ISSN 1393-614X Minerva - An Internet Journal of
Philosophy Vol. 9 2005.
____________________________________________________
|
Descartes: Libertarianist, Necessitarianist, Actualist? Timo Kajamies |
Abstract
According to necessitarianism, all truths are logically necessary, and
the modal doctrine of a necessitarian philosopher is in a sharp contrast with something
that seems manifest—the view that there are contingent truths. At least on the
face of it, then, necessitarianism is highly implausible. René Descartes is
usually not regarded as a necessitarian philosopher, but some of his
philosophical views raise the worry as to whether he is committed to the
necessity of all truths. This paper is an appraisal of this worry.
1. Setting the Stage
According
to necessitarianism, all truths are logically necessary. A necessitarian
philosopher does not allow logically contingent truths, and her modal doctrine
is therefore in a sharp contrast with our ordinary modal beliefs. I have quite
a firm belief that Descartes is not among partisans of necessitarianism, but it
appears that some essential passages in the Cartesian corpus provide room for
being worried as to whether this belief really holds water. This paper is an
attempt to raise and assess that worry.
The
question whether one is committed to necessitarianism is connected with the
question whether one’s ontology contains unactualized possibilities. A
necessitarian philosopher does not have any use for such things as possible but
nonactual worlds, beings, states of affairs, and what not. If there are no
contingent truths, the approval of nonactual worlds would have no explanatory
value and would only amount to needless ontological extravagance. A
necessitarian, familiar with Ockham’s razor, should therefore renounce
nonactual entities. At first sight, nothing in Descartes’s modal metaphysics
suggests that he endorses necessitarianism, for he seems to have no reluctance
to posit nonactual beings. As we shall see, there appears to be a lot of
theoretical use for unactualized possibilities in his philosophy, which is hard
to combine with the view that his philosophy contains a necessitarian strand.
However, it has been recently argued that Descartes is an actualist, i.e., a
philosopher whose ontology does not contain nonactual entities. This, I
believe, raises the the question of necessitarianism in the discussion of
Descartes’s modal views. After all, according to a very straightforward account
of counterfactual possibility, the existence of possible but nonactual
entities—contingently nonactual worlds
for instance—make some propositions counterfactually possible. This analysis is
not available to an actualist, and she should provide a different account as to
how her ontology is supposed to allow there being contingently true
propositions. So, if Descartes were an actualist, he should be able to explain,
without committing himself to nonactual entities, how there can be room for
contingency in his philosophical thought, or else his system can be seen as
leading to the view that every proposition is either necessarily true or
necessarily false.
Descartes’s
views notwithstanding, necessitarianism is, prima
facie at least, highly implausible. Why would one ever claim that all
truths are necessary? We seem to have such a strong intuition that some things
happen without being inevitable, and vice versa, that there are things which
could happen but which in fact do not. What motives could there be behind the
view that an intuition of this sort is misguided and that all truths are
necessary? At least one of the motives can arguably be found in rationalist
maxims of explanation. Rationalism, seen from this angle, is understood as a
doctrine including the view that there is an answer to every why-question
(Bennett 1996, 61), be the discovery of that answer as hard and challenging a
task as it may. Leibniz (AG, 209; AG, 321) famously holds that nothing happens
without a sufficient reason, and that everyone who knows enough should be able
to explain why a given event occurred rather than something else. In a somewhat
similar vein, Spinoza (E1p11d2) believes that there is a reason for the
existence or non-existence of each thing. Both Leibniz and Spinoza seem to hold
that there is nothing ultimately without a sufficient reason, and therefore
both seem to be proponents of explanatory rationalism.
If
Spinoza is seen as an explanatory rationalist, he should hold that every
question “Why did event e occur?” has
an answer. According to Spinoza, particular things and events, or finite modes as he says, are caused by
other particulars or finite modes. There is, Spinoza (E1p28 and E1p28d) holds,
an infinite causal chain of finite modes, in which every finite mode is
causally determined, by natural laws, from antecedent conditions. Accordingly,
the occurrence of any event can, in Spinoza’s philosophy, be explained by
appeal to its antecedent conditions, together with natural laws which link
causes with effects. However, causal determinism is compatible with the
metaphysical contingency of the total infinite causal series (e.g. Carriero
1991, 55; see also Garrett 1991, 192), so the infinite causal ancestry of an
event does not amount to an ultimate explanation of the event, unless there is
an explanation as to why the causal series occurred rather than some other
causal series. For an explanatory rationalist, the occurrence of the entire
causal chain cannot be a mere brute contingent fact, and she must either
explain the occurrence of the chain through something external to that chain,
or else she must deny that the chain is contingent. Spinoza takes the latter
course and arrives at the doctrine of necessitarianism, according to which
there is nothing contingent in the universe; everything is absolutely necessary
right down to the smallest detail.[1] Indeed, Spinoza writes that “In nature
there is nothing contingent, but all things have been determined from the
necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way”
(E1p29), and “Things could have been produced by God in no other way, and in no
other order than they have been produced” (E1p33). Spinoza’s aspiration for
explanatory rationalism seems to end up in the necessitarian thesis that there
are no unactualized possibilities, or, to use contemporary terms, in the thesis
that there is only one world, no possible worlds besides the actual one (e.g.
Sleigh, Chappell & Della Rocca 1998, 1227; Garrett 1991, 191-92).
In
Descartes’s philosophy, the universal explanatory maxim cannot motivate
necessitarian thinking, because Descartes is, in fact, committed to the denial of explanatory rationalism. This
commitment emerges from his curious views on the causal origin of modalities.
Notoriously, Descartes believes that necessary truths, or eternal truths as they were called at that time, are freely created
by God. In April 1630, in one of his letters to father Mersenne (CSMK III, 25,
AT I, 151-53), Descartes first expresses this puzzling voluntarist view as
follows:
The mathematical truths which you call
eternal have been laid down by God and depend on him entirely no less than the
rest of his creatures. Indeed to say that these truths are independent of God
is to talk of him as if he were Jupiter or Saturn and to subject him to the
Descartes’s voluntarism includes the view
that eternal truths are not known by God because of their truth, but vice
versa, they are true because God knows them. This view is in a sharp contrast
with the position of scholastic intellectualists (see Osler 1995, 147), such as
that of Francisco Suárez, who writes in his Disputationes
Metaphysicae, XXXI that the eternal truths
“are not true because they are known by God, rather they are known because they
are true, otherwise no reason could be given why God necessarily knows that
they are true, for if their truth proceeded from God himself, that would happen
by means of God’s will, so it would not proceed necessarily but voluntarily”
(quoted in Curley
1984, 585-86).
