Gary Rosen reviews Russell Shorto’s Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason:
Making the case for one or another historical moment as the starting point of modernity is a familiar hook for writers of grand chronicles. Was the transformative event World War I, with its fateful consequences for 20th-century warfare, ideology and identity? Or perhaps Einstein’s “miracle year” of 1905, when he published his universe-shattering papers? The appearance of Darwin’s “Origin of Species” offers a bright dividing line, as do the (take your pick) French and American revolutions. The literary critic Harold Bloom reaches still farther back, crediting Shakespeare with the “invention of the human” in its various modern modes. Others find the deepest roots of modernity in the bleak realism of Machiavelli.
Russell Shorto’s “Descartes’ Bones” is a smart, elegantly written contribution to this genre. For Shorto, the pivot upon which the old world yielded to the new was the genius of Descartes, the philosopher who gave us the doubting, analytical, newly independent modern self. The Frenchman’s most famous phrase, “I think, therefore I am,” may strike our own ears as a coffee-mug cliché, but in the 17th century it was a revolutionary declaration. Shorto’s achievement is to complicate this picture, and with it our understanding of modernity, by also describing the religious context of the philosopher’s ideas. Though Descartes’s name has come to be associated with unrelenting rationalism, he was “as devout a Catholic as anyone of his time,” Shorto writes, and looked to theology to support his system. As Shorto recognizes,our own fundamentalists, religious and secular alike, might draw some useful lessons in modesty from Descartes’s example.
Read the full review here.