Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

Prague was an accurate reflection of the new sciences in the late sixteenth

century. For some decades scholastic philosophy had seemed to many

scholars to be ‘dead, barren, outworn, and irrelevant.’The response

to this widespread intellectual effeteness emerged in two forms, religious

and philosophical. The religious response was the familiar challenge of

the Reformation to return to a form of Christianity that was closer to the

Gospel, and to unshackle the church from the debilitating scholasticism

that it had adopted as its official language.

The philosophical response was an equally radical search for new cat-

egories and new sciences that would put its practitioners in touch with

a wide range of powers and natural forces and, through them, with the

ultimate source of these occult powers, God. The philosophical revolu-

tion was supported by many of the same people who demanded religious

renewal, but it was not by any means an exclusively Protestant movement.

The exuberance of this intellectual movement, and its tolerance of many

incredible or implausible variations, was evident in the interest shown in

Neoplatonism, cabalistic literature, alchemy, astrology, and various kinds

of magic and sorcery. With almost utopian zeal, countless writers and prac-

titioners of magical arts found it difficult to camouflage their millenarian

hopes and ambitious aspirations to discover the secrets of nature, thereby

opening up a whole new era for mankind.

The first proponents of this new perspective on nature and its occult

powers included Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (–) and Marsilio

Ficino in Florence, Johannes Reuchlin (–)inGermany,and the

Venetian friar Franceso Giorgi (–), who published his book,

The Harmony of the World,in. Although these authors varied in

their identification with different forms of magic, they were united in

their respect for mystical sources and Neoplatonist studies, which pro-

vided the social pressure required to challenge the established learning

of the schools and to motivate the kind of mathematical work that was

required by later scholars such as Brahe and Kepler. Descartes was vaguely

aware of this undercurrent of ideas and wished to become more informed

about it.

His first indirect acquaintance with the work and influence of Cornelius

Agrippa (–) and John Battista della Porta (c.–), and

with the new art of memory allegedly discovered by Ramon Lull, occurred

inimmediately prior to his travels in central Europe. He wrote to

Beeckman (March) that he wished to construct ‘not a LullianBrief