Science Founded by Angel
René Descartes, founder of rationalism, inventor of algebra, chief philosopher of modernity, and something of a running foil on this channel, was presented with his destiny in a now infamous dream on the night of November the 10th 1619. Descartes was 23 and billeted with the protestant armies of the Calvinist Palatine Elector Frederic V, in Neubourg, close aside the banks of the Danube river. These same armies would go on to the battle of White Mountain next spring to be defeated by the armies of the Holy Roman Emperor, a decisive moment in the Thirty Years’ war. The fact that Descartes, a french catholic, was present on behalf of Bavarian protestants, has lead the more conspiratorial historian to assume that that he may have been a spy. In any case he was grandly ambitious and that evening, while an ice storm raged outside, as he warmed himself by the fire, he was “filled with enthusiasm,” and believed that he was on the verge of discovering “the foundations of a wonderful science.”
Enthusiasm, still retaining its old Greek notion of being possessed by a god, was rather scandalous in those days of heretical ecstasy, for heretics were starting up new sects by claiming God-sent enthusiasm, while at the same time women were being persecuted on the basis of this same enthusiasm, although in their case the god within was named the devil. This ambiguity, between possession by god or devil, circulating in the culture at large, likewise circulated and condensed that fateful night in Descartes’ overheated mind.
Feeling that he was going to have remarkable dreams, Descartes fell asleep curled up in his chair by the fire, and dreamt first of a crowd of phantoms in the room that filled him with terror. A whirlwind blown by an evil genius carries him out the open window and blows him to his college, where, in the church yard, an acquaintance offers a melon from a foreign land—of which Descartes later interprets as the “charms of solitude.” He awakes, but little knowing whether he is awake or asleep, and terrified that he is in the grip of “some evil spirit,” quelque mauvais génie, he prays to God to save him. After two hours of prayer and meditation Descartes falls asleep again only to wake at the sound of a thunderclap and finds that his room is full of sparks of fire, bright enough to read by. He is consumed by damnation for his past sins. Again he no longer knows if he is waking or dreaming. He dreams of an unfinished science dictionary and a book of poetry, The angel of truth appears and reveals to him the future, which will be a new mixture of science and rational philosophy.
This mood swing, from doom to destiny, from demon to angel, from dream to waking-thought is indicative of the basic anxiety in which Descartes oscillated throughout his life. The evil spirit will be a recurring character. The formation of his method of radical skepticism, by which he doubts his senses, along with all received knowledge—because it may have been sent by the devil—becomes the means by which he hangs on to sanity. Faced with phantasmagorical uncertainty, he decides on behalf of destiny, the angel and reason, and excludes the rest as madness; an exclusion that, as Foucault notes, becomes an entire carceral institution. In his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) Descartes says that an angel is a thinking substance. Sanity becomes, in essence, the angelic ability to do complex math. To paraphrase his famous axiom, cogito ergo sum: I can do algebraic geometry, therefore I’m not crazy. All the manifest certainties of the maths and sciences, as we know them today, spring from this encounter with an angel (but that might be a devil).
