User:Goclenius/René Descartes' Life

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

From 1596 to 1639

 * Main articles:


 * Descartes’ Life from 1596 to 1629
 * Descartes’ Life from 1630 to 1639

René Descartes (in Latin, Renatus Cartesius) was born 31 March 1596 into a well-off, well-connected family of physicians, lawyers, and provincial government officials. His mother Jeanne died at year later, shortly after giving birth to a son who himself died within days. At the age of ten, in 1606, Descartes was sent to the Collége Henri IV in La Flèche, a recently founded school run by the Jesuits. He received there the education customary for male children in his time: Latin and Greek grammar, rhetoric and literature, arithmetic and geometry, and philosophy. The latter included logic, metaphysics, natural philosophy, and ethics, all taught on the basis of the writings of Aristotle. In 1614 he left La Flèche to attend university at Poitiers, where he received his law degree in November 1616.

From 1618 to 1625 Descartes travelled, first joining the army of Maurice of Nassau in the Netherlands, and then travelling to Germany, Italy, and elsewhere. While staying at Breda in late 1618 he met Isaac Beeckman, a Dutch scholar and schoolteacher. Together the two worked on “mathematico-physics”, a corpuscularian, mathematical version of natural philosophy. The Compendium musicæ was written in December and presented to Beeckman as a New Year’s gift. In November 1619 Descartes had his celebrated dreams, the object of much commentary since. At minimum they can be said to express uncertainty about his future, and perhaps to indicate something of the direction his philosophy would take. While at Ulm in 1620 he may have met the German mathematician Johannes Faulhaber. Similarities in Descartes’ writings from the 1620s with Faulhaber’s from the same period indicate that there was at least some communication between them. During this period, and perhaps earlier, Descartes probably read some Rosicrucian works; there are hints in his early notes of a flirtation with Rosicrucian ideas.

After selling his inherited lands in 1623 and 1624, Descartes rejected the legal career that was his for the asking at that point. He stayed in Paris from 1626 to 1628, meeting with the circle of natural philosophers and erudites associated with Marin Mersenne, collaborating with Claude Mydorge on optical questions, and working on the Rules for the direction of the mind, which alludes to, but does not exhibit, a proof of the angle of refraction. This he abandoned sometime in 1628 or 1629. In 1628, according to Baillet, he met with Cardinal Bérulle, the founder of the Oratorians in France.

In late 1628, after seeing his father for the last time (Joachim Descartes died in 1640) Descartes departed for the Netherlands, which, after freeing itself from Spanish influence, was, though officially Protestant, relatively tolerant. Staying at various places, including Franeker, Leiden, and Amsterdam, he began work on a “little treatise” on metaphysics which has not survived, and whose contents are a matter of conjecture. Letters to Mersenne indicate that he was thinking about metaphysical questions, including the relation of God to the divine ideas and the immortality of the soul—the two topics that, according to Augustine, a Christian philosopher ought to reflect on.

From 1629 to 1633, Descartes worked on natural philosophy, writing Le Monde (The World) and the Traité de l’homme (Treatise on man). In those works he presents for the first time a comprehensive mechanistic, corpuscularian natural philosophy, in which the explanation of natural phenomena is supposed to be based on a few basic laws of motion applied to hypothetical micro-configurations of bodies. The Treatise on man extends the principles of physics to the study of living things, treating the human body (and by analogy those of other living things) as machines; this in contrast to Aristotelian physiology in which vital operations are attributed to the powers of a substantial form or soul. Also during this period he invented a method of relating equations to curves, through the use of coordinates assigned to points on the plane, that allowed him to solve in a very general way many problems in geometry, including the problem from the ancient geometer Pappus that had been sent to him by the mathematician and orientalist Jacobus Golius, a professor at Leiden, in 1631. So-called “Cartesian coordinates” are a later development from Descartes’ invention.

