Descartes' Bones (30 page)

So where was the copper coffin? Where was the copper sword? What's more, Lenoir had believed that one of the larger bone fragments—from which he had made his rings—was a piece of skull. A portion of skull is precisely what should not have been found, the skull being the one piece of the skeleton that has the best documentary reason for not being among the remains.

But the most decisive point against Lenoir is found in his letter to Cuvier. He says that he and two others “took ourselves to the church to make a search for the body of Descartes; and we dug the earth around the pillar to the right of the entrance, where a medallion in terra cotta was attached.” Such a plaque to the memory of Descartes may well have been placed on a pillar to the right of the church entrance, but that was not the location of the tomb. Records of those who participated in the burial at Ste.-Geneviève are clear in stating that when the prayers and songs were finished the coffin was carried “to the southern end of the nave and put against the great wall, between two confessionals, into a vault that had been intended for it, between the chapel of the titular Saint Geneviève and that of Saint François.” Descartes' resting place was not the spot under the floor of the church where Lenoir and/or his assistants dug but a vault along the southern wall.

All of this points to Lenoir as the man responsible for breaking the historical chain—for losing the bones. He must at first have thought that he had gotten the genuine remains of Descartes from the church, for we know how he cherished the remains of great men and women as secular relics, and he went to the trouble of turning these particular bones into jewelry. But in time he seems to have come to realize what had happened, and begun making excuses. The remains—presumably a more or less complete skeleton with the exception of its skull—would probably have been dealt with by revolutionary ransackers. If the vandals had somehow overlooked them, Descartes' bones would have been churned up when the ruined church was finally destroyed in 1807 to make way for the road.

The Cartesian tendency of favoring mind over matter—mind over body—thus has a metaphorical cap. The skull—the representation of mind—having been subjected to repeated and increasingly sophisticated scientific study and judged to be authentic, sits enshrined in a science museum, the Musée de l'homme, or Museum of Man, which was formed in 1937 from older collections of anthropological artifacts. Indeed, as I write, it is part of a special exhibition at the Musée de l'homme entitled
Man Exposed,
sitting beside a Cro-Magnon skull to demonstrate the breadth of human thought and accomplishment over the millennia, once again serving as the very representation of “modern.” As for the body, the trail ends abruptly, veering sharply into oblivion. And that is perhaps as it should be. Dust to dust.
In secula seculorum.

A Modern Face

OMETIME AROUND
1985,
A
J
APANESE TELECOMMUNICATIONS
engineer named Hiroshi Harashima was trying to develop a practical videophone when his thinking suddenly jumped from the technical to the philosophical. He describes his normal work as “how to connect terminals such as a telephone set,” but, he came to wonder, “are not the true terminals human beings rather than telephone sets?” The prime difficulty researchers had found with video phones was not technical. It had to do with the human face. Faces, Harashima realized, convey emotional rather than practical information. Researchers had discovered that people were used to the narrower emotional space of telephone communication and didn't feel comfortable with the deeper level of opening up involved in showing their faces. As Harashima explored the implications of this finding, his usual network of colleagues expanded. He was soon in touch with psychologists, forensic scientists, makeup artists, anthropologists, even mask collectors. He formulated the idea that everything he had formerly been involved in was contributing to the development of what he called “line humanity,” a society built around stream-lined high-tech communications that flattened information. The face, in contrast, was the oldest communication technology yet a deeply sophisticated one in which we expose a range of meanings, including many—making promises, asking for trust—that knit the culture together. “It is not too much to say that [the face] is the basis of social order,” he wrote. He perceived dangers in this faceless society that was developing.

In 1995 Harashima and Hisao Baba, an anthropologist and anatomist who was also a curator at the National Science Museum in Tokyo, cofounded the Japan Academy of Facial Studies. Their intention was to bring together experts in fields as diverse as orthodontics, cosmetology, biology, dentistry, and drama in an evolving project to explore ways to keep one of humanity's most basic communication technologies relevant in a digital world. Projects associated with the Academy of Facial Studies have analyzed wrinkles and aging, studied how people remember facial expressions, and described brain responses to emoticons.

