How Descartes completes his course of Philosophy and learns Mathematics

Descartes spent 9 years uprooting all the errors in his mind.

He took no side on the opinions and difficulties that typically divide scholars and philosophers in their disputes. If we are to believe his testimony, we must conclude that he had not yet begun to seek the foundations of any philosophy more certain than the common one.

The example of several excellent minds who had not succeeded in their attempt had made the difficulty seem so great to him that he perhaps would not have dared to undertake it so soon, if the rumor had not already spread that he had succeeded. This belief had taken hold among the curious without his participation, and it could only have been based on the eagerness of his friends to publish what they knew about it.

As for him, he claims that if he contributed anything to this opinion by his remarks, it was only by more candidly admitting his ignorance than those who have studied a little are accustomed to doing, and by showing the reasons he had for doubting many things that others consider certain. But the goodness of his heart did not allow him to tolerate being taken for someone he was not, and he believed he had to make every effort to become worthy of the reputation he was being given.

This desire led him to resolve to leave all places where he might have acquaintances and to retreat deep into Holland. But fearing he would encounter obstacles to such an extraordinary resolution from his relatives and several of his friends, he wanted to avoid the opportunity of not being able to resist their authority. Instead of saying goodbye to them, he contented himself with writing to them at the time of his departure, and he excused himself from not being able to embrace them and take their orders in person under the pretext of the little time he had left due to the haste of his affairs. He established Father Mersenne as his correspondent for the exchange of letters he was to maintain in France; and he agreed with him on how to keep the secret of his particular place of retreat and the freedom they would use together in their opinions on people and things that would be at issue between them. He entrusted the care of his domestic affairs and revenues to the Abbé Picot, and having said goodbye only to his most intimate friends, he left the city around the beginning of Advent in the year 1628.

He did not think it appropriate to go directly to Holland so as not to immediately expose his health to the severity of the season. Instead, he withdrew to a country location that is entirely unknown to us. We only know that it was not outside of France, and that he spent the winter in this place of retreat, far from the conveniences of cities, to accustom himself to the cold and solitude and to learn the life he was to lead in Holland. This is what we learn from a letter he wrote to one of his friends, to whom he was anxious to persuade that no matter what way of life we engage in, we should only pass from one extreme to the other by degrees, and that a sudden change incommodes the health more than it restores it, even in those who are obliged to change their place or state to recover.

Descartes went to Holland toward the end of March 1629.

He was then completing his 33rd year.

He had barely arrived in Amsterdam when he received news of the discontent of those who were murmuring against his retreat and blaming his resolution.

The complaints made about it had, to be truthful, no other source than the esteem and friendship of his acquaintances who felt abandoned.

There were 3 kinds of reproaches made to him:

1. For having left France, where his birth and education obliged him to stay
2. For choosing Holland
3. For having renounced human society by fleeing companies.

In various places in his writings, Descartes gives 2 main reasons for leaving France:

1. He had to conform to the people with whom he would have had to live publicly.

2. His duty to go from time to time to court and conform to all its practices.

This would have made him lose the best part of his time.

This was still apparent nine years later when, in response to honorable proposals made to him on behalf of Cardinal De Richelieu, he wrote back to Father Mersenne in these terms:

“There is nothing that would be more contrary to my designs than the air of Paris, because of an infinity of unavoidable distractions that are there. And as long as I am allowed to live in my own way, I will always remain in the countryside in some country where I cannot be bothered by the visits of my neighbors, just as I am here in a corner of North Holland.”

He adds that this is the only reason that made him leave his country, where the civilities, annoyances, of his relatives and kin were no less detrimental to his leisure and the peace of his studies than those of his neighbors and friends, as he made known on occasions when he was obliged to explain himself to silence some of his envious critics.

However, he still alleged another reason that had led him to this resolution. It was the warmth of the climate of his country, which he did not find favorable to his temperament in relation to the freedom of his mind, whose enjoyment could not be without some trouble when it was a question of conceiving truths where imagination should not interfere.

He had noticed that the air of Paris was for him mixed with an appearance of a very subtle and very dangerous poison; that it imperceptibly disposed him to vanity; and that it made him produce only chimeras. This is what he had particularly experienced in June of the year 1628, when having retired from Le Vasseur’s to study away from society, he undertook to compose something on divinity. His work could not succeed because his senses were not steady enough; besides, he was perhaps not otherwise pure enough or exercised enough to be able to treat such a sublime subject with solidity.

To satisfy those who claimed to have scruples about his choice of Holland for his retreat, he first replied that being born free and having received enough property from his parents not to be a burden to anyone, he did not believe that any place on earth could be forbidden to him. Since his plan was to live wherever he found himself without commitment and without employment, he had no reason to fear bringing dishonor to the inhabitants of the country where he would seek to settle.

He made them understand that it was not whim that had made him prefer Holland to other places in Europe and that he would not have chosen it if he had found a place more suitable for his designs.

It was a country where he had no acquaintances, especially in North Holland and Friesland, which he had only seen in passing during his travels from Holstein to return to France.