Descartes’s
view sounds very extraordinary, and one is immediately led to wonder what the free
creation of eternal truths could mean and what could be the rationale for this
view (for theologico-philosophical background of Descartes’s
voluntarism, see Kajamies 2004). Following Leibniz (e.g. AG, 220) one
might, for instance, suggest that creation amounts to the actualization of
pre-existing possibilities, and try to understand Descartes’s view of the
causal origin of modalities through a Leibnitian model. According to this
interpretation, the establishment of eternal truths would, so to speak, amount
to a Divine choice, performed within a set of pre-existing alternative
possibilities. However, this cannot be the right interpretation of Descartes’s
thought, because, as a true modal voluntarist, he should hold that the supposed
pre-existing possibilities themselves be created; no universe of possibilities
could pre-exist God’s creation. More generally, there could not be any kind of
standard, purpose, goal or model guiding or restricting God’s creative acts
prior to those acts themselves. As Descartes (Replies to Sixth Objections, CSM
II, 291, AT VII, 431; see also Letter to Mesland, CSMK III, 235, AT IV, 118)
says, God is absolutely indifferent with
respect to everything which has happened or will ever happen, “free to make it
not true that all the radii of the circle are equal—just as free as he was not
to create the world” (Letter to Mersenne, CSMK III, 25, AT I, 152), which shows
that Descartes’s God has no reason behind his creative acts. For Descartes,
nothing can necessitate, or even incline without necessitating, God to perform
any given creative act. Indeed, as Suárez (op. cit.) seems to worry, the
question “Why God willed and decreed as he did?” ultimately remains
unanswerable in genuine modal voluntarism, and therefore Descartes should not be
seen as an explanatory rationalist.[2]
Because
nothing explains God’s actions in modal voluntarism, it is certainly not easy
to avoid the view that eternal truths, according to a voluntarist, hold good
because of an arbitrary caprice or whim of God (see
Yet,
even though explanatory rationalism is not there to motivate necessitarianism
in Descartes’s philosophy, some of his writings give grounds for posing the
question, at any rate, whether he is committed to necessitarian thinking. In
particular, his views on the ethics of belief, including his conception of
human freedom, set the stage for the worries that he might be committed to necessitarianism.
Generating these worries will be one of the two main goals I have in this
paper. The other aim will be to discuss the interpretation according to which
Descartes does not admit possibilia
into his ontology and to work out the consequences of this interpretation with
regard to the problem of necessitarianism.
2. Truth Rule, Compelled Assent, and Necessitarianism
Cartesian Ethics of Belief
In
the Meditations (CSM II, 12, AT VII,
17), Descartes proposes that once in his life he has to pull down the system of
beliefs he has been building since childhood and start from the beginning, in
order to find something epistemically stable and lasting. In his pursuit of a
new stable system of knowledge Descartes decides to hold on to nothing else
than what is beyond any doubt. “Reason now leads me to think that I should hold
back my assent from opinions which are not completely certain and indubitable”,
he writes in the First Meditation (CSM II, 12, AT VII, 18).
Descartes’s
doubt comes forth in the Meditations
in successive waves, starting from sensory perceptions and extending all the
way to the attempt to doubt basic mathematical propositions. He states that the
only reason for doubting the simple propositions of arithmetic and geometry is
the hypothesis that God somehow deceives him in these matters (CSM II, 25, AT
VII, 36). After proving the existence of a veracious God, Descartes (CSM II,
43, AT VII, 62), however, believes that he is entitled to believe in the things
he conceives with utmost clarity and distinctness:
If I restrain my will so that it extends
to what the intellect clearly and distinctly reveals, and no further, then it
is quite impossible for me to go wrong.
This
brings out the core of Descartes’s conception of the ethics of belief. In
Descartes’s deontological epistemology, fulfilment of one’s basic epistemic
duty requires careful employment of one’s mental capabilities. In particular,
the active operations of the mind are
of a special importance. In Descartes’s philosophy of mind, mental operations
fall into two fundamental and exhaustive classes—active operations of the will
and passive operations of the intellect (e.g. Principles of Philosophy I.32, CSM I, 204, AT VIIIA, 17), and the
way in which one actively uses one’s will is what makes one’s actions
epistemically praiseworthy of blameworthy. One cannot be held responsible for
wholly passive and involuntary operations. Automatons, for instance, cannot be
praised or blamed for their operations, because, unlike human agents, they do
not possess any aptitude for voluntary acts. Thus, the notion of
responsibility, be it moral or epistemic, includes the notion of capacity for
free action.[3] And freedom of the will, Descartes
believes, is self-evident and one of our most fundamental innate notions. Our
experience of freedom is so great, and our awareness of it so close, that
nothing can be grasped more evidently (Principles
of Philosophy I.41, CSM I, 205-6, AT VIIIA, 19-20).
For
Descartes, the free actions suitable for epistemic appraisal are special kind
of modes of will: acts of assent. According to Descartes, one can, at will,
assent to the ideas presented by the faculty of intellect, and when one freely
assents to something that is not clear and distinct, one freely runs the risk
of error and can be blamed for an undutiful epistemic deed. Not all
deliverances of our understanding ought to be believed, for the faculty of
understanding sometimes delivers something obscure and confused, and if such an
obscure and confused item is believed, negligence of epistemic duties takes
place.[4] Descartes’s theory of error, therefore, is grounded in doxastic libertarianism, understood
as a view according to which belief is explicable in terms of freedom of the
agent.
The truth rule raises the question of the
nature of clarity and distinctness, the feature whose presence entitles the
epistemic agent to assent to the idea possessing it. One of the features
Descartes often mentions when discussing clear and distinct ideas is
indubitability. Again, his characterizations of indubitability sometimes have a
markedly psychologistic tone, suggesting that the notion of indubitability
comes very close to that of doxastic irresistibility. For example, in his
letter to Regius Descartes (CSMK III, 147, AT III, 64) writes that “our mind is
of such a nature that it cannot help but assenting to what it clearly and
distinctly understands.” Another psychologistically toned expression can be
found in Principles of Philosophy,
where Descartes (CSM I, 207, AT VIIIA, 21) writes: ”the minds of all of us have
been so moulded by nature that whenever we perceive something clearly, we
spontaneously give our assent to it and are quite unable to doubt its truth.”
It is not hard to find a passage of this sort in the Meditations either. In the Fifth
Meditation, while discussing the most simple clear and distinct ideas,
Descartes (CSM II, 45, AT VII, 65) writes that “the nature of my mind is such
that I cannot but assent to these things, at least so long as I clearly
perceive them.” Therefore, Descartes seems to hold that clear and distinct
ideas, as a psychological matter of fact, compel assent. It is a disputed
question whether psychological irresistibility can be used as a criterion of
clarity and distinctness (for a psychologistic view, see Larmore 1984; Rubin
1977; Loeb 1995; for an opposing view, see
Now,
the role of will in Descartes’s ethics of belief was considered problematic
already by Descartes’s contemporaries. In the Third Objections, Hobbes (CSM II, 135, AT VII, 192) expresses his
criticism as follows:
Further, it is not only knowing
something to be true that is independent of the will, but also believing it or
giving assent to it. If something is proved by valid arguments, or is reported
as credible, we believe it whether we want to or not. It is true that
affirmation and denial, defending and refuting propositions, are acts of will;
but it does not follow that our inner assent depends on the will. There is thus
no valid demonstration of the subsequent conclusion, viz. ‘In this incorrect use of free will may be found the privation
which constitutes the essence of error’.
As
I understand Hobbes’ criticism, he argues, firstly, that because there are
cases—such as perceiving some proposition p
clearly and distinctly or perceiving the validity of an argument for p—in which we believe p whether we want to or not, it cannot
be generally true that believing depends on the will. Doxastic libertarianism,
according to Hobbes, cannot be universal, because believing a conclusion of a
valid argument is involuntary. Secondly, he argues that because believing is
not always free, Descartes has not demonstrated that error arises from
incorrect use of will. This second argumentative step by Hobbes is not, as
such, an argument against Descartes’s
theory of error, but rather an attempt to prove that Descartes’s argumentation
for his theory of error is not conclusive. To function as an argument against
Descartes’s theory, Hobbes’ argument should be supplemented with a further
argument either to the effect that believing in absence of clarity and distinctness is not voluntary, or, even
more strongly, to the effect that absence of clarity and
distinctness is always accompanied with suspense of judgment.
