Descartes' Bones (31 page)

By the time I sat down with Hirsi Ali I had been working on this book for two years, and I was used to discovering resonances between its themes and current events. While writing a cover story for the
New York Times Magazine
about Pope Benedict XVI and his efforts to renew the Catholic Church in Western Europe, I realized that everyone I met and interviewed—clergy, lay Catholics, European Muslims, all of them roiled by the tensions between secular Europe, Christianity, and Islam—was living on this fault line of modernity.

On another magazine assignment, I found myself in the living room of a ranch house in suburban Maryland, sharing a meal with six people who were grassroots organizers of a movement in that state to amend its constitution to forbid same-sex marriage. Their feelings stemmed from their religious beliefs about homosexuality: it is a sin and a disease; it has no reality in the individual but is rather a sickness in society. That the World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, and virtually every other professional medical and psychological organization takes a completely different view only reinforces the convictions of these people, for they see those organizations as based on shaky, non-biblical foundations. There have always been people at the fringes of Western society who refused to go along with the basic ideals inherited from the Enlightenment—views about the individual, the primacy of reason, and so on. But the beliefs I encountered in Maryland extend far and wide in America, where Christian absolutism is a major force. They go beyond human sexuality to biotechnology, education, social services, child development, and virtually every facet of life. They have influenced the foreign policy of the world's only superpower. In this system of beliefs modern history turns out to be a series of wrong turns. The group in Maryland pointed these out for me as neatly as if they were holding bulleted outlines. The women's rights movement. The birth control pill. The idea of a separation between church and state. Darwin. Finally, one man, a minister, said the name that was sitting in the front of my mind: “If you think about it, it really all starts with Descartes.” He then went on to talk eloquently about the changes that began with Descartes' reorientation of reality around human reason. “The human mind can be led astray,” he said. “It is no basis for anything without God.”

The historical nature of these clashes of worldviews is striking enough that it has become part of the public discourse. Each generation interprets the past according to its own needs, and lately—as people have found themselves faced with such challenges to modern secular society—the Enlightenment has come back in vogue. In the twentieth century, it was first reanimated in the World War II era. A handful of scholars who came of age under the threat of Nazi domination used the history of the eighteenth century and the work of the great Enlightenment thinkers as a beacon to light the darkness they themselves were living through. Ernst Cassirer's
The Philosophy of the Enlightenment,
which appeared in 1932, was intensely read throughout the war and in the postwar period and was instrumental in creating the twentieth-century view of the late eighteenth century as a time of reason beating back the forces of chaos. Cassirer was a German Jew who emigrated to the United States during the war; his objective was to use history as a tool. He cast his work as a frank appeal: “The age which venerated reason and science as man's highest faculty cannot and must not be lost even for us. We must find a way not only to see that age in its own shape but to release again those original forces which brought forth and molded this shape.”

At about the same time, the American historian Carl Becker gave a shorthand account of the beliefs that the twentieth century had inherited from the early modern era: “(1) man is not natively depraved; (2) the end of life is life itself, the good life on earth instead of the beatific life after death; (3) man is capable, guided solely by the light of reason and experience, of perfecting the good life on earth; and (4) the first and essential condition of the good life on earth is the freeing of men's minds from the bonds of ignorance and superstition, and of their bodies from the arbitrary oppression of the constituted social authorities.”

This is the modern creed—or it was until a generation ago. Things changed in the 1960s and 1970s. After the Vietnam War and the social upheaval of that era, such a grandiose view of history began to seem precious and stale. Were the men and women of the eighteenth century really such paragons? Does history ever actually work that way? Is there really a march of progress, with each generation building on the work of the last and moving forward toward some ever-brighter future? If modern Western history was such a grand parade, how did one account for colonialism, Nazism, Soviet-style communism, for slavery and gulags and concentration camps? Postmodernism replaced progress with skepticism.

Then a new millennium—to be precise, September 11, 2001—brought a sudden turn of thinking, and a reappraisal. The threat from some quarters has seemed bewilderingly ancient, as if a dinosaur had suddenly reared up from its prehistoric slumber. One statement of it came in the form of a letter written in 2006 by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to American president George W. Bush: “Liberalism and Western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today, these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems.” Instead of democracy, Ahmadinejad predicted, “the will of God will prevail over all things.”

Part of the inheritance of modernity has been the idea that its core values of democracy and individual liberty have the force of inevitability. They emerged at a given point in history, and now that they have arrived we tend to think that everyone acknowledges them as universal values. But that doesn't seem to be the case. José Casanova, a sociologist of religion at the New School for Social Research, told me that the idea used to be that Western development “was prescriptive for the rest of the world, that it would be a model for other societies, so that these other societies would follow a secular path. But now throughout the world you find religious revivals. We're learning that more modern societies don't necessarily become more secular.” And whether in Western or non-Western tradition, theocracy has tended not to sit easily alongside concepts of democracy and individual freedom.

