Descartes Page 4
In short, Henri IV had nourished a viper in his bosom by sponsoring the Jesuits, and had been killed by its bite at last. Descartes, Jesuit-educated and for years afterwards a loyal adherent of the Jesuit cause, appears to have served the Jesuit-Habsburg interest against his own country. Given the historical circumstances and the great issue of the day, there were probably many unfaithful hearts in the courts of La Fleche on the day that the dead king's own heart arrived there for burial.
One of the principal ways that the Jesuit movement sought to defend, fortify and potentiate the Catholic cause was by educating boys in such a manner as to make them secure in the faith forever. They saw themselves as soldiers in the van of the Counter-Reformation and, accordingly, one of their prime goals was to barricade young minds against heresy. By means of fine discipline, a military-style structure, and high standards, the Society had forged itself into a formidable instrument since its inception in the mid-sixteenth century. From its seminaries, including the prestigious Collegio Romano, it sent out an army of scholars and teachers to champion the faith. Given Descartes' lifelong adherence to the Catholic faith and to the Jesuit interest, he counts as a signal example of the success of their methods.
If the Society was in the front line for the Catholic cause, its teachers were crucial frontline troops for the Society itself, and that they should succeed in the vital task allotted to them mattered greatly. They therefore thought carefully about education, and the methods they adopted now seem impressively modern. In the schools run by their rivals, the Benedictines, boys were kept at their books for long exhausting hours and drilled incessantly. The Jesuits' teaching manual, the Ratio studiorum, took from Quintilian the comparison of a boy's mind with a narrow-necked bottle: try to pour in too much too fast and little will get into the body of the bottle, but pour slowly and carefully, and the bottle will be filled. The Jesuits took the simile to heart. Using prizes and badges to mark achievement, allowing the boys to enjoy games, dancing and theatrical activities, giving each of them personal attention, promoting discussion, allowing the boys to govern themselves to some extent through a prefectorial system—by such means they won their pupils' confidence and therefore taught them well.
The main forms of instruction were the study of texts, daily review of lessons, weekly debates and discussions, and monthly formal debates in which the participants were given marks for their performance. Everything happened in Latin; use of French was forbidden on pain of punishment. Apart from the fact that Latin was the lingua franca of all educated people, it was especially associated with the Roman Catholic church, in whose view the body of the faithful were one people under their earthly monarch, the Pope, sharing one language and one culture. Interestingly, some Catholic thinkers went so far as to suggest that use of vernaculars constituted a sin because it subverted the integrity of Christendom. Later, Descartes chose to publish in the vernacular, which in the light of these delicate questions counts as a significant gesture.
A pupil's first five years at La Fleche were dedicated to the classical tongues and their literature, beginning with "grammar" and ending with "rhetoric." (In the sixth, seventh and eighth years, if they stayed that long, boys studied philosophy, mathematics and science.) During that time their main focus was on the style of the classical authors rather than on the content of their writings. In Descartes' day, as throughout the Renaissance, the most admired Latin writer was Cicero, whose texts were widely used as models of excellence for style and rhetorical structure.
Most boys spent only five years at La Fleche, because what they acquired in that time was enough for university entrance. But some universities were hostile to the Jesuits and refused to admit their pupils, so the Jesuits made sure that the upper years of some of their colleges could more than adequately take the place of a university education. Descartes benefited from this arrangement. In 1611, when his five years of studying "letters" was over, he took the advanced curriculum, studying Aristotle's logic in the first year, science and mathematics in the second, and metaphysics and ethics in the third.
This was the education Descartes described twenty years later in his Discourse on Method. "From my childhood I have been nourished on letters," he wrote, meaning the classical languages and their literatures, "and because I was persuaded that by their means one could acquire a clear and certain knowledge of all that is useful in life, I was extremely eager to learn them. But as soon as I had completed the course of study at the end of which one is normally admitted to the ranks of the learned, I completely changed my opinion. For I found that I had gained nothing from my attempts to become educated, except for an increasing recognition of my ignorance. And yet I was at one of the most famous schools in Europe, where I thought there must be learned men if any existed on earth."7
This looks like a damning indictment of La Fleche, and on the face of it Descartes might be taken to mean that he had wasted his eight years there. But that is not what he meant. In the same passage he says he had made good use of the college library, reading beyond the curriculum; that he had not been accounted slow-witted by his teachers and peers; and that on leaving La Fleche he found the world to be as well equipped with intelligent people as at any time in history—and yet still he felt that "there was no knowledge in the world such as I had previously been led to hope for." Thus, he did not hold La Fleche particularly responsible for his expectations being disappointed. Rather, he realized that letters, and what passed in his day for philosophy and science, were either limited in value (this, he meant, was especially true of letters) or stood on shaky ground (this, he meant, was especially true of philosophy and science). He appreciated all these subjects as far as they went; he enjoyed stories and poetry, fables and oratory; and above all he loved mathematics. "I delighted in mathematics because of the certainty and self-evidence of its reasonings. But I did not yet notice its real use; and since I thought it was of service only in the mechanical arts, I was surprised that nothing more exalted had been built upon such firm and solid foundations."8
For this reason, he said, he decided to abandon the study of letters, and to avoid metaphysics because it had been cultivated for centuries by the best minds and yet was still embroiled in disputes and doubts. Nor did he think he could venture into the sciences, which stood on the shaky foundations of metaphysics. And he had no intention of being involved with what he called "the false sciences" of alchemy, magic and astrology, of which he was frankly contemptuous. So, he wrote, "as soon as I was old enough to emerge from the control of my teachers, I entirely abandoned the study of letters. Resolving to seek no knowledge other than that which could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world, I spent the rest of my youth travelling, visiting courts and armies, mixing with people of diverse temperaments and ranks, gathering various experiences, testing myself in the situations which fortune offered me, and at all times reflecting on whatever came my way so as to derive some profit from it." The reason he gave for this empirical and pragmatic decision is as pertinent now as then: "For it seemed to me that much more truth could be found in the reasonings which a man makes concerning matters that concern him than in those which some scholar makes in his study about speculative matters. For the consequences of the former will soon punish the man if he judges wrongly, whereas the latter have no practical consequences and no importance for the scholar except that perhaps the further they are from common sense the more pride will he take in them, since he will have had to use much more skill and ingenuity in trying to render them plausible."
