User:Goclenius/Descartes' Life from 1596 to 1639

This article is part of the René Descartes series.

This article is part of the Descartes’ Life series. Articles in this series:
 * Descartes’ Life from 1596 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 (the “melon” of the last dream has been taken to be a pun on the Greek to mellon, “the future”).

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.

In Paris
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 met with Bérulle privately, and was urged to put his talents at the service of the Church.

Natural philosophy and the Discourse (1630–1639)
Descartes, who had been living the rural life at Petit-Marais, left France for the Netherlands at the end of 1628. In July 1629, having had not long before registered as a student at Franeker in Friesland, he mentions a little treatise on metaphysics, which was supposed to have contained proof of the existence of God and the separability of the human soul from the body. To Mersenne he writes that he has a proof on the basis of which he knows that God exists “with more certainty than I know the truth of any proposition of Geometry” (AT 1:182; the claim is repeated in the Conversation with Burman, AT 5:178). It is likely that the proof was a version of the ontological proof later published in Meditations 5 and the first book of the Principles (Gaukroger 1995:198).

In the same letters to Mersenne that mention the little treatise, Descartes puts forward a doctrine now commonly known as “the creation of the eternal truths”. Descartes holds that the creating act of God is absolutely free, and in particular undetermined by any antecedent understanding of essences or the good. Acccording to some interpreters, the doctrine is alluded to in Meditations 5, where Descartes attributes to the ideas of mathematics, as to the idea of God, a nature independent of our manner of thinking of them.

Natural philosophy
In 1630–1633, Descartes devoted himself to mathematics and natural philosophy. In June 1630 Descartes registered as a student at the University of Leiden, where it is likely he saw human dissections at the celebrated anatomical theatre. Late in 1631, Jacobus Golius, professor of mathematics and Arabic at Leiden, sent to various mathematicians a problem posed by the ancient geometer Pappus, who remarked that the general version of the problem could not be solved. By introducing what we would call affine coordinates, and drawing on his expertise in the algebra of Vieta and Faulhaber, Descartes reduces the problem to an algebraic problem. His method, published later in the Geometry, made possible the solution of a host of problems hitherto resistant to the purely geometrical methods of the ancients.

In the latter half of 1629, Descartes, starting from a question about parhelia (sun dogs), undertook to explain a host of meteorological phenomena; by the end of the year he had decided to explain “the whole of physics” (To Mersenne 13 Nov 1629, AT 1:70). The result was a corpuscularian physics, based on three laws of motion, the first of which was the law of inertia put forward earlier by Beeckman. In The World (also known as the Treatise on light), which was published only after Descartes' death, Descartes carries out his program, conceiving of matter only as extension, appealing only to efficient causes, and deriving—in principal—all natural phenomena from the laws of motion and hypotheses about the shapes and motions of particles.

During these years Descartes not only witnessed dissections but performed them himself, on carcasses acquired from local butchers; he also performed experiments on live animals. The Treatise on man, drawing on Descartes’ own observations but also on ancient and Renaissance sources, attempts to do for physiology what The World had done for cosmology and meteorology. Describing the body as a machine or automaton, it explains mechanistically the phenomena that in Aristotelian psychology had been ascribed to the inferior parts of the soul: the vegetative part, which included the powers of generation (reproduction), growth, and nutrition; and the sensitive part, which included the five outer senses, memory, imagination, appetite, and the power of locomotion. Accepting Harvey’s recently published theory of the circulation of the blood, he disagrees with Harvey on the cause of the pulse, and attempted to find a mechanistic explanation for what Harvey had attributed to a power or vis of the heart muscle.

The Discourse and the Essays
In 1633, Descartes, having learned of the condemnation of Galileo, and knowing that to publish the Copernican cosmology of The World would now violate the expressed view of the Holy Office, put his work on natural philosophy aside. For the rest of his life he refused to publish it. Instead, in 1635–1636 he reworked material on optics, geometry, and meteorological phenomena into three Essays. To accompany the Essays, Descartes wrote the Discourse on method, which in addition to a truncated version of the rules devised in the 1620s included an intellectual autobiography, a “provisional morality”, a sketch of his physiology and physics (omitting his Copernican views), and a request that his researches be funded by the state. Written in the vernacular rather than in Latin, the Discourse was intended to be accessible to honnêtes hommes of all sorts, not only to the learned, and even to women, who were not taught Latin as a matter of course.

Most notably, the Discourse included in its fourth part the arguments for the existence of God, the distinction of mind and body, and the resolution of doubt that would be presented more fully in the Meditations. In letters to Mersenne, Descartes says that he did not present the entire argument for fear that his less well-prepared readers might be led astray (To Mersenne, March 1637, AT 1:350). It is in the Discourse—or rather in a Latin translation of it made in the 1640s—and not in the Meditations that the phrase cogito ergo sum (“I think therefore I am”) appears. The Discourse also includes, in its presentation of the body-machine, a criterion by which to discern those machines that have souls joined with them from those that don’t: if the creature before us can respond appropriately in a wide variety of situations, and if in particular it can respond to language, then it is not only a machine but a machine that has the power of reason, and therefore a soul like ours. Turing’s test may be regarded as an updated version of Descartes’. Like Turing’s, Descartes’ test does not of itself prove that the mind is distinct from the body; that a thing which has the power of reason cannot be a body is a separate question.

Hélène and Francine
In 1635 a daughter, Francine, was born to Descartes and Hélène, a serving maid at the house where he was staying in late 1634. Descartes acknowledged paternity, but the relationship was kept secret even from close friends like Constantijn Huygens. In a letter of 1637 to an unknown addressee, Descartes asks that his “niece” and Hélène should arrive as soon as possible. This is the only reference to either of them in Descartes’ correspondence; other letters, including letters to Hélène, for whose existence there is evidence were probably destroyed shortly after Descartes’ death. Baillet says that he planned to send his daughter to France for her education. But in September 1640 Francine died. Baillet reports Descartes as saying that this was “the greatest sorrow he had ever experienced in his life”.

Responses to the Discourse and the Essays
In the period from 1637 to early 1640 Descartes, through the intermediary of Mersenne, engaged in scientific controversy with Hobbes and Fermat. He also corresponded with critics of the Discourse, the response to which seems to have disappointed him. Among his more persistent critics was Jean-Baptiste Morin, author of a book on the existence of God and later of works on astrology. Morin, arguing from an Aristotelian point of view, takes issue with Descartes’ theory of light, with his corpuscularian physics, and with his method. In letters to a more sympathetic correspondent, Pierre Petit, an engineer and astronomer, Descartes defends his claim that animals are machines, a claim that continued to spark controversy between Cartesians and their opponents well into the eighteenth century.

Next in series:
 * Descartes’ Life from 1639 to 1650

Biographies
English translation:

(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.

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.