The Remains of Reason

Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason
By Russell Shorto
Doubleday, 320 pages, $26

Given the difficulty philosophers have explaining themselves, the prospect of a journalist doing it for them usually doesn’t bode well. Few journalists have both the nimbleness of mind and the lucidity of prose required to explain abstract ideas; fewer still can tell a really good story. One sterling exception is Russell Shorto, whose last book, The Island at the Center of the World, a best-seller in 2004, was widely praised for weaving an ambitious argument—the Dutch, not British, gave Americans some of their most cherished democratic values—around a lively narrative about Manhattan’s early settlers. His new book, Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason, does something similar with René Descartes. Mr. Shorto traces the obscure, centuries-long controversy surrounding the burial of Descartes’ remains to argue that his philosophy undergirds much of Western thought, from modern science to secular democracy.

Descartes’ Bones gets into trouble, though, not because it’s a bad read—it’s actually hard to put down—but because its efforts seem misplaced. Few would deny that Descartes was one of the essential pre-Enlightenment thinkers, and yet for much of the book, proving this uncontested claim seems Mr. Shorto’s main focus.

According to Cartesian philosophy, the only thing we humans can know for certain is the existence of the voice inside our head. We call this thought; philosophers call it “the mind.” If you go along with this idea (you’ve heard the slogan, “I think, therefore I am”), then you’ll agree that everything else we say exists in this world must be susceptible to proof by the mind’s most critical asset, its ability to reason. Referring to the Latin version of the slogan, cogito ergo sum, Mr. Shorto writes, “With the ‘cogito,’ … and with the theory of knowledge that arises from it … human reason supplanted received wisdom.”

For the most part, Mr. Shorto is too astute a reader and too careful a writer to make that kind of oversimplified statement. He’s right that Descartes gave reason a big push in modern intellectual history, but Descartes wasn’t the first to use or discover it. Though reason may not have had as much cachet before Descartes and other Enlightenment thinkers made it their darling, Socrates and Thomas Aquinas, among other premodern thinkers, cherished it just the same. Isn’t the Socratic method precisely Mr. Shorto’s version of Descartes—the force of reason brought to bear on received wisdom—acted out in dialogue?

MR. SHORTO BEST DISPLAYS his strengths when he enlivens arcane philosophical debates. In the early chapters, we meet the living Descartes lecturing at universities in Leiden and Utrecht, where the peripatetic French philosopher got into many well-documented controversies. Ever ambitious, Descartes sought to overturn Aristotelianism, the philosophical foundation of Western thought at the time.

Aristotelianism posed the greatest stumbling block to the advancement of science. For instance, premodern “natural philosophers,” as scientists were then called, based their medicine on Aristotle’s idea of bodily humors—blood, phlegm, and black and yellow bile. Any illness was thought to be caused by an imbalance of these humors, hence practices like phlebotomy (bloodletting), the acupuncture of its day. Mr. Shorto keenly points out the irony of doctors treating Descartes with phlebotomy on his deathbed, in 1650. The philosopher was in Sweden, suffering from pneumonia, and likely died from complications of both the illness and the treatment, at 53.

Not until Descartes made his crucial distinction between “mind” and “body”—dualism, as we know it—could scientists approach their work from an entirely new perspective. Mr. Shorto handily shows how Cartesianism would lead to the scientific revolution. Newton, at the turn of the 18th century, used the philosophy for good, applying it to rewrite the laws of physics. By the middle of the 19th century, however, other scientists would use Descartes’ philosophy for ill, walking its logic down the dark alleys of racism.

Mr. Shorto introduces us to Georges Cuvier, a leading mid-19th-century French scientist who would at one point safeguard Descartes’ skull. Cuvier championed the pseudoscience of phrenology, which held that intelligence could be measured by the size of the head. “Good and bad science,” Mr. Shorto writes, “are always taking place simultaneously.” Cuvier proves the point. He “laid the foundations for modern biology, and at the same time he was engaging in lurid studies to prove black people were cousins of orangutans.”

FOR CENTURIES AFTER DESCARTES’ reburial in France, in 1666, scientists bickered over his remains. (His skull, the only part of him still around, is in Paris’ Museum of Man.) Mr. Shorto feels a journalistic imperative to make this strange controversy fit into today’s news. He thus stretches its implications into the present modishness of atheist manifestos by Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins, et al. He describes how Descartes, a practicing Catholic, was misjudged by the church, condemned not for what he actually wrote, but for where his ideas might lead: atheism. (It doesn’t help Mr. Shorto’s case that Descartes was buried in a church graveyard for more than a century, but that’s a minor quibble, I suppose.)

As Mr. Shorto makes clear, atheism was not Descartes’ intent. “By putting the ephemeral stuff of mind and soul in one category and the physical world in another, [Descartes] believed he was building a wall around the fortress of faith, protecting it from the encroachments of science.” True, the Catholic Church banned his books in 1663, but, as Mr. Shorto notes, they banned lots of other books, too. Moreover, it was Spinoza who did more than any other early modern thinker to give atheism its philosophical heft, a fact Mr. Shorto mentions only in passing.

The broader point Mr. Shorto is trying to make, and it’s an important one, becomes clearer near the book’s end. He wants to reframe the current debate that mistakenly pits faith against reason. The Enlightenment and reason are again in vogue, particularly since Sept. 11 buried postmodernism in its rubble, but already the wrong lessons seem to be stressed.

“We need to remind ourselves who we are,” Mr. Shorto writes, so we need to point out what was both good and not in Descartes’ ideas. Without being critical of reason itself, we need to acknowledge that our wits can mislead us, too. Otherwise we risk sliding towards a fundamentalist secularism. “To deny religion outright exposes those who trumpet reason to the charge of unreasonableness—to intolerance,” Mr. Shorto insists. This is why Russell Shorto’s search for Descartes’ bones is important: The story makes it fun, the argument makes it matter.

Eric Herschthal is a reporter at The Jewish Week. He can be reached at books@observer.com.