Descartes’ Bones
There are many challenges in writing about other people, especially those whose ideas have become important to you, or more widely. The challenge is simple: do you talk about the ideas, and leave the author a disembodied voice, or do you address the person, a life lived, a network of relationships, and a history of events and actions? In recent decades there has been an increasing interest in the person, sometimes to the point that revelations about the personal life and antipathies of a philosopher, historian or scientist can be used to set aside or side-step what they had said in terms of their contribution to understanding. Russell Shorto came up with an interesting twist on this, using skeleton bones as the linking motif in his story on the history of Descartes and an exploration of his thinking.
Descartes’ Bones is a frustrating yet fascinating book. In one sense it starts at the end. Shorto’s account begins in 1650. Descartes is in bed, dying in Pierre Chanut’s house in Stockholm. Chanut was the French Ambassador to Sweden. He was Descartes’ friend, and a worried man as it was he who had invited Descartes to visit. Worse than that, it wasn’t just a very cold winter, but Descartes had earlier nursed Chanut as he’d been the one experiencing a fever, only for Chanut to recover and Descartes to catch the same illness. In Descartes’ case it was a fever that was to prove fatal. Christina, the 23 year old Queen of Sweden, had been a source of the invitation to Descartes to come to Stokholm, and she was to send her personal physician in an attempt to aid his recovery. The physician failed to impress Descartes; he was dismissed, and the philosopher died shortly after.
However, beginning at the end isn’t always a good idea, and in this case misses out on all the activity – and hilarious issues – that surrounded Descartes as he developed his ideas. Of course, it was relatively early in his career that he explained the result of his intensive introspection was to conclude ‘I think, therefore I am’ – a phrase which became known as cogito ergo sum and is inextricably bound to every account of his work. His method of exercising doubt was to define this aspect of his work, which was to focus on reason. However, while that is the Descartes we know about, Shorto makes it clear there is a lot more to be understood about his work and his approach.
In a sense, the trouble started with his book, Discourse on the Method. He saw this as an opening salvo in a career that was to provide a basis for education, for understanding, and, most important, to replace the received wisdom of his forbears from Aristotle onwards. Shorto tells us Descartes wanted to “reorient the way every human being thought”, and that meant influencing the approach of learning across all the disciplines pursued at the university, and in particular at the university in Utrecht. Somewhat unwilling to jump into controversies himself, he allowed proxies to argue his approach. Early on, this was Regius, the professor of medicine at that university, but they didn’t always agree. Regius was happy to follow the work of Harvey on such matters as the circulation of blood in the body: Descartes, beginning a career of arguing with all and sundry, believed the heart wasn’t a pump, as Harvey proposed, but a furnace, heating the blood which caused it to circulate.
However, the core of his approach was doubt, an approach that was almost designed to ensure that he was in conflict with most other people in the university. They saw him as selling his approach through his own personal magnetism, “encouraging his followers to forget what they had learnt from the ancient master”. He was accused of emptying students minds so he could fill them with his own approach. It was an approach to win friends!
Russell Shorto does go back to the beginning, especially the emergence of Descartes’ thinking. He also goes well past his life, and we spend much of the book following a detective trail, seeking to find what had happened to his skeleton, and even where his skull ended up once it followed a different route from the rest of his bones. In fact, Descartes is a small player in this book, which uses the wanderings of his skeleton as a framework to explore the emerging intellectual revolution that was to sweep through Europe. OK, not sweep, but slowly and often controversially begin to change the intellectual path for academics, thinkers and even religious practitioners in the west. Above all it is an amusing book, told as a story intended to be funny. It is an enjoyable read.
However, while amusing, there are times Shorto’s account can be frustrating, as we hop back and forth in time. It is somewhat odd to find, 154 pages in, that we are, in Shorto’s words, “back to the beginning”. There is Descartes dying in Sweden and creating something of a problem. It’s not just that he is far from home, as he was a Frenchman who had lived much of his life in Holland, but he was a Catholic and Sweden was Protestant. Given his religious character, he is buried in a ‘forlorn’ cemetery, some distance away from Stockholm. Eventually, sixteen years later, the deteriorating skeleton is disinterred, and the remains put into a two and one half feet copper coffin, ready for it to be transported to France. This is where we learn that the French Ambassador is given permission “to take, as a personal relic, a bone of the right index finger”!
This is just one part of a very tangled story. His skeleton got to France, but his skull didn’t make it. Instead, the captain of the guard watching over the coffin before it was sent south decides on his own initiative that “Sweden should not ‘lose completely the remains of such a famous person’”. The guardsman, Isaak Planström, kept the skull as “a rare relic of a philosophical saint” for the rest of his life. However, a merchant, Olof Bång, later collected some property from the estate of a man who had died and owed him money, and one of the items was the skull. In due course Bång’s son, Jonas Olofsson, was showing the skull to a local headmaster, Swen Hof. The story has it, perhaps accurately, that Bång wanted to find an appropriate set of words to accompany the skull, which Hof provided, and which Bång wrote on the skull. There on the skull, with the text in Latin, is a poem ‘celebrating Descartes’ genius and mourning the scattering of his remains.
What did this inscription say?
In Latin –
Parvula Cartesii fuit haec calvaria magni,
exuvias reliquas gallica busta tegunt;
sed laus ingenii too diffunditur orbe,
mistaque coelicolis mens pia semper ovat.
In English –
This small skull once belonged to the great Cartesius,
The rest of his remains are hidden far away in the
land of France;
But all around the circle of the globe his genius
is praised,
And his spirit still rejoices in the sphere of heaven.
