User:Goclenius/Descartes' Life from 1596 to 1629

This article is part of the René Descartes series.

This article is part of the Descartes’ Life series.

The Descartes’ Life series presents information about Descartes’ life and his historical context. For systematic discussion of his philosophical doctrines, see René Descartes.

Articles in this series:
 * Descartes’ Life from 1596 to 1629
 * Descartes’ Life from 1630 to 1639
 * Descartes’ Life from 1639 to 1650

Background: 1596
At the end of the seventeenth century, France was recovering from a bloody series of civil wars, politically and religiously motivated, that had finally come to an end with the Edict of Nantes issued by Henry IV in 1598. In the sciences, meanwhile, first Copernicus and then Kepler had overturned ancient theories of the motions of the planets; Galileo was embarking on the discoveries in physics and astronomy that would place him with Descartes among the founders of the new science. The Jesuits, founded in 1540, had put the teaching of Aristotle’s philosophy, which though increasingly in dispute was still the basis of the university curriculum, on a sound basis, systematic in presentation, humanistic in style. It was to them that Henry IV entrusted the administration and teaching at the Collège founded by him in 1603 at La Flèche (fr); and from them Descartes, like his older contemporary Mersenne, would receive his primary and secondary instruction—in Latin, it should be noted, which was the language of scholarship throughout Europe.

Early years and schooling (1596–1618)
Descartes, born 31 March 1596, was the fifth child of Joachim Descartes (1563–1640) and Jeanne Brochard (ca. 1566–1597). Joachim, though descended from a distinguished line of physicians, took a degree in law and served as counselor to the Parlement of Bretagne (Brittany); many of Jeanne's family were in government service. Descartes’ was therefore a privileged background. It is not surprising that he too would take a law degree or study medicine. Thirteen months after Descartes was born, his mother died six days after giving birth to a male child who himself died shortly thereafter.

La Flèche
At Easter in 1606, Descartes was sent to the Collège Henri IV at La Flèche. His older brother Pierre had already been there for two years. The rector of the school, Father Charlet, was a distant relative (Watson 2002:44). Forty years later Descartes addressed him as “you who had the role of a father through all my younger years” (9 February 1645; AT 5:156). Descartes says later that at La Flèche all students were treated almost the same regardless of status, and there is not much reason to think that Descartes received any unusual privileges.

The curriculum at La Flèche, as at most schools in the period, began with Latin grammar, adding Greek in later grades. The pupils were steeped in the classics of ancient literature and, like their ancient counterparts, learned rhetoric and poetics; in the later grades, they learned philosophy and elementary mathematics. The curriculum of the last three years was devoted to logic, ethics, natural philosophy, mathematics, and metaphysics, all based on Aristotle, but with significant departures and additions that had accreted in the three centuries or so since the Aristotelian corpus had become the basis of secondary education. Defenders of Aristotle though they might be, the Jesuits were attuned to developments in natural philosophy, and especially to new experiments and observations. In 1610–1611, for example, in a collection of sonnets published on the anniversary of the death of Henri IV, one poem celebrates the discovery of the moons of Jupiter by Galileo, published in 1611.

Poitiers; military service
After leaving La Flèche in 1614, Descartes went to the university in Poitiers, where his maternal uncle René Brochard II was living, to study law. He received his baccalaureate in November 1616, opening the way to a career like that of his father Joachim and his older brother Pierre. But Joachim’s position was destined for Pierre; Joachim had purchased a second position, but this was intended for his first son by his second marriage. Descartes would have to wait. A few years later the sale of inherited lands to Pierre would give Descartes enough money to buy a position himself. But by then he was no longer interested in a legal career.

The customary alternatives for a cadet or younger son were the clergy or the army. Descartes joined a French regiment serving under Prince Maurice of Nassau, commander of the army of the newly independent United Provinces (now the Netherlands). The United Provinces had signed a twelve-year truce with Spain in 1609, and its army was idle (the “Eighty Years’ War” would continue until the Treaty of Münster was signed in 1648). Descartes saw no action. But at Breda he may have studied fortification and other military sciences. By the end of 1618, he had grown tired of idleness and lack of conversation, and in April 1619 he left, eventually to join the army of the Emperor Maximilian I.

First scientific work and the Rules (1619–29)
At Breda, however, at the end of 1618, Descartes had the first significant intellectual encounter we have any record of. Isaac Beeckman’s Journal records his meeting with a young “Frenchman from Poitou” with whom he discussed mathematical and physical problems, and a new way of combining the two that Beeckman calls “physico-mathematics” (Gaukroger 1995:68–69). Descartes and Beeckman also shared in interest in music (i.e. the theory of proportions and scales). In December 1618 Descartes dedicated to his friend a Compendium musicæ (Treatise on music), and gave it to him as a New Year’s gift. Ten years later Descartes, upon hearing that Beeckman had presented Descartes’ ideas as his own and had claimed to be his teacher, would write a scathing letter of rebuke.

Beeckman, largely self-taught in natural philosophy (his degree was in medicine), had already arrived at a corpuscularian mode of explanation and (in 1613) at a “law of inertia”, the first of three laws that he and Descartes would arrive at during their collaboration. Descartes wrote up his version of the laws over a decade later in The World, and published versions of them in the Principles, twenty-five years after his encounter with Beeckman. Together the two solved problems in mechanics and hydrostatics—among them the problem, solved earlier by Galileo, of determining the distance traversed by a freely falling body in a given time.

