Customer Reviews

Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason

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Whether you are a " philosophile" or know Descartes only for the famous "Cogito, ergo sum", you will probably find this well-told tale of the continuing legacy of Descartes' thinking fascinating and informative. I enjoyed this book so much that I almost feel guilty not giving it a 5-star rating, but it DOES have two serious flaws. As others have pointed out, the "hook" of the title, the story of Descartes' bones over the past 350 years, is not well integrated into the rest of the book and is not a big enough "hook" on which to hang the book anyway (It might make a nice magazine article.). The second big flaw is the use of the current journalistic "cliche" in which serious topics are introduced through character sketches. Descartes' Bones opens with a vignette of Philippe Mennecier, the curator at Paris' Musee de l'Homme, a vignette which is not very interesting and makes no contribution to the topic of the book. Other modern sketches intrude at other points in the book.
The reviewer in the New York Times called this an "investigative book, one that goes off on frequent philosophical, historical and forensic tangents." I hesitate to disagree with the august Times, but I believe he has it backwards, and this may be the source of the flaws. I consider this to be primarily a wonderful history of philosophy and ideas, encompassing religion, science, and political thinking and tracing the influences of Descartes through them all for 350 years. This is a tall order and a weighty topic, and the flaws in the book may come from an attempt to "lighten it up" lest it intimidate the general reader. Personally, if I used my normal heuristic of "do I like the first page enough to go on?" I would probably have stopped reading, and that would have been a mistake. The "bones" theme and the modern tangents are only a small part of the book, and the rest is worth the investment of your time.

I really hate to disagree with most of the previous reviewers, but I found this book to be interesting and enlightening. I admit it is not a page-turner, but it is, after all, an "intellectual" detective story and not a thriller or novel of suspense.

I was first introduced seriously to Descartes as the subject of a graduate seminar in philosophy during my first year as a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Washington way back in the ancient year of 1961. I did not then -- nor do I do now -- consider Descartes to be a "great" philosopher, even though he is considered to be the so-called father of modern philosophy. That aside, there is no question that he raised philosophical issues of great import which still haunt us today.

This book does give the reader, in my opinion, an interesting detective story, despite the fact that he roams around a lot of intellectual history; and European geography, for that matter. For those readers, however, who have never been introduced to Descartes or the real problem he created -- the so-called body-mind problem -- this could be an adventure for them much needed.

So, I have to respectfully disagree with the other reviewers of this book who are negative toward it. I found it a good, if not excellent, read and would, without hesitation, recommend it to all general readers. Granted it is not great philosophy, maybe not even great history; but it is a fascinating tale. And I think told well.

Unfortunately, I was stuck with reading an uncorrected proof of this book. There were a number of quotes I would have cited to discuss. But such is not to be done, according to the warning clearly imprinted on the back cover of the book. So what I have said above is all to be said from my standpoint. Still, considering that restraint, I do advise potential readers not to shy away from this book. There's a lot to learn here and the ever-present battle between faith and reason, which is a continuous theme throughout the book, makes for a good read in spite of some of the shortcomings.

On occasion there comes a book which examines some piece of history, a thing thought of as a footnote, and successfully demonstrates its importance. Shorto's last book, "The Island at the Center of the World" examined such a footnote, examining the fascinating, brief, and often neglected, history of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. With that work he offered a story that was not just entertaining, but gave considerable food for thought as one reconsiders American history. Shorto doubtless hoped to achieve the same illumination with Descartes' Bones, following the mystery of the disappearance of the Philosopher's remains as a vehicle for considering his central place in the development of modernity. Where "Island" sought to explore the under appreciated early history of a city which played a generally agreed upon crucial role in world history, in "Descartes' Bones" Shorto wants to take a person to whom most people have likely given little thought and make him the intellectual fulcrum of the Enlightenment.

If that sounds like a big task to you, you would be right. Worse still, Shorto not only does not succeed in accomplishing his goal, but cuts several intellectual corners to make a round peg of an idea fit into a square hole of a book.

In the first place, even used as a metaphor as Shorto wishes to, Descartes' remains and their whereabouts is just not that interesting a topic. A long essay in the Atlantic perhaps, but a better than 200 page book? In the second place, Shorto's claims regarding Descartes do not stand up to scrutiny to anyone familiar with his topic. One senses that even the author knows this as he often gives only the briefest attention to those important aspects of Cartesian philosophy which under cut his thesis.

