The New Criterion

Russell Shorto Descartes' Bones:
A Skeletal History of the Conflict
Between Faith and Reason.
Doubleday, 386 pages, $26

In 1619, René Descartes wrote to his friend Isaac Beekman, “What I want to produce is … a completely new science, which would provide a general solution of all possible equations involving any sort of quantity, whether continuous or discrete.”

Perhaps emboldened by the bracing confidence of the great philosopher, his most recent chronicler has taken on a project very nearly as ambitious. Writing a history of the conflict between faith and reason, even a “skeletal” one, as Russell Shorto attempts to do in Descartes’ Bones, is a daunting undertaking. While it can be argued that Descartes actually succeeded in his project, the same cannot be said for Shorto.

Shorto’s conceit, to be sure, is ingenious. He follows the skeleton of Descartes from the philosopher’s death in 1650 to the twenty-first century. Dug up, transported across nations, stolen, sold, lost, found, vanished, and multiplied, the great thinker’s bones and their serpentine travels do tell a curious tale. But Shorto, in one brief, unfortunate epiphanic moment, saw more: a correlation between the journey of these tired bones and the journey of Western civilization: “it occurred to me that the trail of Descartes’ bones was a path through the landscape of the modern centuries. Following the bones was a way of retracing my own intellectual upbringing, reminding myself of what we’ve been through in the past four hundred years.”

So the author sets out on his trip, forgetting in his excitement to pack Occam’s razor. Descartes’ Bones is overfull, multiplying entities beyond necessity and finding correlations between entities beyond credulity. A lively style is sprinkled with Da Vinci Code-like dramatic teases that promise eventual delivery of satisfying solutions to enticing mysteries. Part mystery, part intellectual history, part social criticism, part (unconvincing) love story, part self-help book, Descartes’ Bones tries blithely to jet ski over the deepest waters, from the religious debates of the early modern era to the convictions of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

And while there’s too much here, there’s also far too little. The debate between believers and skeptics, of course, began long before Descartes’ fertile and destructive doubt came into being. From Job to Ecclesiastes, from Pyrrho to Lucretius, faith and doubt have struggled. Shorto, while spending far too much time, say, on ancient medicine, gives nary a nod to these venerable forerunners of the modern debate. Admittedly, he could do worse than choose as a starting point for his “history” the most celebrated doubter since Thomas. But then, as Shorto chronicles the French Revolution and the rise of phrenology, devotes pages to debates about cranial capacity and intelligence, and cites (briefly) Darwin, Dawkins, and Hitchens, the reader begins to wonder, where is Hume, where are Russell and Lewis, where is Henry Ward Beecher?

The book’s shaping conceit is only one of countless “fascinating” intellectual convergences Shorto discerns across time and space. Thus, Descartes’ Bones overflows with strange, sometimes anachronistic, equivalences, some of which are puzzling and ungainly—Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp “signals one of those telltale shifts in what is deemed socially acceptable—like women wearing pants, or the end of segregation in the American South”—while others are dangerously misleading, e.g., the citing of Robespierre’s Reign of Terror as a well-known “forerunner to the infamous … logic of the Vietnam War.”

Shorto is at his best producing a primer of the history of science over the last few centuries, especially the great discipline-creating pioneers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The stories of the establishment of scientific authority and the dizzying debates among practitioners like Cuvier, Delambre, Broca, Gratiolet, and Berzelius are fun to read, though Shorto’s prose, often recalling the script of a PBS docudrama, gets in the way: “Centuries of robed scholars and scribes had bent in tallow-tapered light over parchment sheets and leather-bound manuscripts … quill-scratching, rubricating, memorizing, parsing …”

While he clearly enjoys writing about the “reason” side of the debate, Shorto’s enthusiasm wanes when it comes to discussing religion. He gives short shrift to the early modern theologians, humanists, and zealots, not even mentioning Descartes’ important predecessors More and Erasmus. Faith as an actual experience seems foreign to Shorto. He understands believing intellectuals—like the secretary to the French Academy of Sciences Jean-Pierre Flourens (1794–1867)—to be essentially trying to preserve an “established social system” rather than genuinely to believe in the existence of a soul. When he discusses today’s culture wars, Shorto makes the by-now-maddening equivalence between the horrific excesses of militant Islam and the “Christian absolutism” in America’s Bible Belt. He claims to oppose religion and democracy when he means to oppose theocracy and democracy.

About Descartes’ monumental contributions to mathematics and physics, Shorto has almost nothing to say. And when he talks philosophy, he simplifies to the point of banality. “On this score [Descartes’ distinction between res extensa and res cogitans], he has long since been put in his place: the prevailing wisdom in neuroscience and philosophy is that Descartes was dead wrong in conjuring up his two dissimilar substances.” Some of his philosophical forays are simply inaccurate: he presents Descartes’ treatment of the Aristotelian metaphysics of “substance” and “accident” as a stark separation rather than the dependent adaptation it is.

While Descartes’ Bones proves at times entertaining and even compelling, Shorto’s project is ultimately thwarted by his scattershot, digressive approach. This author’s tumbling enthusiasms and aerobic prose need a more appropriate subject than the meticulously cautious Descartes.