Dreams and travels
It was at the end of 1619 that Descartes had his famous dreams, of which we have only an indirect report from his early biographer Adrien Baillet (Baillet 1691, 1:81–85). Baillet quotes a note, dated 10 November, in which Descartes says, “I was filled with enthusiasm and discovered the foundations of a wonderful science” (AT 10:216). Descartes’ dreams have for some interpreters provided a key to the subsequent work of Descartes, and for others the starting-point for ruminations on the birth of modern philosophy. They can at least be taken to indicate that Descartes, now in his mid-twenties, was very uncertain about his future: in the third and last dream, leafing through an anthology of Latin poets, he lights upon a vers from Ausonius: “Quod vita sectabor iter?” (“Which path shall I follow in life?”

Upon leaving Breda, Descartes, after wandering around a bit, travelled to Frankfurt (where he witnessed the coronation of Ferdinand, the new head of the Holy Roman Empire), Ulm, and perhaps Heidelberg. There, in the gardens of the Elector of the Palatine, he would have seen the grottos and fountains, designed by Salomon de Caus, to which he may be referring in the Treatise on man (Rodis-Lewis 1995:58; AT 10:215–216). In Ulm he met and exchanged ideas with the mathematician Johann Faulhaber, who was connected with the Rosicrucians. He seems to have flirted briefly with notions found perhaps in the books on curious subjects he claims to have read during his years of schooling (Discours 1, AT 6:), before turning his attention to the mathematical and optical questions that preoccupied him as he was writing the Rules for the direction of the mind.

From Paris to the Low Countries
In 1622, Descartes returned to visit his family and then visited Paris, leaving for Italy where his biographers say that he travelled to Rome and Venice. In June of 1625 he was back in Poitiers. Having decisively turned away from the legal career still open to him, in July he went to Paris at the urging of his friends, where he met Mersenne, the writer Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac (also fr), and Jean Silhon, who in 1626 published Les Deux vérités, a defense of the existence of God and of the immortality of the soul—the two topics that, according to Augustine, a Christian philosopher should be concerned with, and that would figure in the subtitle of the Meditations. During this time also he worked with the physicist Claude Mydorge on the problem of determining the angle of refraction. Descartes’s solution, mentioned in the Rules, was published in the Dioptrique (Optics), one of the Essays of 1637.

It was during this period that Descartes worked on the Rules for the direction of the mind, parts of which may have been written as early as 1619. It was left incomplete when Descartes left for the Netherlands at the end of 1628. Descartes projected thirty-six rules, in three groups of twelve; of these, only twenty-one were written out, and the last three lack any commentary. The Rules indicate, without describing, a proof of the law of refraction which, according to Descartes, can be demonstrated—and could have been discovered—according to his new method.

Near the end of his time in France, in November 1627, Descartes attended a lecture by the chemist Chandoux (who would be executed for forgery in 1631). Present at the lecture were the Papal Nuncio, Cardinal Bérulle, founder of the French Oratorians, and Mersenne among others. Descartes praised Chandoux for rejecting Aristotle, but found Chandoux’s new principles only probable. In place of both he offered his own, “better established, more true, and more natural” not only than Chandoux’s but than any yet offered (to Villebressieu, summer 1631, AT 1:213). According to Baillet, Descartes also met with Bérulle privately, and was urged to put his talents at the service of the Church. But this, like the claim that Bérulle was Descartes’ spiritual director, is doubtful.

Next in series:
 * Descartes’ Life from 1630 to 1639

Works of Descartes
Collected editions

Adam, Charles, and Paul Tannery. Œuvres de Descares. Paris: J. Vrin, 1964–1981.

Alquié, Ferdinand. Œuvres de Descartes. Paris: Garnier, 1963–1973.

Cottingham, John, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, Anthony Kenny, eds. and trans. The philosophical writings of Descartes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–1991.

Single works

Abrégé de musique. Translation, presentation, and notes by Frédéric de Buzon. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987. French translation of the Compendium musicæ.

Compendium musicæ. [Online edition]. Ed. and intro. by Paolo Gozza. Latin with Italian translation.

Règles utiles et claires pour la direction de l’esprit en la recherche de la vérité. Trans. Jean-Luc Marion, mathematical notes by Pierre Costabel. La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977.

Regulæ ad directionem ingenii. Ed. Giovanni Crapulli. La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966.

Biographies
English translation: Life of Monsieur Descartes, containing the history of his philosophy and works, London: R. Simpson, 1693. Facsimile reprint of the French: New York: Garland Publishing, 1987.

(Eng. trans. Jane Marie Todd,

Other works
Ariew, Roger. (1999) Descartes and the last Scholastics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Ariew, Roger, John Cottingham, and Tom Sorell, eds. (1998) Background to Descartes’ Meditations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Beeckman, Isaac. (1604–1634) Journal tenu par Isaac Beeckman de 1604 à 1634. Ed. Cornelis de Waard. The Hague, 1939–1955. 4v.

Dainville, François. L’éducation des jésuites. Ed. Marie-Madeleine Compère. Paris: Minuit, 1978.

Kuhn, Heinrich. (2005) ”Aristotelianism in the Renaissance“. Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, 2005. Last access: 24 Mar 2006.

2 vols. (Series: À la recherche de la vérité)

Schmitt, Charles, ed. (1988) The Cambridge history of Renaissance philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.