For those who forget Philosophy 101, Descartes famously claimed he wanted to construct his understanding of the world based on nothing more than things of which he could be logically sure. To this end, he began with the question of how he could even be sure he existed, concluding he must with the famous phrase "Cogito ergo sum," or "I think therefore I am." In so much as this idea of building understanding on logic, Descartes served an important purpose in that he broke with the Aristotelian dogma of his day.

Unfortunately, contrary to Shorto's claims, in so doing Descartes not starting a movement, but joining one. At the time of Descartes birth Galilleo was in his thirties. Descarte aided this movement by giving birth to the "rationalist" school, but his efforts suffered from substantial limitations, indeed, Shorto works mightily to hide these shortcomings.

Back for a moment to philosophy 101. The problem with Descartes idea of I think therefore I am is that it leaves the "thinker" as a disembodied mind. Of course that would be quite boring, so the philosopher needs to find a bridge out. To this end, he leans on an ontological argument for the existence of god to "prove" that he can trust his senses. Here again, Shorto gives short shrift to a crucial segment of Descartes thought; while the author does wish to explore the fact that Descartes thought of himself as a very religious Catholic - particularly as it relates to the disputes between moderate and "radical" Cartesians - he does not want to focus on how that belief works as a central pillar of Descartes' work.

Shorto also seeks to put Descartes at the foundation of all later philosophers and therefore lay at the Frenchman's feet credit for what they built. Unfortunately history and those other thinkers own writing, gets very much in the way. Many found Descartes philosophy hollow - which one can understand, since it basically required a "cheat" to escape being disembodied mind - and thus another philosophical school was born. This school - empiricism - far from seeing themselves as part of a Cartesian revolution saw themselves in opposition to it. These thinkers, first Locke, but later and more significantly Hume, are far more the fathers of modern ideas of personhood, property, and ethics than Descartes. Indeed, when Immanuel Kant said that "Hume had "woke him from his dogmatic slumber" Cartesian thought was the dogma to which he referred.

Time and again Shorto papers over this great intellectual conflict. Thus he offers the American revolution vs. its French counterpart as a conflict between moderate and radical Cartesians. Unfortunately, the Founding Fathers, devoted as they were to the Empiricist school of Locke and practical politics, would have found the notion absurd.

Cartesian philosophy, existing as it does almost entirely as a function of the mind, had a powerful impact on abstract mathematics. However, Descartes' thought was not, as Shorto wants to argue, the basis for experimental science - doubting the veracity of one's senses makes gathering data difficult - here again, Hume plays the central role.

One can quibble with other aspects of Shorto's work, such as his tendency to turn all those who opposed his protagonist into villains described in Perils of Pauline fashion, with epitets such as "rat faced," but that is to quibble. For the most part, he writes very well. No, in this case his problem lies in the short comings of his topic, a deficiency one cannot easily overcome.

Russell Shorto has written a very different but overly detailed story about the plight of Rene Descartes' relic bones. Taking information about Descartes and the Cartesians of the of the 17th Century, Shorto begins to craft a mystery of the bones by the telling of the Cartesian philosophy and the feathers ruffled with this new and groundbreaking thinking. By taking the history of Descartes philosophy and using the mystery of his bones, Shorto weaves both into the history of modern philosophical thinking.

The bibliography is nicely developed and easy to follow. The number of works that were researched for this rather short work (250 pages) of nonfiction is quite large showing that Shorto's twist on Descartes is based on fact and not opinion nor hearsay.

However, that said, I have to now grade the story itself. For about 100 pages, I was very engrossed and the history of the Enlightened Era of Philosophy made for an interesting tale. But after 100 pages, the story bogged down into a quagmire of words and detailed history of Europe and I'm not even sure what. I'm not going to say that someone interested this type of stuff will be bored, but I was. I'm a scientist by nature, so this wordiness about just about nothing got to me. I lost the train of thought in the mystery of the bones until the author put together his take on the mystery near the end.

In my mind (and here I agree with another reviewer), this would have made a very interesting short story, but really the length of 250 pages stretched the base of the story into areas that were just out of the realm of the initial focus. If you love philosophy, you might like this, but if you are looking for a mystery, read anything else. I just didn't get it.

Russell Shorto's engaging book is an exciting tour through the history of politics, religion and ideas from the 17th Century onwards, that takes the bizarre and fascinating story of the vicissitudes of the late philosopher's bones as an occasion to illuminate and ruminate on the question what makes us modern.

