It may not be coincidental that René Descartes, the so-called father of modern philosophy and founder, in terms of philosophical underpinnings, of the modern self— whose Cogito ergo sum (“ I think therefore I am”) formulation reoriented all knowledge on the individual self— arrived in Amsterdam at almost the same time as Rembrandt and lived in the city for much of the next five years. I say it may not be a coincidence because Amsterdam had become a magnet for people of a modernizing bent: for liberals. Its burghers may have gone around in sober black coats with somehow even more sober white lace collars, but (again, the whiplash contrast) it was simultaneously a hotbed of reform and experimentation. While elsewhere in Europe the Catholic Church and various monarchs were inhibiting scientific tinkering, here people were grinding lenses for telescopes and perfecting the microscope. There were forty publishers in the city, and dozens more in other Dutch cities, and they were the most liberal— and the freest from constraint— in Europe. Descartes had come to the Dutch provinces to have published what would become arguably the touchstone of modernity, A Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences. The manuscript of Galileo’s Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences, which was too incendiary for other European countries, found a Dutch publisher in Leiden. The Blaeu family of cartographers, who served as mapmakers to the VOC, ran Europe’s biggest printing press on the Bloemgracht in Amsterdam, employing eighty men and cranking out ever-more-refined perspectives on the globe. Dutch presses published tracts written by opponents of both the English monarchy and the French king Louis XIV, literature that would have brought a death sentence to a publisher in England or France.

Descartes tramped around the city as awestruck as any tourist and provided a kind of advertisement for Amsterdam’s golden age when he wrote to a friend of the wonder of watching “ships arriving, laden with all the produce of the Indies and all the rarities of Europe.” He went so far as to relate the various kinds of openness that the city fostered to the personal freedom he required: “Where else on earth could you find, as easily as you do here, all the conveniences of life and all the curiosities you could hope to see? In what other country could you find such complete freedom, or sleep with less anxiety, or find armies at the ready to protect you, or find fewer poisonings or acts of treason or slander?”

All of this boundary-breaking activity can be related to gedogen, the look-the-other-way form of tolerance that had guided Amsterdam in dealing with Anabaptists and other radicals back in the sixteenth century (and that still governs its approach to sex and drugs). And ultimately it relates back to water: to people who banded together to make their home out of what was once sea and in whom an ethic of cooperation became hardwired, so that tolerance of otherness trumped ideologies. At least much of the time.

Shorto, Russell (2013-10-22). Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City (pp. 143-145). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.