c CUNYB/Clarke     December, :

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In Search of a Career

(–)

What path shall I follow in life?

(Ausonius)

D

made a decisive break with his past and a significant

step toward his life’s work – although this became clear only in

retrospect – when he left France and travelled north to the United

Provinces at the beginning of. There is no evidence to suggest that

he embarked on this journey with the intention of devoting his life to phi-

losophy, or that he was considering emigrating permanently from France,

as he did a decade later. His state of mind, in, was that of a young

man who was uncertain about a career. He had provisionally declined to

follow his father and his brother into a legal career and had opted instead

forthe other standard path to social promotion in French life – as a gentle-

man army officer. He also seemed vaguely conscious of intellectual gaps

in his education, and of the benefits of foreign travel to help remedy those

deficiencies.

Descartes’ formal education had been narrowly scholastic, and it had

certainly not provided a basis for the fundamental reform of human

knowledge that he eventually undertook. During this period of transition,

the young Jesuit alumnus seems to have been willing to consider per-

spectives as disparate as the mystical and cabalistic writers of the Middle

Ages and the astrologers and alchemists of the Renaissance. He mentioned

authors as diverse as Ramon Lull, Johannes Kepler, and Thomas Cam-

panella, and flirted briefly with the arcane philosophy of the Rosicrucians.

On two occasions he considered purchasing a royal appointment, possi-

blyasareliable source of income rather than an alternative to amateur

scholarly pursuits. In many ways he drifted, both intellectually and geo-

graphically, without any clear plan of where he was going or what precisely