Descartes is, of course, widely acknowledged to be the father of modern philosophy. This is not because he was the most brilliant modern philosopher, or scientist, or mathematician -- although he was brilliant in all of these, and he came of age in a time when these three were not at all as clearly differentiated as we now conceive them to be -- but because his thinking set the stage for a new approach to thinking that has dominated the landscape of philosophy ever since (at least until the twentieth century). Systematic inquiry, beginning with and always returning to a careful analysis of the foundations of that inquiry, is the modern approach to philosophy, and Descartes is the one to have established this approach as the only one proper to a philosophy that would aim for certainty. Even those successors who challenged some of his most distinctive results -- i.e. his claim that the mind and the body are distinct, and yet somehow able to interact in the pineal gland -- took for granted that philosophy must begin with an investigation of how we know what we claim to know, that even metaphysics is always subject to the demands of epistemology. Even Immanuel Kant -- probably the most important philosopher since Aristotle -- can be seen to be following in Descartes' footsteps and merely attempting to do his project over with greater rigor. So Shorto is right to suggest that the story of Descartes' remains should have some wider interest.

What I was unprepared for, however, was how rich the story of his remains turns out to have been. What Shorto does is identify several episodes in the story of his bones, and he outlines the historical and political and religious background necessary to appreciate these episodes. It turns out that to tell the story of Descartes' bones it really is necessary to tell the story of how we "moderns" came to be what we are -- and to outline many of the tensions and ambiguities in the thinking and practices that have led us to where we have come.

Descartes died of pneumonia in Sweden, after having agreed to tutor Queen Christina -- and to give up his usual practice of writing in bed until mid-morning, and travel through the wintry climes to give her lessons at 4 in the morning. The question what to do with him became important, not only because it was a national embarrassment to have indirectly caused the death of the famous philosopher, but because Descartes was a Catholic and Sweden was Protestant -- so rather than go under in style, he had to be buried with infants from a distant orphanage, since the young are innocent and their religion was not a factor in their burial site. Fourteen years later, his bones were relocated and brought back to France where his views had been deemed heretical. Along the way, it seems, some bones -- likely to include even his skull -- were stolen as relics. He was buried by supporters in France, who hoped thereby to strike a blow for Enlightenment and against the Catholic church. But the question what to do with his remains was raised again after the French revolution, and again following the Napoleonic wars, after which his skull was discovered to be missing, and then, allegedly, found after having been auctioned off in Sweden. The number of important scientists and politicians and historical figures who became intimately involved in the various debates over questions regarding the authenticity and ultimate disposition of his bones is pretty astonishing.

Shorto traces the meandering story patiently, and effortlessly. The story reads like a mystery novel infused with philosophical weight. The author knows how to move back and forth from broad strokes history and philosophical and religious discourse to detailed accounts of the various persons involved in that history, and rich anecdotes that illustrate their character and temperaments. I knew a lot about this history coming into the book, and especially knew a lot about Descartes himself and his contemporaries, but I was surprised and intrigued by several important details: such as the fact that on his death bed Descartes had to fight against the royal physician's insistence that he be bled as a cure (and that Descartes ultimately gave in, accelerating his decline); or that Descartes' skull and its cranial capacity became a focus for debates on the science (now considered a pseudo-science) of phrenology, which (ironically, given Descartes' own thoughts) reduces the mind to the brain.

This is a remarkable book -- well written throughout, entertaining and engaging, and also intellectually astute. While there may be some controversy in his assessments of the thought and work of some of the many figures he outlines, Shorto is obviously well-read and thorough, and shows throughout that he is aware of the controversies that crop up in the history he recounts. Highly recommended for those who like intellectual history, pitched at a level that should appeal to a wide range of educated readers.

It is rare to find such an endeavor as Descartes Bones outside the space of academic research. Russell Shorto gives us a well documented dissertation of the end of pre-modern thinking through the real birth and evolution of modern scientific philosophy. Although most works are too heavy for the average reader, this fascinating little book can engage even the novice interest. This discussion is not so much about the life of Rene Descartes but of his death and how his influence had engaged a serious interest in who might enjoy the ownership of his bones.

