Mr. Cogito

Descartes: An Intellectual Biography

by Stephen Gaukroger

(Oxford University Press, 499 pp., $35)

In the winter of 1619-20, Rene Descartes had a dream. In the midst of fever, thunderstorms and panic, phantoms appeared before the young scholar. Unable to beat them back, he felt shame and weakness in his right side. A window opened, and in terror he found himself borne away by a violent wind. Staggering to a chapel, he struggled to enter it. He failed. Some people passed by, one of them carrying a melon from a foreign land. He understood that an evil genius was trying to seduce him and fought to exorcise it. Sleep came, thunderclaps woke him again, and in the confusion he opened, shut and reopened his eyes--and found certainty.

Was he dreaming or awake? In another dream, Descartes opened a dictionary and book of poems, seeing this single line of Ausonius: Quod vitae sectabor iter? (What path in life shall I follow?) A man appeared and tried to make him read another Ausonian passage that began: "it is and is not." The book vanished, to be replaced by some portraits. Peace returned to the night. Descartes himself offered an analysis of his dreams. They were, in his view, philosophical allegories. The dictionary, he contended, represented the unity of the sciences, the coming together of philosophy and wisdom and, finally, God protecting him from the evil genius. Thunder was the sign of the spirit of truth, and the melon a sign of "the charms of solitude, but presented by purely human inducements."

In these dreams we can find bits and fragments of Descartes's philosophy: the struggle for certainty, the quest to defeat the evil genius of doubt and epistemic deception, the aspiration for a unity of knowledge and--perhaps most importantly--the grappling with faith. But we who live in an age of psychoanalytic interpretation are beckoned also by the prospect of other layers, "deeper" strata. And some 300 years after that tortured night, in 1929, a Descartes scholar was intrigued by the dreams and sent a paraphrase of them (from an early biographer who had seen Descartes's original and subsequently lost record of them) to Freud. He responded by picking out certain features, such as Descartes's partial, right-side weakness, as a sign of internal conflict. Freud speculated that the melon might "represent a sexual picture which occupied the lonely young man's imagination." Above all, he cautioned that this was a Traum von oben, a complex of ideas so highly structured that it might as well have come from the organized thoughts of waking life--whence their poetic and abstractly symbolic form. No doubt Descartes had done an exemplary job of parsing the dream from above; but in such dreams, Freud wrote, the few bits "about which the dreamer does not know what to say" are where the exploration of the unconscious must begin.

In writing a life of Descartes, Stephen Gaukroger is in a position not entirely dissimilar from Freud's. Absent the kind of detail needed to piece together the texture of Descartes's life, all that we have is Descartes's own record of his life-- a record at once poetic, abstract and symbolic. Gaukroger calls his work an "intellectual biography"; it is (to paraphrase Freud) a Biographie von oben. His story of Descartes is the story of a cluster of ideas located in an eclectic intellectual environment. We encounter the ins and outs of Descartes's exploration of theology, a myriad of sects, heresies and orthodoxies. There are the mathematical intricacies of Descartes's venture into geometrical optics, algebra and geometry; the complexities of sixteenthcentury music theory, the models and the metaphors that Descartes employed to explain physiology and physics. Throughout Gaukroger's book there is an abiding concern with the philosophical issues that emerge from, and motivate, these scientific explorations. This is a biography "from above," partly because Descartes did not leave the archival record to support a psychological or social-historical exploration, and partly because Gaukroger is really a historian of philosophy.

Despite his close attention to philosophical, religious and scientific ideas, there are moments in Gaukroger's book when the vivid Cartesian personality breaks out: in Descartes's attachment to his illegitimate daughter Francine born in 1635, in his fury at his adversaries. Descartes called Fermat, perhaps the greatest mathematician of his time, "shit," and Thomas Hobbes "extremely contemptible" for criticizing the Discours de la methode. The letters of the French mathematician and lawyer Jean Beaugrand were "toilet paper." On the whole, however, Gaukroger's book is not so much a personal portrait of Descartes as it is an extraordinary perambulation around the spiritual and intellectual life of the seventeenth century. It tells the tale of Descartes's recasting of the concerns of his contemporaries into a world that we find utterly familiar.

