Russell Shorto      ... journalist and author. Following his success with the best-seller, The Island at the Center of the World, Mr. Shorto has written Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason. He is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and director of The John Adams Institute in Amsterdam, where he lives.

Audio Preview of Russell Shorto 1:37

 

The conflict between faith and reason in the West is as alive in today’s world as it was when René Descartes fueled the Enlightenment with “I think, therefore I am”, says journalist Russell Shorto. He follows Descartes’ bones and ideas through four centuries, convinced Descartes’ willingness to challenge authority is especially relevant now.

“We're in this era of competing fundamentalisms which you could say started with Descartes, with that generation. You had this theological world view. And suddenly it had something opposed to it, a world-view based on reason.

“Very quickly what developed was not a two-way but a sort of three-way split, and here I'm using the categories of Jonathan Israel. You had a radical Enlightenment in which the modern thinkers really opposed themselves violently to the old religious perspective.

“But you also had a moderate Enlightenment which said part of the job of reason is to figure out how to incorporate the irrational within the human sphere. Because that is in fact part of what we are.

“And so, over the course of the modern centuries you see these three forces at play. The more fundamentalist ones will tend to try to say, no, it's just the two of us and it's a fight to the death. But there is this other as well.

“Certainly Descartes himself said that there is in fact a third substance. Reality. He himself realized that dividing into the mind and body -- the medical, material world -- didn't work.

“What he came to late in his life in his last book, The Passions of the Soul, is to me a very prescient notion. It foreshadowed a lot of what people in the past thirty or forty years have been working on. The ‘passions’ in the 17th century were emotions. And our emotions work on our physical beings and our mental beings. So here's the best I've come up with. Descartes, while being very humble at this point late in his life -- saying maybe our minds are structured so that we can't figure this out -- is saying that the emotions part are a kind of bridge that wraps itself around mind and body. So that that experience of reality is maybe the ultimate human experience of reality.

“I would say that these years of the Bush Era has, we've seen such a rise of fundamentalists that I think a lot of people are yearning for some leader to come forward and say, ‘There's another way to do this.’”

Descartes is a stand in for all of us, for everyone who came after, Mr. Shorto concludes.

“The challenge to us is that with these great mountains of evidence. A lot of effort is necessary on the part of individuals to sort through it. The internet is the example. This is what I say to my daughters all the time. You got it from the internet -- is this how they're taught to do research? How do you trust your sources?”