Book #77

Descartes' Bones
by Russell Shorto

I was having trouble deciding how to describe my experience of reading Russell Shorto's new history/philosophy book, Descartes' Bones, when I realized: that difficulty represents the experience itself. I found the book to be slippery. It was hard for me to focus on what I was reading, and yet I was interested enough to stop myself, when I realized I had just sped my eyes over a page without taking any of it in, and go back to read what I had missed when my attention wandered. Unfortunately, what often happened at that point was that my attention wandered again, and I had to repeat the process. I found myself re-reading the same page four or five times, on more than one occasion.

This is not a good sign. But then, when I think back on the book in order to summarize it, I can't pinpoint a specific problem. I like the author's writing, other than a few problems -- his attempts to inject a little modern humor were jarring, for instance, probably because the narrative is a touch pedantic and slow -- and I find the subject personally fascinating: Rene Descartes, the originator of Cogito, ergo sum and Cartesian dualism, which are the foundation of the modern era and the age of reason, along with all of the turmoil and conflict around Descartes' ideas of doubt and its resolution that have occupied so much of the last four hundred years. This is my meat and potatoes, my loaf of bread and jug of wine; I wanted to read this book. So why couldn't I sink into it? Why did I keep skittering off the surface and falling away, only to catch myself by the barest edge of fingernails before I vanished below the horizon, so to speak?

I think the answer is that Shorto chose the wrong focus. The story of Descartes' bones, while certainly far more interesting than the average tale of mortal remains after death, is not really an epic and inspiring tale. It is also not much of a metaphor for the schism between faith and reason to which Descartes was so integral, and which underlies so many of our modern problems and concerns. But Shorto tried very hard to make it so, to use the bones as a touchstone as he explored the history of the Enlightenment in France and the long-term effects of Descartes' philosophy on our modern age. Unfortunately, it didn't really work, no matter how much he wanted it to, and I wanted it to, and therein lies the problem.

It's too bad, really. The story of Descartes' bones should be perfect for bringing to life the history of the rise of Reason. Descartes himself was the single greatest influence on the separation of faith and reason, and on reason's rise to equal and then surpass faith as a source of knowledge; his bones passed through the possession of several other luminaries, including Alexandre Lenoir, the founder of the first Natural History museum, and two of the founders of neuroscience, Franz Gall and Pierre Broca. Descartes' proper place in history, and thus the proper handling of his remains, was a point of debate not only for the scientific community of France, but also of the republican governments of the French Revolution, and so Descartes' body has been reburied several times, displayed in several countries, and doubted and reconfirmed again and again since his death in 1650.

Sadly for me, as important a figure as Descartes was, the book does not go into much detail about his life -- certainly because the ground has already been well-tilled by previous authors. And while the men and women associated with Descartes' bones were related to the rise of reason and the struggle between reason and faith, they weren't really the most important figures in those events. So Shorto was forced to stray away from the line of the narrative again and again, in order to tell the history he was trying to cover, and then he was forced to cram and fold, spindle, and mutilate the historical character of the people involved with his narrative in order to make them fit in the history. For instance, the story begins with the fact that Descartes did not die in France, and so was not buried in his home country -- the decision to return his remains to France was the start of the controversies that would surround the bones for more than two centuries -- but the circumstances of his death and burial were not terribly momentous: he died of a fever he caught while visiting a friend in Sweden. The queen of Sweden, Christina, had wanted Descartes to join her court to act as a magnet for philosophers and scientists; had that happened, and the court of Sweden become a source of great new scientific discoveries, or great moments in the mind/body debate that Descartes was famed for, then it would have made this story better. But no: Christina and Descartes didn't get along, he died suddenly, and Christina abdicated her throne and converted to Catholicism. As interesting as her story is, it isn't terribly well connected to Descartes, and other than Christina, there was nothing in Sweden at the time that would relate to the conflict between reason and faith. And so it goes with the rest of the people involved in the tale. Lenoir and Broca, Gall and Georges Cuvier and everyone else that tried to put a finish on the wandering of Descartes' bones were interesting, but not the main players in the story I really wanted to hear, and which Shorto's prologue promised: the journey of Descartes' bones as a path through the landscape of the Enlightenment, as a key to unlocking the history of our current age's struggles between Reason and Faith.

In retrospect, I would have enjoyed this book more if I already knew the basic story. If I had already read a biography or two of Descartes, and if I knew the story of Spinoza and Kant and Hobbes and Locke, and Newton and Bacon and Leibniz and -- everything else that led to, and came from, the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, then this book would have made a nice confection on top of the meal. It's an interesting anecdote, but not enough of a history or a biography to serve the needs of this particular layman.