یکشنبه ۲۵ شهریور ۰۳ | ۱۳:۲۸ ۸ بازديد
others (something about which he was very sensitive). In
the Meditations on First Philosophy, Together With the First Six Sets of
Objections with Replies appeared in Latin; a second, enlarged, volume
came out a year later, and a French translation by the duc de Luynes,
to which Descartes gave his approval, followed in . The
Meditations, whose first-person singular is not so much the historical
Descartes as it is any reflective person working their way through a
set of arguments, do not describe philosophical discoveries, but
present them in the order in which readers are enjoined to enact
the process of discovery for themselves. In this they are unlike the
Discourse, which is presented as a personal and historical narrative.
In his Latin Principles of Philosophy followed; three of its four
books are about ‘science’ (physics and natural philosophy) rather
than strictly philosophical principles. It was published in French in
in a translation by Abbé Claude Picot (?–), a Parisian
priest who was converted to Descartes’s philosophy by the
Meditations, and who came as a friend to look after Descartes’s finan-
cial affairs in the last years of his life. Also in a Latin version of
the Discourse appeared, which made this text accessible to the wider
learned community. Other writings followed, often in response to
criticisms of his work, for by the early s Descartes had become
notorious throughout Europe; these included the Comments on a
Certain Broadsheet (Notae in programma quoddam), which appeared
in . Descartes’s philosophy (or rather, a version of it which he
disowned) had been enthusiastically adopted by his disciple Henrick
de Roy (Regius) (–), of the University of Utrecht; the rec-
tor of that same Calvinist establishment, Gijsbert Voet (–),
had it condemned there in . Regius was the author of the broad-
sheet which provoked the Comments of , in which he set out a
version of Cartesianism unacceptable to Descartes, who very much
resented being drawn into such controversies; he looked upon them
as distractions from his true vocation, which was to develop his
system in order eventually to provide a secure grounding for ethics
and medicine. He himself had also hoped that his philosophy might
be adopted by the Jesuits for use in their colleges; but as he ruefully
told Huygens in a letter dated January (AT . ), he found
xvii
the Low Countries. 10
The last work to appear in his lifetime, in , was the Passions of
the Soul (Les Passions de l’âme), written, like the Discourse, in French.
This may well have been inspired by his contacts, beginning in ,
with Princess Elizabeth (–), the Calvinist granddaughter of
James I and daughter of the deposed king of Bohemia, who was
living in exile in The Hague; in her correspondence with him, she
had pressed him to explain the interaction of soul and body in his
system. He had already made explicit his decision to write accessibly,
not only for members of the court but also for women; her lucid and
shrewd questioning must have confirmed for him the wisdom of this
decision.
By the financial stability which had allowed Descartes to live
independently and to reject all offers of patronage seems to have
been threatened. In that year he returned to Paris, to arrange to take
up the royal pension that he had been granted in that year––an
expensive procedure, involving the outlay of money to obtain a royal
warrant before any pension was received. The following year saw the
beginning of the civil wars in France known as the Fronde, which
effectively put an end to royal patronage for half a decade (in spite
of Baillet’s claim to the contrary, it seems that Descartes was never to
receive a penny of royal largesse). It may have been such material
factors that persuaded him to accept the patronage offered by Queen
Christina of Sweden (–), who was actively seeking to sur-
round herself with prominent scholars and thinkers. In , having
put his affairs in order, he set out with all his papers for Stockholm,
dressed, to the astonishment of his acquaintances, in the clothes of a
fashionable courtier, with his hair in ringlets.11 After a rather unsatis-
factory beginning to his stay there, during which he made some new
French friends and was entrusted with some nugatory tasks, he was
eventually summoned to the royal palace on Christina’s return to her
capital, to instruct her in his philosophy. She ordained that this
10 Gaukroger, Descartes, –.
11 AT . has the description of Brasset, the secretary of the French Embassy at
The Hague.
xviii
weak chest, who had spent the greater part of his life rising late and
nursing his health, was now exposed not only to the rigours of a
Stockholm winter in the early hours of the morning, but also to the
infectious pneumonia of his friend the French ambassador, Hector-
Pierre Chanut (–), in whose residence he lived, and whose
bedside he attended during his illness. Descartes in turn contracted
pneumonia, and died on February .
Descartes’s correspondence, which was published soon after his
death, reveals something of the character of its author, as do his early
biographers. Baillet, in a somewhat hagiographical account of Des-
cartes’s life, describes him as a man with a serene and affable expres-
sion, careful in his consumption of food and wine, content to keep
his own company, without personal affectations or foppishness (he
only took to wearing a wig towards the end of his life, for reasons of
health). Baillet assures us that if he was at all vain, this was only a
superficial vanity; he was modest, indifferent to public acclaim, and
had a gift both for fostering the careers of those for whom he was
responsible, and for the friendship of his peers. Among Descartes’s
modern biographers, only Geneviève Rodis-Lewis has retained
many of these features; she has also stressed his frequent changes of
address, and attributed them to his overriding desire to be left alone
to pursue his search for scientific and philosophical truth. His elu-
siveness was noted even by his contemporaries: his acquaintance
Claude de Saumaise (–) wrote to a correspondent in
that Descartes kept well away from others (‘à l’escart’) even in a
small town like Leiden, and wittily suggested said that his name
ought to be spelt ‘D’escartes’ (AT . ); Descartes himself wrote
on more than one occasion that he disliked having neighbours (AT .
