Descartes' Bones Read online

  Descartes was by now formulating his goal in life, which was nothing less than to supplant Aristotle as the basis for education. It was an almost laughably grandiose ambition, far greater than that of Galileo or Leonardo or even Aristotle himself, who after all did not think he was laying the intellectual framework for centuries of human history. Not to put too fine a point on it, Descartes wanted to reorient the way every human being thought. And he knew you didn’t do that by writing a book or two and giving some lectures. If his philosophy was to be adopted he had to build a network: to win over influential professors, church officials, university overseers, and government leaders. This process would start with Regius.

  Regius was keen to promote Cartesianism; with Descartes’ blessing, he gave a series of formal disputations on the subject at the university. Since he was a professor of medicine, the theme was “the science of health”—a title that in itself denoted the clinical approach he would present. He seems to have built up the drama, and the audience, as he went: each talk was progressively bolder. Starting from the radical new ground of individual human consciousness, which is able to manipulate the tool of reason, he laid out the Cartesian universe in all its machinelike regularity: from the Copernican view of the heavens, in which the earth is just one of many bodies revolving around just one of many suns, to the organs of the body, which depend not on a divine agency but on the proper physical conditions for their functioning. He delved into details: the action of the pulse, respiration, and even “de excrementis.” He largely ignored theology, openly ridiculed the Aristotelian categories, and presented Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood—which Descartes had taken up and made a central part of his own physiology—as the key to the body’s functioning. (While Descartes followed Harvey’s overall theory of circulation, he disagreed with Harvey’s thesis that the heart pumped blood. Descartes believed—wrongly, of course—that the heart acted like a furnace that heated the blood, causing it to circulate.)

  But while some intellectuals across Europe were poring over the Discourse and crediting it with creating a new framework for knowledge, the response to Cartesianism at Utrecht—arguably the first public reaction to the idea that we call modern—was different. At the end of Regius’s last talk, the packed room erupted in catcalls and chaos. The dignitaries stormed out. The mayhem was unprecedented, and a full-scale crisis was under way.

  For all his ambition, Descartes didn’t like direct confrontation, and he had kept away from Utrecht during this time. Regius, however, with his boxer’s face and querulous disposition, was all for mixing it up with the Aristotelians, which further inflamed the crisis. When a physician named Jacques Primerose challenged him on the theory of the circulation of the blood, Regius fired off an essay that he called “A Sponge to Wash Away the Filth of the Remarks Published by Dr. Primerose.”

  The real enemy, however, was Gysbert Voetius, who in addition to being a theologian and an Aristotelian was also the rector of the university. If Regius had recognized at once the sweeping promise of Descartes’ philosophy, Voetius—a small, intense, ferret-faced man—immediately saw the danger in it. Voetius mounted an attack on Regius, Descartes, and the “new philosophy,” charging that Copernican astronomy, which Descartes had taken as part of his system, was an affront to “sacred physics” that was creeping insidiously into the minds of the European intelligentsia and had to be eradicated. More to the point, Descartes had promised that his philosophy, grounded in his method, would bring sweeping new insights into nature—but according to Voetius this level of knowledge was not of this world but spiritual: it was of the order of the “Kingdom of Heaven” of which Jesus taught. “There is so much we do not know!” Voetius declaimed. Given that fact, the way to truth was not via the destructive doubting of all that had been carefully built up over the centuries but through cultivating and reverencing a “learned ignorance.”

  Voetius used his influence to wage his campaign against Cartesianism on several fronts. He warned that it was a road leading to the most dangerous of places the human mind could go: atheism. He and his supporters accused Descartes of being something akin to a cult leader, who kept his followers in thrall by means of personal magnetism. That was the real purpose of Cartesian doubt: by encouraging his followers to forget what they had learned from the ancient masters, Descartes was emptying their minds, so that he could fill them with his own teachings. Then, for good measure, and in the time-honored fashion of smear campaigns everywhere, Voetius and his allies accused Descartes of sexual deviance.