To me it seems that the former
supplementary argument is easier to carry out than the latter. It is reasonable
to ask what believing in absence of clarity and distinctness might mean, and
Descartes’s theory seems to suggest that we can, so to speak, arbitrarily decide or choose to believe in things we do not perceive distinctly. Wilson
(1978, 144ff) claims, and I am inclined to agree with her, that it is
implausible to suppose that believing in absence of clarity and distinctness is
nothing but an arbitrary decision of a wanton mind—it may even be
phenomenologically impossible just to decide to believe or assent to something
(Curley 1975, 177-78). The latter supplementary argument leads to the
Spinozistic view that suspension of judgement is nothing but seeing that one’s
perception is not clear and distinct. According to E2p49s, (the addition in
square brackets is in the quoted text): “I reply by denying that we have a free
power of suspending judgment. For when we say that someone suspends judgment,
we are saying nothing but that he sees that he does not perceive the thing
adequately. Suspension of judgment, therefore, is really a perception, not [an
act of] free will.” It has been argued by Curley (1975, 177) that Spinoza was
right in claiming, against Descartes, that suspending judgment is simply
finding arguments pro and con to be inconclusive. According to Curley, absence
of clarity and distinctness can lead to nothing else than suspension of
judgment. However, I agree with Wilson (1978, 146) that it is much less
obviously wrong to suppose that one can make a judgment in the absence of
clarity and distinctness than to suppose that believing in absence of clarity
and distinctness is nothing but an arbitrary decision. There seems, then, to be
no straightforward way of making Hobbes’ argument conclusive against
Descartes’s view that error depends on misuse of will.
Indifference and Spontaneity
For present purposes, the
first stage of Hobbes’ argument is more relevant than the ways in which Hobbes’
argument could be supplemented. To be plausible, the first stage seems to
include the implicit premise that nothing can be, so to speak, both forced and
voluntary. According to Hobbes, seeing that an argument is valid forces an
inner assent upon us, which contradicts the view that believing always is a
free act of will. It is perfectly natural to raise this critical point against
Descartes, for the combination of the view that clarity and distinctness compel assent, and the view that assent
neverteheless is a free act of will,
surely seems problematic. Furthermore, as Descartes’s doxastic advice is that
one should assent to all and only those propositions which one clearly and
distinctly understands, the irresistibility of clear and distinct ideas not
only seems to make the use of free will in the pursuit of truth completely redundant,
but it also seems to free the followers of Descartes’s epistemic advice from
epistemic responsibility.
As
far as I can see, the answer Descartes gives to Hobbes in the Third Replies is quite unsatisfactory as
such, but what he writes elsewhere enables him to provide a more plausible
response to the criticism that compelled assent cannot be an act of free will.
In the Fourth Meditation, Descartes (CSM II, 40-41, AT VII, 57-60) draws an
important distinction between two senses of freedom: freedom of spontaneity and
freedom of indifference. Descartes (CSM II, 40, AT VII, 58) tells us he
experiences freedom of indifference “when there is no reason pushing me in one
direction rather than another”.[5] Supposing that believing is voluntary,
this sense of freedom seems fairly unproblematic, for it is characteristic of
freedom of indifference that nothing forces the will to one doxastic direction
rather than another. It is entirely up to the will to make the doxastic choice.
Nevertheless, we immediately see that freedom of indifference is not what is at
stake when it comes to clear and distinct ideas. A compelled act of assent cannot be an act which manifests freedom of
indifference. Freedom of spontaneity, however, seems quite well tailored to
describe the case of compelled assent. When our will exhibits freedom of
spontaneity, Descartes (Letter to Mesland, CSMK III, 234, AT IV, 117) says, it
“follows so promptly the light of our understanding that there is no longer any
indifference at all.” But while the amount of spontaneity is inversely
proportional to the amount of indifference in this way (see also Fourth
Meditation, CSM II, 41, AT VII, 59), we might ask whether the amount of
spontaneity is similarly proportional to the amount of freedom. After all, freedom
of spontaneity seems to include some sort of resignation of the will to some
antecedent assent-compelling conditions. We should ask how spontaneity can be a
genuine brand of freedom before we can accommodate ourselves to what Descartes
(CSM II, 40, AT VII, 57) says in the Fourth Meditation:
The will simply consists in our ability
to do or not do something (that is, to affirm or deny, to pursue or avoid); or
rather, it consists simply in the fact that when the intellect puts something
forward for affirmation or denial or for pursuit or avoidance, our inclinations
are such that we do not feel we are determined by any external force.
In
this passage Descartes discusses both indifference and spontaneity, and there
is no doubt that he considers spontaneity as a genuine kind of liberty. What he
says is that freedom of the will consists in indifference or, rather, in spontaneity. Anthony Kenny
wonders what the force of ‘rather’ is in the passage just quoted. Does it
perhaps mark second thoughts, so that Descartes withdraws the statement that freedom consists in indifference? Does
he identify the two kinds of freedom?
Kenny argues, I believe convincingly, that Descartes believes that freedom often involves indifference, but sometimes it consists only in spontaneity.
(Kenny 1972, 18-19.) On this view, Descartes acknowledges both kinds of freedom
as genuine. Nevetheless, Descartes (Fourth Meditation, CSM II, 41, AT VII, 59)
holds that the freedom of our belief is at its greatest when our assent is
spontaneous without any trace of indifference. So, questions remain as to how
spontaneity can be a full-fledged type of freedom.[6]
One
sense in which spontaneous acts of assent can be held to be free lurks right
under the surface of a much quoted passage in the Fifth Meditation (CSM II, 48,
AT VII, 69):
Admittedly my nature is such that so
long as I perceive something very clearly and distinctly I cannot but believe
it to be true. But my nature is also such that I cannot fix my mental vision
continually on the same thing, so as to keep perceiving it clearly; and often
the memory of a previously made judgement may come back, when I am no longer
attending to the arguments which led me to make it. And so other arguments can
now occur to me which might easily undermine my opinion, if I were unaware of
God; and I should thus never have true and certain knowledge about anything,
but only shifting and changeable opinions.
Here Descartes says, firstly, that he
cannot but assent to what his intellect clearly and distinctly presents, and,
secondly, that later on when clarity and distinctness are no longer present in
an idea he can fall into doubt about the truth of the idea, and his assent is
no longer compelled. The idea, in so far as it is not clear and distinct any
longer, is no longer a reason inevitably pushing his will, and other reasons
may occur that incline his will to other directions. In other words, the amount
of indifference easily increases when a once clear and distinct idea no longer
is clear and distinct. The reason for the loss of clarity and distinctness is,
we are told, that one cannot continuously fix one’s attention to the same
thing. Diverting one’s attention from an irresistible clear and distinct idea
leads, through the loss of clarity and distinctness, to the ability to withhold
assent from the idea, or even to the ability to make a contrary judgement
(Letter to Mesland, CSMK III, 234, AT IV, 116-17). Descartes’s letter to
Mesland (ibid.) reveals that we can
control our attention so that the inclinations of our will become more
spontaneous: “it is a good action to pay attention and thus to ensure that our
will follows so promptly the light of our understanding that there is no longer
any indifference at all.” On my view, Descartes believes that we can freely choose
whether we pay attention to clear and distinct ideas or not, or, in deciding
whether we pursue clarity and distinctness or not. Peter Schouls (1989, 103)
has put this point quite elegantly by saying that “the exercise of liberty of
indifference will create the conditions for the experience of liberty of
spontaneity.” Therefore, freedom of spontaneity really is a genuine brand of
freedom at least in the sense that we can freely commit ourselves to be led by
clarity and distinctness. The conclusion I set forth here is in agreement with
Alanen’s (1999, 111) view that, not being programmed like automata, we can
voluntarily shift our attention away from a clear and distinct idea and thus
avoid assenting to it. Even if doxastic libertarianism did not apply after we
have exercised the faculty of clear and distinct perception, it applies a step
back, so to speak.
