HoP 466 Well Hidden: Descartes’ Life and Works
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Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Well Hidden, Descartes' Life and Works. René Descartes was his own first biographer.

In his short work Discourse on the Method, published in 1637, he looks back on his development from youth to maturity. You shouldn't turn to this book looking for juicy anecdotes, reminiscences of lost love, or even a mention of the author's father, mother, or daughter. If it's a life story, then it's the story of a life of the mind.

Indeed, it's just the kind of autobiography you might expect from someone who, say, thinks of themselves as a disembodied intellect with an obscure connection to a body that is something like a machine. Someone that is like René Descartes, who from now on I'm just going to call Descartes, which will be less annoying for both you and me. The pivotal moment in his own version of his story comes when he resolves to abandon all received opinions.

Reasoning that majority vote has never been a guarantee of truth, and that a single man could make discoveries that large groups might not, Descartes determines to be that man. He will develop his philosophy by depending not on authoritative tradition, but on principles whose truth is completely evident. That sound you hear is the starting gun for early modern philosophy being fired.

The sparks would ignite a flame of enlightenment that would spread across Europe, whose burning embers were the fuel for Kant's essay on enlightenment with its emphasis on thinking for yourself. Or at least that's the usual story. But we probably shouldn't take Descartes' word for any of this, given his earliest written remarks include the following note, So far I have been a spectator in this theater which is the world, but I am now about to mount the stage, and I come forward masked.

Nor did he lose his taste for concealment as he got older. In 1634, he wrote to his friend Nassen that he sought to live by the motto, he lives well who is well hidden. True to his word, he leaves quite a lot out of his own story in the discourse, including the names of those who might have influenced or inspired him. The only thing he mentions along these lines is the education he received at the Jesuit school La Fleche when he was an adolescent.

His point in discussing this is precisely to emphasize that his philosophy was not shaped by this education, as he has long since freed himself from the grip of scholastic ideas. He concedes that his early formation was useful to some extent, especially the study of classical language, but later in the discourse he is rather dismissive of the schoolmen whom he compares to ivy growing on the tree of Aristotle's teachings. They can climb no higher than he did.

Warming to his theme, he offers a second analogy. With their obfuscating terminology and profusion of technical distinctions, the scholastics are like a blind aggressor who lures an enemy into a dark cellar so as to be able to fight with them on even terms. As for Descartes, he's the one who would open the cellar windows and let the light shine in.

Descartes was not always so polemical in his remarks about the scholastics. He once recommended La Flèche as the best place in Europe for a youngster to study, and also admitted that it is extremely useful to work through the curriculum offered by the Jesuits before undertaking to raise one's mind above pedantry. Certainly, he took the scholastics seriously, at least as opponents and arguing partners. Given their continued dominance of the intellectual scene, he could hardly do otherwise.

In 1640, only a few years after the appearance of the discourse, he asked Mersenne to provide him with copies of the main scholastic textbooks, since he had not engaged with them for some two decades. So Mersenne had probably just been flattering Dick Hutt, when in a letter sent to him a couple of years earlier, he praised him for his grasp of Aristotelianism. You understand scholastic philosophy just as well as the masters who teach it, and who seem most proud of their own ability.

Still, when the mid-career Descartes began to focus especially on topics like certainty and skepticism, God and the soul, he was deliberately laying foundations for a system that could compete with scholasticism. The result was Descartes' most famous work, the Meditations. But let's not get ahead of ourselves, because having touched on the discourse, we have learned no more about Descartes' life than he wanted to tell us, which is almost nothing at all. Fortunately, we do have other sources.

There were other early biographers, notably Édouard Baillé, author of A Life of Monsieur Descartes that appeared in 1691, so 41 years after Descartes' death. Then, of course, there are the letters. Pride of place here goes to the correspondence with Mersenne, but we also have exchanges between Descartes and numerous other figures. These sources allow us to reconstruct his life story in some detail.

By us, I of course mean other people, like Genevieve Rodi-Lewis and Stephen Gaucrozier, whose modern biographies have given me plenty to draw on in this episode. To make their very long stories very short, after studying at La Flèche, Descartes moved on to the University of Poitiers, where he studied law.

In 1618, he joined a Protestant army in the Netherlands. This might seem surprising, given that Descartes was a Catholic and had no intention of defecting to the Protestants. In the Discourse, he explains his faithfulness to the Church in terms reminiscent of Montaigne, saying that he has been content to follow the customary beliefs of the religion in which he was raised. Actually, though, it's not that strange for him to have fought alongside Protestants, since their foe was Spain, at this time also an enemy of France.

Thereafter, Descartes traveled in Germany, France, and Italy until 1625, when he returned to Paris and joined the circle around Mersenne. Five years later, he was back in the Netherlands, living first in Amsterdam, then in Leiden, then near Haarlem.

This was the period of his life where he showed most interest in his daughter, who was fathered with a maid at one of his lodgings. His early biographer, Baillet, at pains to stress Descartes' upright character, claims that he lived a chaste life after this one lapse of sexual morality. Sadly, his daughter, Francine, died in 1640.

