Descartes: A Biography

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In Search of a Career (–) 

life in a more general sense. This Freudian analysis coincided with some

elements of Descartes’ own interpretation.

The Pythagorean dichotomy represented by the ‘It is and is not’ has

obvious connotations of the Y-shaped representation of life choices found

in authors such as John Dee. In hisMonas Hieroglyphica, Dee traces the

development of individuals from infancy to adolescence, until they reach

afork in the road at which they have to choose between a life ruined by

debauchery and a path that leads to wisdom.Dee’s own career illustrates

Descartes’ intellectual journey almost in reverse. Dee’s earliest writings

were unambiguously in natural philosophy.In this context, he borrowed

a metaphysics of light similar to that developed in the Middle Ages by

Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon, and he used it to speculate about

the influence of the heavenly bodies on human lives through some kind of

mechanical force. In contrast, his later work shows a radical slippage into

speculating about spirits that inhabit the world and communicating with

spirits to help understand or foretell future events. The Monas symbol

that he adopted was intended to signify a sharp dichotomy between the

spiritual life of an adept and its opposite. By the time he joined forces with

Kelley, he was fully committed to divination and to the reliability of the

revelations that Kelley imagined while crystal gazing. In other words, he

saw himself as having become an adept.

If Descartes were to borrow the Monas symbol from Dee, even in the

course of a dream, he could have used it only to symbolize a development

that went in exactly the opposite direction. Descartes had learned some-

thing about the astrologers and hermeticists of Bohemia, and he was about

to face a choice between their inspired enthusiasm and an alternative path

that would lead more reliably to scientific knowledge. It seems presump-

tuous to think that he understood clearly, in, the alternatives that

were available to him or that he realized the significance of the path on

which he was about to embark.

What could Descartes have meant by the claim that he ‘understood the

fundamental principles of a wonderful discovery’ (x.)? He is some-

times read as conceiving of a new method, inspired by mathematics, by

which he could resolve all the problems of the age. This looks more like a

retrospective interpretation made in the light of subsequent events, sup-

ported by some of Descartes’ own remarks, than a reliable reading of

events in. The enthusiasm he experienced on his travels in Germany

suggests the kind of holistic, metaphorical, and even cabalistic writing of