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RENÉ DESCARTES
René Descartes, born March 31, 1596, La Haye, Touraine, France died February 11, 1650, Stockholm, Sweden
French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher, considered the father of modern philosophy.
Educated at a Jesuit college, he joined the military in 1618 and traveled widely for the next 10 years. In 1628 he settled in Holland, where he would remain until 1649. Descartes’s ambition was to introduce into philosophy the rigour and clarity of mathematics. In his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), he undertook the methodical doubt of all knowledge about which it is possible to be deceived, including knowledge based on authority, the senses, and reason, in order to arrive at something about which he can be absolutely certain; using this point as a foundation, he then sought to construct new and more secure justifications of his belief in the existence and immortality of the soul, the existence of God, and the reality of an external world. This indubitable point is expressed in the dictum Cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). His metaphysical dualism distinguished radically between mind, the essence of which is thinking, and matter, the essence of which is extension in three dimensions. Though his metaphysics is rationalistic (see rationalism), his physics and physiology are empiricist (see empiricism) and mechanistic (see mechanism). In mathematics, he founded analytic geometry and reformed algebraic notation.
French mathematician and philosopher
French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher. Because he was one of the first to abandon scholastic Aristotelianism, because he formulated the first modern version of mind-body dualism, from which stems the mind-body problem, and because he promoted the development of a new science grounded in observation and experiment, he has been called the father of modern philosophy. Applying an original system of methodical doubt, he dismissed apparent knowledge derived from authority, the senses, and reason and erected new epistemic foundations on the basis of the intuition that, when he is thinking, he exists; this he expressed in the dictum “I think, therefore I am” (best known in its Latin formulation, “Cogito, ergo sum,” though originally written in French, “Je pense, donc je suis”). He developed a metaphysical dualism that distinguishes radically between mind, the essence of which is thinking, and matter, the essence of which is extension in three dimensions. Descartes’s metaphysics is rationalist, based on the postulation of innate ideas of mind, matter, and God, but his physics and physiology, based on sensory experience, are mechanistic and empiricist.
Early life and education
Although Descartes’s birthplace, La Haye (now Descartes), France, is in Touraine, his family connections lie south, across the Creuse River in Poitou, where his father, Joachim, owned farms and houses in Châtellerault and Poitiers. Because Joachim was a councillor in the Parlement of Brittany in Rennes, Descartes inherited a modest rank of nobility. Descartes’s mother died when he was one year old. His father remarried in Rennes, leaving him in La Haye to be raised first by his maternal grandmother and then by his great-uncle in Châtellerault. Although the Descartes family was Roman Catholic, the Poitou region was controlled by the Protestant Huguenots, and Châtellerault, a Protestant stronghold, was the site of negotiations over the Edict of Nantes (1598), which gave Protestants freedom of worship in France following the intermittent Wars of Religion between Protestant and Catholic forces in France. Descartes returned to Poitou regularly until 1628.
In 1606 Descartes was sent to the Jesuit college at La Flèche, established in 1604 by Henry IV (reigned 1589–1610). At La Flèche, 1,200 young men were trained for careers in military engineering, the judiciary, and government administration. In addition to classical studies, science, mathematics, and metaphysics—Aristotle was taught from scholastic commentaries—they studied acting, music, poetry, dancing, riding, and fencing. In 1610 Descartes participated in an imposing ceremony in which the heart of Henry IV, whose assassination that year had destroyed the hope of religious tolerance in France and Germany, was placed in the cathedral at La Flèche.
In 1614 Descartes went to Poitiers, where he took a law degree in 1616. At this time, Huguenot Poitiers was in virtual revolt against the young King Louis XIII (reigned 1610–43). Descartes’s father probably expected him to enter Parliament, but the minimum age for doing so was 27, and Descartes was only 20. In 1618 he went to Breda in the Netherlands, where he spent 15 months as an informal student of mathematics and military architecture in the peacetime army of the Protestant stadholder, Prince Maurice (ruled 1585–1625). In Breda, Descartes was encouraged in his studies of science and mathematics by the physicist Isaac Beeckman (1588–1637), for whom he wrote the Compendium of Music (written 1618, published 1650), his first surviving work.
Descartes spent the period 1619 to 1628 traveling in northern and southern Europe, where, as he later explained, he studied “the book of the world.” While in Bohemia in 1619, he invented analytic geometry, a method of solving geometric problems algebraically and algebraic problems geometrically. He also devised a universal method of deductive reasoning, based on mathematics, that is applicable to all the sciences. This method, which he later formulated in Discourse on Method (1637) and Rules for the Direction of the Mind (written by 1628 but not published until 1701), consists of four rules: (1) accept nothing as true that is not self-evident, (2) divide problems into their simplest parts, (3) solve problems by proceeding from simple to complex, and (4) recheck the reasoning. These rules are a direct application of mathematical procedures. In addition, Descartes insisted that all key notions and the limits of each problem must be clearly defined.
Descartes also investigated reports of esoteric knowledge, such as the claims of the practitioners of theosophy to be able to command nature. Although disappointed with the followers of the Catalan mystic Ramon Llull (1232/33–1315/16) and the German alchemist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535), he was impressed by the German mathematician Johann Faulhaber (1580–1635), a member of the mystical society of the Rosicrucians.
Descartes shared a number of Rosicrucian goals and habits. Like the Rosicrucian’s, he lived alone and in seclusion, changed his residence often (during his 22 years in the Netherlands, he lived in 18 different places), practiced medicine without charge, attempted to increase human longevity, and took an optimistic view of the capacity of science to improve the human condition. At the end of his life, he left a chest of personal papers (none of which has survived) with a Rosicrucian physician—his close friend Corneille van Hogelande, who handled his affairs in the Netherlands. Despite these affinities, Descartes rejected the Rosicrucian’s magical and mystical beliefs. For him, this period was a time of hope for a revolution in science. The English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626), in Advancement of Learning (1605), had earlier proposed a new science of observation and experiment to replace the traditional Aristotelian science, as Descartes himself did later.
In 1622 Descartes moved to Paris. There he gambled, rode, fenced, and went to the court, concerts, and the theatre. Among his friends were the poets Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac (1597–1654), who dedicated his Le Socrate chrétien (1652; “Christian Socrates”) to Descartes, and Théophile de Viau (1590–1626), who was burned in effigy and imprisoned in 1623 for writing verses mocking religious themes. Descartes also befriended the mathematician Claude Mydorge (1585–1647) and Father Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), a man of universal learning who corresponded with hundreds of scholars, writers, mathematicians, and scientists and who became Descartes’s main contact with the larger intellectual world. During this time Descartes regularly hid from his friends to work, writing treatises, now lost, on fencing and metals. He acquired a considerable reputation long before he published anything.
At a talk in 1628, Descartes denied the alchemist Chandoux’s claim that probabilities are as good as certainties in science and demonstrated his own method for attaining certainty. The Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle (1575–1629)—who had founded the Oratorian teaching congregation in 1611 as a rival to the Jesuits—was present at the talk. Many commentators speculate that Bérulle urged Descartes to write a metaphysics based on the philosophy of St. Augustine as a replacement for Jesuit teaching. Be that as it may, within weeks Descartes left for the Netherlands, which was Protestant, and—taking great precautions to conceal his address—did not return to France for 16 years. Some scholars claim that Descartes adopted Bérulle as director of his conscience, but this is unlikely, given Descartes’s background and beliefs (he came from a Huguenot province, he was not a Catholic enthusiast, he had been accused of being a Rosicrucian, and he advocated religious tolerance and championed the use of reason).
Residence in the Netherlands
Descartes said that he went to the Netherlands to enjoy a greater liberty than was available anywhere else and to avoid the distractions of Paris and friends so that he could have the leisure and solitude to think. (He had inherited enough money and property to live independently.) The Netherlands was a haven of tolerance, where Descartes could be an original, independent thinker without fear of being burned at the stake—as was the Italian philosopher Lucilio Vanini (1585–1619) for proposing natural explanations of miracles—or being drafted into the armies then prosecuting the Catholic Counter-Reformation. In France, by contrast, religious intolerance was mounting. The Jews were expelled in 1615, and the last Protestant stronghold, La Rochelle, was crushed—with Bérulle’s participation—only weeks before Descartes’s departure. In 1624 the French Parliament passed a decree forbidding criticism of Aristotle on pain of death. Although Mersenne and the philosopher Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) did publish attacks on Aristotle without suffering persecution (they were, after all, Catholic priests), those judged to be heretics continued to be burned, and laymen lacked church protection. In addition, Descartes may have felt jeopardized by his friendship with intellectual libertines such as Father Claude Picot (d. 1668), a bon vivant known as “the Atheist Priest,” with whom he entrusted his financial affairs in France.
In 1629 Descartes went to the university at Franeker, where he stayed with a Catholic family and wrote the first draft of his Meditations. He matriculated at the University of Leiden in 1630. In 1631 he visited Denmark with the physician and alchemist Étienne de Villebressieu, who invented siege engines, a portable bridge, and a two-wheeled stretcher. The physician Henri Regius (1598–1679), who taught Descartes’s views at the University of Utrecht in 1639, involved Descartes in a fierce controversy with the Calvinist theologian Gisbertus Voetius (1589–1676) that continued for the rest of Descartes’s life. In his Letter to Voetius of 1648, Descartes made a plea for religious tolerance and the rights of man. Claiming to write not only for Christians but also for Turks—meaning Muslims, libertines, infidels, deists, and atheists—he argued that, because Protestants and Catholics worship the same God, both can hope for heaven. When the controversy became intense, however, Descartes sought the protection of the French ambassador and of his friend Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687), secretary to the stadholder Prince Frederick Henry (ruled 1625–47).
In 1635 Descartes’s daughter Francine was born to Helena Jans and was baptized in the Reformed Church in Deventer. Although Francine is typically referred to by commentators as Descartes’s “illegitimate” daughter, her baptism is recorded in a register for legitimate births. Her death of scarlet fever at the age of five was the greatest sorrow of Descartes’s life. Referring to her death, Descartes said that he did not believe that one must refrain from tears to prove oneself a man.
The World and Discourse on Method
In 1633, just as he was about to publish The World (1664), Descartes learned that the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) had been condemned in Rome for publishing the view that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Because this Copernican position is central to his cosmology and physics, Descartes suppressed The World, hoping that eventually the church would retract its condemnation. Although Descartes feared the church, he also hoped that his physics would one day replace that of Aristotle in church doctrine and be taught in Catholic schools.
Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637) is one of the first important modern philosophical works not written in Latin. Descartes said that he wrote in French so that all who had good sense, including women, could read his work and learn to think for themselves. He believed that everyone could tell true from false by the natural light of reason. In three essays accompanying the Discourse, he illustrated his method for utilizing reason in the search for truth in the sciences: in Dioptrics he derived the law of refraction, in Meteorology he explained the rainbow, and in Geometry he gave an exposition of his analytic geometry. He also perfected the system invented by François Viète for representing known numerical quantities with a, b, c, … , unknowns with x, y, z, … , and squares, cubes, and other powers with numerical superscripts, as in x2, x3, … , which made algebraic calculations much easier than they had been before.
In the Discourse he also provided a provisional moral code (later presented as final) for use while seeking truth: (1) obey local customs and laws, (2) make decisions on the best evidence and then stick to them firmly as though they were certain, (3) change desires rather than the world, and (4) always seek truth. This code exhibits Descartes’s prudential conservatism, decisiveness, stoicism, and dedication. The Discourse and other works illustrate Descartes’s conception of knowledge as being like a tree in its interconnectedness and in the grounding provided to higher forms of knowledge by lower or more fundamental ones. Thus, for Descartes, metaphysics corresponds to the roots of the tree, physics to the trunk, and medicine, mechanics, and morals to the branches.