  Descartes was stunned by this reaction to the introduction of his philosophy. He may have shied away from face-to-face confrontation, but his arrogance was rather spectacular, and when crossed he had a deep malicious streak. As one opponent wrote, “It may be true that Descartes tries to free himself of all prejudices, yet there is one to which he remains singularly attached—the conviction that he is absolutely right on everything.” When it came to dealing with criticism, Descartes could be thin-skinned and downright scatological. The mathematics of Fermat he once characterized as “shit”; another prominent writer’s work he described as toilet paper. In an argument with Pascal over the existence of a vacuum in nature (Descartes insisted there was no such thing, Pascal said there was), he tossed off the witticism that the only vacuum was in Pascal’s skull. When the second edition of his Meditations came out, he took the opportunity to add in an appendix his version of the events in Utrecht. Not content to leave it at that, he then wrote a two-hundred-page response, which he published under the title Letter to Voetius, defending his philosophy and accusing the theologian of being a demagogue, a slanderer, and, turning the tables, an atheist. On top of which he achieved a rhetorical pirouette in making a case that the real reason for the vitriol thrown at him was that Voetius and his cohorts knew that Descartes was onto the truth and they couldn’t face the reality of their worldview’s collapsing. The effect of all of this was to bring the whole affair to the wider European audience.

  For his pains, Descartes found himself charged with libel and facing the possibility of a criminal sentence. He called on the French ambassador for help, who in turn went to the stadtholder, the chief magistrate of the province. As the affair wound through the Dutch system, it became something of a public event: town officials, theologians, regents, clergymen, magistrates, professors, and students pondered the issues involved, weighing whether the new philosophy, now fully tricked out with its Cartesian underpinnings, was a genuine path to knowledge or an assault on Christianity or—perish the thought—both. There was a palpable feeling that the foundations of society were under attack. The lawsuit reached one climax in 1642, when the city of Utrecht formally banned Descartes’ philosophy.

  The controversy didn’t stop there: the panic and confusion spread. In 1647, the debate reached Leiden University, the most prestigious institution of learning in the country and the very city where the Discourse on the Method had been published. The university, like Utrecht before it, tried to settle the matter by banning Descartes’ philosophy, decreeing that “neither in public nor in private lessons must philosophers depart from Aristotle’s philosophy.” As in Utrecht, Cartesianism was debated in a public disputation that became violent. People stood on tables and benches, packing the auditorium so that “heads reached to the vault.” A philosophy professor named Adam Stuart presented the case against Decartes: “There are certain newfangled philosophers who deny that the senses can in any way be trusted and claim that philosophers can deny that there is a God or that one can doubt His existence.” By now there were quite a few disciples of Descartes’ among the faculty and students, and some expressed outrage that Stuart was misrepresenting him. Tempers rose; students stamped their feet and hooted. Stuart came completely unglued and took to shrieking at the principal defender of Descartes, “In virtue of my public authority, I order you to be silent! Shut up, I do not want to hear you!” As in Utrecht, the event ended in chaos.

  What was at issue in the
se confrontations—which would be repeated over and over across Europe in the ensuing decades—was the nature of the relationship between faith and reason and also the relationship between the spiritual and physical worlds. In each, according to tradition and law, the former had precedence over the latter. Then again, the battle lines between faith and reason have never been clear-cut. Descartes himself was not the cool rationalist that history has portrayed him as. He held sincerely to his faith, and while he was undeniably a modern philosopher, he also had one foot in the Middle Ages. In the manner of medieval philosophers, he incorporated “proofs” of the existence of God into his philosophy. It was necessary for him to prove both the existence and the innate goodness of God, for, given the corrosiveness of Cartesian doubt, these were the only assurances we have that the material world really exists. So his work has a theological grounding: not only do the world and science depend on God, but so does Cartesian philosophy.

