The New Criterion

C’est le privilège du vrai génie, et surtout du génie qui ouvre une carrière, de faire impunément de grandes fautes.

It is the privilege of true genius, and above all genius that opens up a new path, to commit great errors with impunity.
—Voltaire

Bene vixit, bene qui latuit. He lived well who concealed well.
—Descartes’s motto

One evening many years ago, when I was in graduate school, I somehow found myself in conversation with a group of graduate students who were studying political science. Almost everything about that conversation is now lost in the mists of time, except one detail. The conversation had turned to the nature of modernity. I brought up Descartes, and was probably just about to utter the word “dualism” or “technology” when a vivid young man who (as I recall) tabulated election results interrupted: “I really don’t see what someone who lived in the seventeenth century could possibly tell us about the modern world.”

The reply, if any, is not recorded. But the incident remained with me as a sort of cautionary tale. Notwithstanding the indifference with which that tabulator of election results regarded the seventeenth century, it is difficult to name an individual whose thinking did more to pave the way for modernity than René Descartes—born though he was in 1596. Everyone knows Descartes’ famous formula Cogito ergo sum. Almost everybody knows—or supposes he knows—that Descartes espoused a relentlessly dualistic philosophy that made an all-but-impermeable distinction between mind and matter. Of course if this were the whole story, my tabulator would have been right to shrug.

But it is not the whole story. Nor is it simply that Descartes was, as textbooks invariably put it, “the father of modern philosophy”: that he was, in the words of a typical encomium, “one of the founders of modern thought and among the most original philosophers and mathematicians of any age.” True, without Descartes’ contributions to mathematics, it is not clear that our tabulator of election results could have done much with his tabulations. Every time that a student of algebra calculates the square root of a + b or refers to a³ he uses a notation pioneered by Descartes; when someone wishes to plot a curve on a graph, he is likely to do so using the co-ordinate system invented by Descartes and that still bears his name.

But Descartes’ influence goes far beyond algebraic notation, analytic geometry, and other mathematical innovations. For better or worse—quite possibly for better and worse—the modern world is in a deep sense a Cartesian world. To appreciate the extent of Descartes’ continuing presence, one need only consider the triumph of scientific rationality and its handmaiden, technology. Descartes did not single-handedly invent these defining features of modernity, the foundations of which belong to an even earlier era. But along with Copernicus, Galileo, Bacon, and others, Descartes was one of the key figures in the formulation of the so-called “New Science” that was destined to replace the contemplative model of science inherited from the Greeks.

To an unprecedented degree, Descartes understood that the citadel of nature could be successfully stormed only by redescribing reality in the language of mathematics—thus purging the visual world of all that was merely visual—and then by testing those descriptions in experiment. In the Discourse on Method (1637), justly one of his best-known books, Descartes boasted that his philosophy, in contrast to that taught by the Schools, is fundamentally a “practical philosophy” whose precepts yield “knowledge which is very useful in life.” By following his methods, Descartes wrote, we could discover the basic mechanical principles of natural phenomena and then, like skilled craftsmen, intervene and put those principles to work in the world. By so doing, he promised in one of his most striking phrases, we could “render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature.” Medicine was only one field in which he expected great strides to be made on the basis of his philosophy.

Looking back from the end of the twentieth century, when technology has transformed the world, it is difficult not to acknowledge the power of Descartes’ vision. Perhaps less obvious, however, is that fact that underlying Descartes’ “method” was a fateful new attitude toward both the self and the world. As the image of rendering man the master and possessor of nature suggests, physical reality was henceforth to be seen as a homogenous field for human experimentation, manipulation, and reconstruction. We get a clue about Descartes’ attitude toward the self in his famous method of systematic doubt: his resolve to “reject as if absolutely false anything as to which I could imagine the least doubt, in order to see if I should not be left at the end believing something that was absolutely indubitable.” If traditionally philosophy began in wonder, as Aristotle said, after Descartes it would begin more darkly with doubt. (In this context, it is significant that Descartes hoped to explain extravagant natural phenomena such as meteors and lightning in such a way that “one will no longer have occasion to admire anything about what is seen”: for Descartes, wonder was an impediment to knowledge.) Never mind that Descartes himself embraced what he was careful to call “hyperbolic” i.e., exaggerated—doubt chiefly because it guaranteed (as he thought) an invincible certitude: his heirs found that certitude plenty fragile. And they seized upon the turn inward that such doubt presupposed not as a preliminary to more certain affirmation but as an invitation to explore the newly emancipated self that was thereby revealed.