Meditations
In 1641 Descartes published the Meditations on First Philosophy, in Which Is Proved the Existence of God and the Immortality of the Soul. Written in Latin and dedicated to the Jesuit professors at the Sorbonne in Paris, the work includes critical responses by several eminent thinkers—collected by Mersenne from the Jansenist philosopher and theologian Antoine Arnauld (1612–94), the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), and the Epicurean atomist Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655)—as well as Descartes’s replies. The second edition (1642) includes a response by the Jesuit priest Pierre Bourdin (1595–1653), who Descartes said was a fool. These objections and replies constitute a landmark of cooperative discussion in philosophy and science at a time when dogmatism was the rule.
The Meditations is characterized by Descartes’s use of methodic doubt, a systematic procedure of rejecting as though false all types of belief in which one has ever been, or could ever be, deceived. His arguments derive from the skepticism of the Greek philosopher Sextus Empiricus (fl. 3rd century ad) as reflected in the work of the essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) and the Catholic theologian Pierre Charron (1541–1603). Thus, Descartes’s apparent knowledge based on authority is set aside, because even experts are sometimes wrong. His beliefs from sensory experience are declared untrustworthy, because such experience is sometimes misleading, as when a square tower appears round from a distance. Even his beliefs about the objects in his immediate vicinity may be mistaken, because, as he notes, he often has dreams about objects that do not exist, and he has no way of knowing with certainty whether he is dreaming or awake. Finally, his apparent knowledge of simple and general truths of reasoning that do not depend on sense experience—such as “2 + 3 = 5” or “a square has four sides”—is also unreliable, because God could have made him in such a way that, for example, he goes wrong every time he counts. As a way of summarizing the universal doubt into which he has fallen, Descartes supposes that an “evil genius of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me.”
Although at this stage there is seemingly no belief about which he cannot entertain doubt, Descartes finds certainty in the intuition that, when he is thinking—even if he is being deceived—he must exist. In the Discourse, Descartes expresses this intuition in the dictum “I think, therefore I am”; but because “therefore” suggests that the intuition is an argument—though it is not—in the Meditations he says merely, “I think, I am” (“Cogito, sum”). The cogito is a logically self-evident truth that also gives intuitively certain knowledge of a particular thing’s existence—that is, one’s self. Nevertheless, it justifies accepting as certain only the existence of the person who thinks it. If all one ever knew for certain was that one exists, and if one adhered to Descartes’s method of doubting all that is uncertain, then one would be reduced to solipsism, the view that nothing exists but one’s self and thoughts. To escape solipsism, Descartes argues that all ideas that are as “clear and distinct” as the cogito must be true, for, if they were not, the cogito also, as a member of the class of clear and distinct ideas, could be doubted. Since “I think, I am” cannot be doubted, all clear and distinct ideas must be true.
On the basis of clear and distinct innate ideas, Descartes then establishes that each mind is a mental substance and each body a part of one material substance. The mind or soul is immortal, because it is unextended and cannot be broken into parts, as can extended bodies. Descartes also advances a proof for the existence of God. He begins with the proposition that he has an innate idea of God as a perfect being and then concludes that God necessarily exists, because, if he did not, he would not be perfect. This ontological argument for God’s existence, originally due to the English logician St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033/34–1109), is at the heart of Descartes’s rationalism, for it establishes certain knowledge about an existing thing solely on the basis of reasoning from innate ideas, with no help from sensory experience. Descartes then argues that, because God is perfect, he does not deceive human beings; and therefore, because God leads us to believe that the material world exists, it does exist. In this way Descartes claims to establish metaphysical foundations for the existence of his own mind, of God, and of the material world.
The inherent circularity of Descartes’s reasoning was exposed by Arnauld, whose objection has come to be known as the Cartesian Circle. According to Descartes, God’s existence is established by the fact that Descartes has a clear and distinct idea of God; but the truth of Descartes’s clear and distinct ideas are guaranteed by the fact that God exists and is not a deceiver. Thus, in order to show that God exists, Descartes must assume that God exists.
Physics, physiology, and morals
Descartes’s general goal was to help human beings master and possess nature. He provided understanding of the trunk of the tree of knowledge in The World, Dioptrics, Meteorology, and Geometry, and he established its metaphysical roots in the Meditations. He then spent the rest of his life working on the branches of mechanics, medicine, and morals. Mechanics is the basis of his physiology and medicine, which in turn is the basis of his moral psychology. Descartes believed that all material bodies, including the human body, are machines that operate by mechanical principles. In his physiological studies, he dissected animal bodies to show how their parts move. He argued that, because animals have no souls, they do not think or feel; thus, vivisection, which Descartes practiced, is permitted. He also described the circulation of the blood but came to the erroneous conclusion that heat in the heart expands the blood, causing its expulsion into the veins. Descartes’s L’Homme, et un traité de la formation du foetus (Man, and a Treatise on the Formation of the Foetus) was published in 1664.
In 1644 Descartes published Principles of Philosophy, a compilation of his physics and metaphysics. He dedicated this work to Princess Elizabeth (1618–79), daughter of Elizabeth Stuart, titular queen of Bohemia, in correspondence with whom he developed his moral philosophy. According to Descartes, a human being is a union of mind and body, two radically dissimilar substances that interact in the pineal gland. He reasoned that the pineal gland must be the uniting point because it is the only nondouble organ in the brain, and double reports, as from two eyes, must have one place to merge. He argued that each action on a person’s sense organs causes subtle matter to move through tubular nerves to the pineal gland, causing it to vibrate distinctively. These vibrations give rise to emotions and passions and also cause the body to act. Bodily action is thus the final outcome of a reflex arc that begins with external stimuli—as, for example, when a soldier sees the enemy, feels fear, and flees. The mind cannot change bodily reactions directly—for example, it cannot will the body to fight—but by altering mental attitudes, it can change the pineal vibrations from those that cause fear and fleeing to those that cause courage and fighting.
Descartes argued further that human beings can be conditioned by experience to have specific emotional responses. Descartes himself, for example, had been conditioned to be attracted to cross-eyed women because he had loved a cross-eyed playmate as a child. When he remembered this fact, however, he was able to rid himself of his passion. This insight is the basis of Descartes’s defense of free will and of the mind’s ability to control the body. Despite such arguments, in his Passions of the Soul (1649), which he dedicated to Queen Christina of Sweden (reigned 1644–54), Descartes holds that most bodily actions are determined by external material causes.
Descartes’s morality is anti-Jansenist and anti-Calvinist in that he maintains that the grace that is necessary for salvation can be earned and that human beings are virtuous and able to achieve salvation when they do their best to find and act upon the truth. His optimism about the ability of human reason and will to find truth and reach salvation contrasts starkly with the pessimism of the Jansenist apologist and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–62), who believed that salvation comes only as a gift of God’s grace. Descartes was correctly accused of holding the view of Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609), an anti-Calvinist Dutch theologian, that salvation depends on free will and good works rather than on grace. Descartes also held that, unless people believe in God and immortality, they will see no reason to be moral.
Free will, according to Descartes, is the sign of God in human nature, and human beings can be praised or blamed according to their use of it. People are good, he believed, only to the extent that they act freely for the good of others; such generosity is the highest virtue. Descartes was Epicurean in his assertion that human passions are good in themselves. He was an extreme moral optimist in his belief that understanding of the good is automatically followed by a desire to do the good. Moreover, because passions are “willings” according to Descartes, to want something is the same as to will it. Descartes was also stoic, however, in his admonition that, rather than change the world, human beings should control their passions.
Although Descartes wrote no political philosophy, he approved of the admonition of Seneca (c. 4 bc–ad 65) to acquiesce in the common order of things. He rejected the recommendation of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) to lie to one’s friends, because friendship is sacred and life’s greatest joy. Human beings cannot exist alone but must be parts of social groups, such as nations and families, and it is better to do good for the group than for oneself.
Descartes had been a puny child with a weak chest and was not expected to live. He therefore watched his health carefully, becoming a virtual vegetarian. In 1639 he bragged that he had not been sick for 19 years and that he expected to live to 100. He told Princess Elizabeth to think of life as a comedy; bad thoughts cause bad dreams and bodily disorders. Because there is always more good than evil in life, he said, one can always be content, no matter how bad things seem. Elizabeth, inextricably involved in messy court and family affairs, was not consoled.
In his later years Descartes said that he had once hoped to learn to prolong life to a century or more, but he then saw that, to achieve that goal, the work of many generations would be required; he himself had not even learned to prevent a fever. Thus, he said, instead of continuing to hope for long life, he had found an easier way, namely to love life and not to fear death. It is easy, he claimed, for a true philosopher to die tranquilly.
Final years and heritage
In 1644, 1647, and 1648, after 16 years in the Netherlands, Descartes returned to France for brief visits on financial business and to oversee the translation into French of the Principles, the Meditations, and the Objections and Replies. (The translators were, respectively, Picot, Charles d’Albert, duke de Luynes, and Claude Clerselier.) In 1647 he also met with Gassendi and Hobbes, and he suggested to Pascal the famous experiment of taking a barometer up Mount Puy-de-Dôme to determine the influence of the weight of the air. Picot returned with Descartes to the Netherlands for the winter of 1647–48. During Descartes’s final stay in Paris in 1648, the French nobility revolted against the crown in a series of wars known as the Fronde. Descartes left precipitously on August 17, 1648, only days before the death of his old friend Mersenne.
Clerselier’s brother-in-law, Hector Pierre Chanut, who was French resident in Sweden and later ambassador, helped to procure a pension for Descartes from Louis XIV, though it was never paid. Later, Chanut engineered an invitation for Descartes to the court of Queen Christina, who by the close of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) had become one of the most important and powerful monarchs in Europe. Descartes went reluctantly, arriving early in October 1649. He may have gone because he needed patronage; the Fronde seemed to have destroyed his chances in Paris, and the Calvinist theologians were harassing him in the Netherlands.
In Sweden—where, Descartes said, in winter men’s thoughts freeze like the water—the 22-year-old Christina perversely made the 53-year-old Descartes rise before 5:00 am to give her philosophy lessons, even though she knew of his habit of lying in bed until 11 o’clock in the morning. She also is said to have ordered him to write the verses of a ballet, The Birth of Peace (1649), to celebrate her role in the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War. The verses in fact were not written by Descartes, though he did write the statutes for a Swedish Academy of Arts and Sciences. While delivering these statutes to the queen at 5:00 am on February 1, 1650, he caught a chill, and he soon developed pneumonia. He died in Stockholm on February 11. Many pious last words have been attributed to him, but the most trustworthy report is that of his German valet, who said that Descartes was in a coma and died without saying anything at all.
Descartes’s papers came into the possession of Claude Clerselier, a pious Catholic, who began the process of turning Descartes into a saint by cutting, adding to, and selectively publishing his letters. This cosmetic work culminated in 1691 in the massive biography by Father Adrien Baillet, who was at work on a 17-volume Lives of the Saints. Even during Descartes’s lifetime there were questions about whether he was a Catholic apologist, primarily concerned with supporting Christian doctrine, or an atheist, concerned only with protecting himself with pious sentiments while establishing a deterministic, mechanistic, and materialistic physics.
These questions remain difficult to answer, not least because all the papers, letters, and manuscripts available to Clerselier and Baillet are now lost. In 1667 the Roman Catholic church made its own decision by putting Descartes’s works on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Latin: “Index of Prohibited Books”) on the very day his bones were ceremoniously placed in Sainte-Geneviève-du-Mont in Paris. During his lifetime, Protestant ministers in the Netherlands called Descartes a Jesuit and a papist—which is to say an atheist. He retorted that they were intolerant, ignorant bigots. Up to about 1930, a majority of scholars, many of whom were religious, believed that Descartes’s major concerns were metaphysical and religious. By the late 20th century, however, numerous commentators had come to believe that Descartes was a Catholic in the same way he was a Frenchman and a royalist—that is, by birth and by convention.
