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.”