Benefits of doubt

February 4, 2007
Benefits of Doubt
By SIMON BLACKBURN

Book Review:
DESCARTES
The Life and Times of a Genius.

By A. C. Grayling.

Illustrated. 303 pp. Walker & Company. $26.95.

You need not be much of a mathematician to know of Cartesian coordinates. And even people who have only a slender acquaintance with philosophy have often heard of “Cogito ergo sum” — I think therefore I am. They may even have heard of Cartesian skepticism and Cartesian dualism, and may know that it was in the course of pursuing the first, and establishing the second, that Descartes relied on his famous remark. The brilliant, enigmatic Frenchman whose name is thus remembered comes vividly to life in this fascinating new biography, by one of Britain’s foremost literary figures and philosophers.

Descartes lived in interesting times. He was born just before the 17th century, in the sunny Touraine region of France, and died exactly halfway through it, in the bitter northern winter at the court of Queen Christina of Sweden. For most of this time Europe was racked by the Thirty Years’ War, a dreary, vicious contest between Protestants and Catholics, which so exhausted the Old World that religion never really recovered there, and had to be exported to the New.

In “Descartes,” A. C. Grayling (whom I know as a professional colleague) deftly conjures up the political and religious conflicts of Bohemia and France, Spain and Holland, and brings to life those distant characters and events that began to shape modern Europe: the Holy Roman Emperor, the Winter King, Maurice of Nassau and Gustavus Adolphus, among others, pursuing their gigantic conflict with countless lesser players at the Defenestration of Prague, the Synod of Dort, the Battle of the White Mountain or the Treaty of Westphalia. He makes a convincing case that Descartes had a minor role as some kind of intelligence agent in the affairs of the day. He was certainly suited for the part, being solitary, unsociable and secretive, and he undoubtedly had an uncanny habit of turning up in the thick of the action. The idea also offers an explanation of some strange aspects of his subsequent life, like his choosing to live outside France. A devout Catholic, he had an apparently unswerving loyalty to the Jesuits who conducted his schooling, and the Society of Jesus had interests that would not necessarily have been those of France.

Whether or not he was a spy, Descartes skulked in the shadows of Europe’s great events for a fairly short time. After following the armies and conducting secretive travels for some seven years, he settled down to the life of a savant in the United Provinces of the Netherlands. The rest of his story belongs not so much to political history as to the history of natural science, mathematics and philosophy. It has been told before, and Grayling does not seek to compete with such renowned scholars as Charles Adam or Stephen Gaukroger. But his strength lies in how he provides context, drawing the strange world from which modern science was emerging. Like his rough contemporary Francis Bacon in England, Descartes wanted the key to a method that would separate astrology, necromancy, alchemy and dark hermeneutic claptrap on the one hand from astronomy, chemistry, physics and real science on the other. Bacon was in one way farther on the right track than Descartes, emphasizing experiment and observation where Descartes pinned his faith in the powers of reason. But whereas Bacon is often compared to Moses, who led people to within sight of the promised land but never entered it, Descartes went ahead and did so. He experimented and observed and made real progress in optics, physiology and mathematics, all the time hoping to synthesize what he found into a unified system, a crystalline structure of “clear and distinct” ideas. He wanted to know not just how events do fall out, but why they have to fall out as they do, why it stands to reason that the laws of nature have to be as they are. And he thought that by finding that out we would, quite literally, be reading the mind of God.

If we hope that the lives of great scientists, mathematicians or philosophers will be ones of moral grandeur, Descartes will disappoint us. He could not stand criticism, and seems to have exhausted much of his energy conducting bitter academic quarrels. At various times he showed himself ungrateful and less than scrupulous in his conduct of his various controversies. A more attractive side comes out in his love for his illegitimate daughter, whose early death prostrated him, and in the avuncular correspondence he had with the gifted Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, who put her finger on the insoluble problem of mind-body interaction, given Descartes’s strict separation of consciousness from the physical world. The problem is with us still, under the new name “the hard problem of consciousness.” It is a pity that Elizabeth had no fortune to share with him (she later became a nun), leaving him open to an offer from the autocratic Christina. Descartes’s preferred habit was to stay warmly in bed in the mornings; Christina had him give her intellectual nourishment, bareheaded and standing in deference to her royalty, in her icy palace at 5 a.m. Pneumonia set in, fatally, but perhaps he had the last laugh when, some years later, she turned Catholic and relinquished her throne.

Simon Blackburn is professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge. His most recent books are “Truth: A Guide” and “Plato’s Republic.”