In addition of our being free to commit
ourselves to pursue clarity and distinctness, there is another sense in which
agents experiencing spontaneity can be held to be free. While we are
spontaneous, “our inclinations are such that we do not feel we are determined
by any external force”, says Descartes (CSM II, 40, AT VII, 57). The notion of
external force is of great importance here. The lack of external determining
forces in spontaneous assent means that the mind works autonomously, in a
self-legislative way. Mind, the agent which exercises the power of willing
when a spontaneous assent occurs, produces its volitions by itself. There is no agent external to the mind participating in
the production of these volitions. As Descartes (Letter to Mesland, CSMK III,
234, AT IV, 116) writes, freedom should not be viewed as “indifference but
rather as a real and positive power to determine oneself”, which means that the
mind can be seen as an autonomous, free agent. Freedom as the autonomy of mind
is a theme that extends all through the Meditations,
and is of a special importance in Descartes’s epistemology. The Meditations can be seen as a guide of
liberating one’s mind of bodily impulses and of ideas whose production is, at
least partly, due to the senses. When the mind has turned away from the senses
in the sense of abandoning the Scholastic view that concepts are abstracted
from experiences (Carriero 1990, part I), and
taken up the contemplation of innate ideas instead, it can, by the use of
reason, build a stable system of knowledge instead of a shaky system of mere
opinions. An autonomous mind, one that has chosen to pursue clarity and
distinctness, assumes its epistemic responsibilities in the best possible way.
Even if Descartes can argue
that spontaneous assent exhibits the autonomy of mind, a problem seems to
remain in Descartes’s account of spontaneity. An autonomous mind is admittedly
an agent which determines itself to action, but the way in which this
determination works while the mind is spontaneous leaves, in a sense, very
little for the will to do. In case of spontaneous assent, it seems, the will
plays no significant role in the transition from a clear and distinct idea to a
belief. We can direct our attention at will so as to engage ourselves in the
pursuit of clarity and distinctness, but do we need any will to transform a
clear and distinct idea into a belief? Bernard Williams (1978, 183; see also
Wilson 1978, 141ff) brought this question up, and rigthly so, in his book on
Descartes by saying that “if in this sense I clearly understand a
proposition—that is to say, I can see it is true—there is nothing else I have
to do in order to believe it: I already believe it. The will has nothing to do
which the understanding has not already done.” We are, in an important sense,
brought back to Hobbes’ criticism, according to which we believe the outcomes
of valid arguments whether we want to or not. In Descartes’s theory of
spontaneous assent, the gap between understanding a proposition distinctly and
believing it as true seems not large enough for the will to have any work in
the production of the belief. In case of clear and distinct perception,
understanding hardly falls short of believing.
On
this view, Descartes’s account of affirming clear and distinct ideas sounds
quite Spinozistic. In E2p49 Spinoza writes that “In the Mind there is no
volition, or affirmation and negation, except that which the idea involves
insofar as it is an idea.” Spinoza emphasizes that it is wrong to understand
the notion of judgement as including an act of will which is directed towards
an idea distinct from the volition. It seems that Descartes’s view of clear and
distinct ideas commits him to a position not far from Spinoza’s account,
according to which ideas are inherently judgmental. An important difference,
however, remains between Spinoza and Descartes here: whereas for Spinoza will
and intellect are identical (E2p49c) and hence all ideas, including the
so-called inadequate ideas, are inherently judgmental, Descartes certainly does
not accept, nor is committed to accept, the view that
obscure and confused ideas do not fall short of affirmation or denial. But as
far as clear and distinct ideas are concerned, Descartes is committed to a view
which closely resembles Spinoza’s theory of judgement.
The Problem of
Necessitarianism
The unity of understanding and believing in
cases of clear and distinct perception brings us, finally, to the problem of
necessitarianism. Let us consider a case in which we attempt to evaluate the
modal status of a given proposition p,
say, the proposition “
On the present view, then,
we should have a clear and distinct understanding of the proposition “
The truth rule can be seen to have its
bearing also on those propositions which we are inclined to look upon as
contingently true. For example, when we enter into the assessment of the
proposition “
If the observations made
above are correct, we seem to have arrived in quite a surprising
outcome. Descartes’s way of struggling with the problem of freedom seems to have
a strange and unwelcome consequence regarding his views on modality. His system
begins to appear as necessitarian, as he seems to have no room for contingently
false nor contingently true propositions.
A
different route to the necessitarian worry in Descartes is Principles of Philosophy III.47, where Descartes writes that
“matter must successively assume all the forms of which it is capable” (CSM I,
258, AT VIIIA, 103). This suggests that every possible state of the (material)
universe occurs at some instant of time. Leibniz later claims that Spinoza,
while expounding more clearly the views endorsed by Descartes in Principles of Philosophy III.47,
correctly draws the necessitarian conclusion from Cartesian principles.
Leibniz, thus, held that Descartes’s philosophy includes a necessitarian
commitment, but arrived at the necessitarian interpretation of Descartes
through considerations other than those expounded in this paper. (See Letter to
Philipp, L, 273.)
3. Actualism, Necessity, and Contingency
Evidence Against the Necessitarian
Interpretation
It
certainly seems problematic to understand Descartes as a necessitarian
philosopher. Just a brief consideration of his view of the causal origin of
modalities seems to contradict the interpretation that he believed all truths
to be necessary. If God has freely created all eternal truths, as Descartes
claims, it appears that even these most stable truths are in some bizarre sense
not necessary. After all, God could have acted in an entirely different fashion
that he did, if only he had willed to do so. He was, according to Descartes
(Letter to Mersenne, CSMK III, 25, AT I, 152), as we already saw, “free to make
it not true that all the radii of the circle are equal—just as free as he was
not to create the world.” Some scholars, perhaps most notably
Further
evidence for the view that Descartes is not a necessitarian philosopher can
also be found from the argument for mind-body dualism, built in the Sixth
Meditation on grounds presented in previous Meditations. Chiefly on the basis
of the Second and Fifth Meditations Descartes arrives at the conclusion that he
can understand mind apart from body and body apart from mind, and finally in
the Sixth he argues that clear and distinct understanding of one substance
apart from another suffices for the certainty that the one excludes the other
(see also Replies to Fourth Objections, CSM II, 159, AT VII, 226). In the
famous passage from the Sixth Meditation, Descartes (CSM II, 54, AT VII, 78)
writes:
First, I know that everything which I
clearly and distinctly understand is capable of being created by God so as to
correspond exactly with my understanding of it. Hence the fact that I can
clearly and distinctly understand one thing apart from another is enough to
make me certain that the two things are distinct, since they are capable of
being separated, at least by God.
Descartes
explicitly states here that two things are distinct because they are capable of being separated. A
straightforward interpretation of this seems to be that Descartes regards
possible separation as a sufficient condition for, and perhaps even
constitutive of, real distinction, i.e., distinction that holds good between
substances (see Garber 1992, 85, 89; Hoffman, 1996, 343n; Wilson 1978, 190,
207). On this view, really distinct substances do not have to be actually
separate. It is enough that they are separable, capable of existing without one
another. Descartes (CSM I, 213, AT VIIIA, 28) lucidly comments on this tenet in
Principles of Philosophy, where he
writes:
…even if we suppose that God has joined
some corporeal substance to such a thinking substance so closely that they
cannot be more closely conjoined, thus compounding them into a unity, they
nonetheless remain really distinct. For no matter how closely God may have
united them, the power which he previously had of separating them, or keeping
one in being without the other, is something he could not lay aside; and things
which God has the power to separate, or to keep in being separately, are really
distinct.
It
appears very hard to see how the dualism argument should be understood, if
there was no room for contingent truths in Descartes’s philosophy.