Descartes himself said that good sense is destroyed when one thinks too much of God. He once told a German protégée, Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–78), who was known as a painter and a poet, that she was wasting her intellect studying Hebrew and theology. He also was perfectly aware of—though he tried to conceal—the atheistic potential of his materialist physics and physiology. Descartes seemed indifferent to the emotional depths of religion. Whereas Pascal trembled when he looked into the infinite universe and perceived the puniness and misery of man, Descartes exulted in the power of human reason to understand the cosmos and to promote happiness, and he rejected the view that human beings are essentially miserable and sinful. He held that it is impertinent to pray to God to change things. Instead, when we cannot change the world, we must change ourselves.
Major Works
The history of the original works and their early translations into English is as follows: Musicae Compendium (written 1618, published 1650); Renatus Des-Cartes Excellent Compendium of Musick (1653); Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii (written 1628, published 1701); Le Monde de Mr Descartes; ou, le traité de la lumière (written 1633, published 1664); Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, & chercher la verité dans les sciences. Plus la dioptrique; les meteores; et la geometrie (1637; A Discourse of a Method for the Wel-guiding of Reason, and the Discovery of Truth in Sciences, 1649); Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (1641; and its 2nd ed., with Objectiones Septimae, 1642; Six Metaphysical Meditations; Wherein It Is Proved That There Is a God, 1680); Principia Philosophiae (1644); and Les Passions de l’âme (1649; The Passions of the Soule, 1650).
Descartes’s correspondence has been collected in Lettres de Mr Descartes: où sont traittées plusieurs belles questions touchant la morale, physique, medecine, & les mathematiques, ed. by Claude Clerselier, 3 vol. (1666–67); and Correspondance, ed. by Charles Adam and G. Milhaud, 8 vol. (1936–63, reprinted 1970). The standard edition of complete works is Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 13 vol. (1897–1913), which includes Descartes’s correspondence and is available in later editions.
Modern translations into English, many with valuable commentaries, include such selections as The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross, 2 vol. (1911–12, reprinted 1982); The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. by John Cottingham et al., 3 vol. (1984–91); Philosophical Letters, trans. and ed. by Anthony Kenny (1970, reissued 1981); Descartes’ Conversation with Burman, trans. by John Cottingham (1976); Le Monde; ou, traité de la lumière, trans. by Michael Sean Mahoney (1979), in English and French; Treatise of Man, trans. by Thomas Steele Hall (1972); Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, trans. by Paul J. Olscamp (1965); Principles of Philosophy, trans. by Valentine Rodger Miller and Reese P. Miller (1983, reprinted 1991); The Passions of the Soul, trans. by Stephen Voss (1989); and Descartes: His Moral Philosophy and Psychology, trans. by John J. Blom (1978).
French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher, considered the father of modern philosophy.
Educated at a Jesuit college, he joined the military in 1618 and traveled widely for the next 10 years. In 1628 he settled in Holland, where he would remain until 1649. Descartes’s ambition was to introduce into philosophy the rigour and clarity of mathematics. In his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), he undertook the methodical doubt of all knowledge about which it is possible to be deceived, including knowledge based on authority, the senses, and reason, in order to arrive at something about which he can be absolutely certain; using this point as a foundation, he then sought to construct new and more secure justifications of his belief in the existence and immortality of the soul, the existence of God, and the reality of an external world. This indubitable point is expressed in the dictum Cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). His metaphysical dualism distinguished radically between mind, the essence of which is thinking, and matter, the essence of which is extension in three dimensions. Though his metaphysics is rationalistic (see rationalism), his physics and physiology are empiricist (see empiricism) and mechanistic (see mechanism). In mathematics, he founded analytic geometry and reformed algebraic notation.
French mathematician and philosopher
French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher. Because he was one of the first to abandon scholastic Aristotelianism, because he formulated the first modern version of mind-body dualism, from which stems the mind-body problem, and because he promoted the development of a new science grounded in observation and experiment, he has been called the father of modern philosophy. Applying an original system of methodical doubt, he dismissed apparent knowledge derived from authority, the senses, and reason and erected new epistemic foundations on the basis of the intuition that, when he is thinking, he exists; this he expressed in the dictum “I think, therefore I am” (best known in its Latin formulation, “Cogito, ergo sum,” though originally written in French, “Je pense, donc je suis”). He developed a metaphysical dualism that distinguishes radically between mind, the essence of which is thinking, and matter, the essence of which is extension in three dimensions. Descartes’s metaphysics is rationalist, based on the postulation of innate ideas of mind, matter, and God, but his physics and physiology, based on sensory experience, are mechanistic and empiricist.
Early life and education
Although Descartes’s birthplace, La Haye (now Descartes), France, is in Touraine, his family connections lie south, across the Creuse River in Poitou, where his father, Joachim, owned farms and houses in Châtellerault and Poitiers. Because Joachim was a councillor in the Parlement of Brittany in Rennes, Descartes inherited a modest rank of nobility. Descartes’s mother died when he was one year old. His father remarried in Rennes, leaving him in La Haye to be raised first by his maternal grandmother and then by his great-uncle in Châtellerault. Although the Descartes family was Roman Catholic, the Poitou region was controlled by the Protestant Huguenots, and Châtellerault, a Protestant stronghold, was the site of negotiations over the Edict of Nantes (1598), which gave Protestants freedom of worship in France following the intermittent Wars of Religion between Protestant and Catholic forces in France. Descartes returned to Poitou regularly until 1628.
In 1606 Descartes was sent to the Jesuit college at La Flèche, established in 1604 by Henry IV (reigned 1589–1610). At La Flèche, 1,200 young men were trained for careers in military engineering, the judiciary, and government administration. In addition to classical studies, science, mathematics, and metaphysics—Aristotle was taught from scholastic commentaries—they studied acting, music, poetry, dancing, riding, and fencing. In 1610 Descartes participated in an imposing ceremony in which the heart of Henry IV, whose assassination that year had destroyed the hope of religious tolerance in France and Germany, was placed in the cathedral at La Flèche.
In 1614 Descartes went to Poitiers, where he took a law degree in 1616. At this time, Huguenot Poitiers was in virtual revolt against the young King Louis XIII (reigned 1610–43). Descartes’s father probably expected him to enter Parliament, but the minimum age for doing so was 27, and Descartes was only 20. In 1618 he went to Breda in the Netherlands, where he spent 15 months as an informal student of mathematics and military architecture in the peacetime army of the Protestant stadholder, Prince Maurice (ruled 1585–1625). In Breda, Descartes was encouraged in his studies of science and mathematics by the physicist Isaac Beeckman (1588–1637), for whom he wrote the Compendium of Music (written 1618, published 1650), his first surviving work.
Descartes spent the period 1619 to 1628 traveling in northern and southern Europe, where, as he later explained, he studied “the book of the world.” While in Bohemia in 1619, he invented analytic geometry, a method of solving geometric problems algebraically and algebraic problems geometrically. He also devised a universal method of deductive reasoning, based on mathematics, that is applicable to all the sciences. This method, which he later formulated in Discourse on Method (1637) and Rules for the Direction of the Mind (written by 1628 but not published until 1701), consists of four rules: (1) accept nothing as true that is not self-evident, (2) divide problems into their simplest parts, (3) solve problems by proceeding from simple to complex, and (4) recheck the reasoning. These rules are a direct application of mathematical procedures. In addition, Descartes insisted that all key notions and the limits of each problem must be clearly defined.
Descartes also investigated reports of esoteric knowledge, such as the claims of the practitioners of theosophy to be able to command nature. Although disappointed with the followers of the Catalan mystic Ramon Llull (1232/33–1315/16) and the German alchemist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535), he was impressed by the German mathematician Johann Faulhaber (1580–1635), a member of the mystical society of the Rosicrucians.
Descartes shared a number of Rosicrucian goals and habits. Like the Rosicrucian’s, he lived alone and in seclusion, changed his residence often (during his 22 years in the Netherlands, he lived in 18 different places), practiced medicine without charge, attempted to increase human longevity, and took an optimistic view of the capacity of science to improve the human condition. At the end of his life, he left a chest of personal papers (none of which has survived) with a Rosicrucian physician—his close friend Corneille van Hogelande, who handled his affairs in the Netherlands. Despite these affinities, Descartes rejected the Rosicrucian’s magical and mystical beliefs. For him, this period was a time of hope for a revolution in science. The English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626), in Advancement of Learning (1605), had earlier proposed a new science of observation and experiment to replace the traditional Aristotelian science, as Descartes himself did later.
In 1622 Descartes moved to Paris. There he gambled, rode, fenced, and went to the court, concerts, and the theatre. Among his friends were the poets Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac (1597–1654), who dedicated his Le Socrate chrétien (1652; “Christian Socrates”) to Descartes, and Théophile de Viau (1590–1626), who was burned in effigy and imprisoned in 1623 for writing verses mocking religious themes. Descartes also befriended the mathematician Claude Mydorge (1585–1647) and Father Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), a man of universal learning who corresponded with hundreds of scholars, writers, mathematicians, and scientists and who became Descartes’s main contact with the larger intellectual world. During this time Descartes regularly hid from his friends to work, writing treatises, now lost, on fencing and metals. He acquired a considerable reputation long before he published anything.
At a talk in 1628, Descartes denied the alchemist Chandoux’s claim that probabilities are as good as certainties in science and demonstrated his own method for attaining certainty. The Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle (1575–1629)—who had founded the Oratorian teaching congregation in 1611 as a rival to the Jesuits—was present at the talk. Many commentators speculate that Bérulle urged Descartes to write a metaphysics based on the philosophy of St. Augustine as a replacement for Jesuit teaching. Be that as it may, within weeks Descartes left for the Netherlands, which was Protestant, and—taking great precautions to conceal his address—did not return to France for 16 years. Some scholars claim that Descartes adopted Bérulle as director of his conscience, but this is unlikely, given Descartes’s background and beliefs (he came from a Huguenot province, he was not a Catholic enthusiast, he had been accused of being a Rosicrucian, and he advocated religious tolerance and championed the use of reason).
Residence in the Netherlands
Descartes said that he went to the Netherlands to enjoy a greater liberty than was available anywhere else and to avoid the distractions of Paris and friends so that he could have the leisure and solitude to think. (He had inherited enough money and property to live independently.) The Netherlands was a haven of tolerance, where Descartes could be an original, independent thinker without fear of being burned at the stake—as was the Italian philosopher Lucilio Vanini (1585–1619) for proposing natural explanations of miracles—or being drafted into the armies then prosecuting the Catholic Counter-Reformation. In France, by contrast, religious intolerance was mounting. The Jews were expelled in 1615, and the last Protestant stronghold, La Rochelle, was crushed—with Bérulle’s participation—only weeks before Descartes’s departure. In 1624 the French Parliament passed a decree forbidding criticism of Aristotle on pain of death. Although Mersenne and the philosopher Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) did publish attacks on Aristotle without suffering persecution (they were, after all, Catholic priests), those judged to be heretics continued to be burned, and laymen lacked church protection. In addition, Descartes may have felt jeopardized by his friendship with intellectual libertines such as Father Claude Picot (d. 1668), a bon vivant known as “the Atheist Priest,” with whom he entrusted his financial affairs in France.
