User:Goclenius/Descartes' Life from 1596 to 1629

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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

[edit] 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.^[1]

[edit] 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.^[2]

[edit] La Flèche

At Easter in 1606, Descartes was sent to the Collège Henri IV at La Flèche.^[3] 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).^[4] 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.^[5]

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.^[6] Defenders of Aristotle though they might be, the Jesuits were attuned to developments in natural philosophy, and especially to new experiments and observations.^[7] 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.^[8]

[edit] 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.^[9] 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.^[10]

[edit] 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.^[11]

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.^[12] 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.

[edit] 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).^[13] 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).^[14] 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?”^[15]

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.^[16] 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.

[edit] 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.^[17] 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.^[18] It was left incomplete when Descartes left for the Netherlands at the end of 1628.^[19] 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.^[20]

Next in series:

• Descartes’ Life from 1630 to 1639

[edit] Notes

1. ^ On Jesuit education, see Dainville 1940/1978, Compère and Julia 1984–2002. On philosophy in the universities generally, see Schmitt 1983, Schmitt 1984, Schmitt (ed.) 1988, Kuhn 2005.
2. ^ In the only extant reference to his mother’s death, Descartes says that she died soon after his birth—that is, in 1596 (Watson 2002:41).
3. ^ There is some dispute over the date: 1606 is the consensus (Gaukroger 1995:424n1, citing Gouhier 1958:158–159).
4. ^ As Watson notes, the relationship thus expressed may not have been all that close (Watson 2002:66). In any case the context is one in which Descartes is attempting to ingratiate himself to the Jesuits, having sent several of them copies of the Principles.
5. ^ On account of his precarious health, Descartes was not required to wake up at the usual time of 5am. In a letter to Guez de Balzac, he says that he slept for “ten hours every night”—two hours longer than the usual (15 Apr 1631, AT 1:198–199). See Rodis-Lewis 1995:30, Watson 2002:68).
6. ^ Gaukroger 1995, c. 2 and the references in note 1. Ariew 1998 draws on Aristotelian and other texts to provide some background to Descartes’ philosophy; Ariew 1999 is a series of essays on relations between Descartes and various Scholastics both before and after him.
7. ^ Hellyer 2005 surveys the situation in Germany. Examples include Galileo’s opponent Christoph Scheiner (see “Scheiner” at the Galileo Project) and Honoré Fabri (Physica, id est, scientia rerum corporearum, 4 vol., Lyon:Laurent Anisson, 1669-1671).
8. ^ Rodis-Lewis 1995:32–33. Rodis-Lewis, following Stephen Toulmin, finds it plausible that Descartes wrote the sonnet.
9. ^ Baillet has him leaving La Flèche in 1614 and spending much of the year between then and his entry into law school in solitude at the village of Saint-Germain-en-Laye outside Paris. Accepting Baillet’s otherwise uncorroborated claim, Gaukroger speculates that during this time Descartes may have suffered from melancholia (Gaukroger 1995:62).
10. ^ Discourse 2, AT 6:11; To Beeckman 23 Apr 1619, AT 10:162. Subsequent letters in the Beeckman correspondence place Descartes in Amsterdam (29 Apr) and Copenhagen (6 May).
11. ^ AT 1:154–167. See Rodis-Lewis 1995:126–128 (1998:86–88) for an account sympathetic to Descartes. Despite the harshness of Descartes’ letter, the two seem to have reconciled not long after. But in 1637, upon hearing of Beeckman’s death, Descartes responded coolly in a letter to Colvius, a friend of Beeckman (To Colvius 14 Jun 1637, AT 1:379–380).
12. ^ Beeckman, Journal 4:49–55 and AT 10:46–78.
13. ^ Although many authors place Descartes in Ulm during this period, Rodis-Lewis, following Baillet, places him in Neuberg (Rodis-Lewis 1995:61, 1998:36).
14. ^ The source of these notes is a nineteenth-century edition of (then) unpublished writings of Descartes by Foucher de Careil from notes taken by or for Leibniz when he visited Paris in 1675–1676. Unfortunately two pages from the bundle transcribed by Foucher seem to have disappeared between the 1850s and the 1890s. Those two pages may well have included the passages cited by Baillet and quoted here, which are not found in the extant manuscript (AT10:210).
15. ^ The “melon” of the first dream has been taken to be a pun on the Greek to mellon, “the future” (Watson 2002:135, citing Alan Gabbey; Watson mentions several other interpretations of the dreams). Descartes himself took the melon to signify the “charms of solitude” (Baillet 1:85). Upon waking, and after reflecting on the dreams, Descartes made a vow to undertake a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin Mary at Loreto in Italy.
16. ^ Although there are parallels in Descartes’ early notes with phrases or passages found in Rosicrucian works of the period, there is no direct evidence of his having read those works, or of his meeting any known Rosicrucian with the exception of Faulhaber. See Rodis-Lewis 1995:59, Gaukroger 195:105, Mehl 2001.
17. ^ Augustine, De Ordine 2.18(47), in Patrologia Latina 32:1017, and Soliloquia 1.2(7), Patrologia latina 32:872.
18. ^ Treatises on method were plentiful in the period. Gilbert 1960 includes several hundred such works published between 1500 and 1650.
19. ^ There is disagreement on the precise dates of composition: see Gaukroger 1995:111.
20. ^ Baillet 1:165, citing papers, no longer extant, that had belonged to Descartes’ literary executor Claude Clerselier. Rodis-Lewis and Watson express doubts concerning Baillet’s report (Rodis-Lewis 1995:102; Watson 2002:142–147).

[edit] External links

• Scholasticon: ed. Jacob Schmutz — bio-bibliographies of Scholastic philosophers