Pre-modern philosophy saw life as a spiritual balance. Science was less of an independent examination and more of an homage to the works of God or gods. Rene Descartes was on the cusp between this pre-modern thought and the modern philosophies geared toward investigation separate from the constraints of religious teaching. This reader feels that Shorto was attempting to demonstrate in his description of the movement of the remains of Descartes post mortem a parallel between Descartes life and death. The continuous controversy over the burial of Descartes bones reflects the tension evolving from pre-modern to modern philosophy. Not only were his bones exhumed and moved but they were examined and measured along with the bones and brains of others in some of the original attempts to link body and mind. The tension over his bones was the result of his having opened the gates of thoughts and allowed the growth of intellectualism that others had wanted but feared.

Such was the socio-political atmosphere that nurtured the French Revolution. People saw themselves capable of greater things than servitude to a religious rule that they feared more than understood.

Russell Shorto steps outside the traditional philosophical discussion and provides a meaningful work that is available to a larger audience. Descartes Bones can be useful to to graduate seminar as well as the fireside chat. This book is highly recommended to anyone interested in the birth of Natural Philosophy as well as the philosophy of Science and Medicine.

I was having trouble deciding how to describe my experience of reading Russell Shorto's new history/philosophy book, Descartes' Bones, when I realized: that difficulty represents the experience itself. I found the book to be slippery. It was hard for me to focus on what I was reading, and yet I was interested enough to stop myself, when I realized I had just sped my eyes over a page without taking any of it in, and go back to read what I had missed when my attention wandered. Unfortunately, what often happened at that point was that my attention wandered again, and I had to repeat the process. I found myself re-reading the same page four or five times, on more than one occasion.

This is not a good sign. But then, when I think back on the book in order to summarize it, I can't pinpoint a specific problem. I like the author's writing, other than a few problems -- his attempts to inject a little modern humor were jarring, for instance, probably because the narrative is a touch pedantic and slow -- and I find the subject personally fascinating: Rene Descartes, the originator of Cogito, ergo sum and Cartesian dualism, which are the foundation of the modern era and the age of reason, along with all of the turmoil and conflict around Descartes' ideas of doubt and its resolution that have occupied so much of the last four hundred years. This is my meat and potatoes, my loaf of bread and jug of wine; I WANTED to read this book. So why couldn't I sink into it?

I think the answer is that Shorto chose the wrong focus. The story of Descartes' bones, while certainly far more interesting than the average tale of mortal remains after death, is not really an epic and inspiring tale. It is also not much of a metaphor for the schism between faith and reason to which Descartes was so integral, and which underlies so many of our modern problems and concerns. But Shorto tried very hard to make it so. Unfortunately, it didn't really work, no matter how much he wanted it to, and I wanted it to, and therein lies the problem.

It's too bad, really. The story of Descartes' bones should be perfect for bringing to life the history of the rise of Reason. Descartes himself was the single greatest influence on the separation of faith and reason, and on reason's rise to equal and then surpass faith as a source of knowledge; his bones passed through the possession of several other luminaries, including Alexandre Lenoir, the founder of the first Natural History museum, and two of the founders of neuroscience, Franz Gall and Pierre Broca. Descartes' proper place in history, and thus the proper handling of his remains, was a point of debate not only for the scientific community of France, but also of the republican governments of the French Revolution, and so Descartes' body has been reburied several times, displayed in several countries, and doubted and reconfirmed again and again since his death in 1650.

Sadly for me, as important a figure as Descartes was, the book does not go into much detail about his life -- certainly because the ground has already been well-tilled by previous authors. And while the men and women associated with Descartes' bones were related to the rise of reason and the struggle between reason and faith, they weren't really the most important figures in those events. So Shorto was forced to stray away from the line of the narrative again and again, in order to tell the history he was trying to cover, and then he was forced to cram and fold, spindle, and mutilate the historical character of the people involved with his narrative in order to make them fit in the history. For instance, the story begins with the fact that Descartes did not die in France, and so was not buried in his home country -- the decision to return his remains to France was the start of the controversies that would surround the bones for more than two centuries -- but the circumstances of his death and burial were not terribly momentous: he died of a fever he caught while visiting a friend in Sweden. The queen of Sweden, Christina, had wanted Descartes to join her court to act as a magnet for philosophers and scientists; had that happened, and the court of Sweden become a source of great new scientific discoveries, or great moments in the mind/body debate that Descartes was famed for, then it would have made this story better. But no: Christina and Descartes didn't get along, he died suddenly, and Christina abdicated her throne and converted to Catholicism. As interesting as her story is, it isn't terribly well connected to Descartes, and other than Christina, there was nothing in Sweden at the time that would relate to the conflict between reason and faith. And so it goes with the rest of the people involved in the tale. Lenoir and Broca, Gall and Georges Cuvier and everyone else that tried to put a finish on the wandering of Descartes' bones were interesting, but not the main players in the story I really wanted to hear, and which Shorto's prologue promised: the journey of Descartes' bones as a path through the landscape of the Enlightenment, as a key to unlocking the history of our current age's struggles between Reason and Faith.

