Descartes: A Biography

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

In Search of a Career (–) 

par excellence from the uncertainty of searching for a career to having

aclear agenda for his life’s work. The stage setting for the dreams is

unambiguous.The dreamer is placed at a border town between the

contending forces of the Holy Roman Empire and the Protestant claimants

to the throne. The date is the eve of St. Martin’s Day,November,

when those involved in the harvest drank the new wine and celebrated

the transition to the winter season. St. Martin of Tours had a symbolic

meaning for all Frenchmen. For Descartes, however, he represented the

ideal of a Christian soldier, about whom many stories and myths were

told of his conversion to Christianity and his single-minded dedication

to his newly discovered vocation. Descartes anticipates an obvious and

plausible interpretation of his recollection: that he had drunk too much

wine that evening, as was the custom for Frenchmen, and that his dream

was nothing more than the effect of an inebriated sleep. Baillet writes, at

the conclusion of his account of the dreams: ‘In fact, it was the eve of

St Martin, when it was customary to overindulge, as they do in France,

wherever one happens to be that evening. But he assures us that he passed

the evening and the whole day in great sobriety, and that it was about

three months since he had drunk any wine.’In what he claimed was a

completely sober condition, then, Descartes fell asleep. He was ‘full of

enthusiasm, carried away completely by the thought of having discovered

the foundations of a marvelous science’, and while asleep at night, he had

a sequence of three dreams.

He dreamt that he was walking along a road, confronted by shadows

that terrified him, and that he was forced to go left rather than right.

Agreat gust of wind, like a whirlwind, spun him about on his left foot

three or four times. He then saw a college gate open ahead of him, and

he retreated there to escape from the storm. He tried to reach the col-

lege chapel, so that he could pray for forgiveness for his sins. As he was

pushed violently by the wind, he noticed someone in the college yard who

recognized him and called him by his name in a friendly and helpful man-

ner. This acquaintance gave him something for another unnamed person,

something that looked like a melon that had been imported from a foreign

country. While he was being constantly buffeted by the wind and finally

knocked down, those who spoke with him were all standing upright, unaf-

fected by the storm. At this point Descartes awoke, and he thought the

whole experience might be the work of some evil genius who was trying to

deceive him.