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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In "The Chain," a chirpy British film comedy from 1984 about moving house, the foreman of a team of movers is taking evening classes in philosophy, and is prone to metaphysical musings while lugging heavy pieces of furniture. On the way to his first job of the day, he recites what he has learned to his workmates: "What Descartes is saying is 'I think, therefore I am.' ''
"Am what?" someone asks.
"Just am."
"Can't just be am. You gotta be am something."
In fact, what Descartes wrote in his "Discours de la Methode," of 1637, "Je pense, donc je suis" (the Latin rendering, "Cogito, ergo sum," came later), was always a slightly cryptic formulation. That's what helped make it the most famous--and probably the most misunderstood--slogan in philosophy. And "Am what?" remains a good question to ask of Descartes the man, as two new biographies show. His personality remains an enigma. Vituperative, devious, insincere, proud, and unpredictable in his correspondence, he published works that ooze sweet reason and cool logic. Why did this Frenchman choose to spend most of his adult life away from his native country? Why did he repeatedly tell friends that he craved calm and quiet, then constantly pull up stakes and rush elsewhere? (A team of movers would have come in useful.) He did not, in adulthood, enjoy reading the books of others. So what, exactly, was going on in his head during his long mornings of inactivity?
It isn't easy to see Descartes's work the way he saw it--the relationship between science and philosophy has changed too much for that. Despite his current reputation, the man himself seems to have been less interested in metaphysics than in applying algebra to geometry and delving into the innards of cows. He turned to philosophy relatively late in life, and out of fear that the Catholic Church would condemn his science. He would have been surprised at how he is remembered.
Most of all, he would have been aghast at the way in which "I think, therefore I am" has been ripped from its context, inflated into a one-sentence summary of his ideas, and turned into something absurd. The rot set in at the start of the nineteenth century, when Hegel made heavy weather of "I think, therefore I am" and took it to mean that thought and being are fundamentally the same thing. Thus began the myth that modern philosophy is subjective at its roots--a view that was expounded by the late Pope John Paul II, who went so far as to suggest that the origins of Nazism and Communism are somehow linked to Descartes.
The origins of Descartes's slogan are straightforward enough, and it is not easy to see Hitler or Marx prefigured in them. In his "Discourse on Method," which is presented as an intellectual autobiography, Descartes recounts how he aimed to rebuild human knowledge on the firmest foundation. As a first step, to purge himself of error, he tried to cast doubt on as much as possible of what he thought he knew. So he pretended for the sake of argument, as he later put it in his "Meditations on First Philosophy" (1641), that "some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me." Since he could not, at this stage of his inquiries, rule out the existence of such a demon, Descartes reasoned that it was possible to doubt all the evidence of his senses. What he thought he saw, heard, and felt might be a dream somehow...
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