EAST WEST NEWSLETTER (since 1997)
www.eastwestcph.blogspot.com
September 17, 2017
from
Charles P. Hoang, Ph.D.
Emeritus
Professor of Research Methodology
Formerly
with Union Institute &University (Cincinnati ,USA)
and
UQAM (Montreal, Canada)
WHERE
IS THE SKULL OF
RENÉ
DESCARTES?
On June 10, 2007,
at the Trudeau Airport in Montreal I bought a book for my reading on the long
travel to The Netherlands and Kazakhstan. Since the day I was back home that
book stayed quietly in one corner of my private “CPH Library”. The truth is
it was forgotten for about ten years. Last week while reorganizing some
sections of my ‘library’ I fell on this forgotten book: DESCARTES’SECRET
NOTEBOOK by Amir D. Aczel (published by Broadway Books, 2005, ISBN-13:
978-0-7679-2034-6;
and ISBN-10: 0-7679-2034-1). It was a great
pleasure to me to reread the Introduction of this book and I now would like
to share with you some following passages (page 8)
“I spent my days at the libraries and archives of
Paris, researching material on Descartes and his work; I traveled to the
locations at which he stayed or lived throughout Europe-Descartes was a great
traveler
who saw most of the continent...
…But sometime in the middle of my search, I made a
surprising discovery: Descartes had kept a secret notebook.
I was now sitting at the heart of the area in which
Descartes loved most to live whenever he was in Paris for longer stays -the
then and-now-fashionable district of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Richard was
talking fast about Descartes and history and Paris, but we were too often
interrupted by the perpetual ring of his cell phone. I looked at the ancient
church in front of us. I knew it was very old -its construction began in the
sixth century. The church has a graceful tower, dating to the tenth century
and still in its original state. It has a rustic kind of beauty, seen more
often in churches in the French countryside, and in fact it used to be out in
the fields, outside the city walls-hence the designation "des
Prés".And I knew something else about this church: inside it is a crypt
containing the remains of René Descartes. But the body of the great
philosopher and mathematician -so revered by the French- lacks a head.
Descartes'skull or rather a skull purported to be that of the philosopher ,is
displayed elsewhere in Paris. Nothing about Descartes is simple, and nothing
is what it seems, as I learned in my quest to understand Descartes and to
uncover his secrets.”
I guess some of you
would ask how such a situation could happen to the remains of Descartes?
Where is his skull?
Descartes died on
February 11, 1650 in Stockholm (Sweden) and was buried in the cemetery of the
hospital for Orphans. Sixteen years later, on October 2, 1666, his body was
exhumed and the remains arrived in France in January 1667 and were placed in
the Chapel of Saint Paul in Paris. Probably the skull was already missing,
before or during the travel. In 1819 the remains of Descartes were finally
transferred to the crypt of the Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
In 1821 a French
baron, G. Curvier presented to the Musée de l’Homme in Paris the skull of
Descartes he received from the famous Swedish chemist Baron Jons Jakob
Berzelius (1779-1848). Berzelius told in a letter to Curvier that he bought
the skull of Descartes at an auction in Stockholm and sent it to G. Curvier
as a donation to the French nation so that it will “be placed with the other
remains of the philosopher”. But for reasons that have never been explained,
Curvier placed it on display in a museum….
I closed the book
on Descartes, and closed my eyes. Then
I thought of several questions for me and one question for you…
Charles Phan Hoang, September 17, 2017
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