René Descartes has long been a problem for me. His name is certainly famous, popping up in popular as well as highbrow literature as one of the chief founders of modern philosophy and science or a precursor of the Enlightenment. The usual story treats him as a solitary figure who, perhaps with the help of lying in bed well into the late morning hours, worked out the metaphysics of nature by thinking hard: a genius deducing eternal truths from first principles. Yet he himself said that human beings exist as mind and body united. If we put his mind back into this body, and his body into the midst of his world, whom would we find? He seems to have authored a lost treatise on fencing, and according to all the biographers who wrote about him in the seventeenth century, he was present in arms at the Battle of the White Mountain, often considered the opening conflict in what would turn out to be the Thirty Years’ War. Was he simply a philosopher, then?
There are other intriguing problems. Descartes is understandably considered French, or a French cosmopolitan, and he loved Paris, where his closest friends could be found. Yet for his last twenty years and more, he lived away from his home country. Why? He spent almost all of that time abroad in the Dutch Republic, and that is where he wrote and published the books that made him famous. He benefited much from the information he gathered from his Dutch acquaintances as well as from their questions and encouragement, and he acquired a bit of spoken Dutch, although he apparently never became fully comfortable in it. So should we think of him as not simply a French philosopher? And how was he supporting himself? He had sold off what he inherited from his mother years before, held no public office, didn’t seem to take pupils, and was without a visible patron. Even in The Netherlands, however, he kept moving from place to place. Moreover, while many observers see him as a good son of the Catholic Church, some of his early friends turn out to have been freethinking libertines, he expressed affection for people who were Calvinist, and several of his most active supporters in later years belonged to marginalized Catholic groups, such as the Oratorians and Jansenists. He finally departed from Amsterdam on another journey, to the court of the freethinking Queen Christina of Sweden, where he died in February 1650. She sent one of her largest warships to convey him to Stockholm. That extraordinary mark of distinction is very curious, suggesting that she considered him more than an ordinary visitor. Did she imagine him to be a simple philosopher, or some other kind of person?
Perhaps Descartes’s early years, in the period before he became known for his printed words, can shed some light on these and other events that do not fit comfortably in the consensus view of his life. His biographers have for the most part brushed aside his first thirty-five years, when he was constantly in motion, as preliminary to the important business of writing philosophy. During the early years, the dapper young nobleman introduced himself to strangers as the sieur du Perron and served on the battlefields of central Europe before traveling on to Italy and making the acquaintance of high-ranking figures in the church. Moreover, if one is attentive to Descartes’s own writings, further questions emerge that might need explanation, such as his views about human and animal physiology and the passions, which did not privilege the male. His mother’s family saw to his education, and his political alliances seem to have been with women: possibly the duchesse du Chevreuse, the queen regent Marie de Medici, and Queen Anne; certainly Princess Elizabeth and Queen Christina. Apparently the female connections in his life require as much attention as the male ones.
In short, the more one considers Descartes’s early life, his world, and his writings, the more questions arise. Having myself moved into a privileged environment where the pursuit of knowledge and education remain valued ideals, I decided to try to look for him in the seventeenth century. He turns out to have been right in the midst of some of the most important struggles for Europe in his time.
So, to come back to the question of why Descartes spent the second half of his life in The Netherlands: I now think that he had become an exile.