The recognition of the sobering fact that these modern ideals are not necessarily spreading around the world—that, possibly, they are not inevitable at all but could rather be fragile, ephemeral, temporary themes in world history—has coincided with a desire to look back at our past to remind ourselves of what we are. I think that is good and necessary; I agree, for example, with the German scholar Heinz Schlaffer when he says that “Western culture is also fundamentalist: Its fundament is called the Enlightenment” and that “the paradox is that this fundament is the basis for our present society, but also half forgotten by it.” Hirsi Ali formulated her message for me in this way: “The only way to stand up to radical Islam is to revive the Enlightenment, the message of the Enlightenment, and make the people who inherited all of this”—and here she waved her hand toward the window and the skyscrapers of Manhattan—“realize that this all just didn't fall out of the sky. There is a long history of struggle behind the development of this society. And religion, including Christianity, has most of the time hindered that development.”

I think this is largely true—and I think in its idiosyncratic way the history of Descartes' bones sketches the long journey, filled with false starts and blind alleys, that led to modern society—but as it narrows, this line of thinking darkens. I suspect that much of the talk about valuing the Western tradition is cover for a brutish sus-or-them impulse. In these pages I have taken up Jonathan Israel's thesis that there was a three-way division that came into being as modernity matured. There was the theological camp, which held on to a worldview grounded in religious tradition; the “radical Enlightenment” camp, which, in the advent of the “new philosophy,” wanted to overthrow the old order, with its centers of power in the church and the monarchy, and replace it with a society ruled by democracy and science; and the moderate Enlightenment camp, which subdivided into many factions but which basically took a middle position, arguing that the scientific and religious worldviews aren't truly inconsistent but that perceived conflicts have to be sorted out. All three of these factions remain with us today. Their adherents express themselves on TV news talk shows, in blogs and opinion pieces, and in court cases. Those who promote “intelligent design” as a replacement for the theory of evolution are members of today's version of the “theological party” who are attempting to infiltrate the moderate camp. In his best seller
God Is Not Great,
Christopher Hitchens sounds the trumpet for “radical Enlightenment” warriors of the twenty-first century by using language that mirrors the freethinkers of three centuries ago: “We distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. . . . The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.”

Hirsi Ali “converted” not just to secularism but to its radical form. She would have found a ready place for her ideas during the French Revolution, and indeed her ideas tend toward a similar extreme: she has declared that “we are at war with Islam” and that, in the name of reason, not just Islamic terrorism but Islam itself, along with its 1.5 billion adherents, must be “defeated” so that “it can mutate into something peaceful.”

This is patently frightening talk, and I believe it exposes the flaws of radical secularism. I agree with the radical secularists that enormous ugliness has been done and is being done in the name of religion, and I think that we have to find an intelligent way not to tolerate religious intolerance, but I believe history shows that there is lethal error in radical secularism—or rather, two errors. First, it thinks too highly of reason, or of the ability of humans to employ it. The history of modernity, even the anecdotal version of it that comprises the story of Descartes' bones—scientific stupidities proliferating majestically alongside real advances—makes plain that trying to follow reason is not the same thing as being right, and every successful demagogue of the twentieth century has demonstrated how easy it is to manipulate reason and direct its course from the truth to something like its opposite.

One could argue that the antidote is to recognize the tendency to misapply reason and try to correct for it. But that ignores the second error, which is the greater. In the interest of pursuing its own brand of certainty, radical secularism takes a too narrow construction of reality. It puts on blinders. Religion, like art, is a way of negotiating the complexity that the philosophical puzzle of dualism, and all of the attempts at overcoming it, acknowledges. To deny religion outright exposes those who trumpet the use of reason to the charge of unreasonableness—of intolerance.

If there is a solution to the dilemma of modernity, surely it lies in bringing the two wings into the middle, which is where most people live. Jürgen Habermas, the great German philosopher (who himself is not religiously inclined), has used the term
postsecular
to describe what he believes can be the next stage in the evolution of Western society. This stage, he argues, would involve “the assimilation and reflexive transformation of both religious and secular mentalities.”

Such transformation would presumably require convincing or teaching or cajoling or arm-twisting the radical partisans—the theologians and the radical secularists—into widening their picture of reality, getting both to acknowledge that they don't have a lock on truth, that the world is too wild for our strategies to contain it. At the same time, it surely would mean finding a way to convince one of those wings—the billions of people who grew up in cultures without the legacy of Descartes' bones—to recognize that we have, in the past few centuries, latched onto some fairly comprehensive ways of understanding the world and advancing humanity and that these must be taken by everyone as a foundation.

The task (which may be impossible to achieve, but is there any alternative but to try?) might be translated into Hiroshi Harashima's terms: to move away from “line humanity” and put faith in the oldest of communication technologies. Then, maybe, members of opposing camps could meet anew, seeking out signs of trust in another person's face.

