The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter: A Portrait of Descartes by Steven Nadler (review)

In his nicely written book, Steven Nadler aims to provide neither a “biography in the conventional sense” nor an “analytic study of Descartes’s philosophy,” but rather “a small, intimate portrait” that presents “Descartes and his philosophy to a broad audience” (7). In this, he has succeeded admirably.

Nadler structures the book around the (likely) circumstances of the production, by Haarlem painter Frans Hals, of a small, oak panel portrait of Descartes now housed in the Denmark National Gallery. Nadler argues that this portrait is likely the one commissioned, according to Descartes’s earliest biographer, Adrien Baillet, by Descartes’s Haarlem friend and Catholic priest Augustijn Bloemaert shortly before Descartes left the Netherlands for Sweden in 1649. Pointing out that “Descartes belongs as much to the intellectual culture of the Dutch Golden Age as he does to the grand history of Western philosophy” (7), Nadler focuses on Descartes’s life in the Netherlands and his friendship with Bloemaert responsible for the Hals portrait.

After a brief chapter introducing the portrait, Nadler provides three biographical chapters. Together they sketch Descartes’s life and place it firmly within the Dutch cultural, political, and religious context that Nadler knows so well. The second and third of these chapters provide brief biographies of Bloemaert and Hals. Leaning on the autobiographical parts of the Discourse and recent scholarly biographies, the first chapter sketches Descartes’s life up to 1633, including his short but influential intellectual apprenticeship with Isaac Beeckman in Breda and his two early, very differently ambitious but ultimately abandoned projects: the universal method of the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, and the complete (and Copernican) natural philosophy of The World.

In the next two chapters, Nadler provides an overview of Descartes’s projects in the Meditations and the Principles. Ultimately, suggests Nadler, in the Meditations “Descartes was concerned actually to provide for science—for his science—solid and indubitable foundations” (93). By the end of the Meditations, “the external world whose existence has been reinstated … is not, qualitatively, the same external world” (107–8). The post-Meditations world is a world of res extensa to be explained by a new natural philosophy.

Nadler turns in the next chapter to this new philosophy and Descartes’s exposition of it in the Principles. Drawing also on Descartes’s Essays and The World, Nadler provides a vivid tour of Descartes’s natural philosophy; his laws of motion and impact, cosmology, and account of magnets all make an appearance. Nadler also sketches Descartes’s dualistic physiology, the processes by which sensations are produced, and their status as obscure and confused perceptions.

Nadler then returns to Descartes’s friendship with Bloemaert and fellow Catholic priest Johan Albert Ban. In this context, Nadler looks in more depth at God’s role in Descartes’s system. He considers Descartes’s claim that God is causa sui (self-caused)—a claim that Johan de Kater (Caterus) criticizes in the First Objections. (Caterus was a confrere of Bloemaert and Ban, who acted as mediators for this set of objections and replies.) Nadler provides a more extended, but still accessible, discussion of Descartes’s views on created eternal truths and on the miracle of the Eucharist. Finally, Descartes’s friendship with Bloemaert provides the occasion to return full-circle. Nadler concludes the book with a chapter discussing the extant early portraiture of Descartes, arguing that the Hals portrait was commissioned by Bloemaert.

As in any work of this kind, one is bound to find claims with which to disagree and simplifications and lacunae to lament. Most of these (and they are few), I pass over in silence. I will, however, mention two. First, we are told that Descartes’s The World “was informed by the theory of nature promoted by the new mechanistic science” (29) and that his discussion of the Eucharist was an effort to “reinterpret it on his own terms and consistent...