From my earlier studies on The Netherlands, in which I was alert to his presence there and was guided by many fine intellectual historians, I had come to doubt many of the messages I had previously learned about Descartes. His Dutch friends seem to have thought of him differently than the later legends. Why was he there, I began to wonder. So I began picking up parts of his story before he settled in the Dutch Republic. As I did so, some of the oddest reports appeared to become more plausible than not, suggesting further reading. Then, paging through indexes to the papers of Cardinal Richelieu—the chief minister to the French king Louis XIII—I stumbled across a reference to one “Descart” as a figure in an action at the siege of La Rochelle: could this be our man? If so, it would confirm the statements of his first biographers, which have been doubted in recent generations. Similarly, when reading an authoritative account of the reign of Louis XIII, I learned that his father had been one of the chief judges in a political trial—a kind of kangaroo court—that passed the death sentence on one of Richelieu’s enemies, a young aristocrat, the comte de Chalais. That fact can be verified, and contextualized. Chalais had been invited into a grand plot by his lover, a leading member of the aristocracy, Marie de Rohan, the duchesse du Chevreuse. Her father in turn was the lord of the town in which Descartes was born as well as the person in charge of the greatest event at René’s boyhood school: the ceremonial entombment of the heart of the assassinated king, Henri IV, above the chapel altar. Moreover, Descartes’s most authoritative early biographer says that he had sought the patronage of the person who happened to be Marie de Rohan’s second husband, who also came from one of the leading families of France and the Holy Roman Empire, the Guises of Lorraine. Their son in turn later translated Descartes’s Meditations from Latin into French, with the author’s help, and Marie and her son later became major patrons of the religiously unorthodox Jansenists, who held Augustinian views on predestination that, to my surprise, Descartes also advocated. The trial of the comte de Chalais seems to have coincided with Descartes’s final break with his father, which would not be surprising if they were on different sides in this important event in the struggle for power in France.
But is it plausible that a philosopher who is usually said to be eager for privacy had connections with events at the great siege, or to grand persons related to a deadly conspiracy? Well, for his father to be sitting on a court formed by Richelieu to dispose of an enemy signals that he, at least, was far more than a simple lawyer. In fact, Descartes’s father turns out to have been an important member of the administration of government in the period, a status also characterizing most of René’s own friends and acquaintances. A bit of additional scratching further highlights how in his own day René Descartes would have seen himself not as bourgeois but noble. Indeed, his family name came from one of the estates acquired by his great-grandfather—the Great René—in the political warfare of the early sixteenth century, a place called Cartes. (In other words, Descartes means “from Cartes.”) His mother’s family, too, used titles restricted to the minor nobility. Yet another relative continued to be associated with the royal army, providing finance and supply. So we should not be surprised after all that if the young Descartes looked to make his way in the world, he would have looked to law, administration, war, or service to ruling families. Perhaps the military connection also explains his interest in mathematics? It turns out that military engineering was one of the most advanced technical enterprises of the period, requiring its practitioners to become comfortable with advanced mathematical methods and instruments, and sometimes with encryption, which used methods of substitution similar to modern mathematical notation. Descartes’s older contemporary, Galileo, had first made a name for himself by teaching military engineering and by developing and selling a remarkable device he called his Military Compass, which could function like a slide rule to make calculations. A search of the literature on Descartes turns up no evidence that he had learned anything but common mathematics in school, but his first visit to The Netherlands was to learn the art of war, which at the time meant military engineering. It was when studying that subject that Descartes met the person who is often said to have put his feet on the road to physicomathematical studies, Isaac Beeckman. Such studies would also help explain what he was doing during some of his time in service in the imperial armies of the Thirty Years’ War.
Moreover, if Descartes started his postschool years as a member of the minor nobility in search of military skills and aristocratic connections, then his friendship with his earliest known correspondent (other than Beeckman), Guez de Balzac, takes on new significance. Balzac is best known as a literary figure who in his youth was associated with some of the most prominent libertines of the period. He came from the same kind of family as Descartes and was of the same age, but he also had connections among some of the highest-ranking nobles at the court of queen Marie de Medici. It is well documented that Balzac later ended up on the wrong side of Cardinal Richelieu and had to flee into exile in the countryside: that happens to be the same moment when Descartes left Paris for what became his twenty-year period in the Dutch Republic. Was it a mere coincidence? Descartes had recently acted as his friend’s champion, defending him against dangerous critics, but after the two went their separate ways, they would not write to each other for three years, out of fear. When at last they did write, their correspondence—if read in light of the deadly factionalism of aristocratic France—confirms that Descartes resisted returning to his homeland during the period of Richelieu’s greatest power.
