René Descartes

Mathematician, scientist and philosopher, b. 31 March 1596 (La Haye, France), d. 11 February 1650 (Stockholm, Sweden).

Descartes' father Joachim owned houses and farms in Châtellerault and Poitou and was a councillor in the Parliament of Brittany in Rennes. Descartes thus inherited a low rang of nobility, which gave him protection during critical moments of his life.

When Descartes' mother died and his father remarried, the one year old René was sent to live with his maternal grandmother and a nurse.

The Descartes family was Roman Catholic but lived in a Protestant (Huguenot) stronghold; the Edict of Nantes, which guaranteed Protestants freedom of worship, was formulated in Châtellerault when René was 2 years old. In a world torn by religious strife and fervour Descartes had thus inherited a tradition of religious tolerance.

In 1606 Descartes entered a Jesuit college to learn the Aristotelian classics, mathematics, science and methaphysics as well as the arts, riding and fencing. In 1614 he went to Poitiers to receive a law degree in 1616. A period of travels began in 1618 with a 15 month stay in the Netherlands, a visit to Bohemia in 1619 and to Bavaria in 1620. During this period he enrolled for brief periods in the armies of the beginning Thirty Years' War but found military life idle, stupid, immoral and cruel. He adopted habits of the Rosicrucians (a Christian brotherhood), such as living a single life, moving house often and practicing medicine without charge.

In 1622 Descartes went to Paris and changed his lifestyle. He gambled, fenced and generally led the good life. He had already formed a positive outlook on philosophical matters, believing in the power of philosophy and science to improve the human condition. When Cardinal de Bérulle, who had founded an order to fight Protestantism, tried in 1928 to recruit Descartes to his cause, Descartes quickly left for the Netherlands, a haven of free thought, and stayed there for 16 years.

During the years 1644 - 1648 Descartes commuted between France and the Netherlands. The revolt of the nobility against the crown in 1648 placed Descartes in danger. Being also harassed by the Calvinist protestants in the Netherlands he accepted an invitation from the Swedish court to come to Stockholm.

Queen Christina had a habit to rise and work early and insisted that Descartes, who usually meditated in bed until 11 am, joined her at 5 am for lessons. After 4 months in Stockholm Descartes developed pneumonia and died.

Descartes' most productive period was in Holland. His works establish his fame as a mathematician and foremost as a philosopher. He wrote his best known work, Discours de la méthode ("Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences", published 1637), in French, explaining that all who had a good sense, including women, should be able to read it. It explains his philosophical system, known as Cartesianism, and how it divides the world into mind (spirit and soul) and matter (body). The essence of mind is self-conscious thinking, the essence of matter extension in three dimensions. Improvement of the human condition comes from finding the truth. Descartes' famous words Cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am") are the expression of basic self-evident truth, from which other truth can be found. The scope of the work is evident from the Preface:

If this Discourse appears too long to be read at once, it may be divided into six Parts: and, in the first, will be found various considerations touching the Sciences; in the second, the principal rules of the Method which the Author has discovered, in the third, certain of the rules of Morals which he has deduced from this Method; in the fourth, the reasonings by which he establishes the existence of God and of the Human Soul, which are the foundations of his Metaphysic; in the fifth, the order of the Physical questions which he has investigated, and, in particular, the explication of the motion of the heart and of some other difficulties pertaining to Medicine, as also the difference between the soul of man and that of the brutes; and, in the last, what the Author believes to be required in order to greater advancement in the investigation of Nature than has yet been made, with the reasons that have induced him to write.

Descartes did not extend his teaching to the animal world. During his medical studies he undertook many unnecessary and cruel vivisections, declaring that animals do not have feelings.

In his second major work La Géometrie ("Geometry", published 1636) Descartes amalgamated Greek geometry with Indian and Arabian algebra (known to him from Latin translations) and introduced the system of coordinates now known as the Cartesian coordinate system. The work had immediate impact; to make it accessible to scholars throughout Europe the Dutch mathematician Frans van Schooten translated it into Latin as Geometria a Renato Des Cartes less than thirty years after its publication.

After his death Descartes' letters came into the possession of a pius catholic, who edited and changed them for publication with the aim to turn Descartes into a saint. Descartes has been variously claimed as a faithful Roman Catholic by some and denounced as an atheist by others, since according to him Christians could choose the way of salvation out of their own free will. (The official church position was that salvation is bestowed through God's grace.) In 1667 the Roman Catholic Church decided to add Descartes' work to the Index of Forbidden Books.

Descartes' philosophy had its greatest impact during his lifetime, when it stimulated Spinoza to most productive criticism. Descartes' name as a mathematician lives on in everyday science. The Cartesian coordinate system is used in mechanics, fluid dynamics and many other areas of science.

Reference

Watson, A. E. (1995) Descartes. Encyclopaedia Britannica 15th ed.

home