In 1629 Descartes went to the university at Franeker, where he stayed with a Catholic family and wrote the first draft of his Meditations. He matriculated at the University of Leiden in 1630. In 1631 he visited Denmark with the physician and alchemist Étienne de Villebressieu, who invented siege engines, a portable bridge, and a two-wheeled stretcher. The physician Henri Regius (1598–1679), who taught Descartes’s views at the University of Utrecht in 1639, involved Descartes in a fierce controversy with the Calvinist theologian Gisbertus Voetius (1589–1676) that continued for the rest of Descartes’s life. In his Letter to Voetius of 1648, Descartes made a plea for religious tolerance and the rights of man. Claiming to write not only for Christians but also for Turks—meaning Muslims, libertines, infidels, deists, and atheists—he argued that, because Protestants and Catholics worship the same God, both can hope for heaven. When the controversy became intense, however, Descartes sought the protection of the French ambassador and of his friend Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687), secretary to the stadholder Prince Frederick Henry (ruled 1625–47).
In 1635 Descartes’s daughter Francine was born to Helena Jans and was baptized in the Reformed Church in Deventer. Although Francine is typically referred to by commentators as Descartes’s “illegitimate” daughter, her baptism is recorded in a register for legitimate births. Her death of scarlet fever at the age of five was the greatest sorrow of Descartes’s life. Referring to her death, Descartes said that he did not believe that one must refrain from tears to prove oneself a man.
The World and Discourse on Method
In 1633, just as he was about to publish The World (1664), Descartes learned that the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) had been condemned in Rome for publishing the view that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Because this Copernican position is central to his cosmology and physics, Descartes suppressed The World, hoping that eventually the church would retract its condemnation. Although Descartes feared the church, he also hoped that his physics would one day replace that of Aristotle in church doctrine and be taught in Catholic schools.
Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637) is one of the first important modern philosophical works not written in Latin. Descartes said that he wrote in French so that all who had good sense, including women, could read his work and learn to think for themselves. He believed that everyone could tell true from false by the natural light of reason. In three essays accompanying the Discourse, he illustrated his method for utilizing reason in the search for truth in the sciences: in Dioptrics he derived the law of refraction, in Meteorology he explained the rainbow, and in Geometry he gave an exposition of his analytic geometry. He also perfected the system invented by François Viète for representing known numerical quantities with a, b, c, … , unknowns with x, y, z, … , and squares, cubes, and other powers with numerical superscripts, as in x2, x3, … , which made algebraic calculations much easier than they had been before.
In the Discourse he also provided a provisional moral code (later presented as final) for use while seeking truth: (1) obey local customs and laws, (2) make decisions on the best evidence and then stick to them firmly as though they were certain, (3) change desires rather than the world, and (4) always seek truth. This code exhibits Descartes’s prudential conservatism, decisiveness, stoicism, and dedication. The Discourse and other works illustrate Descartes’s conception of knowledge as being like a tree in its interconnectedness and in the grounding provided to higher forms of knowledge by lower or more fundamental ones. Thus, for Descartes, metaphysics corresponds to the roots of the tree, physics to the trunk, and medicine, mechanics, and morals to the branches.
Meditations
In 1641 Descartes published the Meditations on First Philosophy, in Which Is Proved the Existence of God and the Immortality of the Soul. Written in Latin and dedicated to the Jesuit professors at the Sorbonne in Paris, the work includes critical responses by several eminent thinkers—collected by Mersenne from the Jansenist philosopher and theologian Antoine Arnauld (1612–94), the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), and the Epicurean atomist Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655)—as well as Descartes’s replies. The second edition (1642) includes a response by the Jesuit priest Pierre Bourdin (1595–1653), who Descartes said was a fool. These objections and replies constitute a landmark of cooperative discussion in philosophy and science at a time when dogmatism was the rule.
The Meditations is characterized by Descartes’s use of methodic doubt, a systematic procedure of rejecting as though false all types of belief in which one has ever been, or could ever be, deceived. His arguments derive from the skepticism of the Greek philosopher Sextus Empiricus (fl. 3rd century ad) as reflected in the work of the essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) and the Catholic theologian Pierre Charron (1541–1603). Thus, Descartes’s apparent knowledge based on authority is set aside, because even experts are sometimes wrong. His beliefs from sensory experience are declared untrustworthy, because such experience is sometimes misleading, as when a square tower appears round from a distance. Even his beliefs about the objects in his immediate vicinity may be mistaken, because, as he notes, he often has dreams about objects that do not exist, and he has no way of knowing with certainty whether he is dreaming or awake. Finally, his apparent knowledge of simple and general truths of reasoning that do not depend on sense experience—such as “2 + 3 = 5” or “a square has four sides”—is also unreliable, because God could have made him in such a way that, for example, he goes wrong every time he counts. As a way of summarizing the universal doubt into which he has fallen, Descartes supposes that an “evil genius of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me.”
Although at this stage there is seemingly no belief about which he cannot entertain doubt, Descartes finds certainty in the intuition that, when he is thinking—even if he is being deceived—he must exist. In the Discourse, Descartes expresses this intuition in the dictum “I think, therefore I am”; but because “therefore” suggests that the intuition is an argument—though it is not—in the Meditations he says merely, “I think, I am” (“Cogito, sum”). The cogito is a logically self-evident truth that also gives intuitively certain knowledge of a particular thing’s existence—that is, one’s self. Nevertheless, it justifies accepting as certain only the existence of the person who thinks it. If all one ever knew for certain was that one exists, and if one adhered to Descartes’s method of doubting all that is uncertain, then one would be reduced to solipsism, the view that nothing exists but one’s self and thoughts. To escape solipsism, Descartes argues that all ideas that are as “clear and distinct” as the cogito must be true, for, if they were not, the cogito also, as a member of the class of clear and distinct ideas, could be doubted. Since “I think, I am” cannot be doubted, all clear and distinct ideas must be true.
On the basis of clear and distinct innate ideas, Descartes then establishes that each mind is a mental substance and each body a part of one material substance. The mind or soul is immortal, because it is unextended and cannot be broken into parts, as can extended bodies. Descartes also advances a proof for the existence of God. He begins with the proposition that he has an innate idea of God as a perfect being and then concludes that God necessarily exists, because, if he did not, he would not be perfect. This ontological argument for God’s existence, originally due to the English logician St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033/34–1109), is at the heart of Descartes’s rationalism, for it establishes certain knowledge about an existing thing solely on the basis of reasoning from innate ideas, with no help from sensory experience. Descartes then argues that, because God is perfect, he does not deceive human beings; and therefore, because God leads us to believe that the material world exists, it does exist. In this way Descartes claims to establish metaphysical foundations for the existence of his own mind, of God, and of the material world.
The inherent circularity of Descartes’s reasoning was exposed by Arnauld, whose objection has come to be known as the Cartesian Circle. According to Descartes, God’s existence is established by the fact that Descartes has a clear and distinct idea of God; but the truth of Descartes’s clear and distinct ideas are guaranteed by the fact that God exists and is not a deceiver. Thus, in order to show that God exists, Descartes must assume that God exists.
Physics, physiology, and morals
Descartes’s general goal was to help human beings master and possess nature. He provided understanding of the trunk of the tree of knowledge in The World, Dioptrics, Meteorology, and Geometry, and he established its metaphysical roots in the Meditations. He then spent the rest of his life working on the branches of mechanics, medicine, and morals. Mechanics is the basis of his physiology and medicine, which in turn is the basis of his moral psychology. Descartes believed that all material bodies, including the human body, are machines that operate by mechanical principles. In his physiological studies, he dissected animal bodies to show how their parts move. He argued that, because animals have no souls, they do not think or feel; thus, vivisection, which Descartes practiced, is permitted. He also described the circulation of the blood but came to the erroneous conclusion that heat in the heart expands the blood, causing its expulsion into the veins. Descartes’s L’Homme, et un traité de la formation du foetus (Man, and a Treatise on the Formation of the Foetus) was published in 1664.
In 1644 Descartes published Principles of Philosophy, a compilation of his physics and metaphysics. He dedicated this work to Princess Elizabeth (1618–79), daughter of Elizabeth Stuart, titular queen of Bohemia, in correspondence with whom he developed his moral philosophy. According to Descartes, a human being is a union of mind and body, two radically dissimilar substances that interact in the pineal gland. He reasoned that the pineal gland must be the uniting point because it is the only nondouble organ in the brain, and double reports, as from two eyes, must have one place to merge. He argued that each action on a person’s sense organs causes subtle matter to move through tubular nerves to the pineal gland, causing it to vibrate distinctively. These vibrations give rise to emotions and passions and also cause the body to act. Bodily action is thus the final outcome of a reflex arc that begins with external stimuli—as, for example, when a soldier sees the enemy, feels fear, and flees. The mind cannot change bodily reactions directly—for example, it cannot will the body to fight—but by altering mental attitudes, it can change the pineal vibrations from those that cause fear and fleeing to those that cause courage and fighting.
Descartes argued further that human beings can be conditioned by experience to have specific emotional responses. Descartes himself, for example, had been conditioned to be attracted to cross-eyed women because he had loved a cross-eyed playmate as a child. When he remembered this fact, however, he was able to rid himself of his passion. This insight is the basis of Descartes’s defense of free will and of the mind’s ability to control the body. Despite such arguments, in his Passions of the Soul (1649), which he dedicated to Queen Christina of Sweden (reigned 1644–54), Descartes holds that most bodily actions are determined by external material causes.
Descartes’s morality is anti-Jansenist and anti-Calvinist in that he maintains that the grace that is necessary for salvation can be earned and that human beings are virtuous and able to achieve salvation when they do their best to find and act upon the truth. His optimism about the ability of human reason and will to find truth and reach salvation contrasts starkly with the pessimism of the Jansenist apologist and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–62), who believed that salvation comes only as a gift of God’s grace. Descartes was correctly accused of holding the view of Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609), an anti-Calvinist Dutch theologian, that salvation depends on free will and good works rather than on grace. Descartes also held that, unless people believe in God and immortality, they will see no reason to be moral.
Free will, according to Descartes, is the sign of God in human nature, and human beings can be praised or blamed according to their use of it. People are good, he believed, only to the extent that they act freely for the good of others; such generosity is the highest virtue. Descartes was Epicurean in his assertion that human passions are good in themselves. He was an extreme moral optimist in his belief that understanding of the good is automatically followed by a desire to do the good. Moreover, because passions are “willings” according to Descartes, to want something is the same as to will it. Descartes was also stoic, however, in his admonition that, rather than change the world, human beings should control their passions.
Although Descartes wrote no political philosophy, he approved of the admonition of Seneca (c. 4 bc–ad 65) to acquiesce in the common order of things. He rejected the recommendation of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) to lie to one’s friends, because friendship is sacred and life’s greatest joy. Human beings cannot exist alone but must be parts of social groups, such as nations and families, and it is better to do good for the group than for oneself.
Descartes had been a puny child with a weak chest and was not expected to live. He therefore watched his health carefully, becoming a virtual vegetarian. In 1639 he bragged that he had not been sick for 19 years and that he expected to live to 100. He told Princess Elizabeth to think of life as a comedy; bad thoughts cause bad dreams and bodily disorders. Because there is always more good than evil in life, he said, one can always be content, no matter how bad things seem. Elizabeth, inextricably involved in messy court and family affairs, was not consoled.
In his later years Descartes said that he had once hoped to learn to prolong life to a century or more, but he then saw that, to achieve that goal, the work of many generations would be required; he himself had not even learned to prevent a fever. Thus, he said, instead of continuing to hope for long life, he had found an easier way, namely to love life and not to fear death. It is easy, he claimed, for a true philosopher to die tranquilly.
Final years and heritage
In 1644, 1647, and 1648, after 16 years in the Netherlands, Descartes returned to France for brief visits on financial business and to oversee the translation into French of the Principles, the Meditations, and the Objections and Replies. (The translators were, respectively, Picot, Charles d’Albert, duke de Luynes, and Claude Clerselier.) In 1647 he also met with Gassendi and Hobbes, and he suggested to Pascal the famous experiment of taking a barometer up Mount Puy-de-Dôme to determine the influence of the weight of the air. Picot returned with Descartes to the Netherlands for the winter of 1647–48. During Descartes’s final stay in Paris in 1648, the French nobility revolted against the crown in a series of wars known as the Fronde. Descartes left precipitously on August 17, 1648, only days before the death of his old friend Mersenne.