There is much more, too, when the evidence from Descartes’s early biographers starts to be traced back into the period rather than dismissed as improbable for a studious intellectual. Although much remains in the shadows, one can reconstruct enough with reasonable probability to propose why the young nobleman Descartes came to be closely associated with certain aristocratic factions in France before fleeing Cardinal Richelieu. Only after the cardinal’s death, under the regency of Queen Anne, would he return for short visits to the country of his birth. Conflicting interests in France and abroad nevertheless continued to bind him by law, war, and diplomacy. They engaged him in dangerous confrontations about God and nature, too, for concepts and beliefs were as much at stake as personal loyalties. He did not start his adult years intending to write philosophy, then: indeed, he explicitly rejected the kind of learning he had acquired in school, only much later figuring out how to speak up in print. He could not raise an army, but he could recruit the powers of nature and of the heart in an effort to put things aright. Whatever else people take away from this account, I trust that his life on the move shows Descartes to have been no armchair philosopher.
I confess, too, to having a larger agenda. Sometimes historical progress is seen as inevitable, with Descartes himself often depicted as intending to help the modern world come into being simply by writing what he thought, all being very straightforward. But in fact, people are shaped by the constraints as well as the opportunities in their lives, with few things feeling inevitable when one is living through them. I have long been interested in exploring how those real felt lives affected the ideas and practices of various “thinkers.” In Descartes’s case, he was, I think, vulnerable. He was socially high-ranking enough to be on the edges of power, but he was never secure; in seeking his fortune, he seriously endangered his life on more than one occasion, and he walked through rooms alert to the personal passions that lay behind the rise and fall of favorites. Why would someone living in such a world help create the new science? Many of the most exciting arguments among historians of science in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have explored the importance of trust among people who knew one another well, considering those personal relationships to be built into the methods used to produce knowledge. But historians have long noticed, too, that the period in which Descartes lived was replete with uncertainty and personal distrust: deadly famine and plague ran through whole regions at a time, war was rampant and made even more horrifying by the brutalities evoked by religious and ideological division, the hunting of witches and heretics terrorized many lands, fortunes might be lost in an instant if ships went down (as they did) or if princes failed to pay what was owed (as they did), honor and office could evaporate overnight on whispers in ears. That was Descartes’s world.
And yet his attempt to advance a new science emerged from the same place. Might he have been trying to resolve the reasons for doubt and mistrust? Might many of his thoughts have been provoked by the materialistic libertinism of his youth? Might his solutions have something to do with methods he became familiar with on his travels, such as engineering, medicine, and other practical sciences? The practices of those arts had to stand up to extreme conditions. Weren’t the ideologues in fact the false dreamers of his world, inevitably losing their way in pursuit of their “isms,” while he stripped all that away to focus on the real? His confidence in physicomathematics to understand the “how” questions, with the “why” questions left aside, might have something to do with the felt need to find a reliable foundation for assurance about truths of nature, at least, in a world of enormous stress. In other words, like so many others, the hardheaded but not hard-hearted young aristocrat came to want truth to be based on proof rather than opinion or rank. His realism also included recognition of the place of the passions in setting the universe in motion. His life and work do not therefore hover above his world but emerge from it. Such a view helps me, at least, to better understand the aims expressed both directly and indirectly in his own written works.
To make that case, however, we must venture into the kind of history that often depends on indirect evidence. I draw much of it from seventeenth-century accounts of Descartes’s life because their authors had access to evidence no longer extant, but many of their declarations and hints can be said to be likely or unlikely in light of other sources. Since I am not myself trained as a historian of philosophy, much less as a Cartesian, nor as a historian of France (despite some coursework years ago), it may be that more expert scholars think that my paths of inquiry end in blind alleys. But I have tried to find the traces of interconnecting passages known to have existed in his day in order to make sense of one young man’s movements, relying with gratitude on those who have scouted the ways before. In the process I have not only learned much that is new to me but stumbled across a few fresh tracks. The foray is meant to raise questions as much as to provide answers, inviting others to attend anew to a moment whose echoes can still be heard.
Beware, though: for the routes he took lead onto ground that has been hotly contested. Old castle walls may now be abandoned, the gates only needing a push to fall open, but if we dare walk through them, we need to prepare ourselves for the confusion of struggles in earnest for possession of the keep. It remains occupied. In the meantime, I have tried to follow Descartes’s own advice: to do one’s best and have no regrets.