On a brutal winter's day in 1650 in Stockholm, the Frenchman RenéDescartes, the most influential and controversial thinker of his time,was buried after a cold and lonely death far from home. Sixteen yearslater, the French Ambassador Hugues de Terlon secretly unearthedDescartes' bones and transported them to France.
Why wouldthis devoutly Catholic official care so much about the remains of aphilosopher who was hounded from country to country on charges ofatheism? Why would Descartes' bones take such a strange, serpentinepath over the next 350 years—a path intersecting some of the grandestevents imaginable: the birth of science, the rise of democracy, themind-body problem, the conflict between faith and reason? Their storyinvolves people from all walks of life—Louis XIV, a Swedish casinooperator, poets and playwrights, philosophers and physicists, as thesepeople used the bones in scientific studies, stole them, sold them,revered them as relics, fought over them, passed them surreptitiouslyfrom hand to hand.
The answer lies in Descartes’ famous phrase:Cogito ergo sum—"I think, therefore I am." In his deceptively simpleseventy-eight-page essay, Discourse on the Method, this small,vain, vindictive, peripatetic, ambitious Frenchman destroyed 2,000years of received wisdom and laid the foundations of the modern world.At the root of Descartes’ “method” was skepticism: "What can I know forcertain?" Like-minded thinkers around Europe passionately embraced thebook--the method was applied to medicine, nature, politics, andsociety. The notion that one could find truth in facts that could beproved, andnot in reliance on tradition and the Church's teachings,would become a turning point in human history.
In an age of faith, what Descartes was proposing seemed like heresy.Yet Descartes himself was a good Catholic, who was spurred to write hisincendiary book for the most personal of reasons: He had devotedhimself to medicine and the study of nature, but when his beloveddaughter died at the age of five, he took his ideas deeper. Tounderstand the natural world one needed to question everything. Thusthe scientific method was created and religion overthrown. If thenatural world could be understood, knowledge could be advanced, andothers might not suffer as his child did.
The greatcontroversy Descartes ignited continues to our era: where Islamicterrorists spurn the modern world and pine for a culture based onunquestioning faith; where scientists write bestsellers thatpassionately make the case for atheism; where others struggle to find abalance between faith and reason.
Descartes’ Bonesis ahistorical detective story about the creation of the modern mind, withtwists and turns leading up to the present day—to the science museum inParis where the philosopher’s skull now resides and to the church a fewkilometers away where, not long ago, a philosopher-priest said a massfor his bones.