According to a widely held reading, Descartes was the quintessential mechanist, having conceived a clockwork world that functioned gear against gear, so to speak, without soul, center or divinity. That has made him a hero to some: Descartes as the first modern, the one who freed tradition from Aristotelean dogma and Church doctrine to create a rational universe that ran on nothing but natural law. For other philosophically inclined critics, especially in the twentieth century, Descartes has become the dreadful harbinger of a desanctified universe, where a utilitarian rationality rules, and the ethical-physical cosmos gives way to empty void, and humanity is left to fend for itself on an insignificant speck shoved this way or that somewhere in infinite space. Still others argue that Descartes's framing of the mind-body division (of what Gilbert Ryle called, in his famous attack on Cartesianism, "the ghost in the machine"), his contributions to the establishment of subjectivity and the problematic correlation of God, the individual and nature, are still living issues for philosophy.

Within the history of science, assessments of Descartes are just as contradictory. On one side stands Descartes the hero of science: originator of the modern scientific method, creator of a naturalistic account of cosmogenesis, reformer of algebra, master of geometrical optics, avid Copernican and principal advocate of an anti-Aristotelean corpuscular materialism. On the other side broods Descartes the obscurantist, the system- building metaphysician reviled, especially by the British natural philosophical tradition. This is the Descartes whose intellectual offspring (so the accusation goes) misguidedly and stubbornly refused the mathematicalphysical wisdom of Newton, the Descartes who speculated idly about natural phenomena instead of experimenting methodically.

Identified (ambivalently) by Edmund Husserl and the phenomenological tradition as the creator of modern philosophy, admired by Noam Chomsky for his account of a mind rich with innate capacity to structure ideas, Descartes remains even today a central figure in semiotics, literary theory and epistemology. Everywhere one turns in philosophy and its cognate fields, there is Descartes. His works remain the touchstone for instruction in " modern philosophy": Descartes is taught as having launched the rationalism of Spinoza and Leibniz and the empiricism of Locke, Berkeley and Hume. How, Descartes persistently asked, can we be sure that what is in our minds is also in the world? That fundamental epistemological question still launches debates at the end of the twentieth century.

But if it is impossible to avoid Descartes, it is equally difficult to reconstruct him. Aside from the difficulties inherent in grappling with 350 years of Cartesian scholarship, a biographer of Descartes faces a task far different from that of tracking the life of a statesman, a scientist or a writer. The problem is not a paucity of sources--Descartes wrote letters prolifically and received enthusiastic responses from a wide variety of his correspondents. One interlocutor, Father Marin Mersenne, in his moments of maximal philosophical enthusiasm, would post two or three letters a day. Nor is it a problem of locating the material; decades ago Charles Adam and Paul Tannery prepared an eleven-volume edition of Descartes's complete works, binding together letters, manuscripts and published works.

The problem for an intellectual biography of Descartes is to devise an organizing principle that structures all this material. Gaukroger does have such an organizing principle. It is somewhat obscured in first 290 pages, but I find it fascinating. It is easily stated. Gaukroger believes that the condemnation of Galileo in 1633 split Descartes's life in two. The younger Descartes looked outward, hoping to explain how the world functioned. What shaped and tinted the rainbows? What made comets fly? What made blood course through the veins? The older Descartes looked inward, seeking certainty and the constitution of selfhood.

