Andrés Vaccari

Descartes: The Life of René Descartes and its Place in his Times
By A. C. Grayling

(The Australian January 14-15, 2006)

Three and a half centuries after his death, René Descartes still has some surprises under his wig. Descartes was, without doubt, one of the founders of the modern world. An exceptional philosopher, scientist and mathematician, he was instrumental in the ascent of modern rationalism in the 17th century. He is most famous for his doctrine of dualism, stating that there are two substances in the universe: mind and matter. Nature is a vast machine obeying a handful of fixed, simple laws. Only humans have the privilege of communing with an immortal, rational soul. Although as a philosophical position it soon proved unworkable, it has had a deep cultural impact as the central image of modern rationality.

However, there is a lot more to Descartes than that. In the last three decades, a fresh generation of scholars has reassessed Descartes’ work as a scientist, arguing that his picture of the universe was much more complex and creative than usually assumed. A. C. Grayling’s new book proves that also in the biographical realm Descartes is a subject far from exhausted. Although he lived in a tumultuous, crucial time in history (his adult years coincided with the Thirty Years War) Descartes’ life seems to have been fairly reserved and uneventful. Most biographers of Descartes have threaded the scant details of his life into the much more action-packed development of his philosophy, shoving aside the tangled historical background of the 17th century. So far, the best work ever written about Descartes is the brilliant and exhaustive Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (1995) by Stephen Gaukroger. Grayling’s intellectual survey is in contrast quite basic, and intended mainly as an introduction. It is the man and his life that Grayling is trying to capture; and some of his claims are explosive.

Grayling’s central thesis is that the philosopher was employed as a Jesuit spy in the service of Habsburg interests. This is not as shocking as it may first seem; it was common for scholars to be recruited as informants or ‘observers’, for they were literate people with access to powerful social circles. Grayling’s theory elegantly explains some murky facts about Descartes’ wanderings, particularly in the years between his graduation from the University of Poitiers in 1616 and his brief sojourn in Italy in 1621-1623.

During these years young Descartes can be located at key historical hot-spots. He joined the army of Prince Maurice Nassau in the summer of 1618, arriving in the northern provinces of the Netherlands as a bitter split in the Protestant church threatened to plunge the region into civil war. This is the first mystery: why would a Jesuit-educated Catholic Frenchman join the army of a Protestant prince at war with the Habsburg kingdom of Spain? Why did Descartes leave as soon as the situation subsided?

Next, he set off to Bohemia to join the Catholic army of Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, taking a long circuitous route that circumvented Protestant German states and crossed mostly Catholic territory. While in the service of the Duke, Descartes was present (officially as an ‘observer’) at the Battle of the White Mountain outside Prague, in November 1620. This marked the beginning of the Thirty Years War, which reconfigured the political and religious map of Europe.

The details of Grayling’s argument are too lengthy to review here, but one last claim deserves mention. Descartes fled France in 1628 and settled in the Netherlands, where he stayed for the rest of his life (bar his last few months), and where he wrote all his major works. The official story is that Descartes was seeking peace, solitude and a climate of tolerance. But then why did he spend long periods of time in Asmterdam, one of Europe’s busiest cities? And why did he change address frequently, pleading to his friend and correspondent Marin Mersenne to keep his whereabouts secret? This is a sensitive point. Nationalist sentiment has swayed earlier chroniclers (in particular Adrien Baillet, author of the first and most influential account of Descartes’ life in 1691) to portray Descartes as a French philosopher. Yet the political climate in France at the time was resolutely anti-Habsburg. Shortly before leaving his native land, Descartes was summoned to meet Cardinal Berulle, one of the most powerful figures in the country, and hostile to the Jesuit and Habsburg interests. It is not known what was discussed at that meeting. Was Descartes’ work as an ‘observer’ for the Jesuits known to the French authorities?

Descartes’ stubborn, lifelong silence about the political situation in Europe can be taken either as a sign of prudence or, as Grayling suggests, as the mark of someone who knew too much. Grayling explicitly insists that his theory is just that: a theory that can be neither absolutely proven nor refuted (what philosophers would call an ‘inductive inference to the best explanation’). Grayling strings together the evidence into a seductive picture that neatly explains a lot of baffling facts about Descartes.

From 1629 onwards Grayling adds nothing new to our traditional picture of the thinker. However, his focus on the human side of the philosopher is effective, yielding as clear and lively a portrait as we will ever get. My only qualm is that Grayling misses some vital connections between the politics and the philosophy. The surrounding climate of unrest deeply affected the very structure and tone of Descartes’ work. He cautiously staged his arguments, placing them in faraway places or in the inner realm of personal conviction. The image of the solitary, withdrawn thinker is central to his most well-known works, the Meditations and Discourse on Method. Also, in his abandoned Treatise on Light, Descartes expounds his system of physics by way of a creation myth set in a distant, imaginary universe. In this way he sought to avoid theological controversy and the ferocious disputes surrounding the ‘new science’. Descartes’ famous search for the certain and clear foundations of human knowledge are a direct result of the reigning crisis of faith. He was a curious mix of conservative and revolutionary, a devout Catholic who ushered in a radically modern vision of the world, for better or worse.

This book will be enjoyable mostly to those who know a bit about Descartes or have an interest in 17th century European history. It illuminates another dimension of this important thinker who, like all great thinkers, knew how to excite not just reason but the imagination.