The long duration of the war had established such good order there that the armies maintained there seemed to serve only to preserve individuals in a safe and peaceful enjoyment of the fruits of the peace that reigned deep within the united provinces. He had considered that the custom of the country did not require people to visit each other as freely as they did in France, and thus it would be more convenient for him to attend to what he called his “study diversions.” He was sure of living as solitary and retired as in the most remote deserts among a crowd of a very active people, but more careful of their own interests than curious about those of others, with people so generally attached to their affairs that he should not fear that they would want to interfere with his.

He was, moreover, so well convinced that he had made a good choice and he seemed so favorably biased toward Holland that he could not help but propose his example to follow to those of his friends who expressed some desire to withdraw from the world. Nothing is more glorious for Holland than the way he wrote about it two years later to Mr. De Balzac, who had given him hope of coming to see him in his retreat by telling him of his plan to retire from court and the world. “I do not find it strange,” he said, “that a great and generous spirit like yours cannot accommodate itself to those servile constraints found at court. And since you seriously assure me that God has inspired you to leave the world, I would believe I was sinning against the Holy Spirit if I tried to dissuade you from such a holy resolution.

You must even forgive my zeal if I invite you to choose Amsterdam for your retreat and to prefer it, I will not only say to all the convents of Capuchins and Carthusians where many people retreat, but also to all the most beautiful residences in France and Italy, and even to that famous hermitage where you were last year.

However accomplished a country house may be, it always lacks an infinity of conveniences that are only found in cities, and the very solitude that one hopes for is never found there perfectly.

I want you to find a canal there that makes the greatest talkers dream, a valley so solitary that it can inspire them with transport and joy. But it is difficult not to also have a number of small neighbors who sometimes bother you, and whose visits are even more inconvenient than those you receive in Paris. While in this great city where I am, there being no man, except me, who does not practice commerce, everyone is so attentive to his own profit that I could live there my whole life without ever being seen by anyone. I go for a walk every day among the confusion of a great people with as much freedom and peace as you could in your alleys, and I do not consider the men who pass before my eyes any differently than I would the trees found in your forests or the animals that graze there. The very noise of their bustle no more interrupts my reveries than would that of some stream.

If I sometimes reflect on their actions, I receive the same pleasure as you would from seeing the peasants who cultivate your fields, considering that all their work serves to embellish the place of my residence and to ensure that I lack nothing there. If there is pleasure in seeing the fruits grow in your orchards and being there in abundance up to your eyes, do you not think there is just as much pleasure in seeing ships arrive here that abundantly bring us everything that the Indies produce and everything that is rare in Europe?

What other place in the rest of the world could one choose where all the conveniences of life and all the curiosities that one can wish for are so easy to find as in this one? Do you know another country where one can enjoy such complete freedom; where one can sleep with less worry; where there are always armies on their feet to guard us without being a burden to us; where poisonings, betrayals, and slanders are less known; and where more of the innocence of our ancestors has remained?

I do not know how you can love the air of Italy so much, with which one so often breathes the plague; where the heat of the day is unbearable, the coolness of the evening unhealthy; and where the darkness of the night covers thefts and murders. If you fear the winters of the north, tell me what shades, what fan, what fountains could so well preserve you in Rome from the inconveniences of heat as a stove and a large fire can exempt you from the cold here.

But whatever advantage Holland had over Italy in Mr. Descartes’s mind, the view of the Catholic religion would have infallibly determined him to retreat beyond the Alps, were it not for the fear of the illnesses that the heat of the air usually causes in Italy, where he protests he would have spent all the time he lived in Holland. In this way, he would have removed all pretext for the slander of those who suspected him of going to the sermon; but he might not have lived in as complete and long health as he did until his trip to Sweden.

As for the reproach made to him for fleeing the company of men, he was well aware that it was less his particular case than that of all great philosophers who, to gain the freedom to attend to study and meditation, have abandoned the court of princes, the stay of their homeland, and often their own family.

He was also careful not to respond to this accusation, considering himself glorious enough to be condemned with so many great men. His envious critics, who could not deny that nothing is more suitable for the study of true philosophy than retreat and solitude, tried to turn his solitude to his shame, as if instead of using his solitude as a philosopher, he had abused it in softness or in some criminal idleness. He certainly had a disposition far from that of melancholics and misanthropes; and if he had had to live in Paris only with honest people, with people capable of edifying him, he would not have sought separation.

The mixing of the one with the other made him resolve to deprive himself of the advantage he would have found in the company of good people and scholars, so as not to have to endure that of people who did not have these qualities. This is what he made known a long time later to Mr. Chanut. “I complain,” he said, “that the world is too big because of the few honest people found there. I wish they were all assembled in one city, and then I would be delighted to leave my hermitage to go and live with them if they wanted to receive me into their company.

Although I flee the multitude because of the number of impertinent and annoying people one encounters there, I still think that the greatest good of life is to enjoy the conversation of people one esteems.” It was neither pride nor impatience that put these expressions in his mouth; and he spoke in this way only in the conviction that God was asking something else of him than to tolerate the faults of others or to condescend to the will of the multitude.