In 1999, the academy and the museum intended to hold a vast exposition entitled the Great Exhibition of the Face. It so happened that before the exposition was planned Baba was in Paris visiting the world-renowned collection of Neanderthal skulls at the Musée de l'homme. While showing him around, Philippe Mennecier, the museum's director of conservation, happened to mention that the museum possessed the skull of Descartes. Baba was “thrilled” to behold the curious object, and as the plans for the exhibition on the face were being drawn up, he had an idea.

Some months later, Mennecier received at the museum a representative of the firm of André Chenue, a company that began its life in 1760 as transporter of the personal belongings of Marie Antoinette and is today one of Europe's leading shippers of fine art. The representative carried a custom-built box—of smooth-grained blond wood with elegant hasps—that was not much larger than a human head. When the representative left the museum, still carrying the box—now packed with cargo—he was in the company of André Langaney, the director of the museum's laboratory of biological anthropology. Later, Langaney boarded a flight for Tokyo and took a seat in business class. His carry-on luggage was the box. Memories of the debacle during the flood of 1910 died hard; the agreement to send the skull of Descartes to Tokyo—the first time it had been out of the museum since 1912, when it spent two hours on display at the Academy of Sciences—came with the condition that it be treated as an object of inestimable value. “It seemed to us out of the question to leave the skull in the luggage hold,” Mennecier told me.

At the time, Baba knew nothing of the skull's history. His interest was not in authentication. The exhibition in Tokyo would feature images of fashion models and Papua New Guinea tribesmen, dental surgery demonstrations, Rembrandt portraits, Noh theater masks, computer-assisted facial reconstructions, Abraham Lincoln's death mask, cartoon caricatures, tapes of Japanese actresses of the 1950s, and Photoshopped Mona Lisas with frowns and grins. It was to be a compendium of facial data, but also a demonstration of human technologies and of one of the current trends in science, the interdisciplinary approach. Baba's idea was that the exhibit should have an introductory piece that set up its historical and intellectual features. He himself was an anatomist who had performed many autopsies. He wanted to apply his skills to the skull of Descartes to give the facial exhibition a face. The skull would be both an introduction to the exposition and, as he said, “a symbol of homo sapiens, a symbol of human intelligence, the symbolic face of modern man.”

The first step was to perform a thorough forensic analysis of the skull. The teeth—in particular the wisdom teeth—indicated that it was the skull of an adult. Evidence of “rough” attachment of the temporalis muscle suggested a person of middle age. Baba's analysis would have pleased Louis-Pierre Gratiolet, who sparred with Pierre-Paul Broca over the matter of cranial capacity, for while Baba noted that “the braincase is wider than that of the average European male today,” he also concluded that “it is almost certain that the bones and muscles of the neck were smaller than those of the average European male, and Descartes was known to be a small man.”

If there was any new information that came out of Baba's study, it concerned diet. The teeth and muscles of the jaw indicated that the subject “had healthy teeth and ate plain, rough food.” More broadly, Dr. Baba concluded that “the individual who had this skull was a small and slender late-middle-aged European male. He is highly likely to have been a man of the late medieval or early modern era.”

Working with a sculptor, Baba made a plaster cast of the skull, then applied muscle, cartilage, and skin and compared the head to what he took to be the most accurate portrait from life: the one in the Louvre. “The shape of the bones reflects the person's facial appearance quite precisely,” he wrote. “This skull shows similar characteristics to the portrait of Descartes. The head was restored by adding muscle and skin onto the replica of the skull and there was no difference between the restored head and the portrait of Descartes.”

From this point, the anthropologist and the sculptor worked from the painting to create a life-sized bust. This, side by side with the skull, formed the introduction to the Great Exhibition of the Face. It opened on July 31, 1999, ran through May of 2000, and had 300,000 visitors.