; . ). While conceding that he had a quick temper, Rodis-
Lewis also points out that he was often generous with his time, and
received even lowly visitors who came to consult him; and in spite of
his conviction that animals were no more than machines (AT . –),
he kept a dog called M. Grat (‘Mr Scratch’), of whom he may even
have been fond. 12
12 Baillet, Vie, –; Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, Descartes.
xix
than a candid acknowledgement of his errors’––advice offered by
Descartes to Regius in January (AT . )––would flow natur-
ally from the pen of the Descartes described in Baillet’s biography;
but it has struck others as out of character in a man who seems never
to have accepted the correction and critique of others. He never fell
out, it is true, with his closest acquaintance Mersenne, although he
offended him on occasion, but with many other contemporaries his
relationship ran into difficulties arising from his touchiness, his high
assessment of his own work, his low assessment of the intelligence of
those around him, and his fastidious and self-protective sense of
privacy. One modern philosopher-critic has described him as ‘lofty,
chilly and solitary’, cultivating ‘a certain reserve and self-sufficiency
in life and manner’; 13 to these unendearing characteristics others
have added arrogance, a contempt for others which was not always
justified, and a capacity to bully those he looked upon as inferior in
intellect to himself. He instructed the long-suffering Mersenne to
treat his adversary Jean de Beaugrand (?–) with contempt,
and described his letters as fit only for use as lavatory paper; the
work of Pierre de Fermat (–) was ‘dung’; mathematicians
who criticized his geometry were said to be ‘flies’; and although he
invited his contemporaries to criticize the Discourse and the works
that followed it, those who took up his invitation came in for a great
deal of contumely. Gilles Personne de Roberval (–) is said to
be ‘less than a rational animal’; Pierre Petit (–), ‘a little dog
who barks after me in the street’; Thomas Hobbes (–),
‘extremely contemptible’ for daring to call his work into question;
others who, having criticized him, did not accept his refutation of
them, were described as ‘silly and weak’. 14 Descartes was also not
above mystifying his correspondents, and making fun of them by
setting them difficult or incomplete mathematical problems (AT
. ); he compounded this with an unwillingness to disclose his
work to others (e.g. AT . –) which seems almost to make his
13 Williams, Descartes, .
14 Gaukroger, Descartes, , assembles these comments.
xx
hypocritical. Unsurprisingly, he had a low opinion of the vast major-
ity of his readers, confiding to Mersenne that he did not believe them
capable of recognizing the truth of his arguments (AT . ). If
there is a feature which redeems to some degree such disagreeable
attitudes and behaviour, it is Descartes’s honesty and integrity. He
may have had an exaggerated sense of his own abilities, but (with the
possible exception of his snobbery and his silence over his sense
of a personal prophetic mission), the account he gives of his
thought-processes and his motivations is frank and scrupulous.
Descartes was buried in Stockholm; in it was decided that
his remains should be exhumed and returned to Paris, to rest even-
tually in the abbey church of Sainte-Geneviève. At the exhumation
the French ambassador was allowed to cut off the forefinger of
Descartes’s right hand, and a captain of the Swedish Guards may
well have removed the skull and replaced it with another. This
removed skull was then traded several times, before ending up in the
hands of the Swedish chemist Jons Jacob Berzelius, who in
offered it to the palaeontologist Georges Cuvier; it is now to be
found in the Musée de l’Homme in the Palais de Chaillot in Paris.
The body, meanwhile, found its way eventually to the abbey church
of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where it now lies. 15
This dismemberment is emblematic of the posthumous fortunes
of Descartes’s work and doctrine, parts of which have been taken up
in different ways at different times, even if his philosophical and
‘scientific’ doctrine was recognized as a coherent system in his life-
time. By the adjective ‘Cartesian’ had emerged; it designated
principally his mechanistic philosophy. This was opposed not only
by Aristotelian traditionalists, but also by other radical thinkers, and
was a powerful motor in the debate about the nature of matter and
motion, even if none of his physical theories is now looked upon as
correct. At the same time, the Discourse had another, more diffuse
effect. Its radical programme, which did not require philosophical
and ‘scientific’ training but only the employment of ‘good sense’,
appealed to those who had not received a formal education, notably
15 Ibid. –.
xxi
well-reasoning individual. By the mid-s, in Paris, ‘the free use
of reason’ was associated with various radical views, some of them
feminist, and Descartes was seen as its champion and a liberator
from prejudice: ‘Cartesiomania’ broke out. He was also seen as a
dangerous radical in another way: his theory of matter posed prob-
lems for the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation
(although Descartes insisted that it did not: see AT . ; . ,
; . –); in his works found their way onto the Roman
Inquisition’s Index of Forbidden Books, in the category of those
which needed correction before they could be published: a
supremely ironic fate, given Descartes’s strenuous efforts not to
offend the Church.