Despite what these autobiographical remarks suggest, Descartes did not go travelling immediately after La Fleche. He left the college in the summer of 1614, aged eighteen, and his next documented appearance occurred in November 1616, when he graduated from the University of Poitiers with a degree in civil and canon law. All his biographers assume that he spent just one year at Poitiers, and therefore cite Baillet's claim that the missing year or even fourteen months between Descartes' quitting La Flech
e and beginning his studies at Poitiers was spent in Paris; yet not in the way of youth, with its predictable and even required sowing of oats, but in retreat at Saint-Germain-en-Lay, then a small village on the city's outskirts. Some speculate that Descartes suffered a nervous breakdown, as David Hume and many other brilliant people have done when young— such a thing being almost a rite of passage for the creative intellect. But no evidence supports this idea, although it has a romantic attraction, and nothing in Descartes' later writings on the emotions suggests otherwise—these writings being where he would allude to his own example of emotional turmoil if he had suffered any, given his fondness for the autobiographical technique when explaining his views.
Descartes may have had a breakdown, or even an illness of some kind, but more probably he was indeed sowing some oats in the capital city, perhaps acquiring the taste for gambling later imputed to him; and yet more possible still that a degree in canon and civil law took more than just one year of study, and that the whole of the "missing" year was spent over laborious texts in Poitiers. This latter, I suggest, was exactly the case. The source of Baillet's characteristically embroidered and inflated story about a "year" in retreat on the outskirts of Paris might have been that Descartes, for some reason, spent part of the summer at Saint-Germain-en-Lay immediately after leaving La Fleche and before attending Poitiers University in the autumn of 1614. Baillet, in retrospective obeisance to Descartes' genius, would see a sequestration at Saint-Germain as full of significance for the burgeoning young mind, far more interesting than studying jus scriptum and jus publicum, jus commune et speciale and jus universale et particulare at Poitiers. What Descartes thought about all this jus, given his later strictures on the contrast between useful and useless knowledge, can only be imagined; but at this juncture he had not quite ruled out pursuing a legal career at some future point and thus following in the well-heeled footsteps of his father and brother. Eight years later, in 1625, he wrote to his father asking whether he might apply for the post of lieutenant-general of Chatellerault (the job once held by his great-uncle Michel Ferrand) which required a legal background.9 But he had little intention of doing so immediately, nor of seeking a position in the Parlement. One good reason was the minimum age requirement for entrance to a Parlement, even though, as his brother Pierre had done, he might have entered the legal profession in some other capacity first to gain experience.
If Descartes did indeed spend time at Saint-Germain-en-Lay, perhaps in those summer holidays between school and university as just suggested, an interesting connection between its sole tourist attraction and his later theories offers itself. Saint-Germain was the home of a royal pleasure garden designed by the Francini brothers, whose speciality was fountains—but not just of splashing water, for their expertise ran to hydraulic statues that moved, played music, danced, and even (reputedly) spoke. The garden was a labyrinth of grottos and mysterious passages containing water-powered organs, mechanical birds, and moving, speaking statues: a garden of wonders, and perhaps also of alarms, if Descartes indeed wandered neurasthenically there.10 More interestingly, though, the garden suggests part of the inspiration for some of Descartes' later theories about animals as soulless automata, biological machines without consciousness, who experience neither sensations nor emotions, though appearing to; mere robots barking and mewing, eating and running, as if blindly powered by Francini pumps, and no more conscious than they.