Interestingly, Baba told me he had no idea of Paul Richer's work. Without even being aware of it, he had duplicated Richer's experiment, right down to comparing the results against the Louvre portrait. At the same time, Baba brought Descartes' bones into the era of computer analysis and interdisciplinary study. Like Richer, Baba used the skull to fashion a life-sized bust, giving a face to the bones. The bust created by the Japanese anthropologist and artist is less bold and dashing than Richer's; it has instead a simplicity and calmness. Baba gave a copy of it to Philippe Mennecier, who showed it to me where it is kept in a basement studio at the Musée de l'homme, remarking, with his dry delivery (and, I thought, some truth): “It's a good likeness, though I find the eyes look rather Japanese.”

I
F IT'S FAIR
to assign the credit or blame for modernity and its problems to any one person, Descartes is the prime candidate. Richard Watson, the American philosopher and biographer of Descartes, considers him sweepingly elemental:

Of course, along with all of these achievements came the political strife and the clash of worldviews that dominate our times.

Between them, with their various methods and working at opposite ends of the twentieth century, Paul Richer and Hisao Baba managed to give Descartes a human face. As Baba said, his ambition was to work outward from the skull to create a “symbolic face of modern man.” What, though, in the early twenty-first century, is the face of modern humanity? What are its features? In what direction is it looking? Those are the questions that drove me in the first place to investigate the story of Descartes' bones.

One bright winter day in 2007, I found myself in the restaurant of a fashionable New York hotel having lunch with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the internationally famous Somali-born promoter of the rights of Muslim women and one of the most admired and reviled women of the early twenty-first century. I was interviewing her for a magazine article, and as she talked—about what she sees as the dangerous irrationality inherent in all religion, but especially in Islam, and about how she believes the West contained its own irrationality by cordoning off faith from politics—it occurred to me that hers is one of the faces of modernity; her life story encompasses the legacy of Descartes' bones. As a small child, she sat with her grandmother under a talal tree, shaded from the desert sun of Somalia. At five she was held down on a kitchen table while a man who was probably “an itinerant traditional circumciser from the blacksmith clan” snipped out her clitoris and inner labia with a pair of scissors. She grew up against a background of resurgent Islam, eventually fled to Europe, asked for asylum in Amsterdam, and began what she called “my freedom.” She enrolled at Leiden University (where Descartes had spent time while awaiting the publication, by a Leiden printer, of the
Discourse on the Method
), started reading Voltaire, Rousseau, Marx, and Freud, and turned her back on her faith and tradition. “Meeting Freud,” she wrote in her 2006 autobiography with declarative understatement, “put me in contact with an alternative moral system.”

From religious fundamentalism she veered toward what some of her critics have called Enlightenment fundamentalism. She became a member of the Dutch parliament, and from that platform gained attention as a critic of religion in general and of Islam in particular. When a young Amsterdam Muslim murdered Theo Van Gogh, the filmmaker with whom she had collaborated on an anti-Muslim film, and pinned a note to his chest threatening her life as well, Hirsi Ali became a global phenomenon; as she moved from Europe to the United States, she used the fame to amplify her views on immigration, cultural identity, and the interaction between the Muslim world and the secular West.

Hirsi Ali's beliefs are as sharp as a knife blade. Reason is the great light of humanity; religion is a force of chaos and darkness. “The West,” she told me, “was saved by the fact that it succeeded in separating faith and reason. That led to secular government. Secular government is built on human reason, with all its fallibility. Faith assumes infallibility, and that is the danger. Our prophet Mohammad can never make a mistake, so we are stuck with him.” The fault line Hirsi Ali stands on runs back through the centuries of the modern era; the tensions that swirl constantly around her (as we ate lunch her round-the-clock security team hovered nearby) harken back to the forces that squared off at Utrecht University in the 1630s, when Regius, Descartes' first disciple, presented a form of Cartesianism to an awestruck public, and to those that fueled the French Revolution. Only today those tensions are global. The challenge that Islam poses, in the view of many, is one of a culture that has not experienced the centuries of modernity—that has not lived with Descartes' bones.