Descartes: Philosophy in an Hour. Paul Strathern

despite carrying off all the prizes, Descartes retained a deep ambivalence toward his education. It seemed to him to be largely rubbish: rehashed Aristotle encrusted with centuries of interpretations; the stifling theology of Aquinas which had answers for everything but answered nothing; a morass of metaphysics. Nothing he learned appeared to have any certainty whatsoever, apart from mathematics. And in a life devoid of the certainties of home, family, and meaningful social contact, Descartes craved certainty in the only realm in which he felt at home: the intellect. He left school disappointed. Like Socrates before him, he was convinced he knew nothing. Even mathematics was only capable of providing impersonal certainty. The only other certainty he knew was God.

      When Descartes left La Flèche at eighteen, his father sent him to study law at the University of Poitiers. Joachim Descartes intended René to take up a respected position in the legal profession, just as his elder brother had done. In those days such positions were filled largely by nepotism, a system that succeeded in producing approximately the same percentage of ludicrous and inadequate judges as today. But after spending two years studying the law, Descartes decided he had had enough of it. By this time he had come into possession of a number of small rural properties inherited from his mother. These gave him a modest income, enough to live as he pleased. So he decided to set off for Paris ‘to pursue his thoughts’. Judge Joachim was not pleased – the Descarteses were gentlemen and weren’t expected to spend their time thinking. But there was nothing he could do about it: his son was now a free man.

      After two years Descartes tired of his well-heeled bachelor existence in Paris. Despite devoting himself to a wide range of studies and composing a number of rather dilettantish treatises, he was becoming more and more involved in the social life of the capital, which he found utterly tedious. He withdrew to a quiet address in the Faubourg St. Germain, where no one went visiting, and lived in seclusion while pursuing his thoughts in peace.

      This was to be Descartes’s favored way of life throughout the rest of his years. Yet after settling down for a few months, he suddenly bolted. He seems to have been driven by two finely balanced obsessions: solitude and travel. Never having felt close to his fellow men, he had no wish to live in their company. And never having had a real home, he felt no desire to create one for himself. He was forever restless and solitary.

      This makes Descartes’s next move seem all the more extraordinary: he decided to join the army. In 1618 he went to Holland and signed on as an unpaid officer in the army of the Prince of Orange. The prince’s Protestant army was preparing to defend the United Provinces of the Netherlands against the Catholic Spanish, who sought to retake their former colony. What the Dutch made of this aloof Catholic gentleman with no military experience, who professed to have done a bit of fencing and riding at school, is difficult to judge. At the time Descartes spoke no Dutch and stuck resolutely to his routine of rising at noon. Perhaps they just didn’t notice him as he sat in his tent composing a treatise on music or some such. (Nowadays he would presumably be accused of being a spy; but in those days the military appear to have correctly gauged the importance of spies and were willing to sign on any recruits, regardless of nationality, allegiance, or even willingness to participate in military routine).

      We do know that Descartes found himself bored by life in the army; in his view there was ‘too much idleness and dissipation’. Does this mean there were officers who arose even later than he did?

      One afternoon, while strolling through the streets of Breda, Descartes noticed a poster being stuck up on a wall. In the manner of the time it outlined an unsolved mathematical problem and challenged all comers to solve it. Descartes didn’t quite understand the instructions (they were, after all, in Dutch). He turned to the Dutch gentleman standing beside him and asked if he could kindly translate. The Dutchman was unimpressed by this ignorant young French officer. He replied that he would translate the poster only if the Frenchman were willing to try to solve the problem and bring him his solution. The following afternoon the young French officer arrived at the Dutchman’s house, where to the Dutchman’s surprise he found that the officer had not only solved the problem but had done so in exceptionally brilliant fashion.

      According to Descartes’s first biographer, Baillet, this was how Descartes met Isaac Beeckman, the renowned Dutch philosopher and mathematician. The two were to remain close friends, corresponding regularly for the next two decades (with a few brief interruptions when they disagreed). ‘I was asleep until you wakened me’, Descartes was to write to Beeckman. It was he who revived Descartes’s interest in mathematics and philosophy, which had lain dormant since he had left La Flèche.

      After a year or so in the Dutch army, Descartes set off on a summer tour of Germany and the Baltic. He then decided to try another spell of army life and journeyed to the small town of Neuburg in southern Germany, where the army of Maximilian Duke of Bavaria was camped in its winter quarters on the upper reaches of the Danube. Army life here appears to have been as strenuous as ever for Descartes, who describes how he took up residence in fine warm quarters, persisted in his habit of sleeping ten hours a night and rising at noon, and spent his waking hours ‘communing with my own thoughts’.

      The political situation in Europe was now becoming serious, though it’s difficult to deduce this from Descartes’s attitude. The Bavarians had gone to war against Frederick V, the elector palatinate and Protestant king of Bohemia. The entire continent was rapidly sliding into the long and disastrous conflict that came to be known as the Thirty Years War. This war, with its ever-changing fortunes affecting countries from Sweden to Italy, was to continue until virtually the end of Descartes’s life, leaving large areas of Europe, especially in Germany, devastated and deserted. Yet the effect of this war on Descartes, even when he was in the army, appears to have been minimal. Still, one can’t help suspecting that this persistent background of political uncertainty, together with Descartes’s own psychological uncertainties, somehow contributed to the deep internal need for certainty that was to characterize his entire philosophy.

      Meanwhile the Bavarian winter set in, and soon the snow lay round about deep and crisp and even. Descartes found it so cold he claims that he took to living in a stove – a subject of much debate. Some claim that Descartes really meant a well-heated room, others that he meant something more like a sauna. But Descartes uses the French word poêle, which unquestionably means a stove.

      One day while sitting in his stove, Descartes had a vision. It’s not clear precisely what he saw under these rather steamed-up circumstances, but it seems that this vision contained a mathematical picture of the world. This convinced Descartes that the workings of the entire universe could be discovered by the application of some universal mathematical science. That night when Descartes went to sleep he had three vivid dreams. In the first he found himself struggling against an overpowering wind, trying to make his way down the street toward the church at his old college in La Flèche. At one point he turns to greet someone, and the wind flings him against the church wall. Then, from the middle of the courtyard, someone calls to him that a friend of his has a melon which he wants to give him.

      In the next dream Descartes is overcome with terror and hears ‘a noise like a crack of lightning’, after which the darkness of his room is filled with a myriad of sparks. The last dream is less clear: in the course of this he sees a dictionary and a book of poetry on his desk. This is followed by a number of the usual inconsequential and highly symbolic happenings that never fail to delight the dreamer and bore his listener. Descartes then decides (in his dream) to interpret these happenings. This might have given us a deep insight into Descartes’s understanding of himself, but unfortunately his biographer Baillet becomes rather garbled at this point.

      The events of that winter day and the following night (November 11, 1619) were to have a profound and lasting effect upon Descartes. He believed that this vision and the ensuing dreams had revealed to him his God-given vocation. They were to give him a much-needed confidence in his calling as well as in the correctness of its findings that was not always backed by argument. But for this experience, the brilliant dilettante might never have realized his vocation. It is ironic that Descartes, the great rationalist, should have found his inspiration in a mystical vision and highly irrational dreams. This element in Descartes’s thinking is often overlooked in French lycées, where the great Gallic hero and hypnophile is held up as a rationalist exemplar.

      Descartes’s