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Descartes

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Grayling's account of the life of Descartes is an engaging and accessible read. If anything, it is a little too short and light, and left me wanting more. As a professional philosopher, Grayling is well placed to treat of Descartes' contribution to Western thought, but he eschews deep technical analysis in favour of true biography - an account of the events of Descartes' outward life. An interesting life it appears to have been, as well. Set against the events of the Reformation and the 30 Years' War, Grayling makes the intriguing suggestion that Descartes, Jesuit-educated and a Catholic to the end, was for part of his life travelling as a Jesuit spy. This is not as dramatic as it may sound, as any multilingual and educated person of the time might have been called upon to provide intelligence about countries he passed through at the time. Descartes was certainly involved with the military and present at the Battle of White Mountain, very roughly contemporaneous with the Defenestration. At any rate, the question adds an air of mystery and adventure which engages the reader's attention.

This was an interesting review of the legacy of a thinker whose name I knew well while studying sciences at school and university. I found it useful to be reminded all these years later of the range of his contributions. Reading Damasio on cognition I had come to focus on Descartes' name as the heuristic for an error - Cartesian Dualism, the long-discredited notion that the mind and the body are of different stuff, one mechanistic and the other a ghost, or "soul", in the mechanism. Of course, his contribution to our thought was greater by far and he is one of the pivotal philosophers and mathematicians of early modernity. Not for nothing do we plot most of our graphs using "Cartesian" coordinates. Without Descartes' approach of reducing our reasoning to only that which absolutely cannot be doubted - "Cogito ergo sum" - could the modern conception of scepticism, or even the Scientific Revolution itself, have taken the shape they did? Perhaps the idea was in the air and would have emerged anyway, but it was Descartes who formalised and published it. Could the idea of understanding reality only in terms of naturalistic processes have been wrested from the grip of the religious establishment without him? In the context of the Reformation, perhaps this was inevitable, but it was Descartes who formulated the idea so as not to threaten orthodoxy and provoke a backlash. (Ironically, given the outcome.) He is one of the architects of the modern mind.

Descartes life took him to all the key countries of Reformation Europe save Spain and Poland, as far as I can ascertain. He lived for some time on what must have seemed enemy territory, in Reformed Amsterdam. As a result of his sympathies, probably, he avoided his native France for much of his life, perhaps exiled as a persona non grata. At the end, his great works behind him and on the search for royal preferment, he travelled to Sweden and the court of Christina. There, in unaccustomed cold and required to rise at 5 AM in contradiction of his lifetime habits, he caught a fever and died at the all-too-young age of 54. Christina converted to Catholicism and abdicated soon after, possibly a last legacy of the great thinker.

Grayling is sufficiently sympathetic to convey sorrow at this end to a life of achievements, but does not elide Descartes' somewhat difficult character. I appreciated his balance here, as it is tempting for a biographer to become partisan and Grayling adroitly evades this trap. Descartes was quick to take offence at differences of opinion and seems to have been a bitter and rather vindictive party to such disputes. One might choose to offer him some slack on account of his genius, but this aspect of his character cannot be denied. It is a flaw, and not a particularly humanising one. Grayling simply gives an account of the exchanges and makes no apology.

All in all, this was a great life and Graylings is a fine introduction. Quickly and easily readable and quite non-technical, with a hint of the mystery novel about it.

In his preface, Grayling states that he is working from a different premise than previous biographers and hopes to dispel some of the 'myths' and 'misconceptions' that have grown up around Descartes over the years. He also, with great humility, introduces his own 'educated guess' as to how Descartes (who was of modest financial birth) able to travel so much in the first half of his life. To my mind he has done both rather well and most if not all his speculations are wrapped in 'apologia' should they become known to be false.

Descartes it seems was never as great a man as he wanted or claimed to be. This is unfortunate because he did manage to leave some concepts that are relevant for study even in the 21st century. His writings aside (well somewhat), Descartes must have been a man who was haunted by his own demons, he wrote so much so much in his letters how he did not want or need honors, but then let this need cause his death. Had he stayed in Holland and put aside this need, he could easily have lived another ten years. Though like most great thinkers he did most of his 'good' works before he was forty (though he published his first book at forty-one), his publications was mostly rehashes of ideas he had during his twenties and thirties and only wrote further elaborations. His science and mathematical ideas had stopped when he took up philosophy, more because he felt that that was where his true future lie rather than in another area.

That a man who was so smart and insightful was unable to see his own weaknesses is sad in its' own right. The fear engendered in him by his own religion (as expressed in his overwhelming dread of the inquisition) seems to me to be almost an oxymoron. How can one believe in a religion that makes you fearful of how you live your life and express your views. This is more the decision of some one who doesn't think for themselves but is manipulated by the thoughts of others. It is a quandary, but isn't that the 'stuff' of philosophy?

Zeb Kantrowitz