NYTIMES REVIEW
Making the case for one or another historical moment as the starting point of modernity is a familiar hook for writers of grand chronicles. Was the transformative event World War I, with its fateful consequences for 20th-century warfare, ideology and identity? Or perhaps Einstein’s “miracle year” of 1905, when he published his universe-shattering papers? The appearance of Darwin’s “Origin of Species” offers a bright dividing line, as do the (take your pick) French and American revolutions. The literary critic Harold Bloom reaches still farther back, crediting Shakespeare with the “invention of the human” in its various modern modes. Others find the deepest roots of modernity in the bleak realism of Machiavelli.
Russell Shorto’s “Descartes’ Bones” is a smart, elegantly written contribution to this genre. For Shorto, the pivot upon which the old world yielded to the new was the genius of Descartes, the philosopher who gave us the doubting, analytical, newly independent modern self. The Frenchman’s most famous phrase, “I think, therefore I am,” may strike our own ears as a coffee-mug cliché, but in the 17th century it was a revolutionary declaration. Shorto’s achievement is to complicate this picture, and with it our understanding of modernity, by also describing the religious context of the philosopher’s ideas. Though Descartes’s name has come to be associated with unrelenting rationalism, he was “as devout a Catholic as anyone of his time,” Shorto writes, and looked to theology to support his system. As Shorto recognizes, our own fundamentalists, religious and secular alike, might draw some useful lessons in modesty from Descartes’s example.
Descartes made a cameo appearance in Shorto’s previous book, “The Island at the Center of the World” (2004), a richly detailed revisionist history of 17th-century Dutch Manhattan and its liberalizing influence on America’s British colonies. In those pages, we encountered the philosopher as a celebrity in Holland, where he lived for almost two decades and, in 1637, published his seminal “Discourse on the Method.” Descartes takes center stage in Shorto’s new book, but not in the way one might expect. The action opens in the winter of 1650, with the hapless Frenchman on his deathbed in faraway Stockholm, cursing the fate that had lured him to the Swedish court of Queen Christina. By Page 40, after an instructive synopsis of his controversial career, exit Descartes, a corpse — and enter a large, motley cast of Cartesians, determined to do right by their teacher’s ideas and by his moldering, displaced bones.
Shorto makes deft use of the centuries-long to-and-fro over Descartes’s remains, a tale that involves three different burials, events in six countries and lingering questions, partly resolved by the author himself, about the authenticity of the skeleton, or rather of its scattered parts. As it turns out, the skull of the philosopher was separated mysteriously, at an early date, from the rest of his bones. This macabre fact provides Shorto with the makings of a detective story but also with an irresistible metaphor. Descartes’s chief contribution to modern science and philosophy was his radical focus on epistemology, on defining the boundaries of what we are capable of knowing with certainty. At the center of this project was his assertion of mind-body dualism, the notion, as Shorto explains, that “the mind and its thoughts exist in a different category or somehow on a different plane from the physical world.” For his admirers and for a latter-day scientific establishment aware of its debt to him, what could be more urgent than identifying and uniting the deceased philosopher’s own head and body?
The parade of colorful figures taking part in this drawn-out effort forms the heart of Shorto’s narrative. We meet Hugues de Terlon, a militant Catholic and the French ambassador to Sweden, who in 1666 had Descartes’s bones repatriated, seeing in the philosopher’s famed “method” a superior window into God’s handiwork. Another central character is the waifish, ethereal Alexandre Lenoir, a rationalist aesthete and supporter of the French Revolution who spent the years after 1789 fighting to preserve the artistic and architectural heritage of the old regime, including the Parisian church of Ste. Geneviève, where Descartes was (ostensibly) buried. A number of early-19th-century scientific notables also play significant roles in the story, including Jöns Jacob Berzelius, the Swede who invented modern chemical notation; Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre, an important contributor to the development of the metric system; and Georges Cuvier, a pioneer in comparative anatomy and paleontology.
The religious quarrels in which Descartes’s ideas embroiled both himself and his followers are too numerous to count, ranging from the character of transubstantiation in the Eucharist to the possibility that the animal kingdom might exhibit something other than the Bible’s apparent “fixity of the species.” Most of these disputes concern, in one way or another, the challenge posed by the new mechanistic science to classical notions of nature and its ends — that is, to the teleology inherited from Aristotle and codified by churchmen. But, as Shorto emphasizes, there was another side to Descartes’s project. The philosopher thought he had succeeded not in overturning the true faith but in protecting it from the crumbling edifice of ancient natural science. His mind/body distinction, Shorto notes, has long been invoked in defense of “an eternal realm of thought, belief and ideals that can’t be touched by the prying fingers of science.”
Whether Shorto himself falls into this camp is hard to say, but he offers welcome sympathy to those of us who would like to see today’s discussion of the relationship between science and religion placed on a more civil, informed footing. It is a mistake, he writes, to think that the Enlightenment “set reason firmly against faith and the two have ever since been locked in a death struggle.” Radicals among the trailblazing modern thinkers were more than equally matched by moderates who believed that “reason would function alongside faith to increase human happiness and life span, end disease, reduce suffering of all kinds and give people greater power over nature and greater freedom in their lives.” If the founders of the modern sensibility could bridge this divide, perhaps we can, too.
Shorto overreaches at times in the interest of advancing a strong thesis and weaving an engaging tale. Descartes’s influence was immense, to be sure, but it is a stretch to credit him, as Shorto does, with laying the ground for modern ideas of equality, individual rights and self-government. On the scientific side of the ledger, Shorto’s eagerness to set apart Descartes as a system-builder leads to his unfortunate assertion that the celebrated experimenters and empiricists of early modern science — Galileo, Bacon, Harvey, Kepler — initially sowed “more confusion than clarity.” Melodrama also occasionally intrudes into Shorto’s account, particularly in his sleuthing about Descartes’s skull and his speculation about the philosopher’s feelings for his working-class mistress and their illegitimate daughter.
None of this detracts much, ultimately, from Shorto’s feat of intellectual story-telling. If pressed, he would probably concede that his philosophical hero was not so single-handedly responsible for modernity; Descartes had many capable partners, even peers. But Shorto is right about certain enduring aspects of Descartes’s thought. As he observes in the book’s epilogue, in an especially eloquent passage about dualism: “We are all philosophers because our condition demands it. We live every moment in a universe of seemingly eternal thoughts and ideas, yet simultaneously in the constantly churning and decaying world of our bodies and their humble situations. . . . The result is a nagging need to find meaning.”
Gary Rosen is the chief external affairs officer of the John Templeton Foundation.