Closely
related to the dualism argument, evidence for the view that Descartes admits
counterfactual possibilities can be found in his notion of substance. Being
separable and hence capable of existing without one another, both mind and body
meet the independence requirement of substancehood. Cartesian finite substances
are entities which exist independently
of other finite entities (Principles of
Philosophy I.51, CSM I, 210, AT VIIIA, 24), which is to say that they can exist without other things, i.e. by
themselves and without the aid of any other substance besides God (see Replies
to Fourth Objections, CSM II, 159, AT VII, 226). Therefore, in addition to
Descartes’s crucial premise in the dualism argument and his independence-based
characterization of substancehood suggest that he was committed to the
acceptance of counterfactual possibilities.
In
addition to the evidence against the necessitarian interpretation of Descartes,
it seems that evidence can be found for the view that he did not renounce
nonactual entities. Descartes (Replies to First Objections, CSM II, 83, AT VII,
116) explicitly states that “we must distinguish possibility from necessity”,
and that “possible existence is contained in the concept or idea of everything
that we clearly and distinctly understand; but in no case is necessary
existence so contained, except in the case of the idea of God.” And
importantly, “even though our understanding of other things always involves
understanding them as if they were existing things, it does not follow that
they do exist, but merely that they
are capable of existing” (ibid.,
emphases mine). To start with, these are
hardly necessitarian characterizations. Furthermore, Descartes’s statement that
our understanding of things only entails their possible existence, as opposed
to actual existence, could be read to show that he accepted nonactual entities,
or mere possibilia. Descartes also
speaks of things such as winged horses and it seems that he does not want to
rule out their possible existence, even if there are no such things as winged
horses. For instance, he writes: “When, for example, I think of a winged horse
or an actually existing lion, or a triangle inscribed in a square, I readily
understand that I am also able to think of a horse without wings, or a lion
which does not exist, or a triangle apart from a square, and so on” (CSM II,
84, AT VII, 117). Winged horses are conceivable, and as far as this means that
there are nonactual entities, Descartes is helping himself to entities which
any necessitarian philosopher would be at pains to renounce.
Contrary
to the view that Descartes admitted unactualized possibles into his ontology,
it has been recently argued by Alan Nelson and David Cunning and that Descartes
can be interpreted as an actualist (Nelson & Cunning 1999; Cunning 2002),
i.e. a philosopher who does not believe in nonactual entities. If this
interpretation of Descartes’s modal metaphysics were correct, the passages in
which he appears to refer to nonactual entities would be useless as evidence
against the necessitarian interpretation of his philosophy.
Actualism and Possibilism
In
this paper, the notion of actualism has, up to this point, simply been taken to
include the renunciation of nonactual entities. However, contemporary
discussions on modal metaphysics show that actualism can be understood in a
number of different ways. Hence, I believe it is important to take a brief look
into some recent formulations of actualism before discussing the actualist
interpretation of Descartes. As this paper is primarily written for students of
Descartes’s thought, familiarity with the main lines in the discussion of
actualism and its challenges cannot be presumed. A word of caution is also in
order: I do not intend to pursue anachronistic hypotheses to the effect that
present-day views on quantified modal logic should be attributable to
Descartes, but I shall consider some contemporary formulations of actualism in
order to have a clearer view on the thesis Descartes is held to accept when we
call him an actualist.
Salmon
(1987, 56) characterizes actualism and possibilism as follows:
The doctrine that the standard quantifiers of natural
language (the English words ‘everything,’ ‘something,’ etc.) are possibilist
quantifiers is sometimes called ‘possibilism’, and the doctrine that they are
actualist quantifiers is sometimes called ‘actualism.’
According
to this formulation, the debate between actualists and possibilists concerns
the domain of entities over which our quantifiers range. The actualists refuse
to quantify over nonactual entities,
contrary to the possibilists. A similar, and quite common, way of formulating
the actualist thesis can be found in Linsky and Zalta (1994, 436):
Thesis of actualism: Everything which exists (i.e.,
everything there is) is actual.
According
to these formulations, an actualist holds that everything that exists, exists
in the actual world (see also Fitch 1996, 53). Actualism, according to this type
of approach, can be seen as a metaphysical theory according to which truth of
modal claims can be accounted for without quantifying over nonactual
individuals or worlds. The actualists are not willing to commit themselves to
such ontological extravagance as, for instance, dictated by modal realism, or genuine modal realism (see Divers, 2002,
21-22), held by David Lewis (1973, 85), who writes:
When I profess realism about possible worlds, I mean
to be taken literally. Possible worlds are what they are, and not some other
thing. If asked what sort of thing they are, I cannot give the kind of reply my
questioner probably expects: that is, a proposal to reduce possible worlds to
something else. I can only ask him to admit that he knows what sort of thing our
actual world is, and then explain that possible worlds are more things of that
sort, differing not in kind but only in what goes on at them.
An
actualist cannot accept genuine modal realism, because a genuine realist
believes there are, besides the actual one, nonactual entities over which our
quantifiers irreducibly range. At the other side of the fence, a possibilist
who endorses genuine modal realism has the advantage of being able to account
for the truth of modal claims in a very straightforward way, treating modal
operators as ontologically committing quantifiers over possible worlds, but at
the expense of multiplying her ontology beyond the limits of actuality.
The
distinction between genuine modal realism and the thesis that everything there
is is actual calls for an important clarification concerning the notion of
actuality. The need for this clarification can be seen by considering the way
in which the concept of actuality can be applied in genuine modal realism. In a
sense, it can be said that a genuine modal realist only accepts entities which
are actual, because she holds that any given entity is actual in the world in
which it exists. Unicorns, for instance, are actual in every world in which
there are unicorns, and their being actual existents in those worlds accounts
for the truth of the claim “It is possible that there are unicorns”. The
distinction between genuine modal realism and actualism requires drawing a
distinction between indexical and absolute senses of ‘actual’. According to an
indexical theory of actuality, endorsed by the genuine modal realist, the
reference of ‘actual’ varies depending on the context, i.e., the world, in
which it is used. On the indexical view, ‘actual’ means merely ‘occurring in this world’, ‘occurring in a world we are in’, or suchlike (see
Another
clarificatory point is now in order. According to one formulation of actualism,
one can claim that nothing but actual entities exist and still endorse possibilism.
This formulation is based on the idea that the difference between actualism and
possibilism concerns the question whether the quantifier ‘there are’ is
existentially loaded, so to speak. Consider the following formulation by
Bergmann (1996, 359n1):
Actualism is the thesis that necessarily everything
that there is exists. […] Thus, actualism is opposed, for example, to Meinong’s
claim that there are objects which have being but not existence.
This
characterization allows that a possibilist such as Meinong, who distinguishes
being from existence, can accept as trivially true the thesis that no nonactual
entities exist, but still endorse the
possibilist thesis that there are nonactual
entities. I shall not, in what follows, understand the notions of actualism and
possibilism through the distinction between being and existence. I shall use
the expressions “There are no nonactual entities” and “No nonactual entities
exist” as synonymous. It should be noted, though, that Descartes has been
interpreted as being committed to the distinction between being and existence
in his philosophy of mathematics. Anthony Kenny (1970, 692-93, 699) argues that
Descartes was no less than the father of modern Platonism, who believed that
the objects of mathematics depend on physical substances, not physical existents.
Kenny thus claims that Descartes posited things which subsist without
existing—have being without having existence. Therefore, if Kenny’s
interpretation was correct, Descartes should be read as a possibilist, and
Bergmann’s formulation of possibilism would be the one to use. However, I
believe, and shall argue in the next section, that Kenny’s argument in favor of
the Platonic reading of Descartes’s modal metaphysics is unconvincing.
According to my reading, Descartes did not accept abstract Platonic substances,
over and above the extended and thinking substances which comprise all there is
in his dualist ontology.
