Book Review: Descartes' Bones

Title: Descartes’ Bones
Author: Russell Shorto
Publisher: DOUBLEDAY
Number of pages: 257




Review: This book, published in October 2008, provides (in the words of its subtitle) “A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason.”

Russell begins with an overview of “The man who Died” (chapter 1). Descartes lived in a an age of many scientific discoveries. However, he perceived them to be without any unifying foundation. The crises he experienced was a loss of meaning, and he began a quest for truth, for something to believe in. He was resolved to slash every idea until he came to a proposition that was impossible to deny. Aristotle, Aquinas, Plato, the Hebrew prophets and the Apostle Paul were all regulated to the same dustbin. Even his own senses could not be trusted since senses can deceive. There might be a tree in front of me, or I might be just dreaming that that is a tree.

“At the end of this remorseless reduction there is only one thing that remains, one proposition that can’t be denied, one sound, as it were, in the universe, like the lonely ticking of a clock. It is the sound of the thinker’s own thoughts. For can I doubt that thoughts are occurring right now, including this one? No: it’s not logically possible.” Hence the conclusion: “Cogito, ergo sum,” or, “Je pense, donc je suis,” or “I think, therefore I am.” This was way more than a slogan. As Shorto explains, it declared that “the mind and its ‘good sense’--that is to say, human reason--are the only basis for judging whether a thing is true…. Human reason supplanted received wisdom. Once Descartes had established the base, he and others could rebuild the edifice of knowledge. But it would be different from what it had been. Everything would be different.”

Following the overview of chapter one, the majority of Shorto’s book is devoted to a description of the peregrinations of the French philosopher’s bones down through the centuries following his death in 1650. The story is fascinating, not only because the skull was separated from the bones sixteen years after Descartes’ death (and followed a completely different trajectory through different countries), but because of the recurring connection that Descartes’ bones had with the developing ideas and events of the “modern” world that Descartes’ philosophy had produced. Thus, in an odd way, Descartes’ skull and the ideas which emerged from it keep intersecting.

This is a fascinating read, because it is on the one hand a non-fiction historical detective story, and on the other hand a philosophical analysis of modernity. Descartes introduced “modernism” which eventually gave way to “postmodernism.” The postmodern world ended, according to Shorto, on September 11, 2001. He borrows from the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas the term postsecular to describe the next stage in the evolution of Western society. This is a stage in which the two radical extremes--radical secularists (such as Christopher Hitchens and other “radical Enlightenment” warriors) and the “theological camp” (people “at the fringes of Western society who [refuse] to go along with the basic ideals inherited from the enlightenment,” who reject homosexuality, etc., and who value supposed divine revelation over human doubt)--are brought into the “moderate Enlightenment camp” in which it is recognized that “scientific and religious worldviews aren’t truly inconsistent but that perceived conflicts have to be sorted out.” (He explains how the American Revolution was the result of “moderate Enlightenment” thinking, and the French Revolution the result of “radical Enlightenment” thinking.)

Our understanding of the relationship of faith to reason and reason to faith have titanic implications to our own personal worldview. Understanding how these two have related throughout western history helps us better relate to the millions around us who, indifferent as they may be to the doubts concerning the authenticity of Descartes’ skull, are nonetheless the products of the doubts that skull produced.