After graduating from Poitiers in November 1616, Descartes next appeared publicly in the guise of a young godparent, signing the baptismal register in both October and November of 1617 at the church in Suce. This small town stood near the property that his increasingly well-off father had bought some years before: the estate of Chavagne-en-Suce, a commodious chateau set in fertile farmland among wooded hills. This suggests that Descartes may have spent the year after graduating from Poitiers at his father's house, perhaps assisting with the farm or his father's legal business, or reading, or all three, while considering what to do next. He might also have entered into an informal apprenticeship with a local doctor, out of curiosity; he later reported that he had studied some medicine as well as law when young. By the same token, he could have attended medical and anatomical lectures at Poitiers, though formally registered as a law student. If so, a two-year stay at the university becomes more probable still, unless Descartes was given (like Baillet) to inflationary reminiscences, turning attendance at a few lectures into a study of medicine. That seems unlikely.
In any event, the answer to Descartes' question about what he should do next was soon found. He decided to join an army. Given the political circumstances just before the Thirty Years War, Descartes had several armies to choose from. The one he joined belonged to Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange, arguably the greatest general of the day. (He thought so himself; he generously acknowledged that the famous Ambrogio Spinola, a Genoese who commanded the King of Spain's armies, was second best in the world.)
To enlist in Maurice's army Descartes travelled to Breda, just over the border from the Spanish Netherlands in the United Provinces of the free Netherlands. He arrived there in the summer of 1618, apparently intending to cut something of a dash, because he styled himself "sieur du Perron" after the small property his mother had left to him and which had recently come into his possession when he reached his majority.11
His choice of Breda is partly explained by the fact that it was the base of a de facto military school, where military engineering and other technical skills of the art of war were taught.12 Descartes' facility with mathematics evidently inclined him to the idea of learning how to build such defences as bastions, ravelins, horn-works, and the like, and to construct siege camps, make temporary bridges and pontoons, calculate artillery ranges, dig mines (for placing explosives under city walls), and more.
It was a fateful decision, for in the town of Breda one day Descartes met a man who was to give his life its first nudge in the direction of its later great achievements—not the definitive nudge, for Descartes still needed several years before settling on the vocation of philosophy, but the first major push. It was an accidental meeting too, and an improbable one, given that the Jesuit-educated Catholic Frenchman Descartes was there in Protestant Dutch Breda, standing in front of a poster pasted to a wall in a street, when the man in question happened to be passing by and stopped to look at the same poster. The man Descartes thus encountered was Isaac Beeckman.
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Beyond a suddenly acquired desire to be a military engineer, what could have inspired a Jesuit-educated Catholic Frenchman (or for that matter, any Jesuit-educated Catholic) to enlist in the forces of a Protestant prince whose country was corning to the end of a short armed truce with its bitterest enemy, the Jesuit-supported Catholic Habsburg power of Spain?
Descartes had deliberately stepped into a situation by then more than seventy years in the making, the history of which he would have been well aware. In January 1579 the seven Protestant northern provinces of the Netherlands, which was then in its entirety under Spanish dominion, made a declaration of mutual support, thereby forming themselves into the "Union of Utrecht."This was a response to a similar declaration jointly made by the Netherlands' Catholic southern provinces, which wished to affirm their allegiance to the Spanish crown and the Catholic faith, and which had therefore formed themselves into the "Union of Arras." The seven dissenting Protestant provinces in the Union of Utrecht were Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Gelderland, Overijssel, Friesland and Groningen (without its city).
The semi-formal nature of this pair of unions was ominous for the future of Spanish hegemony in the region. Within just two years the members of the Union of Utrecht had declared themselves independent of the Spanish crown by the Oath of Abjuration (1581), and a protracted war began. The longer term outcome of that war (and a fact of great significance to Descartes personally, as later events proved) was that the United Provinces— as the Dutch republic of the northern provinces became known— managed to secu
re their independence from Spain. The United Provinces flourished mightily in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, becoming immensely rich as a result of their overseas trade and empire, with a superlative domestic cultural tradition in consequence. This was the great age of Dutch painting; the country's relative liberty of thought and life encouraged thinkers, scientists and writers to settle there, and political exiles with them. It was, literally as well as figuratively, the Dutch Golden Age.
By contrast, most of the part of the Netherlands that remained under Catholic Spanish control eventually became Belgium.
Phillip II of Spain tried hard to reconquer the United Provinces, but the Spanish empire was by then a moribund force, though dying slowly, and eventually Phillip realised that the task was beyond him. By the time he had reached this decision in the late 1590s the United Provinces had built formidable defences along the line of the Maas and Waal rivers, and had developed a flourishing and growing trade with the Mediterranean lands, Spanish America, and Indonesia. In the hope at least of limiting the United Provinces' progress, Phillip turned the Spanish Netherlands into a semiautonomous state under his daughter Isabella and her husband (and cousin) Archduke Albert of Austria, who had already been in post as governor-general at Brussels for several years. The husband-and-wife team became known as "the Archdukes," and although effectively under the control of the Spanish crown, they little by little increased their margin of competence, though never seeking to make the Spanish Netherlands wholly independent.