Just in case you think that was all, Descartes’ skull has several other pieces of writing on it, most of which are now quite impossible to read. It sems that once you’ve written something, others follow. Certainly, that was evidently the case when I was young and in a London park you came across a tree where someone had carved something along the lines of:
PF loves PC
From the moment one such testimony to everlasting love was cut into a tree’s bark, others would follow, despite the fact that the collective effort for memorialise relationships could lead to the tree dying. At least Descartes’ skull had the attribute of already being dead … and perhaps that is similar to those people who spray paint their mutual love on walls?
There is much more to Shorto’s story than the adventures of a disembodied skull. He reveals that Descartes was far from being a shrinking violet. “He may have shied away from face-to-face confrontation, but his arrogance was rather spectacular, and when crossed he had a deeply malicious streak”. We read that he considered Fermat’s mathematical endeavours as ‘shit’, and a colleague of his as writing ‘toilet paper’. Not every comment was scatological, of course, and when writing about Pascal, he suggested that the only vacuum (the subject of the argument they were having) was a vacuum in Pascal’s skull!
He also makes it clear that Descartes had considerable belief in his own excellence, and Shorto remarks that he believed:
“The body was a machine; therefore it simply needs to be understood in all its parts in order for it to work properly. In this regard, death was tantamount to a malfunction; locate and correct the errors and you solve the problem of death. Descartes became convinced he would crack the body’s code and extend the human life span as much as a thousand years. At one point in his career he was certain enough of his progress that he felt he would do it soon, provided, he wrote – and he seems to have missed the joke – that he was not prevented ‘by the brevity of life’”.
However, we also read that this ‘vainglorious’, self-centred and isolated man had one sign of a rather different perspective on family, when he fathered a daughter born out of wedlock. That child was to be the love of his life, even though he kept the facts of her birth hidden., travelling with the mother, Helena, as his servant, and his daughter Francine as his ‘niece’. However, Francine came down with scarlet fever and died when she was five years old.
There is some evidence that this loss had a lasting effect on Descartes and his work, pushing him to take on physiology and anatomy. This was to prove important. Descartes had insisted that the physical and the mental were two distinct substances: that left him with explaining how they interacted. The puzzle was clear: if your body needed food, how did the stomach’s need get transmitted to your mind, and then lead to other actions (walking to get something from a cupboard, for example). It was his continuing dissections that gave him an answer.
Together with others Descartes noticed there was a small ‘nut shaped structure in the centre of the brain’, the pineal gland, and decided that this was the place where the physical and the mental came together:
“the principal seat of the soul, and the place in which our thoughts are formed. The reason I believe this is that I cannot find any part of the brain, except this, which is not double … moreover it is situated in the most suitable place for this purpose, in the middle of all the [brain’s] concavities; and it is supported and surrounded by the little branches of the carotid arteries, which bring spirits into the brain.”
Overall, Descartes’s Bones is an enjoyable read rather than an academic review. However, there are a couple of points that do deserve emphasis. As a man who has been described as a wimp and a menace Descartes influence on philosophy has been considerable. First and obviously among these, Descartes’ concept of the brain and how it was the focus of separation between the soul and the physical body created what has proven to be an enduring ‘mind-body’ problem, which is still debated today, especially in contemporary in discussions about artificial intelligence, consciousness, and the nature of self.
In referring to its contemporary relevance, this analysis isn’t just a matter of philosophical speculation about the nature of the human mind. His ideas still influence how we think about everything from health and well-being to personal responsibility and social dynamics. Often referred to as ‘dualism’, his views stimulate argument and there are continuing attempts and even philosophical justifications to challenging Descartes’ divide. Indeed, considerable contemporary research is devoted to moving beyond dualism, and to emphasizing that the mind and body are inextricably linked. Many advocate a more integrated approach, not just as a matter of speculation, but as a basis for developing approaches into such areas as treatment for a variety of mental conditions and illnesses. While Descartes might have lost his head through events subsequent to his death, his thinking is still alive.
Russell Shorto really is a frustrating writer as he hops between Descartes’ time, the years soon after, and then onto decades and even centuries later. However, there is a purpose in his approach, as it encourages a focus on issues, rather than following a linear timescale and thereby having to keep several themes together. That would be a complicated balancing act.
Instead, what he achieves is three fold. He makes Descartes live, and instead of appearing as a dry yet brilliant philosopher, we begin to learn about the real person. This is a dilemma, of course, as what is written should stand alone, separately from whether the author is a puritan or a drunkard. Well, perhaps that is too idealistic a view, but the reality of the author has to be appreciated in a measured way, and not allow it to overwhelm insights and conclusions, even if they might be viewed with suitable caution.
Second, he brings home Descartes impact in a way that academic analyses often fail to achieve. We get glimpses, albeit rather partially, that illustrate Descartes wasn’t a dry analyst, and that he spent much of his life worrying and hoping. The worrying was evidence of his recognition that elements of what he had to say needed constant re-examination, and that nuances could sometimes get in the way of clarity. At the same time, he was a man of curious passions and ambitions, and Shorto illustrates many of these limitations.
Third, the greatest strength of Descartes Bones is that it sets the scene – both for Descartes lifetime, and for the eras that followed – for a time in which ideas, bones, and even a skull wandered around Europe. This isn’t philosophy, nor is it narrowly written history. It is more an account of some of the odd figures that played a role in Descartes life and the ideas and controversies they contributed. It’s a worthwhile book to read, and a good way to make you think about this curious thinker, offering an explanation as to why he is often seen as a wimp and a menace. He did claim more than was justified, for certain, and he did back away from taking some of his arguments to their logical end, but he was a key thinker in a time of revolutionary ideas.