The
final clarificatory point I want to make concerning the notions of actualism
and possibilism is related to the aforementioned topic of abstract entities, in
that it concerns the ontological status of the things we posit when accounting
for the truth and falsity of our modal claims. Consider the following
formulation by McMichael (1983, 50):
According to the possibilists, possible worlds are
concrete entities. In this respect, they are like the the concrete universe
which we inhabit. […] Actualists who believe in possible worlds view them as
existing abstract entities. The
actual world is not actual merely in the sense that it exists—all possible
worlds exist—but rather in the sense that this concrete universe corresponds to it.
According
to McMichael’s formulation, modal realists—people who believe in possible
worlds—can be divided into possibilists and actualists. Possibilist modal
realists believe possible worlds are concrete, whereas actualist modal realists
believe they are abstract. Notice that this distinction is precisely the
distinction between genuine realism and actualist realism. Divers (2002, 22),
for instance, writes that “genuine realism conceives of the possible worlds as
a vast plurality of non-actual, concrete things, while actualist realism
conceives of the possible worlds as a vast plurality of actual, abstract things.”
I think this distinction is quite important when we assess the hypothesis that
Descartes endorses actualism, since it seems fairly uninteresting to discuss
whether Descartes accepts or denies the existence of nonactual concrete things.
Calling Descartes an actualist on the ground that he does not accept nonactual concreta is very likely to be true, but
it is even more likely to be very uninteresting. Genuine realism has born from
the need to provide semantics for quantified modal logic, and there is no reason
to suppose that Descartes would have even thought of there being nonactual
concrete entities. What is interesting, however, is whether Descartes accepts
actualism in the very strong sense that his ontology only contains actual concreta, nothing else. This question is
especially pressing concerning the worry that Descartes might be committed to
necessitarianism, since it is not obvious how a philosopher who only accepts
actual concrete things can save our basic modal intuitions concerning, say,
things which could happen but in fact do not.
An Actualist Reading of Descartes
Although
actualism has been a topic of discussion predominantly in contemporary
philosophy, actualism was not an unknown doctrine in early modern philosophy.
Spinoza famously endorsed full-blown actualism, and if Descartes can be
approached from an actualist angle, we might be able to argue that Spinoza was
following Descartes while embracing actualism. Actualism does not, however,
immediately stand out as any sort of acknowledged doctrine in Descartes’s
writings; a proponent of an actualist interpretation obviously has the burden
of proof over the supporters of the opposing opinion. Basically, three
considerations have been set forth on the basis of which it has been argued
that Descartes might well have renounced unactualized possibles (Cunning 2002).
One of these considerations is textual and the remaining ones are systematic.
The
textual evidence comes from the Third Meditation, where Descartes discusses the
idea of God and asks what could have caused its representational content, or objective being in Cartesian
terminology. He writes that “the objective being of an idea cannot be produced
merely by potential being, which strictly speaking is nothing, but only by
actual or formal being” (Third Meditation, CSM II, 32, AT VII, 47). Cunning’s
reading of this is that Descartes denies the existence of potential being. And
if he does so, it is hard to see how he could have included nonactual entities
in his ontology. However, I believe it is not so clear that this passage, as it
stands, shows that Descartes denies the existence of purely potential being. An
alternative reading can be presented along the following lines. To start with,
the topic Descartes deals with is the question what might have caused the
objective being of an idea. Descartes’s position is that it cannot be caused by
a pure potentiality, and the reason he offers for this is that a pure
potentiality “strictly speaking is nothing”. Why does he say “strictly
speaking” instead of just blatantly denying the existence of a merely potential
being? I believe it is possible to interpret him as saying that a purely
potential being, in so far as it is merely potential and not actual, cannot
have any causal efficience. What makes a merely potential entity causally
ineffective is that it does not have a suitable mode of being; unlike God,
finite minds and finite bodies, it is not a concrete
entity, and it is therefore causally inefficient. Thus, as it stands, the
passage under scrutiny is compatible with the view that purely potential
entities are causally inefficient abstract entities. However, if it could be
further argued that there is no room for abstract entities in Descartes’s ontology,
the case for reading him as renouncing potential beings becomes much more
convincing. And indeed, the nominalist, or rather, conceptualist, tendencies in
Descartes’s philosophy seem to provide extra support for the proponent of this
reading. For instance, in Principles of
Philosophy I.58, entitled as “Number
and all universals are simply modes of thinking”, Descartes (CSM I, 212, AT
VIIIA, 27) writes as follows:
In the same way, number, when it is considered simply
in the abstract or in general, and not in any created things, is merely a mode
of thinking; and the same applies to all the other universals, as we call them.
Now,
if merely potential beings are not concrete, and if abstract entities are
merely modes of our thought, the upshot seems to be that nonactual entities
only exist as modes of our minds and do not have a first-class residence in
Descartes’s dualist ontology. A winged horse, for instance, exists only as mode
of our thought if no created thing has the property of being a winged horse.
The essence of this nonactual zoological species does not exist in an
independent abstract universe of essences, but is reducible to the ways of our
thinking. In fact, Descartes seems to accept even a stronger claim that all essences are nothing but modes of
our thought. In one of his key letters on voluntarism, he identifies eternal
truths with essences, telling Mersenne that “it is certain that he [i.e. God]
is the author of the essence of created things no less than of their existence;
and this essence is nothing other than than the eternal truths” (CSMK III, 25,
AT 1, 152). Then, in Principles of
Philosophy, he says:
All the objects of our perception we regard either as
things, or affections of things, or else as eternal truths which have no existence
outside our thought (CSM I, 208, AT VIIIA, 22).
The
identification of essences and eternal truths, together with the claim that
eternal truths have no existence outside our thought, amount to the view that
all essences are modes of our thought.
In
understanding essences as modes of our thought, Descartes appears as a defender
of conceptualism and perhaps as some sort of precursor of mathematical
intuitionism, rather than as a defender of Platonic realism and a forerunner of mathematical logicism (of these concepts, see e.g. Quine 1953,
14-15). This interpretation is in a sharp contrast with Kenny’s view that
Descartes, indeed, is a Platonist about essences. However, I am not convinced
by Kenny’s argument in favor of the Platonist interpretation. According to
Kenny (1970, 696), Descartes is committed to hold that essences are something
distinct from God, because God stands in a causal relationship to them, being
their efficient cause. I find this plausible, because if essences were somehow
located in God, it would be strange that Descartes calls them creatures (see
also Cunning 2002). Geometrical essences, for instance, are something distinct
from God, but Descartes holds that no material object exactly corresponds to
them, because actual bodies are always too irregular, as Kenny (1970, 694)
rightly points out. Indeed, when responding to Gassendi’s nominalist and
abstractionist view of essences (see Fifth Set of Objections, CSM II, 222-23,
AT VII, 320-21), Descartes (Fifth Set of Replies, CSM II, 261, AT VII, 380)
argues that the essence of a triangle—or of any other geometrical figure—cannot
be abstracted from particular confrontations with material objects. Now, as far
as I can see, Kenny’s argument for the Platonic interpretation of Descartes is
this: He claims that since geometrical essences must be distinct from God, but
irreducible to material objects, the only remaining ontological alternative for
Descartes is to hold that those essences are abstract Platonic entities.