Thereafter, Descartes developed into the national emblem of a
specifically French kind of rationalism, and was attacked or
defended as such in contradistinction to the empirical philosophy of
the English. This opposition was fostered by early Enlightenment
thinkers such as Montesquieu and Voltaire (to the disadvantage of
Descartes). By the time of the French Revolution he had been
turned into a representative of republican thought, deserving of a
place in the pantheon of such French heroes; in the nineteenth cen-
tury he came to be seen as a petit-bourgeois Catholic thinker, before
being appropriated by the French educational system and made into
the model of clarity of thought and good style in French. It is hardly
surprising, therefore, that in , on the three-hundred-and-fiftieth
anniversary of the publication of the Discourse, a book appeared with
the title Descartes c’est la France. 16
Across the Channel, meanwhile, in more recent times Descartes,
has been heralded as an honorary practitioner of analytical phil-
osophy, even in some ways its founding father; and although his
accounts of the relationship of mind and body, or the existence of
other minds, or that of possible other worlds are seen as flawed, he
has set the agenda for a certain sort of philosophical training, and the
standard for rigorous introspective philosophical speculation. His
16 See Stéphane Van Damme, Descartes: essai d’histoire culturelle d’une grandeur
philosophique (Paris, ); the author of Descartes c’est la France is André Glucksman.
xxii
drives his ‘science’ or vice versa, whether they are interdependent,
and what role his religious belief plays in his thinking. To some
degree these are questions of emphasis, and mark the perpetual revi-
sionism to which all historical thinking is prone; they also reveal the
complex and many-faceted nature of his work, the interdependence
of its many aspects, and its continued ability to provoke even after
three and a half centuries.
The Genesis of the Discourse and its Development
Descartes never intended to publish a book like the Discourse; his
plan was to fulfil a promise to his Parisian friends to set down an
account of his world system, which would be called The Universe. So
the Discourse and the essays which accompany it are a substitute for
something else, which would have been more comprehensive, more
coherent, and more ‘scientific’ in character. The essays which follow
the Discourse are described by Descartes as no more than ‘examples’
of his method in action; in a letter to Mersenne written a few months
before its publication, he claims that the Discourse itself only refers to
his method and its coming into being, and does not state it formally
anywhere in the text: ‘I haven’t been able to understand clearly what
you object to in the title,’ he writes, ‘for I am not saying Treatise on
the Method but Discourse on the Method, which means Preface or
Notice on the Method, to show that I do not intend to teach the
method but only to speak about it’ (AT . ). This was a matter of
disappointment to his Parisian acquaintances, as Jean-Baptiste
Morin pointed out in a letter to him dated February ; it
prevented them from engaging in a direct critique of the principles
of Cartesian physics (AT . –).
I have already suggested that one might see the dreams which
Descartes experienced in as decisive in forming in him the
ambition to discover some new general account of nature; one road
which he might have taken to fulfil this was that of assiduous study
of all relevant previous authors. He explicitly discards this as a cor-
rect strategy in the Discourse, not only because he had already been
inculcated with what he saw to be unsound ancient philosophy and
xxiii
frequently admits in his writings and his letters, because he found
reading the work of others tiresome. His (not very large) library at
his death consisted almost entirely of books that had been given to
him by his friends; to various of his correspondents he expresses his
dislike of ‘fat tomes’, and asks them to recommend short books on
subjects he wishes to study (AT . , ; . ; . –); an
early comment in his unpublished Private Thoughts (Cogitationes
privatae) runs as follows: ‘in the case of most books, once we have
read a few lines and looked at a few of the diagrams, the entire
message is perfectly obvious. The rest is added only to fill up the
paper’ (AT . ). There is another, more serious, reason to reject
the accumulation of the views of others as a road to truth. Descartes
does not quote the popular dictum, ‘Plato is my friend, Socrates is
my friend, but truth is a greater friend’ (to which I shall return
below), but he alludes to it. ‘We shall not become philosophers if we
have read all the arguments of Plato and Aristotle, but are unable to
form a secure judgement on the matters in hand’, he avers in the
Rules For the Direction of Our Native Intelligence (AT . ). He
consistently recommended the ‘light of reason’ as the best guide;
but he was later to recognize the power of philosophical name-
dropping, for he gloomily confided to Mersenne on September
that he had decided in future to back up his arguments
with the authority of others, as ‘truth by itself is so little respected’
(AT . ). 17
Throughout the s Descartes had been working on geometry
and optics, although it seems that the final versions of these works
(and the meteorological treatise) were not written until . I have
already mentioned that he was known to be planning an auto-
biographical essay entitled ‘the story of my mind’ in ; Guez de
Balzac wrote to him on March of that year that ‘it is [eagerly]
awaited by all your friends . . . it will be a pleasure . . . to read of the
path you have followed, and the progress which you have made, in
[discovering] the truth of things’ (AT . –). It would seem that
17 On these and similar quotations and their currency, see Ian Maclean, Logic, Signs
and Nature in the Renaissance: The Case of Learned Medicine (Cambridge, ), –
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