Chapter One - The Child of War

CHAPTER ONE

The Child of War

RENÉ DESCARTES WAS born in 1596, which was a terrible time to be born in Europe. The continent was falling apart from plagues, religious wars, collapsing empires, and a general vibe of “we have no idea what we’re doing.” France was barely holding together. The Catholics and the Huguenots were going at each other’s throats, and the Thirty Years’ War was right around the corner.

Descartes’ mom died when he was one. His dad was a judge who shipped him off to live with relatives, because that was pretty standard back then if you were rich-ish and didn’t feel like doing the parenting part. René grew up without a mom, without much supervision, and with a bunch of questions no one seemed interested in answering.

By the time he was eight, he got dumped into a Jesuit boarding school, the Collège Royal Henry-Le-Grand at La Flèche. It was one of the best schools in France, full of theology, Latin drills, logic, and enough discipline to scare the soul out of a kid. But René actually liked it. He was weirdly into rules. He wanted to know how the universe worked, and the Jesuits, for all their faults, gave him a system. There were categories. Definitions. Proofs. Everything was neat and clean.

It didn’t stick.

He started noticing the cracks pretty early. The contradictions. The stuff that didn’t quite add up. Why did philosophy say one thing while theology said another? Why did so many “truths” rely on tradition or authority? And why did no one seem bothered by that?

Descartes didn’t say anything yet. He just watched, took notes, and stayed quiet. He had a weak immune system and probably some kind of chronic illness, so he spent a lot of time in bed thinking. Which, in hindsight, may have been his origin story. A sickly little genius lying under the covers, silently preparing to throw out the entire foundation of European knowledge.

Even as a kid, he didn’t trust things just because someone said so. That’s the part people miss. Descartes didn’t become a skeptic after some dramatic midlife crisis. The seed was already there. The wars, the death, the dead mom, the religious politics, the contradictions in the textbooks, it all piled up.

And somewhere in that pile, a question started forming:
How do we know anything?

That question never left him.