Though Descartes was clearly not a sentimental man, perhaps we can allow ourselves to imagine that he channeled his paternal feelings into an affectionate intellectual relationship he developed with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia. She was about two decades younger than him and became one of his most important philosophical interlocutors in his later life. He continued to spend time in France and the Netherlands in the 1640s, but was then invited to the court of Queen Christina of Sweden.

This would allow him to enjoy the sort of patronage that was rare, if not unique, in his career. But "enjoy" is probably not the right word, given that upon arrival, Descartes complained, "Men's thoughts are frozen here, like the water." He was made to abandon his lifelong and endearingly relatable habit of sleeping late each morning. Forced to tutor the queen at an hour when any self-respecting Frenchman would only be calling an end to the previous night's entertainments, Descartes was dead within half a year.

This was on February 11th, 1650, when he was only 54 years old. Breezing through these basic facts, I've duplicated an omission made by Descartes in his discourse. I did not mention Isaac Baikman. Unless you're an expert on early modern philosophy or have been paging through biographies of Descartes to write podcasts about him, you almost surely haven't heard of Baikman. But he is a wonderful example of something I never tire of stressing, the major importance of minor figures in the history of philosophy.

The young Descartes met Beckmann upon arriving in the Netherlands for his military service, and the two men embarked on an intellectual love affair. The somewhat older Beckmann seems to have taken Descartes under his wing and encouraged in him an interest not just in doing science, but in doing science in a very particular way. Both of them were convinced that physics should be pursued using the tools of mathematical analysis.

This must have come naturally to Baikman, who was, among other things, a practicing hydraulic engineer, and who, just a few years later, would found a "mechanical college" in Rotterdam. The word "mechanical" is important here, because it expresses nicely the way that both Baikman and Descartes thought about the natural world.

Descartes' published works betray little sign of Beckmann's impact upon him, and in fact some years later he would break with his friend over just this question, because he got the impression that Beckmann was claiming to have originated some of the fundamental ideas of Cartesian physics. Massen served as intermediary between the two, and in the end things were patched up at least to some extent.

The earlier Descartes was much more willing to give credit where it was due. He told Baikman, "...you are truly the only one who roused my inactivity and who led my mind, wandering away from serious undertakings to something better," and remarked that he had never met anyone else who combined physics and mathematics into a joint scientific enterprise in the way he did.

The two men discussed and corresponded about a range of topics, including pure mathematics, pure physics , as well as applied physics for instance a puzzle about water pressure, and even music. But the most important idea that Descartes shared with, and perhaps took from, Baikman is the belief that the familiar things in the physical world around us are made up of corpuscles, that is, microscopically small bodies.

Indeed, Dan Garber, an expert on this aspect of Descartes' thought, has written that, Bechmann is quite likely the first person with whom Descartes worked seriously who genuinely believed corpuscularianism as an account of the way the world is.

If the only thing you've ever read by Descartes is the Meditations, you might be thinking that this hardly seems to establish Baikman as a significant factor in the development of Cartesian philosophy. After all, the Meditations is not about physics. It is about radical skepticism and its overcoming through the famous cogito argument, I think, therefore I am, followed by proofs of God's existence, and ultimately the restoration of our confidence in our beliefs about the world around us.

not a corpuscle in sight, and not only because they're too small to see. But there's good reason to doubt that these issues of epistemology and metaphysics represent the ultimate aim of Descartes' project. For one thing, Descartes never lost interest in natural philosophy. Even in his later career, he was still doing things like visiting butcher shops to see animals being slaughtered and then taking parts home to dissect in order to learn more about anatomy.

For another thing, he himself warned against getting fixated on the issues covered in the Meditations. He told Elizabeth to master the metaphysical foundations but then devote herself to natural philosophy, and advised another friend that the Meditations was merely intended to lay the groundwork for the study of physical and observable things. Now, I'm not trying to make you feel bad if you think the Meditations was Descartes' most important achievement.

As we'll be seeing, it richly deserves its reputation as one of the highlights of early modern philosophy. Descartes' own contemporaries already held it as a major contribution and as maybe the most significant thing he had written. This is in part because of his hesitancy to publish the treatment of natural philosophy that should have been the real landmark of his thought. He worked at length on a major treatise called, with typical immodesty, The World, part of which was an anthropological treatise called The Human.

In 1633, he was just about ready to show the world to the world. But then he got news about Galileo's trial down in Italy. As he told Mersenne, he was both shocked and fearful, and even considered burning his own papers lest he face similar persecution. He could no longer see any way to publish his treatise since the fact that the earth goes around the sun was vital to his own cosmology.

"It is so closely interwoven in every part of my treatise," he wrote, "that I could not remove it without rendering the whole work defective." Instead, he withdrew the work from publication, and it would not appear until after his death. This leaves us with the strange and unsatisfactory situation that in the middle period of his career, Descartes was providing foundations for a system he could not fully exhibit. Admittedly, he did make his ideas available in part,

The Discourse was published with essays on optics and meteorology that were presumably outtakes from the world, and showed how his method would work in practice. But a fuller version of the system would not appear in print until 1644, when Descartes brought out an extensive treatise called Principles of Philosophy. It finally brings the whole story together, starting with metaphysics and moving on to physics. This confirms that he did indeed see natural philosophy as a significant goal of his project.