  The Aristotelians weren’t buying it. Descartes’ method used reason as its tool, so its approach to the physical world downgraded theological readings. To pursue it as an actual basis of thought, they argued, would lead to atheism, to a breakdown of authority, to a world riven by doubts and confusions, without any arbiter, any rules.

  What is most remarkable in all of this is how familiar it sounds to twenty-first-century ears. There are a lot of people today who would say that this is precisely where we are now: rudderless, suffering the consequences of relativism and doubt. As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger put it just before he became Pope Benedict XVI, “We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.” Much of what he and other current religious conservatives say sounds identical to the fears of a contemporary critic of Descartes who warned that Cartesian “doubts might be imported from philosophy to theology. Students would go on to doubt everything: themselves, God, et cetera.” On the other side are those—secularists or religious moderates—who insist that blind faith is the problem that humanity has to overcome. The striking thing is that within a matter of months of the publication of the Discourse on the Method, the first work of modern philosophy, the crisis that might be said to define the modern era—the deep and complex confusion over the realms of faith and reason, which would appear again and again in different guises in the coming centuries, from the French Revolution to Darwin’s theory of evolution to present-day debates on how to deal with militant theocracies and religion-fueled terrorism—had already appeared.

  Occasionally, it’s not only a philosophical inheritance but a concrete event from the dawn of modernity that sprouts into the present, like a seed from an heirloom plant in a field of bioengineered crops. In June of 2006, I was invited to lunch at the faculty club of Utrecht University by Theo Verbeek, one of the most distinguished Descartes scholars in the world, and Erik-Jan Bos, a philosopher at the university. Together they are editing a critical edition of the correspondence of Descartes (which runs to five volumes—in his zeal to promote his philosophy Descartes was a formidable communicator). Verbeek told me of a remarkable event he had participated in the year before. In a formal ceremony (with a Latin text, no less), officials of the city and the university issued a public apology to Descartes for the treatment he had received, lifted the ban of 1642, and, in the words of Le Monde, which covered the event, “solemnly rehabilitated” the philosopher. The event made news as far away as Japan. In 2000, Pope John Paul II had apologized for the Catholic Church’s having put Galileo on trial over his Copernican views. “We modeled it on the Vatican’s ceremony,” Verbeek said to me. “Utrecht was the first place in the world to recognize Cartesianism and the first place to ban it. We’ve finally corrected that.”

  During our lunch we also talked about the house Descartes had lived in briefly in Utrecht, which has long since vanished. As we left the dining room, I asked Verbeek whether there were any landmarks particularly associated with Descartes’ time in the city that were still standing. He gave me a slightly incredulous look—as if to say, “You mean you don’t know?”—then led me around a corner and opened a large wooden door. The room it gave onto was a vast, sweeping, churchlike space with high vaulted ceilings and ornate wood carving. A doctoral dissertation was in progress, which in the Dutch system is a formal affair, requiring scholars to wear academic robes and mortar boards—giving an extra turn of historical verisimilitude to the scene. For me, it was an electric moment, all the more so because I hadn’t been expecting it. This was the aula, or auditorium, of the university, unchanged in more than three centuries. It was where, in 1641, Regius had given his disputations in support of Descartes’ ideas—the place, you might say, where modernity first went public.

  IN THE YEARS AFTER he hit on his “method for rightly conducting the reason,” Descartes applied it obsessively, voraciously, to everything he could think of. Ironically for a historical figure who is remembered as the ultimate conceptual thinker, whose very name has become an adjective paired with abstractions (Cartesian coordinates, Cartesian dualism), he was tremendously fixated on the mundane. He studied snow, rocks, grains of salt. He was fascinated by the idea of bringing his method to bear in law and once took on the case of a peasant who had been accused of murder. He investigated the details and appealed to the authorities on the man’s behalf: a use of reason that presaged Sherlock Holmes and forensic science.