Thus it was that Descartes’ efforts to achieve certainty by withholding assent from everything susceptible to doubt instigated a revolution not just in philosophy but in the whole tenor of intellectual life. There are perhaps few thinkers less “Cartesian” than Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud. Yet even such paradigmatic modern figures continued to move on a map drawn by Descartes, partly in their very opposition to the Cartesian view of man (opposition being a common token of intellectual debt), partly in their determination to subject every accepted opinion to the corrosive scrutiny of doubt.

Whether Descartes, devout Catholic that he was, would have welcomed this development is a good question: almost certainly he would have deplored it. In the Discourse on Method, he warns that the “resolution to get rid of all opinions one has so far admitted to belief is in itself not an example for everybody to follow.” For one thing, he explains, it is just the sort of thing to tempt those many people “who think they are more clever than they are, and cannot help forming precipitate judgments.” Jacques Derrida, where are you?

Given the extent of Descartes’ influence, it is perhaps not surprising that his legacy should be fraught with ironies, misunderstandings, and various intellectual perversities. As Stephen Gaukroger notes in his ambitious new biography of Descartes,[1] “more than any other modern philosopher, he has been fashioned according to the philosophies of the time and interpreted accordingly.” Mr. Gaukroger, who teaches philosophy at the University of Sydney, proposes to extract the “real” Descartes from the integument spun by his multifarious interpreters; whether what we actually get is an unemcumbered Descartes, or only one bedecked with Mr. Gaukroger’s preoccupations, is an open question. His reference early on to “Simone de Beauvoir’s incomparable intellectual autobiography” will hearten or dismay readers according to their feelings about this onetime idol of gauchiste feminism. His evident fondness for psychoanalytic interpretations occasionally insinuates a slight psychologizing haze into the biographical portions of the book, though this rarely becomes downright disfiguring. Mr. Gaukroger several times refers, somewhat anachronistically, to occasions when Descartes may have suffered a “nervous breakdown”; he makes much of the facts that Descartes’ mother died a little more than a year after he was born and that his father was distant and cold. (Actually, he seems to have been distinctly hostile. When Descartes published the Discourse on Method in 1637, his father is reported to have remarked: “Only one of my children has displeased me. How can I have engendered a son stupid enough to have had himself bound in calf?”)

In any event, the real meat of this book lies elsewhere. It is often said that with Descartes philosophy abandoned or at least discounted metaphysics for the sake of epistemology. The prime exhibits for this contention are the Discourse on Method and the Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), works that set forth Descartes’ experiments in systematic doubt and that put the question of justifying knowledge center stage. These are the books by Descartes that every beginner in philosophy is invited to ponder and that most philosophers have made the center of their interest in Descartes. As it happens, the most engaging pages of Mr. Gaukroger’s book are those dealing with these two books. But he also spends a great deal of time explicating Descartes’ more strictly scientific and mathematical works. This makes some parts of the book quite technical and even—since much of Descartes’ science is chiefly of historical interest—a tad antiquarian. Mr. Gaukroger’s mastery of this material is impressive. But I think it fair to say that most readers, asked if they were interested in long, detailed discussions of Descartes’ theory of vortices or the function of the pineal gland, would respond as did Salter in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop: “Up to a point, Lord Copper.”

Mr. Gaukroger’s focus on Descartes’ scientific works is part and parcel of his mildly “revisionist” view of the philosopher’s accomplishments. Mr. Gaukroger, who duly acknowledges three grants from the Australian Research Council, informs readers that “it is not the Descartes from whom philosophers have made such a good living for decades that they will find here.” Well, yes and no. There are not really that many surprises in this book, though Mr. Gaukroger does emphasize elements of Descartes’ work that generally get shorter shrift. In his view, Descartes was first of all committed to making advances in natural science, not to immunizing philosophy against the virus of skepticism. Among the most explicit items he advances to support his case is the note that Descartes wrote toward the end of his life to one of his admirers:

You should not devote so much attention to the Meditations and to metaphysical questions… . They draw the mind too far away from physical and observable things, and unfits it to study them. Yet it is precisely physical studies that it is most desirable for men to pursue.

Accordingly, perhaps the chief intellectual interest of this book is Mr. Gaukroger’s effort to rescue Descartes from the philosophers and set his work in the context of seventeenth-century scientific speculation, especially the daring—but heterodoxDescartesash\cosmological theories of Copernicus.

