Descartes' Bones (2 page)

If the West is heading toward some kind of crisis, it's worth asking ourselves a few basic questions. Modern society as we normally define it—a secular culture built around tolerance, reason, and democratic values—occupies a rather small portion of the world, and there are signs that it is shrinking. Is modernity the inexorable force of progress that we tend to assume? Is it a mere moment of human history that is fast fading? If it is something to value, how can we rediscover it, separate the good and the bad in it, make it relevant and vital?

Eventually it occurred to me that the trail of Descartes' bones was a path through the landscape of the modern centuries. Following the bones was a way of retracing my own intellectual upbringing, reminding myself of what we've been through in the past four hundred years. This book is not an exhaustive survey of modernity but a record of a journey. It proceeds from the conviction that idiosyncrasy is a serious business.

What's more, its focus on bones isn't accidental. Following the trail of Descartes' bones showed me that philosophy, which we think of as an arid discipline, isn't all abstraction but is braided into human history and comes not just out of the human mind but out of the human body as well. Abstract thinking is an excellent and necessary tool, but the loftiest thoughts are rooted in our physical beings: in the curious way our hearts that love are entangled with our hearts that pump blood, in the fact that we die. While it's not a biography, the story does involve a man—whom history has caricatured as virtually a disembodied human brain but who turns out to be surprisingly full-blooded and substantial. Indeed, there is a sense in which Descartes' philosophy, for all its abstraction, sprang from places of human warmth: from his own body, for one, and also from the love he felt for the person who mattered most to him. It was a small, tender love that, in its quiet intimacy, nearly—but not quite—escaped the prying lens of history. Maybe it's true of every human exploration: dig deep enough and you find a love story.

That said, it shouldn't be surprising that we begin not with love or history or philosophy but with death.

         

The Man Who Died

N THE SOUTHERN EDGE OF
S
TOCKHOLM'S
O
LD
Town stands a four-story building that was constructed during the busy, fussy period called the Baroque. Its redbrick façade is ornamented with sandstone cherubs and crests. Two upright cannons flank the entry; bearded busts gaze down sternly on those who approach the door. If you could somehow ignore the designer handbag shop and the upscale “Glenfiddich Warehouse” restaurant/bar occupying the ground floor, and the streams of tourists moving past on a summer afternoon, the structure would probably seem very much of the year—1630—when a merchant named Erik von der Linde built it.

In the dead of night in the dead of winter in the year 1650, the most solemn rite of passage was playing out on an upper floor of this building. People hurried between rooms, past windows that looked out onto the dark, icy harbor below, exchanging information and worried looks. But if the occasion was grave, it wasn't quiet. For someone close to death, the man who lay in bed—not quite fifty-four years old, small-boned, ashen, the center of everyone's attention—was alarmingly active. It was fury that gave him these last bursts of adrenaline. His friend and protégé Pierre Chanut, the French ambassador to Sweden, in whose house he lay dying, was at his side constantly, trying to manage the man's anger while feeling doubly guilty: it was he who had urged René Descartes to come to this frozen land and he who had first contracted a fever, through which Descartes had nursed him before catching it himself.

Chanut fervently believed that Descartes was in the process of transforming the world with his revolutionary thinking. In this he was essentially correct. A change took place in the middle of the 1600s. People began to employ a new, sweeping kind of doubt, to question some of their most basic beliefs. The change was in a way more profound than the American and French revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, or the information age, because it underlay all of them and affected the very structure of people's thought—the way they perceived the world, the universe, and themselves in it. And the person most closely identified with this transformation was the man who lay dying in the Swedish winter. Pierre Chanut couldn't have known the scope of the future, but he knew, as did many others, that something staggeringly significant was afoot and that Descartes was at its center. It had by now dawned on the diplomat that, in bringing the philosopher here, he had unwittingly engineered a catastrophe.

The fever had given way to pneumonia; the patient's breath was ragged, his eyes wandering. Chanut had wanted to call the court physician, but Descartes raged against that idea. Finally, from her fairy tale palace on the other side of the small island in the harbor that was the center of Stockholm, Christina, the twenty-three-year-old queen of Sweden, who would go down as one of the more remarkable personalities in European history (there is, for starters, the centuries-old line of serious speculation that she was infact a king), sent her physician to attend him. It was Christina who, with Chanut, had coaxed the intellectual celebrity northward in the first place.

The doctor, a Dutchman named Wullens, approached the bed reluctantly. There was a sharp exchange in which the philosopher made it venomously clear he thought the physician an ass. The encounter climaxed when Wullens proposed bloodletting, whereupon the patient erupted with a theatrical cry—“Gentlemen, spare French blood!”—and ordered the man out. Wullens departed, washing his hands of the business, muttering as he went a rather fatuous piece of consolation from the Roman poet Horace: “He who saves someone against his will does the same as to kill him.”

The rage had two components. First, the philosopher had known Wullens during his long years in the Dutch provinces. One of the early public airings of Descartes' philosophy had come at Leiden University, and it caused an uproar among those who considered it a challenge to the whole system of education and thought that had been in existence throughout Europe for centuries. Wullens had stood with those who opposed the new philosophy. Descartes never forgot an enemy.

But there was another reason for the anger. In a peculiar way, much of Descartes' career had been a kind of chess match with death, and for a long time he had actually convinced himself that he had the upper hand. He had been a sickly child, with a pale complexion and a dry cough that he had inherited from his mother, who died when he was a year old. His father—a jurist and a man of power and ambition—seems to have despised the child's weakness and favored his older brother. The family doctors didn't bother to hide from the boy their conviction that he would die young.

When he was ten, however, Descartes was sent off to the Jesuit college of La Flèche in Anjou, one of the finest educational establishments in Europe. There, to his surprise, he flourished. He became strong, healthy, vigorous, aware of the wider world, and hungry for knowledge. But the early experience remained lodged inside him. When he settled into his mature work, medicine became its central focus. He developed his revolutionary philosophy, with its grounding not in the Bible or ancient writers but in human reason, and became famous and infamous for it. But the heart of it, the deep reason for it, was his desire to solve the puzzle of the body, to cure disease, and to lengthen human life—including his own. At the end of the
Discourse on the Method,
his epoch-changing work of philosophy, he vowed to the reader not that in the future he would craft a revised metaphysics or a new approach to mathematics but that he would “devote what time I may still have to live to no other occupation than that of endeavoring to acquire some knowledge of Nature, which shall be of such a kind as to enable us there from to deduce rules in medicine of greater certainty than those in present use.” Five years before he lay dying in Sweden he wrote to an English earl, “The preservation of health has
always
been the principal end of my studies.”

The same goal was in the minds of many of his contemporaries. When we think of science and the spark of modernity, we tend to think of astronomy: Galileo crafting his telescopes and peering into the skies above central Italy; locating sunspots, moons around Jupiter, craters on the earth's moon, and other irregularities in a universe that the church had taught was perfect; amassing data that corroborated the theory that the earth revolves around the sun; encountering the systematic wrath of the Inquisition. In our perennial effort to understand who we are and what it means that we are “modern,” we choose astronomy as a starting point in part because it provides a sturdy metaphorical peg for thinking of the massive change that humanity underwent in the seventeenth century, when we—seemingly—left our mythic, biblical selves behind and reoriented ourselves in the cosmos. In 1957—the year of Sputnik and the dawning of the space age, a time when people had a simpler, clearer sense of “modern” than they do today and felt ready to embrace what they thought the word meant—a best-selling book expressed this idea in its title: the change was “From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe.”

But one could just as easily see modernity springing from the intense interest in the human body that arose in Europe at the same time. If our place in the universe is an elemental marker of who we think we are, our physical being is something more. The magnitude of human suffering down the centuries is somewhat quantifiable. The life expectancy of a child born in Descartes' France was twenty-eight; in England between 1540 and 1800 it was an estimated thirty-seven. Similar rates—in the twenties and thirties—held for high-born citizens of ancient Rome, forager societies in Africa and South America, and people in rural India and China into the early twentieth century. More than half of all children born in London around the time of the American Revolution could be expected to die by age fifteen. And most deaths in early modern Europe were caused not by war or marauding brigands but by disease. Century upon century, hour after desperate hour, parents watched helplessly as their children succumbed to maladies whose very names—ague, apoplexy, flux, dropsy, commotion, consumption—spoke of the misty ignorance that was a definitive sentence.

The mists have lifted somewhat in three and a half centuries—we live longer and healthier lives—and still the body remains a touchstone of modernity. Zoloft, Lipitor, Viagra, Botox, ibuprofen, angioplasty, insulin, birth control pills, hormone replacement therapy, anabolic steroids—we don't merely allow science and technology into our physical beings but insist that they continually do more to better manipulate and aid the brute facts of our flesh and blood and bone selves. Embedded in this outlook is an idea of the body as a machine, so that illness is seen as a breakdown of the machine, healing involves repairing the broken parts, and a doctor is a kind of mechanic with medications as his or her tools. This simplistic view has been changing in the last twenty or thirty years. We have a hankering now to see mind and body as deeply connected, to appreciate the way thoughts and the environment influence our physical being. Yet the mechanical model has been very successful, and our medicine is still largely constructed around it. And it was this model that came into being in Descartes' generation.

This new way of viewing the human body was bewildering when it was first aired. Many people, in fact, equated it with atheism. It was frankly at odds with the overall approach to knowledge in the period against which modernity arose. Aristotelianism, or Scholasticism, was a blend of Christian theology and thinking derived from Aristotle and other ancient Greeks. These streams of thought had stewed together for centuries and resulted in a worldview that, often spiced with astrology and folklore, treated every subject under the sun, from the story of creation to the roles of men and women. It explained why a stone dropped from a window fell to the earth rather than floating upward (because objects want to move toward the center of the earth, which is the center of the universe); it told what happened when you died; it gave an account of the end of all things.

The premodern medical establishment—which Descartes had dedicated himself to overthrowing—was built around the teachings of the ancient Greek physician Galen, whose work in turn was dependent on Aristotle's division of the physical world into the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water. Corresponding to these were the bodily “humors,” or fluids: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Diseases and disorders were seen as the result of a humoral imbalance. This system—augmented by folk medicine, witchcraft, Christianity, and astrology—had the advantage of completeness. My body and its little world of concerns—toothaches and fevers, lovesickness and moodiness—was part of the wide world and the wider universe. This doesn't mean that the view was that the body was made of the same material as everything else in the universe or that physical forces controlled everything. The ineffable was a genuine and necessary part of reality. Jesus walked on water; miracles happened; the Devil stalked the land. The supernatural—magic—existed within the natural; it was woven into the fabric of the world and the stars, including the sinews of the human body.

At the same time, the system was practical. As a physician in ancient Rome (with a list of clients that ran from Marcus Aurelius to gladiators), Galen himself had favored close observation of the patient—he was the first to recognize the pulse rate as an indicator of health—so that his approach had much to offer it, which explains why it endured for so long. One problem was that the underlying account of the physical world—Aristotle's four elements, which combined in different ways to create all the stuff of reality, from mountains to lily pads to manatees to earwax—did not serve as an especially sturdy foundation. Diagnosis and treatment via the system of humors—a melancholic, or “earthy,” illness called for an “airy” compound, and so on—were dodgy if not lethal, as patients well knew and as Molière, for whom the medical profession was a favorite target, suggested with the observation “most men die of their remedies and not of their diseases.”