Clerselier’s brother-in-law, Hector Pierre Chanut, who was French resident in Sweden and later ambassador, helped to procure a pension for Descartes from Louis XIV, though it was never paid. Later, Chanut engineered an invitation for Descartes to the court of Queen Christina, who by the close of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) had become one of the most important and powerful monarchs in Europe. Descartes went reluctantly, arriving early in October 1649. He may have gone because he needed patronage; the Fronde seemed to have destroyed his chances in Paris, and the Calvinist theologians were harassing him in the Netherlands.
In Sweden—where, Descartes said, in winter men’s thoughts freeze like the water—the 22-year-old Christina perversely made the 53-year-old Descartes rise before 5:00 am to give her philosophy lessons, even though she knew of his habit of lying in bed until 11 o’clock in the morning. She also is said to have ordered him to write the verses of a ballet, The Birth of Peace (1649), to celebrate her role in the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War. The verses in fact were not written by Descartes, though he did write the statutes for a Swedish Academy of Arts and Sciences. While delivering these statutes to the queen at 5:00 am on February 1, 1650, he caught a chill, and he soon developed pneumonia. He died in Stockholm on February 11. Many pious last words have been attributed to him, but the most trustworthy report is that of his German valet, who said that Descartes was in a coma and died without saying anything at all.
Descartes’s papers came into the possession of Claude Clerselier, a pious Catholic, who began the process of turning Descartes into a saint by cutting, adding to, and selectively publishing his letters. This cosmetic work culminated in 1691 in the massive biography by Father Adrien Baillet, who was at work on a 17-volume Lives of the Saints. Even during Descartes’s lifetime there were questions about whether he was a Catholic apologist, primarily concerned with supporting Christian doctrine, or an atheist, concerned only with protecting himself with pious sentiments while establishing a deterministic, mechanistic, and materialistic physics.
These questions remain difficult to answer, not least because all the papers, letters, and manuscripts available to Clerselier and Baillet are now lost. In 1667 the Roman Catholic church made its own decision by putting Descartes’s works on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Latin: “Index of Prohibited Books”) on the very day his bones were ceremoniously placed in Sainte-Geneviève-du-Mont in Paris. During his lifetime, Protestant ministers in the Netherlands called Descartes a Jesuit and a papist—which is to say an atheist. He retorted that they were intolerant, ignorant bigots. Up to about 1930, a majority of scholars, many of whom were religious, believed that Descartes’s major concerns were metaphysical and religious. By the late 20th century, however, numerous commentators had come to believe that Descartes was a Catholic in the same way he was a Frenchman and a royalist—that is, by birth and by convention.
Descartes himself said that good sense is destroyed when one thinks too much of God. He once told a German protégée, Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–78), who was known as a painter and a poet, that she was wasting her intellect studying Hebrew and theology. He also was perfectly aware of—though he tried to conceal—the atheistic potential of his materialist physics and physiology. Descartes seemed indifferent to the emotional depths of religion. Whereas Pascal trembled when he looked into the infinite universe and perceived the puniness and misery of man, Descartes exulted in the power of human reason to understand the cosmos and to promote happiness, and he rejected the view that human beings are essentially miserable and sinful. He held that it is impertinent to pray to God to change things. Instead, when we cannot change the world, we must change ourselves.
Major Works
The history of the original works and their early translations into English is as follows: Musicae Compendium (written 1618, published 1650); Renatus Des-Cartes Excellent Compendium of Musick (1653); Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii (written 1628, published 1701); Le Monde de Mr Descartes; ou, le traité de la lumière (written 1633, published 1664); Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, & chercher la verité dans les sciences. Plus la dioptrique; les meteores; et la geometrie (1637; A Discourse of a Method for the Wel-guiding of Reason, and the Discovery of Truth in Sciences, 1649); Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (1641; and its 2nd ed., with Objectiones Septimae, 1642; Six Metaphysical Meditations; Wherein It Is Proved That There Is a God, 1680); Principia Philosophiae (1644); and Les Passions de l’âme (1649; The Passions of the Soule, 1650).
Descartes’s correspondence has been collected in Lettres de Mr Descartes: où sont traittées plusieurs belles questions touchant la morale, physique, medecine, & les mathematiques, ed. by Claude Clerselier, 3 vol. (1666–67); and Correspondance, ed. by Charles Adam and G. Milhaud, 8 vol. (1936–63, reprinted 1970). The standard edition of complete works is Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 13 vol. (1897–1913), which includes Descartes’s correspondence and is available in later editions.
Modern translations into English, many with valuable commentaries, include such selections as The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross, 2 vol. (1911–12, reprinted 1982); The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. by John Cottingham et al., 3 vol. (1984–91); Philosophical Letters, trans. and ed. by Anthony Kenny (1970, reissued 1981); Descartes’ Conversation with Burman, trans. by John Cottingham (1976); Le Monde; ou, traité de la lumière, trans. by Michael Sean Mahoney (1979), in English and French; Treatise of Man, trans. by Thomas Steele Hall (1972); Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, trans. by Paul J. Olscamp (1965); Principles of Philosophy, trans. by Valentine Rodger Miller and Reese P. Miller (1983, reprinted 1991); The Passions of the Soul, trans. by Stephen Voss (1989); and Descartes: His Moral Philosophy and Psychology, trans. by John J. Blom (1978).
domingo, 9 de maio de 2010
domingo, 2 de maio de 2010
sexta-feira, 22 de janeiro de 2010
GENGHIS KHAN
Secret History
The renaissance of Mongolian State
At the beginning of the 20th century, external and internal prerequisites existing in Khalkh Mongolia led to the downfall of the Manchu tyranny. Resistance to the Manchu Qing Empire embraced all of society. In 1900, there was an armed revolt of soldiers in Uliastai. In Ikh Khuree there were a number of uprisings by lamas against the Manchu and China. The movement for the renaissance of the Mongolian State led by Bogd Khan spread nationwide. On the 1 December 1911, Outer Mongolia in effect proclaimed its independence from Manchu domination and intended to unite all Mongolian-speaking people.
On 29 December 1911, Bogd Javzundamba was crowned head of Religion and State, with the title "Elevated by all", and the state was named Mongolia. Bogd Khaan set up five ministries: Internal Affairs, Foreign Affairs, War, Finance and Justice. Thus, at the beginning of the 20th century, the national liberation movement won and the age-old country of Mongolia restored its statehood and independence. But this aim remained unfulfilled due to the expansionist policies of Tsarist Russia and China. In 1919 the Chinese government violated the Russian, Chinese, Mongolian tripartite treaty of 1915, and conquered the Mongolian State through the use of armed force.
This precipitated another upsurge in the national liberation movement in the country and so in 1921 the Khalkh Mongols, the dominant ethnic group in modern Mongolia (Khalkh means shield or protection), under the direction of S.Danzan, D.Bodoo, and Sukhbaatar liberated the Mongolian territory from foreign conquerors. 11 June 1921 was chosen as the day to celebrate the creation of the independent Mongolian state and since that time the date of the victory of the people's revolution has been celebrated as a national holiday.
From 1921-1924 Mongolia was a republican monarchy. In 1924, however, it became a Soviet-style Republic with one-party system that lasted until 1990. Two key figures dominated the political scene from the mid 1930s to 1984, as leaders of the ruling Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party. Khorloogiin Choibalsan (1895-1952) developed a Soviet-style economy and destroyed theocratic power through political and religious purges, remaining in power until his death in 1952. Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal's (1916-1991) period of tenure was marked by increasingly close integration with the USSR at the same time as following a program of rapid industrialization of the livestock economy and urbanization of nomadic people.
The country, which at the end of the 19th century was viewed by Western historians and some scholars as an almost extinct nation, succeeded in achieving considerable progress in promoting its national economy in areas such as animal husbandry, agriculture and industry and improving standards of living, raising educational and cultural levels, evidence of which can be seen in its economic and social statistics. The country's population tripled at the end of the 20th century, reaching 2 million. The population's annual rate of growth increased to 3.5 per cent after 1960. Just over 80 years ago the majority of the population was illiterate, but by 1960 the entire adult population of the Mongolian People's Republic was able to read and write due to measures undertaken to eradicate illiteracy. This was in sharp contrast to the past when the only education available was provided by monasteries for those destined to become monks.
A special prize was granted by UNESCO in recognition of such striking progress. During the 1960s, the objective of ensuring that all school age children received secondary education was successfully realized. The 20th century witnessed the progress made by Mongolia in fostering the development of its culture, arts, sports and sciences. Mongolian citizen J.Gurragchaa participated in a space flight together with his Soviet colleagues, and carried out tests and studies.
Successors of Genghis Khan
In accordance with the Great Khaan's last will, the Mongol Empire was divided among his four sons. His eldest son, Zuchi, received the lands west of the Irtysh River. His second son, Tsagaadai, inherited the territory between the rivers Amudarya and Syrdarya. His third son, Ugudei, was given possession of western Mongolia and Tarbagatai. By tradition, the youngest son, Tului, obtained his father's ancestral land.
In 1229 the Great Hurildai elected Ugudei official successor to Genghis Khan. Ugudei's name is associated with a number of innovations in the development of the Mongol Empire. He set up a regular horse-relay post service (morin ortoo), which lasted until the mid 20th Century, to ensure prompt communication within the empire's entire administration as well as the transportation of dignitaries.
In 1230 Ugudei sent troops to Persia that later, in 1231-1239, also invaded the Caucasus. Guided by Genghis Khan's will, Ugudei concluded a tactical agreement with the Song dynasty of southern China on joint action against the Chin, and in 1231 he personally led a campaign to crush the Chin Empire and complete the conquest of northern China.
The fourth Khan of the Mongol Empire, Munkh (1251 -1259), also undertook two military campaigns: one headed by his brother Khubilai (founder of the Mongolian Yuan State), was intended to complete the conquest of China, and the other (aimed at invading Iran) was led by his other brother, Hulege. In 1258 Hulege took Baghdad and overthrew the Abbasid dynasty.
The wars waged by Genghis Khan's successors resulted in the dispersal of the Mongolian tribes and a considerable reduction in the size of the Mongolian population. On the other hand, however, these wars precipitated the process of unification among various Asian and European tribes, and drew East and West nearer together, something that had never been done before.
After the defeat of the Mongolian Yuan State by the Chinese Min State in 1367, the Mongolian Khans returned from Beijing to their native territory. At this time Mongolia ceased to be the centre of world trade and culture, but the Mongols retained their home territory.
Due to a crisis lasting from 1388 to 1400, various khaans replaced each other as ruler on the territory of modern Mongolia. The eastern and western Mongols' struggle intensified from the beginning of the 15th century as a result of malevolent actions by Ming China. The strife resuited in the emergence in 1452 of the Mongol Oirad state. Some written sources described this period as the period of small Khaganates. In the second half of the 15th century, the Mongol state was divided into east and west and then subdivided into six principalities. The six principalities included such Mongolian tribes as Khalkh, Ordos, Uriankhai, Tumd, and Yunsheby. The western Mongolian Oirads were comprised of the Mongolian tribes of Durvud, Khoshuud, Torguud and Tsoros. The period from the 17th to the early 20lh century was the bleakest in Mongolian history because of the 275 years of Manchu colonial domination.