  These pursuits reflected his main motivation, which he shared with contemporaries like Bacon and Harvey and which we have inherited from them: the idea of human progress. “Mastery of nature,” Descartes believed, would lead to “freedom,” and by this he meant freedom from drudgery, freedom from prejudices and errors of thought, and of course freedom from pain and disease. For the sickly child shivering in fear of death never went away: Descartes kept human health as a chief focus. When he lived in Amsterdam in 1635, his address on the Kalverstraat was a convenient one: the street was named for the calves and oxen that were slaughtered by butchers there. He had to walk only a few steps—along a row of two- and three-story gabled houses, in the shadow of the baroque clock tower called the Munt—to find the freshly killed specimens that he would cart back to his home, where he would slice them open to search the mystery of the eyeball, the dark tangle of the intestines, the chambers of the heart. In his years of medical research he dissected rabbits, dogs, eels, cows. As in other areas, his self-confidence, not to say arrogance, was vast. “I doubt whether there is any doctor who has made such detailed observations as I,” he wrote to a friend. “But I have found nothing whose formation seems inexplicable by natural causes. I can explain it all in detail.”

  Elsewhere he noted blithely, “Now I am dissecting the heads of different animals in order to explain what imagination, memory etc., consist of.” If the arrogance was uniquely his, this sort of naïveté with regard to the imminent payoff of science was something he shared with his contemporaries. There was a tendency, in that idealistic moment at the birth of the modern, to believe that solutions to some of the most complex of human problems were just around the corner, and Descartes was convinced that his method was the key. He insisted, for one example, that to achieve mental health one need only turn the method of reason on oneself. Once people did that, perversions and manias would fall away, as would ordinary feelings of jealousy, fear, greed, and anger.

  The optimism went further still. The body was a machine; therefore it simply needed to be understood in all its parts in order for it to work properly. In this regard, death was tantamount to a malfunction; locate and correct the errors and you solve the problem of death. Descartes became convinced that he would crack the body’s code and extend the human life span to as much as a thousand years. At one point in his career he was certain enough of his progress that he felt he would do it soon, provided, he wrote—and he seems to have missed the joke—that he were not “prevented by the brevity of life.”

  As absurd as Descartes’ hopeful ideas a
bout medicine seem today, they were believed by others. Europe’s greatest intellectuals were as aware of his medical focus as they were of his philosophical and mathematical discoveries. He gave Blaise Pascal medical advice. The Dutch statesman and poet Constantijn Huygens wrote to ask if Descartes could pause in his investigations long enough to give a few hints on “the means to live longer than we now do.” Royals wanted to be updated on his progress, to know if he had yet found a way to increase the life span “to equal that of the Patriarchs.” He seemed to relish the role of medical adviser, but in the absence of some basic medical discoveries—germ theory, blood types, anesthesia, microbes, and bacteria were centuries in the future—much of his advice was sound if unexciting: he tended to recommend rest, soup, and keeping a positive outlook. Meanwhile, proving that he was truly modern, as he saw gray hairs sprouting on his head after he turned forty, he got to work on a process he believed would retard graying.

  Of course, Descartes did not go down in history as a medical researcher. His focus broadened eventually beyond the human body, and one reason for that broadening had to do with the body itself and its frailty. Descartes never married and had almost no known intimate relations, but he was, after all, human. We happen to know that on October 15, 1634, while he was lodging at the home of his associate Thomas Sergeant in Amsterdam, Descartes had sex with a woman named Helena Jans, who was his host’s housekeeper. We can be precise about this because nine months later a child was born, and afterward Descartes gossiped to a friend and told him the date of conception, of which he had obviously made a note. Helena Jans was in the employ of Sergeant, an Englishman who ran a bookshop and who lived in a house that still stands in the center of the city (it is just around the corner from the Anne Frank House), but when several months later Descartes left Amsterdam for the Dutch town of Deventer, where he had previously been living, Helena Jans went with him. Her daughter was born there; they named her Francine.