In the first half of his life, there is Descartes's "scientific" work, which I trap in quotation marks because the twentieth-century notion of science fits badly into the early seventeenth-century conception of knowledge. It was during this period before 1633 that Descartes left his most original contributions to natural philosophy. Among them was his discovery of the law of refraction, spelling out, in precise quantitative form, how rays of light are bent when they pass from one medium to another, as from air to the glass of a lens. Of even greater significance were his mathematical explorations, in which he solved problems that had stymied the ancient geometers. These were victories that left Descartes ever more confident that he was in possession of a method that would provide a royal road to knowledge.

And still a third set of inquiries re-examined the very meaning of algebraic expressions. Until Descartes, the quantity x that appeared in mathematical expressions was interpreted as a line length, x2 as an area, and x3 as a volume. Equations with terms exponentiated beyond cubes were simply unintelligible, as they corresponded to no imaginable geometrical form. By reinterpreting these terms as ratios--x4 through the ratio x4/x3 = x, for example--Descartes lifted higher-order algebraic quantities out of physical interpretation and made it possible to contemplate quartic, quintic, or any higher-order equations without fear of uttering nonsense.

Descartes's discoveries were epoch-making. They inaugurated new directions in natural philosophy by offering clarity about the kind of objects that there were. But nothing he had done--so Descartes believed--compared with the work he immodestly titled Le Monde (finished in 1632, suppressed until the 1660s). If his foundational work in algebra reduced exponentiated variables to simple extension, his corpuscular account of nature was designed to do the same for the physical world in all its apparent diversity. Le Monde began as an exploration of a specific physical problem, then rapidly expanded to become a model of the universe as a whole with all the living forms and the inert forms within it.

Populated by "particles" of different sizes that slid past one another, Descartes's universe was a plenum whose parts were in ceaseless motion. In this universe, there were only two things to describe: extension and motion. Beyond this distinction between extension and motion, there were no further distinctions to be made (other than microphysical shape) between one substance (say, gold) and another substance (say, lead). Though any physical metaphor is inadequate to capture Descartes's matter-and-motion universe, one might imagine oneself immersed in an infinite and pure sea populated with nothing but water and frozen chunks of water variously sized and shaped. In such a waterworld, everything would be explained in terms of the extension of these rigid frozen bits of water, and their encounter with diverse vortical and shearing motions of the water itself.

The Aristoteleans posited qualities of hot and cold, hard and soft, moist and dry, transparent and opaque, and many more such dyadic pairs; but Descartes would have none of them. Hot was only the motion of parts, cold was only the absence of such motion. Fire was not the fundamental entity it had been in ancient cosmologies; combustion was merely the violent dissociation of objects through the displacement of their parts. Stones, plants, air, fire, water, earth, rainbows, even the "perfect" objects above the moon (planets, stars and the like), would be nothing but different structures within the plenum. The solar system itself was simply a whirlpool in the plenum, and gravity was the inward driving power of the vortices. Heavy objects were those that resisted the inward pull of whirlpool motion, while light objects were simply those porous to the maelstrom flow. According to Descartes, we on earth are not alone in this predictable, mechanical universe: the reaches of space are populated with other such whirlpools with other suns and other planets. (Comets were orbs thrown between different whirlpool solar systems.)

Copernicus himself held nothing so radical as Descartes's infinite, un- centered universe. The Copernican cosmos was famously supposed to spread its planets and stars across a world much larger than the diameter Ptolemy had supposed (and Copernicus's world was, of course, sun-centered). Still, Copernicus had "our" solar system squarely located at the center of a finite cosmos. And Galileo, too, shied away from effacing the dichotomy of the corruptible sublunary sphere in which we and all living things exist, and an unchanging superlunary sphere that would always return to its previous, perfect and unaltered form. But Descartes's science of matter and motion went further. In the second half of Le Monde, called "L'Homme," he put forward a fictitious world, mightily resembling our own, in which the human body worked as a superb automaton. Nerves functioned by transporting pressure, and sight became the isomorphic transport of pressures on the exterior of the eye, back through tubules, until consciousness arose as the sequence of pressures arrived at the pineal gland.