Upon hearing of the condemnation of Galileo in 1633, Descartes set aside The world and the Treatise, preferring silence to conflict with the pronouncements of Rome. In 1635, however, he began revising and repackaging material from those works, along with his work in optics and geometry, into three Essais; to the Essais he added the Discourse on method. These works, published in 1637, were his first publications. In the Discourse, the cogito appears for the first time, together with a version of the resolution of radical doubt and a proof of the existence of a nondeceiving God. The Discourse also includes a précis of his work in the Treatise on man, and offers a criterion for distinguishing machines that have human souls joined with them from machines that don’t. That criterion is appropriate behavior, and in particular the appropriate use of speech, which provides the best evidence we could have that a thing has the power of reason, and thus a soul.

In the summer of 1635 a daughter was born to Descartes and Hélène, a servant in a house where he was staying. That daughter, Francine, is referred to just once in his surviving correspondance, but it is possible that she and her mother stayed with Descartes between 1637 and 1640. She died in September 1640 as Descartes was preparing to send her to France for her education.

After the publication of the Discourse, Descartes responded to various critics, and engaged in controversy with Hobbes and Fermat on questions in optics and mathematics. Two in particular preoccupied him: a dispute on mathematical matters with the Dutch mathematician Jan Stampioen, and a set of theses, supervised by the Jesuit Pierre Bourdin, which were opposed to various claims in the Discours and Essais. Bourdin would later write the seventh set of Objections to the Meditations.

From 1639 to 1650 and after

 * Main article: Descartes’ Life from 1639 to 1650. Notes and references will be found there.

Iconography
Only two portraits of Descartes made during his lifetime are known (Watson 2002:175–176). These are:
 * A painting by Jan-Baptist Weenix made in 1647–1649; now at the Centraalmuseum in Utrecht
 * A drawing by Frans van Schooten the Younger, intended to be included in his Latin translation of the Geometry (Geometria, Leiden, 1649) but published (as an engraving) only after Descartes’ death in the second edition of the Latin Geometry (1659)

The well-known painting attributed to Frans Hals is neither by Hals nor of Descartes. It is said to be a copy by an unknown hand after an authentic portrait painted in 1649. See the |catalogue Frans Hals entry at the Louvre. The supposed Hals portrait was adapted for use in a French postage stamp, engraved by Henry Cheffer, commemorating the three-hundredth anniversary of the publication of the Discourse in 1937.

An engraving of Descartes as Faust was published as a frontispiece to the Opuscula posthuma of 1701.

On the sources
Bene vivit qui bene latuit—“he lives well who hides well”. Descartes, who quoted that Latin tag at least once, and who announced in his early notes that he would “go forth masked” (larvatus prodeo), realized his intentions quite well. Many, perhaps most, of his papers have disappeared; substantial portions of his correspondence—including, for example, the letters written to Hélène, the mother of his natural daughter Francine—are missing. The early years in particular are poorly documented; but even for his last years crucial points cannot be substantiated. The historian is left with the accounts of early biographers like Baillet, from whom much must be taken, if at all, on trust alone. The usual cautions apply.

Biographers are left with many lacunæ that can be filled only by speculation. Descartes’ relations with Rosicrucianism are a case in point. His reasons for leaving France are another. A cautious approach is required, especially in light of the volume of speculation on such matters as Descartes’ dreams, the “little treatise” on metaphysics of 1629, and his relations with Princess Élisabeth.

The primary sources are Descartes’ own works, including the autobiographical part of the Discourse; the various fragments copied by Leibniz and others discovered later; the notes and anecdotes published by Baillet; the correspondence, most of which passed through the hands of his literary executor Claude Clerselier; and finally the reports of contemporaries. Most of the relevant documents are contained in the Adam-Tannery edition, although even the latest version lacks a few items discovered after the republication of the last volume.

Collected editions
(This is the standard edition, usually cited as ‘AT’.)

Single works
Verbeek, Theo, Erik-Jan Bos, Jeroen van de Ven, eds. (2003) The correspondence of René Descartes, 1643. Utrecht: Zeno.

Biographies
English translation:

(Eng. trans. Jane Marie Todd,

Other works
Smith, Kurt, Supplement to “Descartes' Life and Works”. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2005 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Last viewed April 2005.