A Brill Calendar: November 10

Descartes and Coincidence

Few calendar days in successive years – 1618 and 1619 – present such intimately connected events as November 10.

The venues and scenes of this couplet differ strongly, but imply certainly two parts of one greater picture. In the first year, René Descartes (then 22 and a French mercenary soldier in the service and pay of Prince Maurits, Stadtholder of the new-fangled Republic of the United Provinces), runs through the busy marketplace of Breda into a perfect stranger, one Isaac Beeckman: a fascinating scholar, intellectual, philosopher, moralist and lord knows what else; born and bred in Zeeland Province. His riveting conversation is an eye-opener to the young Frenchman.

On exactly the same date one year later, 1619, Descartes is to be found on another military campaign (and benefiting from different employment) in Neuburg, Germany, where he experiences during the evening and night an all-encompassing revelation involving his whole being: body, soul and mind. Descartes’ moment of visionary release was one that is surely not unlike those revelations experienced by all exceptional artists, thinkers and geniuses throughout the ages.

It is seldom that a Frenchman, true to his intellectual type if there ever was one, came to produce most of his writing and thought outside of France's geographical domain. René Descartes, an exile in any sense of that word and a restless traveller to boot, born in France, dying in Stockholm, found for some two decades in lodging and dwelling places all over Holland, with Leyden and Amsterdam as favourite cities to work in and to cooperate with scholars and printers of his seminal works. Frans Hals painted his famous portrait; it is as if Leonardo would have depicted Copernicus.