Cosmologically and physiologically, Descartes's world was a stunning accomplishment, infinite in its scope of explanation. It was also doubly dangerous: it was Church-defyingly Copernican and, insofar as the human body functioned "like ours" but automatically, it was without soul. Like the world he described, his ambition was limitless: from the inner recesses of thought in imagination and ratiocination to the earth and infinite heavens, the Cartesian project promised an understanding of everything--and since everything came down to extension and motion, precise quantitative analysis. It was, as Husserl said, the first, portentous articulation of "omniscience."

In November 1633 the master treatise was nearing completion. Descartes paused to write Father Mersenne, his friend and philosophical ally, that he had been book hunting in Leiden and Amsterdam for Galileo's latest work, the Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems. He continued, in a stunned tone: "I was told that it had indeed been published, but that all copies had been burned at Rome, and that Galileo had been convicted and fined. I was so surprised by this that I nearly decided to burn all my papers, or at least let no one see them. For I couldn't imagine that he--an Italian and, I believe, in favor with the Pope--could have been made a criminal, just because he tried, as he certainly did, to establish that the earth moves." If the earth didn't move, Descartes went on, then his whole philosophy would collapse. "But for all that, I wouldn't want to publish a discourse which had a single word that the Church disapproved of; so I prefer to suppress it rather than publish it in a mutilated form."

At this point in the story, many interpreters have looked away in disgust. Galileo, after all, stood his ground against the Church. Why not Descartes? There was no Brechtian drama in the story of Descartes, as he hurriedly packed off his Copernican treatise into oblivion. How could Descartes, the pioneer, the creator of modern philosophy and science, have lost his nerve at this crucial moment? How could the towering genius of the modern spirit of rationality have backed down in the face of ecclesiastical doctrine, especially when Descartes was himself ensconced in safe, Protestant Holland? Wasn't the effectively atheistic Descartes merely capitulating to power, delivered ex cathedra?

It is precisely here, in the collision of theology, philosophy, history and science, that Gaukroger is at his best. He explains that atheism in 1625 was not the belief in an untrammeled materialism, but a term of abuse with many connotations. There were atheists accused of believing that God's existence cannot be demonstrated through reason; there were atheists who subscribed to determinism; there were atheists who claimed that God's omnipotence was necessarily limited through His being enmeshed in the finite world. Not one among these atheists, and certainly not Descartes, pressed for a materialist and godless world.

Still, it was a turbulent time for Descartes, when everything was up for grabs in his intellectual circle, from the nature of God to the senses, skepticism and natural law. Debates rebounded from intellectual life to politics and back. Lucilio Vanini was burned at the stake for heresy in Toulouse; three speakers arguing against Aristotle were exiled for assembling a meeting to criticize chemical, alchemical and atomist theses. In such times, the Parisian authorities saw an unbroken link between heterodoxy and disorder. But the strictures of the premodern thought police were not absolute. At the same time that Parisians witnessed the neo-Aristotelean crackdown, various kinds of libertinage prospered: unorthodox thought, Machiavellianism, deism, debauchery. And there were the erudite libertines of the court who explored radical political, theological and scientific matters while clamoring for public order.

Reading Gaukroger, one begins to appreciate the intellectual tightrope that Descartes walked in forging a new understanding of mind, body and God. Far from sketching an unreligious Descartes acquitting himself with merely verbal acquiescence to the Church, Gaukroger's protagonist embraces a God so unknowable as to be beyond imagination. For Descartes, God was bound neither by the truths of the empirical world nor by the truths of mathematics. Indeed, the problem for Descartes was not that God is so weak, so pantheistic in conception, that He does not interfere in natural law. It was quite the reverse: God is so powerful and unknowable that He could have made all our beliefs false. That the Church, led by people of faith, could have condemned Galileo for his Copernicanism was not, for Descartes, simply an intervention of raw power. The Church's condemnation indicated to Descartes that he urgently needed to find some certainty about the basis of human knowledge.