Although Kenny’s premises are plausible, I do not see how the conclusion should
follow. The premises are, I believe, fully compatible with an interpretation
according to which Descartes endorses a conceptualist view of essences, rather
than Platonic realism. According to the conceptualist view (especially Bennett
1994) Descartes understands modalities—and hence essences—to be in some sense a
function of the constitution of our minds. According to the conceptualist
reading, Descartes’s God created modal truths in making us the way we are (see Bennett 1994, 646). The objects of
our mathematical intuitions are, on this view, innate principles or structures
of thinking which have no existence independent of our minds; to deny their
mind-independent existence is not, however, to say that they are randomly
subjective or arbitrary (Alanen 1999, 106). Human minds are creatures distinct
from God, and therefore essences are as well. Kenny’s premises thus allow at
least both the Platonic and the conceptualist interpretation, and I believe Descartes’s
explicit statement that eternal truths have no existence outside the mind
strongly speaks for conceptualism rather than Platonism.
On
behalf of the Platonic interpretation it has to be said that it has no
difficulty in accommodating with Descartes’s view that mathematical truths and
essences are eternal, or as Descartes also says, immutable (e.g. Fifth
Meditation, CSM II, 44-45, AT VII, 64). Eternally existing Platonic forms
guarantee the eternity of eternal truths, but it is not so obvious how the
conceptualist interpretation can account for their eternity. Human mind is,
clearly, a contingent being which can be altered by God. Therefore, a defender
of the Platonist interpretation could argue that the conceptualist
interpretation contradicts Descartes’s view that essences are, in a very robust
sense, immutable. She might argue that the conceptualist Descartes could, at
best, hold that eternal truths are actually unchanging, but unable to maintain
that they are unchangeable. However, Descartes seems to equate ‘God is
immutable’ with ‘God always acts in the same way’ (see The World, CSM I, 96, AT XI, 43; see also Bennett 1994, 665), and
he writes of geometrical essences that “since they are always the same, it is
right to call them immutable and eternal” (Fifth Set of Replies, CSM II, 262,
AT VII, 381). This strongly suggests that Descartes held eternal truths to be
eternal only in the sense that their truth values do not
change. The best the conceptualist Descartes could say about the eternity of eternal
truths, indeed, seems to be just what Descartes really says.[9]
Let us now return to the evidence offered
for the actualist interpretation. The first systematic piece of evidence is
drawn from Descartes’s parsimonious dualistic ontology and his theory of
conceptual distinctions. For Descartes, there are only two kinds of created
substances—minds and bodies—and their modes. As he states in Principles of Philosophy I.48 (CSM I,
208, AT VIIIA, 22), he recognizes only two ultimate classes of things: intellectual
or thinking things, i.e., those which pertain to mind or thinking substance;
and material things, i.e. those which pertain to extended substance or body.
Now, Cunning contends that if the purported mere possibles were just created
substances, then presumably they would have to be actual. To me this sounds
very plausible. The challenger of the actualist interpretation might, of
course, suggest that both of the two fundamental ontological classes of things
in Descartes’s dualism contain entities having actual existence and entities
having possible existence. But this suggestion leads to a problem. Cunning
argues that Descartes could not adhere to his theory of the conceptual
distinction between a substance and its attributes, if he postulated both actually
existing and merely possibly existing entities within one fundamental
ontological class. An important premise in this argument is that Descartes
believes all creatures have possible existence. This premise seems plausible,
since Descartes (CSM II, 117, AT VII, 166) declares in the Second Replies that “Possible or contingent existence is contained
in the concept of a limited thing”. The implication of this view is that an actually existing creaturely thing has possible existence, and there should be
some sort of explanation as to how actual existence and possible existence
differ in this case. Cunning’s argumentation also relies on the view that,
according to Descartes, the existence of a thing is identical to the thing
itself. Evidence for this claim comes from a letter to an unknown
correspondent, where Descartes (CSMK III, 280-81, AT IV, 350) writes, for
example, that the essence of a triangle which exists outside thought is in no
way distinct from the existence of it. Finally Cunning (2002) states that “If
the thing’s existence is just identical to that thing itself, then the thing’s
possible existence is identical to the thing and the thing’s actual existence
is identical to the thing. That is, a thing’s possible existence just is its
actual existence.” The bearing of this argument is that if Descartes wants to
make a distinction between possible and actual existence of a created thing, he
must abandon his theory of conceptual distinction. For the theory of conceptual
distinction would dictate that possible existence is just another name for
actual existence and therefore we would arrive at actualism. I am not quite
convinced of the cogency of this particular argument by Cunning, but regarding
present purposes, and since more convincing evidence for the actualist
interpretation has already been offered, I am more interested in the
implications and developments of the actualist interpretation than the ultimate
credibility of this particular argument.
The second systematic
evidence presented for the actualist interpretation is based on Descartes’s
view of God’s absolute simplicity. In several passages Descartes (e.g. Third
Meditation, CSM II, 34, AT VII, 50; Replies to Second Objections, CSM II, 98,
AT VII, 137) insists that God is a simple being, that there is no priority
between God’s intellect and will (e.g. Letter to Mesland, CSMK III, 235, AT IV,
119), and that God’s willing, understanding and creating are all the same thing
without one being even conceptually prior to the other (Letter to Mersenne,
CSMK III, 26, AT I, 153). From the identity of God’s understanding and will it
follows that whatever God understands he also wills and creates. Lest we be
forced to sacrifice God’s omniscience, unactualized possibles, if they exist,
should be thought as objects of God’s understanding. Nevertheless, that which
is an object of God’s understanding is created and made actual. Cunning puts
forward, I think plausibly, that if Descartes is seriously committed to the
identity of God’s intellect and will, it is difficult to see how he can also
posit nonactual entities.
Supposing
that the actualist interpretation can be persuasively presented as an
interpretive option regarding Descartes’s modal metaphysics, as I am inclined
to hold, we should be able to present the dualism argument in a way that does
not include reference to possible separation as a ground for the real
distinction between mind and body. We should also be able to provide an account
as to what Descartes means when he distinguishes possibility from necessity.
Again, there should be a satisfactory answer to the question how the actualist
interpretation can be combined with Descartes’s voluntaristic view of the
causal origin of modality. If all this can be done and we opt for the actualist
interpretation, we should finally also ask what impact the actualist line of
thought has on the worry that Descartes might be committed to necessitarianism.
Assessing the Evidence for Possibilism and
Overcoming the Necessitarian Worry
For
Descartes (Replies to Fourth Objections, CSM II, 156, AT VII, 221-22), it
suffices for establishing a real distinction “that two things can be understood
as ‘complete’ and that each one can be understood apart from the other”, where
the notion of complete thing means “a substance endowed with the forms or
attributes which enable me to recognize that it is a substance.” Substances are
ontologically independent (Principles of
Philosophy I.51, CSM I, 210, AT VIIIA, 24), and therefore complete things
are ontologically independent. As was already pointed out, a seemingly natural
way of reading Descartes’s dualism argument is that a counterfactually possible
separateness indicates and is constitutive of the fact that mind and body are
complete independent entities, or in other words, really distinct substances.
This
way of understanding the dualism argument should bother
the heads of those who are inclined to accept the actualist
interpretation. And indeed, Cunning believes that to view counterfactually possible
separateness as the indication of the fact that mind and body are ontological
indepencent is to put the cart ahead of the horse. Possible separateness, he
holds, does not indicate real distinction, nor is constitutive of it. Quite the
contrary, as Marleen Rozemond has argued, the separability of mind and body can
be seen as a consequence of the fact that mind and body are really distinct. As
Rozemond (1998, 5) points out, in the Second
Replies Descartes discusses separability as a sign of real distinction and,
indeed, seems to consider it as an insufficient criterion. The objectors had
argued that Descartes has failed to rule out the possibility of a thinking
body. In his reply, Descartes (CSM II, 95, AT VII, 132-3) compares two signs of
real distinction: on the one hand, clear and distinct understanding of one
thing without another, and on the other hand, ability of one thing to exist
without another. Interestingly, Descartes describes understanding one thing
apart from another as his own criterion and states that a more reliable
criterion cannot be provided. If anything is to serve as a criterion for a real
distinction, it has to be applicable, in the sense that we should be able to
know when then criterial features obtain. If separability is a criterion for
real distinction, we should be able to tell with certainty whether or not given
things can exist apart from each other. Further, Descartes holds that
separability is not in this sense a certain sign of real distinction. Finally,
he boldly states that “if the proposed criterion for a real distinction is to
be reliable, it must reduce to the
one which I put forward” (ibid., emphasis mine). I am inclined to believe that
this strongly supports the view that Descartes believed complete understanding of
one thing apart from another, not the separability of one thing and another
thing, to be a criterion for their real distinction. Therefore, the dualism
argument can, it seems, be interpreted without referring to unactualized
possibilities, and if this is the case the dualism argument does not provide
systematic philosophical grounds against the actualist interpretation.