Like all biographers of Descartes, Mr. Gaukroger is constrained to depend rather heavily on Adrien Baillet’s life of the philosopher that appeared in 1691. Although obviously “out of date,” Baillet’s book is still the only source we have for certain quotations and anecdotes about Descartes, parts of whose life are rather sketchily documented. For example, I believe that Baillet is the only contemporary source for the story that Descartes fought a duel over a lady in 1628; likewise, it is from Baillet that we learn that Descartes said, apparently around the same time, that he had never found a woman whose beauty was comparable with that of truth. In the biographical parts of his book—which probably amount to no more than a tenth of his text—Mr. Gaukroger is also indebted to the very readable biography of Descartes by Jack R. Vrooman that appeared in 1970. He leaves earlier useful but somewhat pious efforts such as Elizabeth S. Haldane’s Descartes: His Life and Times (1905) entirely out of account.

Descartes was born in La Haye, a small town in Tours that is now called “Descartes.” The third of three surviving children, he was precocious but sickly. His father, Joachim, was a councillor of the Parlement of Brittany and a man of moderate landed property. After Descartes’ mother died, he and his siblings were sent to live with their maternal grandmother. Joachim remarried and in due course fathered an additional four children. In 1606, when he was ten, Descartes was sent to the new Jesuit collège of La Flèche in Anjou, where he spent the next eight years absorbing the classical curriculum as set forth in the Ratio Studiorum, the comprehensive prescriptions for study and behavior followed by all Jesuit colleges. Sometime in 1615, he went to study law at the University of Poitiers, where he took his baccalaureate and license in civil and canon law in 1616.

When he was in his early twenties, Descartes seems to have contemplated a military career and over the next decade or so was attached to several armies. He enlisted in the Dutch army as a gentleman soldier under Prince Maurice of Nassau in 1618. Later that year, he met and collaborated with Isaac Beeckman, a scientist and mathematician who, eight years Descartes’ senior, acted as a kind of mentor and rekindled Descartes’ interest in science. Descartes presented his first work, Compendium Musicae, as a gift to Beeckman on New Year’s Day 1619. (Beeckman was an interesting figure: among other things he set up the first meteorological station in Europe in 1628.) In 1619, as the Thirty Years War was beginning, Descartes left Maurice and enlisted in the Bavarian army.

It was while he was stationed in Ulm, Germany, on November 10, 1619, that Descartes had the famous series of three dreams (or nightmares) that, he believed, revealed to him the “mirabilis scientiae fundamenta,” the foundations of a marvelous knowledge. According to the French Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, these dreams (the details of which we know about from Baillet) contained “in embryo the whole of cartesian rationalism.” For his part, Mr. Gaukroger is “very pessimistic” about what can be achieved by interpreting the dreams. Noting how “stylized” and literary they are (in one part of the dream, Descartes recalls seeing a fragment from an ode by Ausonius: “Quod vitae sectabor iter?”—“What road of life shall I follow?”), Mr. Gaukroger concludes that “it is quite possible that Descartes was suffering a nervous breakdown, almost certainly not his first.” Be that as it may, Descartes regarded the dreams as “the most important thing in my life” and vowed to make a pilgrimage of thanksgiving to Our Lady of Loretto, a vow he apparently fulfilled five years later.

Descartes’ movements in the early 1620s are not well known. In 1623, he visited Italy, and he was settled in Paris in 1625–26. He sold the property left to him by his mother, losing the title “Seigneur du Perron” but gaining a modest regular income. During this time he met Marin Mersenne, one of his most important correspondents, worked intensively on geometrical problems, and began working on the book (which was left unfinished) that became the Rules for the Direction of the Mind (posthumously published in 1701). Around 1626, he discovered the law of refraction, which explains the behavior of light rays as they pass from one medium to another. In 1628, at a meeting on Aristotelean philosophy at the residence of the papal nuncio, Descartes had a famous public confrontation with a certain doctor Chandoux, a chemist/alchemist who argued against the dominance of scholastic philosophy and in favor of a science based on merely probable knowledge. His training in rhetoric standing him in good stead, Descartes gave a dazzling public refutation, arguing that only absolute certainty could serve as a basis for knowledge. (It is a nice detail that Chandoux was later executed for counterfeiting.) Cardinal Bérulle, an important figure in Parisian intellectual and political circles, was in the audience and encouraged Descartes to develop his insights into a comprehensive system.