GÊNGIS-CÃ
O MONGOL QUE CONQUISTOU O MUNDO
"Se das páginas da História se apagassem as narrativas de todas as batalhas, salvo as de Gêngis-Cã, ainda assim o soldado ficaria na posse duma mina de indizível riqueza, de onde poderia extrair frações de conhecimento útil no aperfeiçoamento dum exército moderno." Quem disse isso foi o General Douglas MacArthur.
Segundo MacArthur, o soldado não pode aprender a arte de guerra tão-somente; embora as armas evoluam e se transforme, ele deve procurar no passado os princípios fundamentais da sua técnica. Ora, em parte alguma esses princípios se podem encontrar mais vivamente expressos do que na colorida e legendária carreira do Imperador dos Mongóis - há 750 anos.
Gêngis-Cã englobou por conquistas o maior dos impérios que a face da Terra já suportou. Estendeu-se o império mongol desde o Pacífico à Europa Central, abrangendo a maior parte do mundo então conhecido, e mais metade de sua população. Sua cidade de Caracorum na Mongólia central se tornou a mais importante capital do mundo oriental, e ameaçou tragar as forças da Cristandade.
Napoleão acabou vencido e prisioneiro. O Grão-Cã nunca perdeu uma batalha decisiva. Morreu velho, no ápice das vitórias, e quando o seu império se dilatava ainda vigorosamente. Alexandre e César ficaram devendo muito aos seus predecessores, que criaram a falange macedônia e a legião romana; quanto a Gêngis-Cã, ele próprio inventou sua máquina de guerra. Os seus exércitos eram quase numericamente inferiores aos do adversário. É mesmo possível que ele nunca tenha conseguido por em luta mais de 200.000 soldados; mas com essa força relativamente pequena pulverizou impérios de milhões. Foi provavelmente o soldado mais feliz de toda a História. O nome Gêngis-Cã significa: O Mais Poderoso dos Soberanos. Ele próprio escolheu esse título orgulhoso, tendo sido conhecido modestamente, nos anos da mocidade, por Temujin.
Temujin contava apenas 13 anos de idade quando seu pai foi envenenado por inimigos; embora novo, já tinha a estatura e a força de um homem. Era capaz de montar um dia inteiro a cavalo e disparar uma flecha de grande peso. Era tão robusto de espírito quanto de corpo, e decidiu suceder o pai, como chefe duma tribo de rijos nômades, que forrageavam a magra subsistência nas ásperas estepes do platô asiático. Mas os homens da tribo recusaram-se a acatá-lo, e os outros chefes resolveram desembaraçar-se do jovem rival. Perseguiram- no como a uma fera através das estepes, agarraram-no e impuseram-lhe um pesado jugo ao pescoço, encadeando-se os pulsos ao mesmo, à moda da Ásia. Uma noite, o preso abateu o guarda com uma pancada desse jugo de madeira, e evadiu-se através do acampamento adormecido. Escondido num ribeiro presenciou a batida que deram os cavaleiros da tribo ao longo das margens, em sua busca. Mais tarde arrastou-se para fora da água, e convenceu um caçador errante, que encontrou, a libertá-lo do jugo e das algemas.
A história desses primeiros anos é uma longa crônica de fugas audaciosas e arriscadas à traição e à perseguição. Mas o jovem nunca abandonou o seu firme propósito de abrir caminho para o poder, de armas na mão. Não tinha ainda 20 anos quando o fizeram chefe. Começou então a intrigar e a combater, para atrair outras tribos a confederar-se com a sua. Das intrigas e batalhas saía sempre feito chefe. Matava invariavelmente todo aquele que procurasse partilhar com ele o poder. Tinha um primo, Jamuga. Nos tempos difíceis, ele e Jamuga haviam dormido juntos debaixo da mesma pele de carneiro, tinham compartilhado as magras refeições, caçando juntos os ratos do campo, quando não havia outra coisa que comer. Mas Jamuga não estava contente de se sentir subordinado, e convocou os seus seguidores. A batalha tornou-se inevitável, e ao fim desta era êle um prisioneiro, de pé, humilhado, na presença do primo, que serenamente o mandou estrangular.
Togrul fora amigo do pai de Tamujin, e ajudara o rapaz em mais de um momento de embaraço. Mas quando o chefe mais velho mostrou relutância em submeter-se às suas ordens, Tamujin mandou matá-lo. Em contraste com isso, recompensava à larga aqueles que se mostrassem ansiosos em servir sob as suas ordens. Correram os anos, e o chefe estabeleceu o seu quartel-general em Caracorum, a Cidade da Areias Pretas - simples grupo de tendas à beira da grande estrada das caravanas que iam de Este a Oeste. Temujin, muito hábil, não molestava as caravanas: reservava-lhes outro papel, muito mais importante, nos seus planos do futuro...
Era uma figura robusta, sempre envolto em peles de carneiro e couro endurecido, com a ligeireza e a flexibilidade do homem que passa a vida montado numa sela. A face coriácea, de linhas profundamente talhadas, tinha uma camada de gordura que protegia dos frios e dos ventos causticantes da estepe. É mais provável que nunca a lavasse mais de uma vez por ano. Seus olhos, bem separados um do outro sob a fronte em declive, irritados pela poeira ardente do deserto, fulguravam com dura intensidade. Falava pouco, e só após madura reflexão.
Aos 50 anos. Temujin tinha unido as tribos da Ásia Central numa só força unida, de que era ele o chefe único e acatado. sua fama espalhou-se para além das estepes. Assim mesmo, se por essa época uma seta inimiga tivesse podido encontrar o ponto fraco da sua armadura de couro, a História ter-se-ia limitado, quando muito, a mencionar o seu nome. os grandes feitos se sucederam e acumularam nos últimos 16 anos de sua existência. Tinha levado a vida a aprestar um instrumento de guerra para a conquista do mundo, e pôs-se em marcha para utilizá-lo.
A Leste estendia-se a China, a mais velha civilização do globo. Estava então dividida em dois impérios, o Kin e o Sung. A Oeste ficava-lhe o Islã, formado duma série de nações em que se tinham fragmentado as conquistas do grande Maomé e seus herdeiros. Mais longe ainda, para o ocidente, estava a Rússia, nesse tempo uma magna de pequenos estados, e a Europa Central, aglomerado confuso de grandes e pequenas soberanias. Atacou primeiro a China. Rompeu caminho através da Grande Muralha, e suas colunas derramaram-se como uma inundação pelos livres espaços do Kin, ou império do norte. A capital, Yemking, foi capturada e o imperador fugiu tomado de pavor. A sua derrota fora completa.
Três anos depois Gêngis-Cã marchou para o ocidente. Dentro de poucos meses a soldadesca mongol saqueava a rica e poderosa Samarcanda, e o sultão punha-se em fuga, para não perder a vida com o poder.
Nos anos que se seguiram, os exércitos do Grão-Cã levaram a invasão para a Ásia Menor, até as planuras do Indostão, dominaram o sudoeste da Ásia e penetraram pela Rússia até o coração da Europa Central. A que atribuir tamanhas vitórias? Gêngis-Cã possuía uma vontade indomável, uma violenta energia física e mental, uma ilimitada crueldade. Mas seu poderio alicerçava-se em algo mais.
Gêngis-Cã tinha a virtude de se desembaraçar das tradições e de ir direto aos problemas com uma atitude inteiramente nova. Sabia aproveitar todos os processos, técnicas e armas disponíveis, e adaptá-los até ao mínimo pormenor às suas próprias necessidades. Foi ele o primeiro a organizar uma nação inteira para o propósito exclusivo de fazer guerra: tinha há 700 anos o conceito, que nos habituamos a considerar moderno, da guerra total. Esplêndida era a matéria-prima que lhe ofereciam o cavalo mongol e o seu cavaleiro. O cavalo, infatigável, podia marchar mesmo que só lhe dessem de beber de três em três dias; sabia encontrar o alimento em todas e quaisquer condições, escavando com as patas a neve e o gelo, para encontrar restos de erva seca. O cavaleiro podia manter-se na sela um dia e uma noite, dormir na neve, e galopar ou guerrear com pouco ou nenhum alimento no estômago. Era guerreiro por natureza, fora criado em combates corpo a corpo, e tinham-lhe ensinado a disparar setas na idade em que começava a aprender a falar.
Ao proceder ao equipamento deste soldado nato é que Gêngis-Cã mostrou o seu gênio dos planos e pormenores. A couraça do mongol era couro cru, endurecido e envernizado. Cada soldado tinha dois arcos, um para usar montado, outro, mais preciso no tiro, para usar em combate de pé. Levava três tipos de flechas: para grande, médio e pequeno alcance. As de pequeno alcance, pesadas e com pontas de aço, destinavam-se a transpassar as couraças dos inimigos. Cada soldado levava consigo uma ração suplementar de coalhada seca: um quarto de quilo lhe bastava para se manter um dia inteiro em combate; tinha uma reserva de cordas para a besta, e cera e agulha para os reparos de urgência. Carregava o equipamento num saco de couro, que se podia encher de ar quando fosse necessário atravessar cursos de água. O exército dividia-se em formações de dez, cem, mil e dez mil homens. Além de combatentes propriamente ditos, ainda havia as tropas auxiliares: engenheiros e especialistas que manejavam catapultas e outros aparelhos de cerco, o corpo de abastecimento, serviço de remonta, guardas do arsenal, um departamento de objetos perdidos e achados. Atrás do exército estava a nação inteira, trabalhando para produzir mantimentos e material para as tropas, ao mesmo tempo em que vivia de quantidades mínimas possíveis.
A tática desenvolvida no combate era uma maravilha de precisão, adquirida mediante intenso treino. A formação de batalha era cinco colunas, ficando os batalhões separados por vastos intervalos. Na frente marchavam as tropas de choque. Pesadamente couraçadas, manejavam sabres, lanças e maças. À retaguarda iam os arqueiros ou besteiros montados. Os arqueiros avançavam a galope através dos intervalos abertos entre os batalhões de soldados de choque, e disparavam setas ao mesmo tempo em que carregava a toda a força. Quando relativamente perto do inimigo, desmontavam, passavam a usar as bestas ou arcos mais pesados e a lançar nuvens de setas pesadas. A essência do ataque estava na intensidade e concentração do tiro, até então desconhecidas.
Quando fileiras inimigas se mostravam desorganizadas, as tropas de choque carregavam para consumar a derrota. Era uma combinação perfeitamente coordenada e fluida. Não havia vozes de comando: as ordens eram transmitidas por sinais, com bandeiras brancas e pretas. O ataque mongol tinha êxito graças à superioridade das armas, a rapidez em por essas armas em contato com o adversário e por fim à intensidade e precisão do tiro. Os exércitos da China, os velozes guerreiros do Islã, os cavaleiros e homens de armas da Cristandade, todos eles foram abaixo diante das nuvens de setas do mongol. O inimigo entrava habitualmente em pânico antes mesmo das tropas de choque começar a ação.
Muito embora as tropas do Grão-Cã fossem excedidas em número pelo adversário, ele tinha quase sempre à mão a massa de soldados necessários para travar a batalha decisiva. Sabia como dividir as forças inimigas e concentrar as próprias. Era um consumado mistificador, que surgia num lugar enquanto o inimigo andava às apalpadelas, buscando-o noutro. Ganhava batalhas mais pelos movimentos envolventes do que por ataques frontais, diretos e custosos.
Algumas de suas campanhas foram antecipadamente meio ganhas pela propaganda, quando os exércitos ainda não tinham entrado em campo. No uso das palavras como armas, nenhum comandante ultrapassou este bárbaro, que não sabia ler nem escrever. A sua “quinta-coluna” era constituída pelos mercadores das caravanas. Por intermédio deles alugava agentes e espiões em todos os países que pretendia conquistar. Estuda a geografia, o povo, a política da nação visada; procurava descobrir os elementos insatisfeitos e pô-los em conflito aberto com o poder.
