Cafeneaua Filozofică is a weekly meetup, moderated by Dana Jalobeanu - a window into Romania, seeing as it looks back at the wider world, at literature, spirituality and philosophy.

I was glad to see Episode 92 was in English, thus accessible.

The subject: Descartes Musketeer. Guest speakers are Harold Cook, who wrote The Young Descartes, and Daniel Garber.

Much to be said about René Descartes (1596–1650). When we use x, y coordinate systems - these are cartesian coordinates. Cartesian comes from the latin spelling of his name, Descartes.

“I doubt, therefore I think - I think, therefore I exist” is by Descartes.

But before he became who he was, interestingly enough, Descartes, like many young people in his tumultuous time, signed up to be a soldier.

More exactly, a mercenary.

He fought numerous campaigns, first on the Protestant side, in Breda, then on the Catholic side, at Prague. Some victories, and some unmitigated disasters - one, at the hand of a Transylvanian army led by Prince Gabriel Bethlen.

This was the 30 years war. Descartes even ended up, as a Musqueteer, at the famous siege of La Rochelle, where the Catholic army besieged the Huguenot city for months, both from land and from the sea.

Half of La Rochelle died of hunger in this siege, before submitting.

In popular culture, Alexandre Dumas has his four musketeers, Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D’Artagnian, at the La Rochelle siege.

The way Harold Cook describes it - for Descartes, a military career was a way to advance in society.

He, himself, was not a zealot. The times were of a religious factionalism, difficult to understand today.

But, looking back, these were Catholics fighting Protestants. Even the Catholics, themselves, were not a monolith. Descartes, it seems, though not absolutely known, may have been a so-called Jansenite.

What is Jansenism, I don’t exactly know. I think it was a flavor of Catholicism that was popular among intellectuals in France, at the time - and among many members of the clergy.

It was considered, later, a heresy, and was quashed.

Looking back at Descartes - now this is very interesting! - biographers that wrote, maybe, 50 years later, they made him a bit more Catholic than he actually was - to adapt him to the spirit of the new times.

Harold Cook describes Descartes as, in some way, similar to another famous Musqueteer-philosopher of the time: Cyrano de Bergerac.

Cyrano, of course, is known from the recent Peter Dinklage movie. My favorite, though, would be the 1990 film directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau and starring Gerard Depardieu in one of his best-ever performances.

Back to Descartes - there’s another interesting episode, and it’s not discussed in the Philosophical Cafe episode. This is from Wiki:

…On the night of 10–11 November 1619 (St. Martin’s Day), while stationed in Neuburg an der Donau, Descartes shut himself in a room with an “oven” (probably a cocklestove) to escape the cold. While within, he had three dreams, and believed that a divine spirit revealed to him a new philosophy. However, it is speculated that what Descartes considered to be his second dream was actually an episode of exploding head syndrome. Upon exiting, he had formulated analytic geometry and the idea of applying the mathematical method to philosophy. He concluded from these visions that the pursuit of science would prove to be, for him, the pursuit of true wisdom and a central part of his life’s work. Descartes also saw very clearly that all truths were linked with one another, so that finding a fundamental truth and proceeding with logic would open the way to all science. Descartes discovered this basic truth quite soon: his famous “I think, therefore I am.“

It’s fascinating to see, over and over, how people experience these sort of moments of mental enlightenment - where you wait, patiently, for years, and prepare.

Then, a moment of crisis comes - in the case of Descartes, I don’t know what it was - and, an abrupt change of state happens, all at once.

These things are very mysterious.