In 1628, Descartes joined the army that was besieging the Huguenot stronghold at La Rochelle. This was to be his last association with the military. In 1629, Descartes retired to Holland, where he remained, with brief interruptions, until 1649. In part, Descartes went to the Netherlands in search of greater seclusion; he was an intensely private, indeed secretive, man, and he moved often to avoid the importunities of friends and admirers. The 1630s found him in Amsterdam, Deventer, Leiden, Utrecht, Haarlem, Endergeest, and the Hague. The Netherlands were attractive also as an oasis of (relative) liberty and freedom. As Bertrand Russell noted in his history of philosophy, “it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Holland in the seventeenth century, as the one country where there was freedom of speculation. Hobbes had to have his books printed there; Locke took refuge there during the five worst years of reaction in England before 1688; Bayle (of the Dictionary) found it necessary to live there; and Spinoza would hardly have been allowed to do his work in any other country.”

Among other activities, Descartes avidly pursued his anatomical researches during these years, acquiring animal parts from local butchers for dissection. In 1635, while he was staying with a friend in Amsterdam, he fathered a child with a maid named Hélène. According to Jack Vrooman, this was “the only relationship in [Descartes\’] life where by his own admission the sexual act played a significant role.” Although he referred to the child, Francine, as his “niece,” he seems to have been genuinely fond of her and to have provided for her and her mother. When the child died of a fever in 1640, he is said to have remarked that it was the greatest sorrow of his life.

Beginning in 1639, the Netherlands became distinctly less hospitable. Descartes became the target of abuse from one Gisbert Voetius, a professor of theology at the University of Utrecht, who, as Mr. Gaukroger observes, “set out to destroy Descartes” in a campaign of insinuation and slander that was to last for more than five years. At one point, Descartes was in danger of being expelled from the city and having his books burned. So it is not perhaps surprising that when Queen Christina of Sweden invited Descartes to come to Stockholm under her protection he (after some hesitation) decided to accept. Descartes arrived in Sweden in October of 1649. At first, he had almost no duties. But in January—the most bitterly cold in many years—he began tutoring the Queen, whom Bertrand Russell aptly describes as “a passionate and learned lady who thought that, as a sovereign, she had the right to waste the time of great men.” The tutorials commenced at 5:00 A.M. three days a week and lasted for some five hours. For Descartes, who was accustomed to sleep late and preferred working in bed, the regime was too much. After nursing a sick friend to health, he himself came down with pneumonia and died in February 1650.

The Descartes who emerges here is a somewhat knottier figure than the serene rationalist we know from Philosophy 101. The knots are of several varieties. Descartes tried desperately to stay out of theological controversy and craved the imprimatur of Church authority. When Galileo’s work was condemned in 1633 for teaching the Copernican system, Descartes promptly suppressed his book Le Monde, which also depended on Copernicus: “if it is false,” Descartes wrote in dismay to Mersenne, “so too are the entire foundations of my philosophy.” Many have criticized his action as timorous, which perhaps it was; but it was also a witness to Descartes’ humility about theological issues: “I wouldn’t,” he wrote to Mersenne, “want to publish a discourse which had a single word that the Church disapproved.” Alas, theological controversy dogged him—not, it must be said, without reason—though his works were not placed on the Index until 1663.

If Descartes exhibited a remarkable reticence when it came to theological matters, he was not in other respects notable for his humility. In 1629, believing that Isaac Beeckman claimed credit for some of his theories about music, Descartes fired off a long, vituperative letter in which he broke off relations with his friend and former mentor, demanding that he return the Compendium Musicae and remarking (among much else) that he had learned as much from Beeckman as he had learned “from ants and worms.” As Mr. Gaukroger notes, “it is just not possible to take Descartes’ side in this dispute.” Descartes wildly over-reacted to an innocent statement by Beeckman and, besides, there can be no doubt that Descartes was intellectually indebted to his early collaborator. Descartes was a philosophical and mathematical genius of the first water; but he shared with lesser men some unfortunate qualities, including a tendency to intellectual vanity that made it difficult for him to acknowledge the achievements of others. In a letter to Mersenne, he referred to the great mathematician Pierre de Fermat as “dung”; others who had criticized his work on geometry were dismissed as “two or three flies”; Thomas Hobbes was “extremely contemptible”; the letters of the mathematician Jean Beaugrand were only fit to be used as toilet paper; etc.

