Correspondence Between Descartes And Princess Elisabeth: Fill & Download for Free

Besides the correspondence (letter exchange) between René Descartes and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, what other correspondences between two notable historical figures exist?Are you kidding? Thousands of such correspondences exist. I subscribe to a Danish history magazine, “Historie”, and each issue ends with extracts from a historical source, usually a correspondence or a diary. I think I get 12–16 such issues of the magazine every year. And these journalists are only scratching the surface!

I wish I were a professor of Early Enlightenment history familiar with the growing awareness of oriental philosophies taking place in the Europe of Descartes time and place.I’m not that. But instead, I can call myself a casual student of Descartes and his period, with interest in the issues of consciousness that Descartes raised. Also, I am a student of meditation and techniques of meditation, having practiced and taught Transcendental Meditation since 1972. I investigated other techniques prior to then, as well as more recently researched the history of European meditation as a cross-over from oriental sources.Bottom line: your question matches my personal hypothesis about the origin of Descartes statement “I think, therefore I am”. Cogito, ergo sum. Another translation could be …“Cogito: I am able to doubt absolutely everything. But I, the true and honest skeptic still remain aware of my ability to suspend judgement on everything. Therefore, that suspended Self “is”. I have experienced the disappearance of the personal ego, being left with awareness without any qualities except “I AM”. This experience allows me to say with the certainty found in mathematics that if I had that experience, then the “inner light” of that awareness proves there is a truth, a certitude provable by anyone else who gains that awareness. This truth, ergo sum, can be found outside of all the deceptions that plague the world of appearance.”Whew. That’s a long one. But let’s tie it all together.Descartes lived in the Netherlands, hobnobbing with royalty such as Princess Elizabeth, daughter of the “Winter King” Frederick, Palantine and briefly King of Bohemia (until the 30 years war started).I’m making this really short now.Descartes had a deep deep deep philosophical relationship and correspondence with Elizabeth. See Elisabeth, Princess of BohemiaDescartes attended the Jesuit school La Fleche. (Look it up.) Being Jesuit, we can infer that he learned the meditation technique of Ignatius of Loyola called the “spiritual exercises”. In defense of this claim, about 10 years ago, I contacted a history professor at Fordham, a Jesuit University, asking if it was reasonable that students like Descartes at La Fleche or other Jesuit school would be exposed to the spiritual exercises. He said, more or less, “yes, that would indeed be expected”.I strongly suspect Descartes taught the spiritual exercises to royal ladies—and probably others. We have the necessary clues in the correspondence between Descartes and Elisabeth; other clues also appear in the subsequent relationship between Descartes and Queen Christina of Sweden (who Descartes visited, tutored, gained her inner-most confidences, and then, unfortunately caught a horrible chill and died). I have no evidence of this meditation training from any written documents. This claim is an inference based on the spiritual questions these ladies shared with Descartes and the kind of deep bonds he developed that were otherwise improbable at that level of royalty.Where does the Buddhism come in? It’s an inference, as follows. Elizabeth lived at the Hague. Descartes lived in Utrecht, among other places (I visited Utrecht on business a couple times and looked up his old address one rainy afternoon. It’s a modern office now.) Utrecht is 68 km to the Hague (about 50 minutes by modern highway!). The Hauge and Utrecht are only 68 and 66km from Amsterdam, respectively. Descartes loved travel.OK, let’s get global. The Dutch were the masters of the sea. Trade with Indonesia, India and Japan was a big new deal. People were getting wealthy off the international scene at that time. Now think. How do traders get the language thing down? They have to talk and exchange ideas. What better way to do that than by bringing native language speakers back to Amsterdam to share culture, language, customs, and find out what tradable objects other countries find valuable. From this and other reasons, I invite you to accept that Buddhist missionaries could easily have shown up in the Amsterdam of Descartes time. Can I prove it now? Nope. But a couple PhD researchers would probably find evidence in the trading ship manifests of the time.Also, lets not forget that far-traveling Buddhist missionaries are nothing new. King Ashok of India sent a colony of Buddhist missionaries to Alexandria several centuries before BC became AD. BTW when Joseph and Mary went to Egypt to escape Herod’s decree, no one can disprove that they avoided all contact with Buddhist-Jewish interchange that absolutely and historically must have existed back then in Alexandria. The influence of Buddhism on Christianity is a whole public dialog that went on amongst European Christians after the first translations of Buddhist texts in the 19th century. (Many pointed out the uncanny parallels between the Gospels and the Buddhist canon.)Descartes was an inquisitive guy and open to many new ideas. He was a new idea guy the equal of any Silicon Valley guru. But, given the political (oops, religious) climate of the time, he had to be circumspect. He adhered to Catholic dogma out of fear for his life. Galileo came under house arrest by the Church for his helio-centric ideas (that many accepted at the time, anyway.) So, the statement “cogito ergo sum” was Descartes best covert deal with the church: “you get the mind and I get the body”, so to speak. The Church can save the soul, and Descartes and others interested in physics, physiology, math (and rational discourse) could save the material realm for discourse.At this point, we can put it all together, in answer to your question “How do you think Descartes' philosophy would have been different had he been exposed to Buddhist philosophies such as non-self?”I think Descartes philosophy IS a product of being exposed to the Buddhist philosophy (or AT LEAST the experience) of “non-self”. He practiced the Jesuit spiritual exercises (a meditation technique). He taught others (royalty) this technique to help them gain respite from worldly stresses and physical torments (people got sicker back then than we can imagine). He could easily have been motivated to seek out new and proven meditative philosophies from international sources in Amsterdam—if not via second-hand sources. The idea of “being” and “non-self” was not strange to Descartes, especially in the context of pure abstracted awareness devoid of the personal self.Now we need a couple or five PhD dissertations to pull this together. Folks have done similar sleuthing on the influence of oriental concepts on Greek philosophy. (They are there.) The Silk Road had a lot of ideas flowing through the camel ruts beyond just silk and dried dates. We’re just catching up.Let’s hear it from other folks, too.