doubted. Strictly speaking, I can’t even be sure of the reality of my own body.

  Which leaves what? At the end of this remorseless reduction there is only one thing that remains, one proposition that can’t be denied, one sound, as it were, in the universe, like the lonely ticking of a clock. It is the sound of the thinker’s own thoughts. For can I doubt that thoughts are occurring right now, including this one? No: it’s not logically possible. So, humble though it is, we can call this a ground: bedrock.

  In this way, Descartes became one of those rare figures in history who have given the world a sentence that is a touchstone. “I am the way, the truth, and the life” was such an utterance, standing on one side of Descartes and his era. On the other side we have “E=mc2.” As philosophers since have pointed out, “I think, therefore I am,” or “Je pense, donc je suis,” or “Cogito, ergo sum,” does not fully encompass what Descartes intended. Once the acid of his methodological doubt had eaten its way through everything else, what he was left with was not, technically, even an “I” but merely the realization that there was thinking going on. More correct than “I think, therefore I am” would be “Thinking is taking place, therefore there must be that which thinks.” But that hardly has the snap to make it a slogan fit for generations of T-shirts and cartoon panels.

  The irony is that in shifting the focus onto the individual human mind, which everyone agrees can be a pretty flimsy and wayward organ, Descartes had arrived at the closest thing to a certain basis for knowledge. If my own thoughts are the only indubitable ground I can stand on, apparently they aren’t so flimsy after all, at least not all the time. As an early follower of Descartes put it, “Doubt is the beginning of an undoubtable philosophy.” Therefore the mind and its “good sense”—that is to say, human reason—are the only basis for judging whether a thing is true. With the “cogito,” as philosophers abbreviate it, and with the theory of knowledge that arises from it, which Descartes outlined in the Discourse on the Method and later works, human reason supplanted received wisdom. Once Descartes had established the base, he and others could rebuild the edifice of knowledge. But it would be different from what it had been. Everything would be different.

  THE MASSIVE GOTHIC CHURCH tower that dominates the skyline of Utrecht stands oddly alone in the middle of a central square of that Dutch city today, separated from its cathedral by a wide swath of paving stones. The explanation for this anomaly is that the nave that connected the two structures collapsed during a violent storm in 1674 and was never rebuilt. With this exception, the exquisitely preserved old city center, with its sunken canals, twisty streets, and gabled brick façades, is not so different from the way it would have appeared in the year 1638, when a bluff forty-year-old medical doctor named Hendrik de Roy—who was known by the Latinized form of his name, Regius—swept determinedly into the building connected to the cathedral, the newly christened Utrecht University, to take up his duties as a professor.

  Shortly after, Regi
us penned a letter to René Descartes, whom he had never met but who was then living in the village of Santpoort, forty miles away (for most of his career Descartes lived in the Dutch provinces, to which he was attracted by the comparatively greater atmosphere of intellectual freedom). Regius wanted to thank Descartes, for, he said, he owed his appointment to the newly created chair in medicine to the Frenchman. Regius had read the Discourse on the Method when it came out the year before, including the accompanying essays on optics and meteorology, and the book had changed his world. He had previously been teaching private lessons in physics; after reading the Discourse he revamped his whole approach, and now his lectures were packed with students intrigued by this new way of understanding the body and, for that matter, the universe. The regents of the university took note; Regius believed that the popularity of the courses had led to his promotion.

  Regius asked Descartes to accept him as his “disciple.” Descartes was delighted: he was highly susceptible to flattery, and besides that this was the type of response he needed if his work was to have an impact. Although initial sales of the Discourse were modest (sounding a note in harmony with authors of all eras, Descartes whined that the print run wasn’t selling out, so he doubted there would be reprints), the book was being read, and he was in the process of moving from obscurity to intellectual celebrity. His name was being uttered in universities, churches, taverns, and cafés. The chattering classes of seventeenth-century Europe were writing to one another and to him using shameless superlatives, referring to him as “this great man,” “the Archimedes of our time,” “greatest of all philosophers,” and “mighty Atlas, who supports the heavenly firmament, not with raised shoulders, but by the firm reasoning of [his] magnificent mind.” The interest was in, as Regius put it, “this excellent method” that Descartes had discovered “for conducting reason in the search for all sorts of truths.”