         

Epilogue

N
F
EBRUARY 11, 2000, EXACTLY 350 YEARS AFTER
the cold Stockholm night when René Descartes breathed his last, a group of about twenty men and women gathered in the stony chill of the church of St.-Germain-des-Prés in Paris at a Mass for the eternal rest of the philosopher's soul. The priest performing the service was Father Jean-Robert Armogathe. Of all the “amoureux de Descartes,” as Philippe Mennecier, the current keeper of the skull of Descartes, refers to the small coterie of people whose interest in the philosopher carries over to his mortal remains, Father Armogathe was the one I saved for last to contact, not because I thought he would make a fitting end for this book but out of intimidation. Besides being a high official in the diocese of Paris who was once the chaplain of Notre-Dame cathedral, Armogathe is one of the preeminent Descartes scholars in the world, director of studies of the History of Religious and Scientific Ideas in Modern Europe program of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes at the Sorbonne, author of works on Cartesian science, on correlations between the Bible and seventeenth-century science, and on that issue at the heart of the Cartesian crisis of dualism, the transubstantiation of the Catholic host.

Others who helped me in my research—themselves prominent philosophers—said, when I inquired about him, that yes, indeed, I would be remiss if I did not seek out Père Armogathe. But they warned that he could be a forbidding presence. “Don't be surprised if you don't hear back,” said Richard Watson, probably the foremost American scholar of Descartes. Eventually I e-mailed the French philosopher-priest, telling him of my project, saying that I planned to be in Paris, and wondering about the possibility of meeting. Surprisingly, Armogathe replied at once, saying he was willing to talk; even more surprising was the way he closed his e-mail—“Looking forward to meet u!”—which certainly stripped away some of the veneer of austerity.

A few weeks later I stood before an ugly 1970s-era building directly opposite the Luxembourg Gardens, the headquarters of the Institut Bossuet, the Catholic boarding school of which Armogathe was the rector. I was shown into his ground-floor office. The windows looked across at the park, with its high iron gates topped with gold spearheads, through which I could see a pair of lovers on a bench and a class of art students, pads in hand, grouped around a statue of twisting Baroque figures. I studied the office while I waited. The desk was piled with stacks of papers. On the walls were a framed engraving of Descartes and one of Baillet, Descartes' seventeenth-century biographer. On a bookshelf, propped against the complete works of Galileo in Latin, were snapshots of Armogathe with Pope John Paul II.

Suddenly the man himself burst in. He was small, stoutish, compact, gray-haired, almost comically vigorous for such a serious person. He was in constant motion, darting or lunging. I asked about his past and he told me a story that seemed right out of
The Da Vinci Code.
“In the 1980s when I was chaplain of Notre Dame I actually had my lodging there—in the cathedral itself,” he said. “In the nineteenth century they had built lodgings for the custodian of the cathedral up in a kind of loft, which were reached by a pseudomedieval corkscrew staircase. It was the most dramatic apartment you could imagine. I had this huge dining room looking over the Seine on three sides. My kitchen window opened out onto the southern rose, where I had my own private terrace. Now the apartment has been destroyed, but I lived there for five years, and I loved it.” Armogathe took to hosting barbecues on the terrace, and it became a thing in 1980s Paris to get an invitation to the soirees of the chaplain of Notre-Dame.

He changed the topic and talked about his work. For five years, he told me, he had been studying vision and optics from the seventeenth-century to the present day. His argument was that from its beginning science took its ideas about vision from medieval and Renaissance Catholic notions of spiritual visions and inner light. The thesis he was formulating was that our scientific understanding of the sense of vision is built around spiritual metaphors. “I'm against the idea that there is a clear cut between the Renaissance and the modern ages,” he said. “I think modern thinking gets its patterns from the theological realm. Biblical concepts allowed science to progress.”

From 1996 to 2000, Armogathe had been pastor of the church of St.-Germain-des-Prés, the site of the last burial of Descartes. During that time, as the 350th anniversary of Descartes' death approached, he had had the idea to conduct a special Mass. What had motivated him to do so? I wanted to know about the event in itself, but really I was interested in a deeper point. Armogathe was both a priest and an authority on Cartesian science. It occurred to me that if anyone alive had insights into bridging the modern divide between body and soul—if anyone alive had perspective on both current science and contemporary spiritual concerns as they relate back to the birth of modernity and the so-called father of modernity himself—it must be him.

“In Catholic tradition,” Armogathe said, “it is not only prayer for the soul of the departed. There is also the belief in the resurrection of the body. For Catholics, mortal remains mean something. Churchyards are not urban repositories for garbage but places of sleep and waiting. It's like there are seeds under the ground, waiting for spring to come.”

