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Descartes: His Life and Thought

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This isn't a bad book, exactly, just a nearly unreadable one--at least for a public prepared for a coherent general picture of Descartes. Its intended audience seems to be the small band of Descartes biographers over the centuries, whom the author takes to task, now one, now another, on this matter and that--on this interpretation of such and such a biographical artifact, or on that reading of a chronology implied by these letters or that diary entry. The book reads, in fact, less like a biography than a sort of catalogue raisonee of all the things still extant that bear Descartes' fingerprint.

There are, nevertheless, some interesting things that emerge from this constant professional cavilling. Despite the fact that Pascal is usually seen as in some sense the polar opposite of Descartes, at points in his philosophical apprenticeship Descartes appears to have experienced something very like Pascal's nuit de feu (an ecstatic, visionary experience that shaped his subsequent career in Christian apologetics). Descartes, too, it seems, carried around with him something like a sketchy account of a dream-experience that pointed out the path his life should take, namely that of subjection to a capital-T Truth. Odd that a career devoted to strictest rationality should have such an experience at its origins.

Genevieve Rodis-Lew is Professor Emerita at the Sorbonne and has written a splendid biography on the life and thought of a major and influential 17th Century European philosopher. Ably translated into English by Jane Marie Todd, Descartes is vividly presented in the context of his time. Drawing upon his own correspondence, Rodis-Lewis traces his disillusion with the Jesuit scholastic method and his attraction mathematics and then to metaphysics. Descartes emerges for the modern reader as a complete and complex man, so much more than a mere footnote in the history of science or the evolution of western philosophical traditions.