In the Principles, there's a famous passage where he uses a metaphor to explain this point. The whole of philosophy is like a tree. The roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches emerging from the trunk are all the other sciences, which may be reduced to three principal ones, namely medicine, mechanics, and morals. By morals, I understand the highest and most perfect moral system, which presupposes a complete knowledge of the other sciences and is the ultimate level of wisdom.

In other words, his arguments for dualism and for God's existence are fundamental, even foundational, but to adapt the metaphor slightly, they are not the fruits we are hoping to harvest. Rather, they are the basis for what really interests Descartes, namely understanding of our own bodies and other bodies in the world around us and learning how best to live in that world. Descartes' teachers at La Flèche would have found that rather surprising, because the normal scholastic curriculum had things the other way around.

For the schoolmen, philosophy is an ascent to the highest principles, which of course include God. These highest principles are studied in metaphysics, so that discipline should be at the end, not at the beginning. The reason for the difference is that Descartes wants something very specific from metaphysics. He needs to establish the existence of a benevolent God so that he can then appeal to God as a reliable source of what Descartes calls our "clear and distinct ideas."

Descartes appeals to such ideas even in early writings, referring to intuition as the source for basic concepts that we use in physics, for example about the nature of light or motion. These ideas are so blindingly obvious that no one can really deny them. As he says in The Principles, his innovation is not to recognize these truths, but to make them fundamental to his philosophy.

But even if the principles seem obvious, one might still subject them to doubt. Perhaps we are somehow deluded, and even what seems undeniable is in fact false. The metaphysical arguments of the discourse and meditations are there to reassure us that this is not the case, and that what seems reliable, because it is clear and distinct, really is reliable. As Descartes told Mersenne, "I would not have been able to discover the foundations of physics if I had not searched for them along that road."

But thanks to his efforts, he was now able to prove metaphysical truths in a manner which is more evident than the proofs of geometry. Descartes' search for indubitable principles can be traced to a very specific event in his biography, the so-called Berulle Affair. In 1628, Descartes was in attendance at a gathering which included some highly placed figures, including Cardinal Pierre de Berulle, a leading figure of the French Counter-Reformation.

Also present was a scholar named Chandu, who was, as Descartes' biographer Bayet puts it, a man of spirit who made a profession of medicine and practiced chemistry in particular. Like a number of intellectuals in the time of Cardinal Richelieu, continued Bayet, Chandu claimed to have departed from scholastic orthodoxy and to have found the principles of a new philosophy.

Confronted by this upstart who was provocatively claiming to have rethought all of philosophy from the ground up, Descartes was annoyed. That's the role he wanted for himself. So Descartes declined to join in the general chorus of approval after Chandu's performance. Noticing this, the cardinal asked him what he thought, and Descartes replied that the arguments Chandu had offered were merely probable.

He went on to show how one can use plausible assumptions to prove first one thing and then the opposite of that thing, a standard technique used by skeptics since antiquity. Descartes then boldly told the assembly that he could do better. He had a method that could "establish principles more clear and more certain, by which it would be easier to give an account of all the effects of nature."

At the time, this was probably little more than a bluff, but over the coming years Descartes would make good on his promise, rooting his philosophy and arguments both old and new, and showing how the rest of the sciences could branch off from those roots. In the Discourse, Descartes says with false modesty, the only kind he would ever manage to muster, that he was reluctant to publish the results of his labors, but was impelled to do so out of his desire to help other people.

This no doubt made it all the more galling when certain other people took a hatchet to his tree of knowledge. Descartes' worst enemy was Gisbert Voitius, a theology professor in the Netherlands. Voitius became a staunch opponent of Cartesianism after he was provoked by Henri Leroy, more commonly known by the Latin version of his name, Henricus Regius.

Regius was an ally of Descartes, who incautiously decided to disseminate and publicly defend the new philosophy in Utrecht. Wojtyla, appalled at all the anti-scholastic innovations, launched a counterattack. He succeeded in getting Descartes' writings confiscated and eliminated from teaching at the university. All this made Descartes' life in the Netherlands far more precarious and uncomfortable, which might be one reason he took the opportunity to move to Sweden, with literally and figuratively chilling results.

nor did Descartes' death put an end to the controversy. Even as his influence spread across Europe, there were attempts to stem the Cartesian tide. In 1663, his works were placed on the index of books prohibited by the Catholic Church, and some of his teachings were singled out for condemnation in 1678. In the 1720s, Voltaire expressed his own opinion in typically witty fashion. Are Descartes born to unearth the errors of antiquity and to substitute his own?

You'll have to decide whether you agree with Voltaire about that over the coming episodes.

Despite Descartes' advice to Elizabeth, we're not going to start with metaphysics and move on to physics. Instead, I think we need to understand the scientific and cosmological ideas Descartes was driving at as context for the famous arguments and doctrines found in the meditations. So, next time, we'll be looking at Descartes' mathematical physics. I hope I can count on you to join me for that, here on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps.