Descartes' Bones (32 page)

Illustration Credits

Musée de l'homme, Paris

Photo by author

Alexandre Lenoir (1761–1839) opposing the destruction of the royal tombs of the French monarchy in the Church of Saint-Denis, 1793 (pen & ink and wash on paper) (b/w photo) by French School (eighteenth century) © Louvre, Paris, France/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library Nationality/copyright status: French

Portrait of René Descartes (1596–1650) by Frans Hals (c. 1582/83–1666)/SMK Foto/Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.

Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris.

Portrait of René Descartes (1596–1650) c. 1649 (oil on canvas) by Frans Hals (1582/83–1666) (after) © Louvre, Paris, France/Lauros/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library Nationality/copyright status:Dutch

New York Times

Japanese National Science Museum, Tokyo

         

Notes

Preface

“You have a triangle”:
Guardian,
February 26, 2007.

Chapter 1
The Man Who Died

“He who saves someone”:
Adam and Tannery,
Oeuvres,
vol. 5, pp. 477–78. Translated for the author by Jane Alison.

“devote what time I may still have”:
Descartes,
Discourse,
p. 96.

“The preservation of health”:
Descartes,
Philosophical Writings,
vol. 3, p. 275.

The life expectancy of a child:
Data from chapter 5 of Clark,
A Farewell to Alms.

“most men die of their remedies”:
Molière,
The Imaginary Invalid.

“What says the doctor”:
The page's reply, meanwhile, seems to mock the practice: “He said, sir, the water itself was a good healthy water; but, for the party that owed it, he might have more diseases than he knew for.”

“
dote not
upon, nor
trust
”:
Sym,
Lifes Preservative Against Self-Killing
; quoted in Andrew Wear, “Puritan Perceptions of Illness in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Porter,
Patients and Practitioners,
p. 80.

the flexor digitorum superficialis:
Masquelet, “Rembrandt's
Anatomy Lesson.
”

“hidden behind the scene so as to listen”:
Roth,
Descartes' Discourse on Method,
p. 14.

“As soon as I had finished the course of studies”:
Descartes,
Discourse,
p. 5.

“nothing solid could have been built”:
Descartes,
Discourse,
p. 8.

“I did nothing but roam”:
Descartes,
Discourse,
p. 59.

He spent time serving in two armies:
A. C. Grayling, in his 2005 biography, speculates that Descartes was working as a spy for the Jesuits, which would explain how he came to be in so many places of military and political significance; Grayling acknowledges, however, that there is no actual evidence for this.

“there will remain almost nothing else”:
Adam and Tannery,
Oeuvres,
vol. 10, p. 158. Quoted in Gaukroger,
Soft Underbelly of Reason,
p. 93.

“the father not just of modern philosophy”:
Schouls,
Descartes and the Possibility of Science,
p. 3.

“the dividing line in the history of thought”:
Roth,
Descartes' Discourseon Method,
p. 3.

“The best way of proving the falsity”:
Adam and Tannery,
Oeuvres,
vol. 9B, p. 18. Quoted in Schouls,
Descartes and the Possibility of Science,
p. 9.

“the lords and masters of nature”:
Descartes,
Discourse,
discourse 6.

“The single design to strip one's”:
Descartes,
Discourse,
p. 49.

“that I am in this place”:
Ibid., p. 119.

In this way, Descartes became:
A sampling of cogito riffs through the ages: “I think, therefore I spam” (blogger Amitai Givertz). “I blink, therefore I am” (slogan of the Cartesian Reflex Project at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst, which is devoted to the study of involuntary blinking, a subject Descartes wrote about in 1649). “Cogito, ergo Cartesius est” (Saul Steinberg). “I am because my little dog knows me” (Gertrude Stein). “Cogito, ergo spud./I think, therefore I yam” (Internet graffito). “Coito, ergo cum” (poet Gustavo Pérez Firmat). “I stink, therefore I am” (many iterations). And my favorite: “I think, therefore I am. I think” (George Carlin).

“Doubt is the beginning”:
Verbeek,
Descartes and the Dutch,
p. 39.

Shortly after, Regius penned a letter:
The letter is in Adam and Tannery,
Oeuvres,
vol. 2, p. 305. I am relying on the commentary in Bos,
Correspondence,
pp. 3–9.

The chattering classes:
Regius, in Bos,
Correspondence,
p. 3.

“greatest of all philosophers”:
Heereboord, in Verbeek,
Descartes and the Dutch,
p. 40. The next quote is from Anton Aemilius, in Bos, p. 18, and the quote about the method is from Regius, in Bos, p. 3.

He delved into details:
Bos,
Correspondence,
pp. 214–20.

“A Sponge to Wash Away”:
Gaukroger,
Descartes,
p. 359.

“learned ignorance”:
Verbeek,
Descartes and the Dutch,
p. 18.

“neither in public nor in private lessons”:
Quoted in Verbeek,
Descartesand the Dutch,
p. 83.

“There are certain newfangled philosophers”:
Ibid., p. 49.

“doubts might be imported”:
Ibid., p. 39.

“But I have found nothing”:
Letter to Marin Mersenne, in Descartes,
Philosophical Writings,
vol. 3, p. 134.

“Now I am dissecting the heads”:
Letter to Mersenne, in Adam and Tannery,
Oeuvres,
vol. 1, p. 263, quoted in Gaukroger,
Descartes,
p. 228.

“prevented by the brevity of life”:
Descartes,
Discourse,
p. 46.

As absurd as Descartes' hopeful ideas:
For the discussion of Descartes'hopeful beliefs about medicine, and how he was looked upon for his medical wisdom, I rely mainly on Shapin, “Descartes the Doctor: Rationalism and Its Therapies.”

Meanwhile, proving that he was truly modern:
Adam and Tannery,
Oeuvres,
vol. 1, p. 434.

We happen to know that on October 15, 1634:
Information on Helena Jans and Francine comes from Baillet,
La vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes,
vol. 2, pp. 89–91; Adam and Tannery,
Oeuvres,
vol. 1, pp. 299, 393–94; Rodis-Lewis,
Descartes,
pp. 137–41; Gaukroger,
Descartes,
pp. 294–95; Van der Ven, “Quelques données.”

“as a peasant does with his field”:
Quoted in Masson,
Queen Christina,
p. 144.

She was said to treat certain young ladies:
Buckley,
Christina,
p. 141.

“Perhaps this will pass”:
Adam and Tannery,
Oeuvres,
vol. 5, p. 430.

“I am out of my element”:
Ibid., p. 467.

“that if he had to die”:
Ibid., p. 478.

“oily”:
Baillet,
La vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes,
vol. 2, p. 420.

“the death-rattle, black sputum”:
Adam and Tannery,
Oeuvres,
vol. 5, pp. 477–78. Translated for the author by Jane Alison.

“We are afflicted in this house”:
The letters quoted in this paragraph are all found in Adam and Tannery,
Oeuvres,
vol. 5, pp. 470–78.

“would have lived five hundred years”:
Baillet,
La vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes
, vol. 2, p. 452. Quoted in Shapin, “Descartes the Doctor,” p. 141.

Chapter 2
Banquet of Bones

“Death,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote:
The complete passage from the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
goes as follows: “Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.”

Where Chanut had been an enthusiastic promoter”:
My sources on Terlon are Terlon's
Mémoires du Chevalier de Terlon;
the Swedish encyclopedia
Nordisk familjebok
; and Dominique Terlon, family genealogist.

Anne attended Mass:
My source on Anne of Austria is Kleinman,
Anne of Austria.

Terlon had been in the process:
Principal sources on disinterment in Sweden and transportation of the bones from Stockholm to Paris are Baillet,
La vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes
; Adam and Tannery,
Oeuvres
; “Documentation concernant le crâne de Descartes.”

“nearly the whole Catholic Church of Sweden”:
Baillet,
La vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes,
vol. 2, p. 598.

“without indecence”:
Ibid., p. 597.

Here in Sweden:
Lindborg,
Descartes i Uppsala,
p. 339.

“the appearance of a bundle of rocks”:
Adam and Tannery,
Oeuvres,
vol. 12, p. 599.

The notes taken by an anonymous lawyer:
Clair,
Jacques Rohault,
pp. 51–52.

Here Descartes and his followers:
I am generalizing here; in fact, there were many variations on this basic Scholastic theme regarding knowledge and perception.

Rohault dismantles this logic:
This example from Rohault's
System of Natural Philosophy
comes by way of Watson,
Breakdown of Cartesian Metaphysics,
p. 87.

A notion had first struck Descartes:
Gaukroger,
Descartes,
p. 356.

Protestants (some of them, anyway):
Lutherans, for one, did not, and do not, believe either that the host represents the body of Christ or that its substance is replaced by the substance of Christ's body, but rather that, with the act of consecration, the two substances—bread and body—coexist. My account of transubstantiation and Cartesianism relies on Schmaltz,
Radical Cartesianism
; Watson,
Breakdown of Cartesian Metaphysics
; and Armogathe,“ ‘Hoc Est Corpus Meum' ” and
Theologia Cartesiana.

In Catholic theology:
Precisely what happens during transubstantiation has remained a sticky point for the Catholic Church. In one of its most recent attempts at clarification, a 1981 report on points of reconciliation with the Anglican Church notes, “The word
transubstantiation
is commonly used in the Roman Catholic Church to indicate that God acting in the eucharist effects a change in the inner reality of the elements. The term should be seen as affirming the
fact
of Christ's presence and of the mysterious and radical change which takes place.” The document then skirts the problem that gave the Church—and the Cartesians—headaches in the seventeenth century, adding that “in contemporary Roman Catholictheology [transubstantiation] is not understood as explaining
how
the change takes place” (Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission,
Final Report,
p. 14).

“our Lord Jesus Christ”:
Waterworth,
Council of Trent,
13th sess., ch. 1.

“Numerous stories were known”:
Watson,
Breakdown of Cartesian Metaphysics,
p. 160.

“I was so surprised by this”:
Gaukroger,
Descartes,
p. 290.

Robert Desgabets:
Details about Desgabets come from Schmaltz,
Radical Cartesianism,
and Watson,
Breakdown of Cartesian Metaphysics.

Desgabets journeyed to Paris:
Desgabets held that the Aristotelian explanation of the Christian miracle didn't work because it required the first substance, that of the bread, to be eliminated before it could be replaced by the second substance, that of Christ's body. Matter, Desgabets argued, could not be destroyed.

Finally, on an evening in late June:
Details on the funeral of 1667 come from Baillet,
La vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes,
vol. 2, ch. 23.

“illustrious and learned ghost”:
Van Damme, “Restaging Descartes.”

The archbishop of Paris:
Quotations are from Schmaltz,
Radical Cartesianism,
pp. 29–33.

The end result, however:
Armogathe and Carraud, “L'ouverture des archives de la Congrégation pour la doctrine de la foi.”

Most significant for history:
My sources on Malebranche and Arnauld include Lawrence Nolan, “Malebranche's Theory of Ideas and Vision in God,” and Steven Nadler,
Arnauld and the Cartesian Philosophy of Ideas.

Chapter 3
Unholy Relics

“at Cards Dice”:
Quoted in Uglow,
Lunar Men,
p. 51.

Voltaire, the godfather of the French Enlightenment:
Voltaire,
Lettres philosophiques,
pp. 2–3.

“was the founder”:
Rée,
Descartes,
pp. 30–31.

In the 1720s, Alberto Radicati:
Jacob,
Radical Enlightenment,
pp. 172–76, and Israel,
Radical Enlightenment,
p. 69.

Even among the first generation of Cartesians:
My paragraph on women and female sexuality relies on Israel,
Radical Enlightenment,
ch. 4: “Women, Philosophy, and Sexuality.”

“if I vindicate”:
Collins,
A Discourse of Free-Thinking,
p. 5.

“the Devil is intirely banish'd”:
Ibid., p. 28.

The modern French scholar:
Vovelle,
Piété baroque et déchristianisa-tionen Provence au XVIII siècle.

“By the
Universe
”:
Quoted in Berman,
Atheism in Britain,
p. xii.

“calls God Nature”:
Quoted in Israel,
Radical Enlightenment,
p. 4.

“Those who have seen naked spirits”:
Ibid., p. 375.

“Immense pains have therefore”:
Spinoza,
Theologico-Political Treatise,
preface, in
Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza.

“The spirit that animated the reformers”:
Quoted in Schouls,
Descartes and the Enlightenment,
p. 73.

“Enlightenment,” he declared:
Quoted in Cassirer,
Philosophy of the Enlightenment,
p. 163.