He thought, therefore modern philosophy is

Cogito, Ergo Sum

The Life of Rene Descartes

Richard Watson

David R. Godine: 376 pp., $35

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The lives of philosophers seldom make compelling reading. Can you think of a “drop everything, must buy now” biography of Hegel? Wittgenstein? Newton? The life of a mind when its thoughts are published can change the world, but it is very hard to make such a life into a must-read. There are few hard acts to follow if you are attempting, as Richard Watson does, to write a lively, pugnacious and clear account of a philosophical life, in this case that of Rene Descartes. Widely regarded as the founder of modern philosophy, Descartes deserves the appellation. He grounded modern thinking on the ability of the human mind to think clearly and distinctly, and he was the first philosopher to see that the new science of Copernicus and Galileo required a radical reordering of our understanding of physical nature simply around the concepts of matter and motion. During his lifetime and after his death in 1650, he was accused of materialism and atheism and, almost as bad, of consorting with Protestants. The other philosophical giant of the 17th century, Isaac Newton, thought that Descartes’ philosophy led straight to atheism and was at pains to hide the enormous debt he owed to Descartes’ mechanistic understanding of nature and his mathematics.

While Watson, an accomplished scholar of Cartesianism, has few competitors for the prize of writing a really interesting life of a classic philosopher, he has one big obstacle in his way: Descartes himself. There are huge gaps in the knowable life of Descartes: He tried to conceal his whereabouts for years, vital manuscripts are lost, previous biographers in a less precise age made up stories to keep the narrative flowing and partisans, particularly of the Roman Catholic persuasion, have labored hard to lay Descartes in the Procrustean bed of Baroque Catholicism and its hostile stance toward all competitors. He is said to have been a great friend of the heresy hunter Cardinal Pierre de Berulle, who watched with glee as Louis XIII’s army starved into submission the Protestants of La Rochelle. Some even claim that Descartes went approvingly to watch the siege and see the massive fortifications. Shortly thereafter, and inconveniently for those who want Descartes to be a loyal son of the church, he left France and lived for 20 years in the majority Protestant Dutch Republic. There he resided for a time in common law with a Dutch Protestant woman, with whom he had a daughter who died young.

Making the matter of his religious beliefs even more complex, Descartes played his cards very close to his chest. He published his major works, most famously “The Discourse on Method” (1637), in the Dutch Republic, where, to paraphrase him, men got on with their business and left him to think as he pleased. While living as a Catholic, Descartes probably cared little about a person’s creed provided he or she shared a life of the mind compatible with clear thinking and the search for nature’s laws. At least that is what he told Queen Christina of Sweden, to whom he became a tutor. Always in somewhat fragile health, Descartes met his demise in the coldness of a Swedish winter. When he died, he was recognized as having built the most compelling case for seeing nature as a mechanism and for accepting that the Earth was just like any other body, at motion and held in place by the direct pressure of other matter in the universe. For Descartes, no motion could occur without contact action between bodies. In 1687, Newton would prove that universal gravitation operated as a force in a vacuum and not in the filled Cartesian universe, but that is another story. Both men knew that scholasticism had to be replaced and, within a century after Descartes’ death, that had largely happened in countries without an Inquisition.

However discreet about his address and private life, behind the scenes Descartes sought out followers, particularly in the Dutch Republic. By the 1640s, Utrecht, among other places, was the site of a bitter contest between Cartesians and Aristotelians. We know that the former won because we too see nature as composed of atoms and as mathematically knowable. The followers of Aristotle, known as schoolmen or scholastics, thought that immaterial forms, such as the soul in human beings, and not contact action between bodies shaped nature and that these forms carried with them “tendencies,” that is, bodies fell to the ground because it was in their nature to seek out that which was heavier. It is not hard to see how people who thought about nature in such a way also imagined kings and nobles as possessing an inherently different form of nature. The defeat of scholasticism by the new science of the 17th century -- and no figure is more important in that story than Descartes -- laid down the metaphysical foundations for democratic thought. That had not been Descartes’ intention. He thought that he was laying the metaphysical foundations for certainty, as Watson rightly observes. Either way, Cartesianism was mighty subversive, and perhaps Descartes’ close card-playing and general discretion signal that he knew the stakes.

Faced with a life of which at times nothing is known, Watson ad-libs and fills. With Descartes in remote Friesland, where Watson and his wife briefly settled, Watson treats us to stories about Dutch candies and weather. The first can be quite interesting; the second is often atrocious. We are introduced to Watson’s wife, Pat, and her apt questions or comments. In pursuit of his hero in Sweden, Watson tells us how he found the weather there and about the various original manuscripts badly transcribed by previous editors. Part of the charm of this book lies in the many tangential stories it tells and the partisanship with which Watson has approached his subject. The book in many ways is as much about Watson as it is about Descartes. At times Watson’s sum in his cogito gets in the way. To have a feel for his rhetoric, Watson’s dismissal of the story of Cardinal Berulle and Descartes is best left in his own words: “The members of the Saint Descartes Protection Society began to refer to Cardinal Berulle as Descartes’ director of conscience. That genocidal maniac (and I speak precisely) as Descartes’ director of conscience? Not bloody likely.” Watson thinks that Descartes was a liberal Christian, a partisan for the modern, the tolerant and the rational, and all the more admirable as a consequence.

It is always risky to like a thinker and his thought so much as to imagine him as one of us. Descartes was a French Catholic who knew that Copernicus had been right, that Galileo was also right (and under house arrest for his trouble) and that the struggle to dethrone Aristotle and the clergy who supported him would take a massive endeavor. He also knew that turmoil in beliefs and ideas could lead to civil wars such as France had experienced from the 1560s to the 1590s. His 20-year sojourn with the Dutch made it possible for him to publish and to gain followers in their Protestant universities. He was a bitter partisan in philosophical warfare that makes our cultural wars look trivial by comparison. He could not imagine a world without kings and noblemen like himself. He was not one of us, and he would have found little to his liking in England, where in 1649, the year before his death, the English beheaded their king. Yet for all his conservatism, Descartes made us moderns possible.