As was the case during the Middle Ages, the heyday of relics, the Catholic Church still places special value on human remains. There is nothing surprising in the fact that Catholicism—or any other spiritual tradition—has the mind-body problem sorted out to its satisfaction. Somehow, faith dissolves dualism, unites body and soul.

But a theological answer wasn't satisfying. I posed the question differently, asking specifically about Descartes as the father of dualism and the modern mind-body problem. Like one of the first-generation Cartesians in late-seventeenth-century Paris who brought Descartes' bones from Stockholm, Armogathe was ready to defend the master. He disputed the idea that Descartes had invented dualism. Expressions of mind and body existing in different realms, he reminded me, go back to the ancient Greeks. This was a good point, and it could be taken further still. A word like dualism suggests an abstract puzzle, but it is grounded in the everyday. 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. We are graced with a godlike ability to transcend time and space in our minds but are chained to death. The result is a nagging need to find meaning. This is where the esoteric “mind-body problem” of philosophy professors becomes meaningful to us all, where it translates into tears and laughter.

Dualism is thus in a sense universal, and philosophers have puzzled over it forever; yet Descartes' statement of it, I suggested to Armogathe, is the one that stirred a historic commotion in the Western world. His dualism is the legacy we live with.

In response, Armogathe pointed me in a new direction—toward what is perhaps the most meaningful “solution” to this puzzle for all of us. Late in life, he noted, Descartes tried to deal with the separation of mind and body. “In his last book, Descartes states that in effect there must be a third substance, which is not really a third substance but a compound of both mind and body,” Armogathe said. “I should treat it as a code, an encoding, which allows mind to react on body and body on mind.” Philosophers have devoted endless hours of thought to the mind-body problem, but there is a real-world way in which we all transcend it. This “encoding” is one of the commonest parts of our lives, and also one of the most precious. Its importance was what Descartes hit on near the end of his life.

For a long time, scholars thought that after the death of his young daughter, Francine, who was born out of wedlock, Descartes parted company with the girl's mother, Helena Jans. It was assumed that his attachment to Helena, the only woman with whom we know him to have been intimate, was only through their child and that he cast her aside after the girl was gone. But a few years ago a Dutch historian named Jeroen van de Ven did some inspired archival digging. Descartes lived at at least twenty addresses in Holland, and sometime after Francine's death he moved to the coast, a place of dunes and lashing winds called Egmond-Binnen. In the notary records of the city of Leiden, Van de Ven discovered a marriage contract, dated four years after Francine's death, between one Helena Jans and a man from Egmond named Jan Jansz van Wel. Could it be the same woman? A kind of dowry was required—one thousand guilders, a considerable sum—and in a separate record Van de Ven discovered that the man who provided it was Descartes. Clearly, the couple stayed linked for four years after their daughter's death. Social standing prevented their truly being together even if Descartes would have wished it; he did, however, feel responsible, and in the end he provided a future for her.

During this time, the philosopher was being attacked mercilessly by Dutch theologians who were outraged at the implications of his work. Finally, he had had enough. “As for the peace I had previously sought here, I foresee that from now on I may not get as much of that as I would like,” he wrote. “A troop of theologians, followers of Scholastic philosophy, seem to have formed a league in an attempt to crush me by their slanders.” He would soon accept the offer of Queen Christina and go off to Sweden. He would leave behind not only the fury over what his work had unleashed but the mother of his child.

At this same time he began what would be his final work, and it may not be a coincidence that the book was a treatise on “the passions of the soul.” Descartes had long before realized that there was a difficulty with his division of reality into mind and body—the difficulty being to figure out how the two substances interacted—and he was now moved to work on that confounding problem. His conclusion was that there is a connective tissue between the two, or, as Armogathe put it to me, “an encoding.” The seventeenth-century terminology for this encoding was “passion.” We might call it heart. This became the subject of Descartes' final work. Heart, he decided, was the interface between mind and body. Love, joy, anguish, remorse: we experience these in both body and mind, and somehow, Descartes became convinced, these passions link our two selves. He thus anticipated another modern field—psychology—in concluding that emotional states are tied to physical health and also to, as he would put it, “the soul.”

But it was to be a purely philosophical exercise. His child was dead; he had married off the woman with whom he had been intimate. He seems to have given up on the “passions” personally. For him there was nothing ahead but cold and ice and death.

Even as he went off to die, however, Descartes gave Helena Jans a future, and the records of the little village of Egmond paint an evolving picture: Helena and her husband, Jan, live their lives at the inn that his family operates; in time, Jan dies and Helena inherits the inn; she remarries, and she and her new husband have three sons. There is no room in the records for all the life that must have been packed into the years, but somewhere in its density—the bustling of the inn, clanking tankards of Dutch beer, pipe smoke, leers and tears, song and suffering—lay the solution to Descartes' puzzle, which each of us solves, if we are very lucky.