According to Gaukroger, Galileo's condemnation brought these issues front and center to Descartes. If he was to continue in natural philosophy, it would have to be by confronting the "hyperbolic doubt" engendered by our inadequacy before the transcendental God. As Gaukroger puts it: "provided one's doubt is sufficiently radical, there is nothing that cannot be doubted, except that one is doubting, and this requires that there be something which exists that is doing the doubting." The building of systems--in the direction of mechanical explanations of phenomena of the body, the brain and the physical world--would have to be set aside for now, while a metaphysical foundation for such systems was established. The quest for certainty was on.

Just months after news of the Galileo catastrophe reached him, Descartes began composing his Discours de la methode. In one of the best-known passages in the history of philosophy, he hammered at each and every claim to certainty that we might possess. Our senses deceive us, we fail to uncover errors in argumentation, bad reasoning even slides into geometrical proofs. Away then, he says, with all these arguments. Better grounding must be elsewhere. Even our awareness of the world is threatened (as in his dream fifteen years earlier), since we may be dreaming while thinking we are awake. The one reed left standing was that "the truth I am thinking, therefore I exist' was so firm and sure that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were incapable of shaking it, I decided that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking." In this world of all-consuming doubt, only the fact of doubting was secure, and it, of all things, provided the firm foundation for certain knowledge. From the presence of this thinking subject, Descartes deduced that God must exist as well, reasoning as follows. Descartes could see that he was not perfect, for it is manifestly better to know than to doubt--and he could only be certain of his doubts. Yet he could form an idea of a perfect (knowing) being. What could be the origin of his idea of perfection? Such an idea could come only from God. So God exists.

The Meditationes de prima philosophia, which was published in 1641, took this issue much further, drawing the cogito argument into a contemplative journey through self-doubt into a rebirth of certainty. But, as Gaukroger rightly points out, those who view Descartes's cogito as no more than a more extreme instance of classical skepticism have missed the point. Descartes is not after the possibility that the world is rife with wrong opinions and that we can't distinguish between them. He is after bigger quarry, the bedrock of fundamental relations between mind, God and world.

By posing the question in terms of the relation between thinking subject, deity and external world, Descartes made a purely epistemological question (about our knowledge) into one that is at root metaphysical (about the nature of mind, God and world). He articulated a notion of subjectivity (borrowed in part from Montaigne) and a notion of an external world. These notions are so absolutely constitutive of our own self-conception that it is hard to recreate the novelty of the problem. But the yawning, painfully unbridgeable gap between mind and matter has remained with us as a problem, a legacy of Descartes's adventure.

And Descartes knew just how confounding the gap was. In 1643, the 25-year- old Princess Elizabeth, daughter of Frederick, King of Bohemia and Elector Palatine, began a powerful correspondence that seems to have captured Descartes's heart and soul. Having read Descartes's cautious exposition of his views after he suppressed Le Monde, she was well aware of his system of corpuscles that were to account for the world around us. How, she asked in her first letter, could Descartes's system of mechanical corpuscles pressing on the pineal gland (the part of the brain that Descartes promoted into the seat of consciousness) interact with the immateriality of mind?

Launched into the thick of the problem, Descartes began his last great metaphysical foray into the Les Passions de l'Ame, developing in the course of this work the view that there was, metaphysically, a halfway house between the abode of the mind and that of the body. It was a difficult, often contradictory venture, this admixture of mind and body, a halting, intriguing, ultimately unsuccessful solution. As far I can see, however, despite periodic protestations to the contrary, we are not one millimeter closer to finding a "solution" to the mind-body question as Descartes posed it than we were four centuries ago. The Passions bring us to the conclusion of the intellectual trajectory of Descartes's life--a fitting attempt to repair the rupture that he had opened between self and world, between mind and body. The narrative of Descartes's intellectual contribution closes, but the biographical project raises questions that are not so easily concluded.