Seus espiões nos países islâmicos informaram-lhe que a mãe do sultão tinha ciúmes do poderio de seu filho. Gêngis-Cã ditou uma carta à mãe ciumenta, supostamente em resposta a uma carta dela, agradecendo-lhe a oferta de assistência que ela lhe fizera... Depois, organizou as coisas de modo que o mensageiro caísse nas mãos do sultão. Quando Gêngis-Cã levantou o grito de guerra, seus exércitos encontraram o país à beira da guerra civil!
Servia-se também da propaganda como uma arma de terror. Tinha por hábito informar a nação que se preparava para invadir das coisas pavorosas que tinham acontecido aqueles que haviam ousado resistir a Gêngis-Cã... Submetam-se ou serão aniquilados, era seu aviso. E quando o inimigo se submetia por medo, ele dava o golpe – e aniquilava-o da mesma forma que todos os outros. Também fazia hábil uso doméstico da propaganda, para fomentar o moral, como diríamos hoje. Prestigiava a profissão do soldado, procurando fazer parecer natural que toda a gente se sacrificasse para manter o soldado em campanha. Ensinou ao seu povo que os mongóis eram uma raça superior, diferente das demais.
Para Gêngis-Cã a política do terrorismo era destituída de paixão, uma coisa fria e lúcida. Se uma cidade lhe opunha resistência, ele incendiava-a, massacrando homens, mulheres e crianças sem distinção num processo de aniquilamento sistemático. Quando o seu exército passava adiante, deixava um punhado de soldados e um bando de cativos ocultos nas ruínas; a certa altura, os soldados forçavam os cativos a sair pelas ruas da cidade gritando que os mongóis já se haviam retirado. Ao ouvir essas vozes, os poucos habitantes que, escondidos, tinham escapado saíam ao ar livre, e eram chacinados. Para evitar dúvidas, decapitavam-se os mortos. Só numa cidade foram massacradas 500.000 pessoas. A História não possui elementos para computar quantos milhões de cadávers se amontoaram na trilha do conquistador...
Tal era a máquina de guerra com que Gêngis-Cã conquistou meio mundo. Veio ele a morrer em campanha, à idade de 66 anos, em 1227, estando no auge do poder. Após a sua morte a máquina continuou rolando. Os herdeiros do Grão-Mongol acabaram de conquistar a China, do norte e do sul. Assenhorearam-se de toda a Ásia. Penetraram mais fundo na Europa, bateram os húngaros, os poloneses, os alemães: ninguém podia interpor-se no seu caminho. O poderio mongólico era ainda formidável ao tempo de Cublai, neto do Grão-Mogol. Pulverizou-se por fim entre mãos de descendentes degenerados, e hoje os mongóis são de novo, apenas, um grupo de tribos nômades. Caracorum foi tragada pelas areias irrequietas do deserto de Gobi, e seu nome quase de todo se apagou da memória dos homens.
The renaissance of Mongolian State
At the beginning of the 20th century, external and internal prerequisites existing in Khalkh Mongolia led to the downfall of the Manchu tyranny. Resistance to the Manchu Qing Empire embraced all of society. In 1900, there was an armed revolt of soldiers in Uliastai. In Ikh Khuree there were a number of uprisings by lamas against the Manchu and China. The movement for the renaissance of the Mongolian State led by Bogd Khan spread nationwide. On the 1 December 1911, Outer Mongolia in effect proclaimed its independence from Manchu domination and intended to unite all Mongolian-speaking people.
On 29 December 1911, Bogd Javzundamba was crowned head of Religion and State, with the title "Elevated by all", and the state was named Mongolia. Bogd Khaan set up five ministries: Internal Affairs, Foreign Affairs, War, Finance and Justice. Thus, at the beginning of the 20th century, the national liberation movement won and the age-old country of Mongolia restored its statehood and independence. But this aim remained unfulfilled due to the expansionist policies of Tsarist Russia and China. In 1919 the Chinese government violated the Russian, Chinese, Mongolian tripartite treaty of 1915, and conquered the Mongolian State through the use of armed force.
This precipitated another upsurge in the national liberation movement in the country and so in 1921 the Khalkh Mongols, the dominant ethnic group in modern Mongolia (Khalkh means shield or protection), under the direction of S.Danzan, D.Bodoo, and Sukhbaatar liberated the Mongolian territory from foreign conquerors. 11 June 1921 was chosen as the day to celebrate the creation of the independent Mongolian state and since that time the date of the victory of the people's revolution has been celebrated as a national holiday.
From 1921-1924 Mongolia was a republican monarchy. In 1924, however, it became a Soviet-style Republic with one-party system that lasted until 1990. Two key figures dominated the political scene from the mid 1930s to 1984, as leaders of the ruling Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party. Khorloogiin Choibalsan (1895-1952) developed a Soviet-style economy and destroyed theocratic power through political and religious purges, remaining in power until his death in 1952. Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal's (1916-1991) period of tenure was marked by increasingly close integration with the USSR at the same time as following a program of rapid industrialization of the livestock economy and urbanization of nomadic people.
The country, which at the end of the 19th century was viewed by Western historians and some scholars as an almost extinct nation, succeeded in achieving considerable progress in promoting its national economy in areas such as animal husbandry, agriculture and industry and improving standards of living, raising educational and cultural levels, evidence of which can be seen in its economic and social statistics. The country's population tripled at the end of the 20th century, reaching 2 million. The population's annual rate of growth increased to 3.5 per cent after 1960. Just over 80 years ago the majority of the population was illiterate, but by 1960 the entire adult population of the Mongolian People's Republic was able to read and write due to measures undertaken to eradicate illiteracy. This was in sharp contrast to the past when the only education available was provided by monasteries for those destined to become monks.
A special prize was granted by UNESCO in recognition of such striking progress. During the 1960s, the objective of ensuring that all school age children received secondary education was successfully realized. The 20th century witnessed the progress made by Mongolia in fostering the development of its culture, arts, sports and sciences. Mongolian citizen J.Gurragchaa participated in a space flight together with his Soviet colleagues, and carried out tests and studies.
Successors of Genghis Khan
In accordance with the Great Khaan's last will, the Mongol Empire was divided among his four sons. His eldest son, Zuchi, received the lands west of the Irtysh River. His second son, Tsagaadai, inherited the territory between the rivers Amudarya and Syrdarya. His third son, Ugudei, was given possession of western Mongolia and Tarbagatai. By tradition, the youngest son, Tului, obtained his father's ancestral land.
In 1229 the Great Hurildai elected Ugudei official successor to Genghis Khan. Ugudei's name is associated with a number of innovations in the development of the Mongol Empire. He set up a regular horse-relay post service (morin ortoo), which lasted until the mid 20th Century, to ensure prompt communication within the empire's entire administration as well as the transportation of dignitaries.
In 1230 Ugudei sent troops to Persia that later, in 1231-1239, also invaded the Caucasus. Guided by Genghis Khan's will, Ugudei concluded a tactical agreement with the Song dynasty of southern China on joint action against the Chin, and in 1231 he personally led a campaign to crush the Chin Empire and complete the conquest of northern China.
The fourth Khan of the Mongol Empire, Munkh (1251 -1259), also undertook two military campaigns: one headed by his brother Khubilai (founder of the Mongolian Yuan State), was intended to complete the conquest of China, and the other (aimed at invading Iran) was led by his other brother, Hulege. In 1258 Hulege took Baghdad and overthrew the Abbasid dynasty.
The wars waged by Genghis Khan's successors resulted in the dispersal of the Mongolian tribes and a considerable reduction in the size of the Mongolian population. On the other hand, however, these wars precipitated the process of unification among various Asian and European tribes, and drew East and West nearer together, something that had never been done before.
After the defeat of the Mongolian Yuan State by the Chinese Min State in 1367, the Mongolian Khans returned from Beijing to their native territory. At this time Mongolia ceased to be the centre of world trade and culture, but the Mongols retained their home territory.
Due to a crisis lasting from 1388 to 1400, various khaans replaced each other as ruler on the territory of modern Mongolia. The eastern and western Mongols' struggle intensified from the beginning of the 15th century as a result of malevolent actions by Ming China. The strife resuited in the emergence in 1452 of the Mongol Oirad state. Some written sources described this period as the period of small Khaganates. In the second half of the 15th century, the Mongol state was divided into east and west and then subdivided into six principalities. The six principalities included such Mongolian tribes as Khalkh, Ordos, Uriankhai, Tumd, and Yunsheby. The western Mongolian Oirads were comprised of the Mongolian tribes of Durvud, Khoshuud, Torguud and Tsoros. The period from the 17th to the early 20lh century was the bleakest in Mongolian history because of the 275 years of Manchu colonial domination.
GÊNGIS-CÃ
O MONGOL QUE CONQUISTOU O MUNDO
"Se das páginas da História se apagassem as narrativas de todas as batalhas, salvo as de Gêngis-Cã, ainda assim o soldado ficaria na posse duma mina de indizível riqueza, de onde poderia extrair frações de conhecimento útil no aperfeiçoamento dum exército moderno." Quem disse isso foi o General Douglas MacArthur.
Segundo MacArthur, o soldado não pode aprender a arte de guerra tão-somente; embora as armas evoluam e se transforme, ele deve procurar no passado os princípios fundamentais da sua técnica. Ora, em parte alguma esses princípios se podem encontrar mais vivamente expressos do que na colorida e legendária carreira do Imperador dos Mongóis - há 750 anos.
Gêngis-Cã englobou por conquistas o maior dos impérios que a face da Terra já suportou. Estendeu-se o império mongol desde o Pacífico à Europa Central, abrangendo a maior parte do mundo então conhecido, e mais metade de sua população. Sua cidade de Caracorum na Mongólia central se tornou a mais importante capital do mundo oriental, e ameaçou tragar as forças da Cristandade.
Napoleão acabou vencido e prisioneiro. O Grão-Cã nunca perdeu uma batalha decisiva. Morreu velho, no ápice das vitórias, e quando o seu império se dilatava ainda vigorosamente. Alexandre e César ficaram devendo muito aos seus predecessores, que criaram a falange macedônia e a legião romana; quanto a Gêngis-Cã, ele próprio inventou sua máquina de guerra. Os seus exércitos eram quase numericamente inferiores aos do adversário. É mesmo possível que ele nunca tenha conseguido por em luta mais de 200.000 soldados; mas com essa força relativamente pequena pulverizou impérios de milhões. Foi provavelmente o soldado mais feliz de toda a História. O nome Gêngis-Cã significa: O Mais Poderoso dos Soberanos. Ele próprio escolheu esse título orgulhoso, tendo sido conhecido modestamente, nos anos da mocidade, por Temujin.
Temujin contava apenas 13 anos de idade quando seu pai foi envenenado por inimigos; embora novo, já tinha a estatura e a força de um homem. Era capaz de montar um dia inteiro a cavalo e disparar uma flecha de grande peso. Era tão robusto de espírito quanto de corpo, e decidiu suceder o pai, como chefe duma tribo de rijos nômades, que forrageavam a magra subsistência nas ásperas estepes do platô asiático. Mas os homens da tribo recusaram-se a acatá-lo, e os outros chefes resolveram desembaraçar-se do jovem rival. Perseguiram- no como a uma fera através das estepes, agarraram-no e impuseram-lhe um pesado jugo ao pescoço, encadeando-se os pulsos ao mesmo, à moda da Ásia. Uma noite, o preso abateu o guarda com uma pancada desse jugo de madeira, e evadiu-se através do acampamento adormecido. Escondido num ribeiro presenciou a batida que deram os cavaleiros da tribo ao longo das margens, em sua busca. Mais tarde arrastou-se para fora da água, e convenceu um caçador errante, que encontrou, a libertá-lo do jugo e das algemas.