In retrospect, I would have enjoyed this book more if I already knew the basic story. If I had already read a biography or two of Descartes, and if I knew the story of Spinoza and Kant and Hobbes and Locke, and Newton and Bacon and Leibniz and -- everything else that led to, and came from, the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, then this book would have made a nice confection on top of the meal. It's an interesting anecdote, but not enough of a history or a biography to serve the needs of this particular layman.

Using Decarte's bones as the medium of storytelling, Russel Shorto provides a fascinating study of Rene Descarte and his impact on history. His new way of thinking literally changed the way people thought in general and led the way to the modern world and to all the various conflicts that exist today between modernity and the past, particularly the conflict between faith and reason. Shorto takes us through this story by following the story of Decarte's remains - his skeleton and his skull, which were originally buried in Sweden but were ultimately translated back to his French homeland.

Shorto presents Descarte's revolutionary thinking during the early part of the 17th century, which led to the breaking away from the autorities at the time, both church and state, that basically set the framework from which man saw the world. By using his own reason, man would now begin the process of deconstructing and analyzing his own reality; by creating and apparent duality between mind an body, man would also begin the process of searching for answers from a scientific perspective, breaking down reality into its components parts, in an attempt to find ansers to how things work, rather than by relying solely on religious explanations. This new way of thinking would set in motion intellectual forces that would lead to democracy and advances in the sciences, while at the same time threatening the powers that be.

Decarte's Bones at times reads like a detective story, as Shorto explores the journey of the deceased's bones and what ultimately happened to them. It is also fascinating to read about how the great minds of the times came together at different moments for a variety of reasons - to discuss the authenticity of the bones, to debate Descarte's philosphy, and other matters - all as a result of Descarte's revolutionary view.

Objectively, Descartes is one of the few men in the history of humanity whose thinking reconfigured dramatically the course of history and to this day continues to have an impact. This book does justice to the man's impact and does so while drawing the reader into the heart of the times in which he lived and in which his legacy grew. If you love history in general or the history of thought and philosophy in particular, this book is highly recommended.

This review based upon an uncorrected proof.

In this little tour de force, Russell Shorto holds out for us the much traveled and sold skull of the great philosopher, Rene Descarte--with its many autographs and epithets, including a lofty poem in Latin scrawled on its crown--and succeeds brilliantly in drawing us into a whirlwind tour of four centuries of Western history and thought. What he shows is a world caught between "the tidal currents" of Cartesianism on the one hand--a worldview based on doubt, on questioning everything until one reaches the bedrock of fact--and Caresian Dualism on the other hand--the idea that our "souls" exist separately from the physical world. Shorto's most brilliant stroke is in using the skull of the philosopher itself as a symbol of this doctrinal tug of war between right and left, between sectarianism and orthodoxy, for each side has in some way tried to claim the work of the great philosopher as its own. The book follows the trail of Descartes bones across the landscape of Western Civilization.

As with Shorto's other works, the writing is brilliant and the insights keen. I have deducted a single star from the rating only because the metaphor of the skull seemed a tad stretched to me in the ending chapters. Nevertheless, this is among the best works of history I have read this year.

From the title's tagline, Descartes' Bones gives the impression that it will follow the history of the burning debate between science and reason by following the path of Descartes' body after death. Sadly, this interesting premise is not delivered.

Instead, Mr. Shorto gives a general, and often glossed over and angled to fit his story, overview of Descartes' life and philosophy. The author's attempts to bring in other historical characters and their perspectives to make the story more interesting, unfortunately did not add the spark needed to flesh out the unlively and sometimes confusing prose.

If one does choose to read Descartes' Bones, skip the preface and read it last; I was hard pressed to delve into the meat of the book after slogging through that bit. I give Mr. Shorto credit for a very appealing title, it sparked my interest, but it is a misrepresentation of the book as a whole.