Recall the tortured dreams of 1619. They raise a fascinating and probably intractable problem about the enterprise of writing a biography of Descartes. Gaukroger, of course, knows these dreams, and after reporting on Freud's interpretation (which he modifies in some interesting ways) he concludes with a cluster of suggestions: the dreams and the mental state that preceded them could have been a migraine. Or perhaps the state is better understood as a state of melancholia or tristesse, "fashionable medical condition s in the seventeenth century." Or, Gaukroger's favorite reading: "One possibility is that Descartes suffered a nervous breakdown, recovered from it, and rationalized his recovery in terms of a great discovery. I think this is probably close to the truth." (The particular "great discovery" was Descartes's venture into the articulation of a generalized method for reasoning, developed in his Regulae ad directionem ingenii over the next few years.)

Such psychological, quasi-Freudian language (as in "nervous breakdown") comes easily to Gaukroger. Another example occurs after Descartes's sudden rupture with his old teacher, Isaac Beeckman, where Gaukroger writes: "it is possible that his reaction to Beeckman may be overdetermined by his relation to his father." In another place he describes the Passions as a form of " psychotherapy." Though interventions of this kind occupy a relatively small part of his text, I take them to be a crucial part of Gaukroger's method. Indeed, he has chosen as the epigram for his biography Nietzsche's words from Beyond Good and Evil: "Every great philosophy has so far been the self- confession of its originator, a kind of unintentional, unconscious memoires."

Any biography written in the twentieth century, of course, must confront the psychological dimension of its subject. Notions of the unconscious and its modes of expression are no longer "theories"; they are thoroughly interwoven with our sense of individuality and subjectivity. And that is precisely the problem. Descartes's lifework was the creation of the category of subjectivity, of the radical and unresolvable difference between "the world" and "the world for us." What does it mean in such a case to talk about a "nervous breakdown," and projections of the father relation, and the rationalization of unconscious tensions? One can, of course, simply take the categories of self elaborated through psychoanalysis as true for all peoples and all times and apply these categories to Descartes to displace his own confused or merely rationalizing tendencies. Another approach, infinitely more difficult, would be to take seriously Descartes's and his contemporaries' construction of the notion of self in a society in which the category did not previously exist (or existed in a very different form).

The historian Norbert Elias famously tracked the slow rise of conditioned habits that transformed European rules of comportment from matters of respect toward others to an internalized sense of shame, fear or guilt experienced even in solitude. Out of this transformation (he argued) came the "modern" conception of self so fully articulated in the psychoanalytic account of human nature. The most difficult and important task facing the historian- philosopher, I think, is to take this historicity of the "self" seriously. And when one takes the historicity of the "self" seriously, a fundamental tension emerges. On the one side, the very genre of twentieth-century biography demands an "inner" or "depth" reading of text, as in Nietzsche's notion of philosophy as confession. On the other side, we have here a subject, Descartes, located in late Renaissance Europe, in whose work the very possibility of such a "depth" reading is precisely that which is in formation. The Biographie von oben pushes Gaukroger to a Biographie von unten; but there is something inherently unstable about such a project, focused, as it is, on a history of the separation between oben and unten.

Still, Gaukroger has written an extraordinary book. It is a never-ending source of astonishment that Descartes can still be so absolutely strange and so absolutely familiar. There is the Descartes who argued that magnetism be best understood as tiny screws whirling through space, or who insisted that the lowly pineal gland was the seat of the mind, or who posited a universe of whirlpools set in motion by an unknowable God; and there is the Descartes whose notions of certainty, of mind against matter, and of human subjectivity are as familiar as the face in the mirror. Gaukroger has united the strange and the familiar in Descartes, teaching us something fundamental about the early conception of our world.

Peter Galison is Mallinckrodt Professor of History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. He is author of How Experiments End (University of Chicago Press) and Image and Logic (forthcoming from University of Chicago Press).