A história desses primeiros anos é uma longa crônica de fugas audaciosas e arriscadas à traição e à perseguição. Mas o jovem nunca abandonou o seu firme propósito de abrir caminho para o poder, de armas na mão. Não tinha ainda 20 anos quando o fizeram chefe. Começou então a intrigar e a combater, para atrair outras tribos a confederar-se com a sua. Das intrigas e batalhas saía sempre feito chefe. Matava invariavelmente todo aquele que procurasse partilhar com ele o poder. Tinha um primo, Jamuga. Nos tempos difíceis, ele e Jamuga haviam dormido juntos debaixo da mesma pele de carneiro, tinham compartilhado as magras refeições, caçando juntos os ratos do campo, quando não havia outra coisa que comer. Mas Jamuga não estava contente de se sentir subordinado, e convocou os seus seguidores. A batalha tornou-se inevitável, e ao fim desta era êle um prisioneiro, de pé, humilhado, na presença do primo, que serenamente o mandou estrangular.
Togrul fora amigo do pai de Tamujin, e ajudara o rapaz em mais de um momento de embaraço. Mas quando o chefe mais velho mostrou relutância em submeter-se às suas ordens, Tamujin mandou matá-lo. Em contraste com isso, recompensava à larga aqueles que se mostrassem ansiosos em servir sob as suas ordens. Correram os anos, e o chefe estabeleceu o seu quartel-general em Caracorum, a Cidade da Areias Pretas - simples grupo de tendas à beira da grande estrada das caravanas que iam de Este a Oeste. Temujin, muito hábil, não molestava as caravanas: reservava-lhes outro papel, muito mais importante, nos seus planos do futuro...
Era uma figura robusta, sempre envolto em peles de carneiro e couro endurecido, com a ligeireza e a flexibilidade do homem que passa a vida montado numa sela. A face coriácea, de linhas profundamente talhadas, tinha uma camada de gordura que protegia dos frios e dos ventos causticantes da estepe. É mais provável que nunca a lavasse mais de uma vez por ano. Seus olhos, bem separados um do outro sob a fronte em declive, irritados pela poeira ardente do deserto, fulguravam com dura intensidade. Falava pouco, e só após madura reflexão.
Aos 50 anos. Temujin tinha unido as tribos da Ásia Central numa só força unida, de que era ele o chefe único e acatado. sua fama espalhou-se para além das estepes. Assim mesmo, se por essa época uma seta inimiga tivesse podido encontrar o ponto fraco da sua armadura de couro, a História ter-se-ia limitado, quando muito, a mencionar o seu nome. os grandes feitos se sucederam e acumularam nos últimos 16 anos de sua existência. Tinha levado a vida a aprestar um instrumento de guerra para a conquista do mundo, e pôs-se em marcha para utilizá-lo.
A Leste estendia-se a China, a mais velha civilização do globo. Estava então dividida em dois impérios, o Kin e o Sung. A Oeste ficava-lhe o Islã, formado duma série de nações em que se tinham fragmentado as conquistas do grande Maomé e seus herdeiros. Mais longe ainda, para o ocidente, estava a Rússia, nesse tempo uma magna de pequenos estados, e a Europa Central, aglomerado confuso de grandes e pequenas soberanias. Atacou primeiro a China. Rompeu caminho através da Grande Muralha, e suas colunas derramaram-se como uma inundação pelos livres espaços do Kin, ou império do norte. A capital, Yemking, foi capturada e o imperador fugiu tomado de pavor. A sua derrota fora completa.
Três anos depois Gêngis-Cã marchou para o ocidente. Dentro de poucos meses a soldadesca mongol saqueava a rica e poderosa Samarcanda, e o sultão punha-se em fuga, para não perder a vida com o poder.
Nos anos que se seguiram, os exércitos do Grão-Cã levaram a invasão para a Ásia Menor, até as planuras do Indostão, dominaram o sudoeste da Ásia e penetraram pela Rússia até o coração da Europa Central. A que atribuir tamanhas vitórias? Gêngis-Cã possuía uma vontade indomável, uma violenta energia física e mental, uma ilimitada crueldade. Mas seu poderio alicerçava-se em algo mais.
Gêngis-Cã tinha a virtude de se desembaraçar das tradições e de ir direto aos problemas com uma atitude inteiramente nova. Sabia aproveitar todos os processos, técnicas e armas disponíveis, e adaptá-los até ao mínimo pormenor às suas próprias necessidades. Foi ele o primeiro a organizar uma nação inteira para o propósito exclusivo de fazer guerra: tinha há 700 anos o conceito, que nos habituamos a considerar moderno, da guerra total. Esplêndida era a matéria-prima que lhe ofereciam o cavalo mongol e o seu cavaleiro. O cavalo, infatigável, podia marchar mesmo que só lhe dessem de beber de três em três dias; sabia encontrar o alimento em todas e quaisquer condições, escavando com as patas a neve e o gelo, para encontrar restos de erva seca. O cavaleiro podia manter-se na sela um dia e uma noite, dormir na neve, e galopar ou guerrear com pouco ou nenhum alimento no estômago. Era guerreiro por natureza, fora criado em combates corpo a corpo, e tinham-lhe ensinado a disparar setas na idade em que começava a aprender a falar.
Ao proceder ao equipamento deste soldado nato é que Gêngis-Cã mostrou o seu gênio dos planos e pormenores. A couraça do mongol era couro cru, endurecido e envernizado. Cada soldado tinha dois arcos, um para usar montado, outro, mais preciso no tiro, para usar em combate de pé. Levava três tipos de flechas: para grande, médio e pequeno alcance. As de pequeno alcance, pesadas e com pontas de aço, destinavam-se a transpassar as couraças dos inimigos. Cada soldado levava consigo uma ração suplementar de coalhada seca: um quarto de quilo lhe bastava para se manter um dia inteiro em combate; tinha uma reserva de cordas para a besta, e cera e agulha para os reparos de urgência. Carregava o equipamento num saco de couro, que se podia encher de ar quando fosse necessário atravessar cursos de água. O exército dividia-se em formações de dez, cem, mil e dez mil homens. Além de combatentes propriamente ditos, ainda havia as tropas auxiliares: engenheiros e especialistas que manejavam catapultas e outros aparelhos de cerco, o corpo de abastecimento, serviço de remonta, guardas do arsenal, um departamento de objetos perdidos e achados. Atrás do exército estava a nação inteira, trabalhando para produzir mantimentos e material para as tropas, ao mesmo tempo em que vivia de quantidades mínimas possíveis.
A tática desenvolvida no combate era uma maravilha de precisão, adquirida mediante intenso treino. A formação de batalha era cinco colunas, ficando os batalhões separados por vastos intervalos. Na frente marchavam as tropas de choque. Pesadamente couraçadas, manejavam sabres, lanças e maças. À retaguarda iam os arqueiros ou besteiros montados. Os arqueiros avançavam a galope através dos intervalos abertos entre os batalhões de soldados de choque, e disparavam setas ao mesmo tempo em que carregava a toda a força. Quando relativamente perto do inimigo, desmontavam, passavam a usar as bestas ou arcos mais pesados e a lançar nuvens de setas pesadas. A essência do ataque estava na intensidade e concentração do tiro, até então desconhecidas.
Quando fileiras inimigas se mostravam desorganizadas, as tropas de choque carregavam para consumar a derrota. Era uma combinação perfeitamente coordenada e fluida. Não havia vozes de comando: as ordens eram transmitidas por sinais, com bandeiras brancas e pretas. O ataque mongol tinha êxito graças à superioridade das armas, a rapidez em por essas armas em contato com o adversário e por fim à intensidade e precisão do tiro. Os exércitos da China, os velozes guerreiros do Islã, os cavaleiros e homens de armas da Cristandade, todos eles foram abaixo diante das nuvens de setas do mongol. O inimigo entrava habitualmente em pânico antes mesmo das tropas de choque começar a ação.
Muito embora as tropas do Grão-Cã fossem excedidas em número pelo adversário, ele tinha quase sempre à mão a massa de soldados necessários para travar a batalha decisiva. Sabia como dividir as forças inimigas e concentrar as próprias. Era um consumado mistificador, que surgia num lugar enquanto o inimigo andava às apalpadelas, buscando-o noutro. Ganhava batalhas mais pelos movimentos envolventes do que por ataques frontais, diretos e custosos.
Algumas de suas campanhas foram antecipadamente meio ganhas pela propaganda, quando os exércitos ainda não tinham entrado em campo. No uso das palavras como armas, nenhum comandante ultrapassou este bárbaro, que não sabia ler nem escrever. A sua “quinta-coluna” era constituída pelos mercadores das caravanas. Por intermédio deles alugava agentes e espiões em todos os países que pretendia conquistar. Estuda a geografia, o povo, a política da nação visada; procurava descobrir os elementos insatisfeitos e pô-los em conflito aberto com o poder.
Seus espiões nos países islâmicos informaram-lhe que a mãe do sultão tinha ciúmes do poderio de seu filho. Gêngis-Cã ditou uma carta à mãe ciumenta, supostamente em resposta a uma carta dela, agradecendo-lhe a oferta de assistência que ela lhe fizera... Depois, organizou as coisas de modo que o mensageiro caísse nas mãos do sultão. Quando Gêngis-Cã levantou o grito de guerra, seus exércitos encontraram o país à beira da guerra civil!
Servia-se também da propaganda como uma arma de terror. Tinha por hábito informar a nação que se preparava para invadir das coisas pavorosas que tinham acontecido aqueles que haviam ousado resistir a Gêngis-Cã... Submetam-se ou serão aniquilados, era seu aviso. E quando o inimigo se submetia por medo, ele dava o golpe – e aniquilava-o da mesma forma que todos os outros. Também fazia hábil uso doméstico da propaganda, para fomentar o moral, como diríamos hoje. Prestigiava a profissão do soldado, procurando fazer parecer natural que toda a gente se sacrificasse para manter o soldado em campanha. Ensinou ao seu povo que os mongóis eram uma raça superior, diferente das demais.
Para Gêngis-Cã a política do terrorismo era destituída de paixão, uma coisa fria e lúcida. Se uma cidade lhe opunha resistência, ele incendiava-a, massacrando homens, mulheres e crianças sem distinção num processo de aniquilamento sistemático. Quando o seu exército passava adiante, deixava um punhado de soldados e um bando de cativos ocultos nas ruínas; a certa altura, os soldados forçavam os cativos a sair pelas ruas da cidade gritando que os mongóis já se haviam retirado. Ao ouvir essas vozes, os poucos habitantes que, escondidos, tinham escapado saíam ao ar livre, e eram chacinados. Para evitar dúvidas, decapitavam-se os mortos. Só numa cidade foram massacradas 500.000 pessoas. A História não possui elementos para computar quantos milhões de cadávers se amontoaram na trilha do conquistador...
Tal era a máquina de guerra com que Gêngis-Cã conquistou meio mundo. Veio ele a morrer em campanha, à idade de 66 anos, em 1227, estando no auge do poder. Após a sua morte a máquina continuou rolando. Os herdeiros do Grão-Mongol acabaram de conquistar a China, do norte e do sul. Assenhorearam-se de toda a Ásia. Penetraram mais fundo na Europa, bateram os húngaros, os poloneses, os alemães: ninguém podia interpor-se no seu caminho. O poderio mongólico era ainda formidável ao tempo de Cublai, neto do Grão-Mogol. Pulverizou-se por fim entre mãos de descendentes degenerados, e hoje os mongóis são de novo, apenas, um grupo de tribos nômades. Caracorum foi tragada pelas areias irrequietas do deserto de Gobi, e seu nome quase de todo se apagou da memória dos homens.
domingo, 17 de janeiro de 2010
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