Mr. Gaukroger remarks dryly that “the simple fact is that Descartes did not like criticism.” Obviously this is an understatement. What is remarkable, though, is the image we have of Descartes as a serene and diligent inquirer who cared for the truth above everything. The fact that he first published his greatest work, the Meditations on First Philosophy, complete with a set of objections by such eminences as Hobbes, Mersenne, Antoine Arnauld, and Pierre Gassendi, only reinforces this image. If the reality was at variance with the image it is partly because Descartes cultivated his image so assiduously. In an often-quoted passage from the Cogitationes Privatae (“Private Thoughts”), a collection of fragments written around 1619 and known to us from a copy made by Leibniz, Descartes writes that “just as comedians are counselled not to let shame appear on their foreheads, and so put on a mask (personam induunt): so likewise, now that I am about to mount the stage of the world, where I have so far been a spectator, I come forward in a mask (larvatus prodeo).” Many writers, above all Jacques Maritain, have made a great deal of this passage. It does not seem to have impressed Mr. Gaukroger particularly (he nowhere mentions Maritain). But it is I think at least curious that Descartes, the proverbial champion of clear and distinct ideas, should have set forth on his career with an admission of deliberateDescartesash\ what? Duplicity? Subterfuge? Artifice? And it is even more striking that he should have chosen the word larvatus, which can mean “masked,” but which also means “bewitched.” (Persona is the common Latin word for “mask.”)

Descartes told one correspondent that his motto was Bene vixit, bene qui latuit: a tag from Ovid that can mean “He lived well who concealed well” or “He lived well who was private and unobtrusive.” The more we know about Descartes, the more both renderings seem appropriate. In this context, it is worth saying a word or two about Descartes’ prose, certainly one of his most impressive artifacts. Quite apart from the substance of his work, one of Descartes’ chief attractions has always been his style. Especially in his more strictly philosophical books—above all the Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy Descartes wrote with beguiling simplicity. The simplicity is beguiling because it is at least in part only the appearance of simplicity. Together with Plato, Hume, Schopenhauer, and (a more florid example) Nietzsche, Descartes is one of the great philosophical stylists of all time. His celebrated embrace of the “clear and distinct” as criteria for truth (or at least immunity from doubt) has a corollary in the elegantly supple lucidity of his prose. When first reading Descartes, one has the sensation of utter clarity and comprehension. It is only when looking back and re-reading that doubts and difficulties, like Descartes’ “evil genius” in the Meditations, begin to undermine one’s confidence.

At the beginning of his book, Mr. Gaukroger writes that “it is easily forgotten just how controversial, reviled, and celebrated a figure Descartes was, not just in his own lifetime, but for the next 150 years or so.” In fact, the revilement continues even today. The great peculiarity is that although we inhabit a world that is inconceivable without the influence of Descartes, no philosopher is more regularly abused and excoriated. For many, the term “Cartesian” is these days little more than a handy negative epithet, an all-purpose term of abuse suggesting by turns sterile rationalism, a predatory attitude toward nature, and even nasty capitalist habits of acquisitiveness. Thus it is that one trendy academic historian warns in his latest work of “cultural studies” against “the Cartesian ethos of consumer culture,” the “commodity fetishism [that] … underwrote a Cartesian vision of an isolated self in an inert world of objects,” etc. It would be exceedingly polite, though not entirely inaccurate, to describe such uses of “Cartesian” as spasms of late Romantic irrationalism: more or less feeble protests against a world that seems unaccountably indifferent to our desires.

Not that there isn’t a great deal to criticize in Descartes. Philosophers from Pascal (who in his Pensées dismissed Descartes as “inutile et incertain”) to Wittgenstein and beyond have found themselves vexed by what Descartes had to say about God, knowledge, the self, the physical world, and other matters. The number of “definitive” arguments mounted against dualism, the cogito, and the ideal of clear and distinct ideas has been legion. Descartes remains: one of those intellectual giants who seem endlessly vulnerable but who are somehow nonetheless ever unavoidable.

The point is that the ambivalence we feel about Descartes is a reflection of the ambivalence we feel about modernity. Despite the prattlings of contemporary academic “humanists,” New Agers, and other intellectually handicapped persons, no one can in good faith utter a simple “no” to modernity. And yet an unqualified “yes” is also impossible. Descartes’ dream of a philosophy that would render man the “master and possessor of nature” has been all but realized. The question is whether we can really inhabit the world that we rule over with such thoroughness. Paul Valéry summed up the problem in his brief sketch for an essay on Descartes. Like many moderns, Valéry found himself bewitched by the heroic solipsism of Descartes’ formula, cogito ergo sum. Yet he knew that a corollary of that formula was a world in which “the word ‘Knowledge’ is increasingly denied to anything which cannot be translated into figures.” Among other things, this meant that “the truth for modern man, which is exactly related to his freedom of action over nature, seems more and more to be in opposition to everything that our imagination and our feelings would like to be true.” What’s left of Descartes? A very great deal. Which is the glory and the frightening challenge of modernity.

Notes
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1. Descartes: An Intellectual Biography, by Stephen Gau- kroger; Oxford University Press, 500 pages, $35. Go back to the text.