What
kind of account can the defender of the actualist interpretation offer for the passages
in which Descartes quite explicitly contrasts necessity with possibility? For
example, what can we make of the view that possible, but not necessary,
existence is contained in the concept of everything we clearly and distinctly
understand? (See Replies to First Objections, CSM II, 83, AT VII, 116.) What
else could this show than the fact that Descartes posited unactualized
possibles into his ontology? An actualist interpretation has been attempted
(Cunning 2002). To start with, it has been pointed out that in describing the
kind of existence had by created things, Descartes uses the terms ‘possible
existence’ and ‘contingent existence’ interchangeably. As Descartes (CSM II,
117, AT VII, 166) writes in the Second
Replies, “Possible or [sive]
contingent existence is contained in the concept of a limited thing, whereas
necessary and perfect existence is contained in the concept of a supremely
perfect being.” Again, in the Notae,
“existence is contained in the concept of God—and not just possible or [vel] contingent existence, as in the
ideas of all other things, but absolutely necessary and actual existence” (CSM
I, 306, AT VIIIB, 361). The original Latin text has sive in the former and vel
in the latter passage, and especially the use of sive supports the interchangeability of ‘possible’ and ‘contingent’
(see Nelson & Cunning 1999, 141-42). Now, if ‘possible’ and ‘contingent’
are interchangeable, we are further led to ask how we should understand
contingency. The supporters of the actualist interpretation have an important
restriction concerning the way in which they interpret Descartes’s view of
contingency. Namely, they should not include reference to nonactual entities in
their analysis. The following actualist account has been suggested: “If
contingent existence is just the kind of existence had by beings that depend
for their existence on God’s will, then the fact that a thing has possible
existence in Descartes’ ontology does not suggest that the thing does not
actually exist” (Cunning 2002). On this view, all things having possible
existence actually exist, but their existence is entirely dependent on God.
Possible existence is understood as nothing else than actual existence of
dependent beings, and necessary existence, in turn, is nothing else than actual
existence of independent beings. According to this analysis, the notions of
ontological dependence and independence are more fundamental than the notions
of contingency and necessity. However, we should now further ask how we are to
understand the notions of ontological dependence and independence, since they
are employed in the analysis of the notions of contingency and necessity. If
the strategy of avoiding any reference to unactualized possibilities is to
understand possibility in terms of contingency and, further, contingency in
terms of dependence, the analysis of dependence should not contain such
reference either. The notion of ontological dependence should not be analyzed
by using modal concepts in any robust metaphysical sense. The actualist line of
reasoning thus leads us to look upon modal concepts as very thin, perhaps even
useless or redundant.
Indeed,
Cunning has argued with Nelson (1999, 137, 140) that in addition to not
admitting modalities into his ontology and having no use for a theory of modalities, Descartes used
modal language in a way that should not
be understood as referring to metaphysical modalities, but instead as serving
other purposes. But what do the apparent modal terms refer to, if not to
metaphysical modalities? What, indeed, are metaphysical modalities, to which
Descartes’s apparent modal language supposedly does not refer to? As I
understand Nelson and Cunning, terms such as ‘possible’ and ‘necessary’, on
their interpretation of Descartes, do not refer to modal facts whose existence
is independent of the human mind. On
their view, Descartes’s apparent modal terms do not refer to objective
modalities, but instead they have some other function in his philosophical
language. If, then, there are passages in which Descartes intends his apparent
modal language to have a metaphysical import, the modal terms he uses in these
contexts should not be interpreted as having any modal force. Instead, they
should be understood as describing some non-modal metaphysical matter, a matter
whose analysis does not include reference to modal concepts.
One
of the purposes that Descartes’s apparent modal terms serve, according to the
actualist interpretation, has already been pointed out: sometimes Descartes
uses the concept of possibility while discussing the contingent existence of
dependent beings. The other uses can be seen to have an epistemic character.
Descartes might write, for example, that body can exist, if we have not clearly and distinctly perceived that it
does not exist (ibid.) According to this type of epistemic reading,
propositions whose negations we have not clearly and distinctly perceived, are
possible. Finally, modal language can also be used to express confused and
false thinking, where modal terms are, again, of an epistemic character. One
might say, for instance, that it is possible to square the circle if one does
not know modern group theory (ibid.) On the view endorsed by Nelson and Cunning
(1999, 138n1), Descartes had no more than what they call a no-theory theory of modality, for he had systematic reasons for
denying that any modal theory is
required. Descartes is thus held to be a proponent of a kind of redundancy view
or deflationary view of metaphysical modalities. When he intends his seemingly
modal language to have an immediate metaphysical bearing, he is discussing the
(non-modal) issue of ontological dependence of finite beings or ontological
independence of an infinite being, and at the other times this language should
be understood through epistemic terms.
The
remaining evidence against a necessitarian interpretation of Descartes’s
philosophy is his voluntaristic view of the causal origin of eternal truths.
The supporters of the actualist interpretation should be able to give an
account as to how their interpretation fits with Descartes’s voluntarism.
Interestingly, there is no difficulty of reconciling the actualist
interpretation with Descartes’s view of the eternal truths as dependent on God.
The proponent of the actualist interpretation can hold that eternal truths are
dependent on God and in this sense (non-modally) contingent. However, the
actualist, or deflationarist, line of thought does not entail that Descartes thought contradictions to be in any
robust metaphysical sense possible, because the actualist view includes the
thought that Descartes excluded metaphysical modalities from his system. And of
course, contradictory propositions are not possible in the epistemic sense
either, because we clearly and distinctly perceive their negations. Therefore,
the actualist interpretation does not water down voluntarism, even if it denies
that Descartes held contradictions to be metaphysically, or in any other sense,
possible. Any interpretation which has resources to maintain this combination
has, I believe, considerable merits.
What
about the worry that Descartes is committed to necessitarianism? Already on the
basis of the discussion above we can see that the deflationarist interpretation
does not lead to the view that Descartes is a necessitarian. Both necessitarianism
and universal possibilism, I presume, are doctrines which acknowledge
metaphysical modalities. According to a necessitarian, all truths are
metaphysically necessary, whereas a universal possibilist endorses the
metaphysical possibility of any proposition. So, as far as Descartes does not
accept metaphysical modalities, the attempt to classify his thought as either
universal possibilist or necessitarian seems misplaced.
I
find this result quite interesting, because, on the face of it, actualism prima facie points towards
necessitarianism rather than helps to account for our intuitions of
possibility. For instance, contemporary actualists typically are not
necessitarians, but, indeed, they strive to argue
that intuitions concerning contingency are compatible with the denial of mere possibilia. When a contemporary modal
metaphysician, who does not want to arrive at necessitarianism, faces the task
of analyzing our ordinary modal beliefs, she should provide semantics both for
propositions which concern things which could not be otherwise and propositions
which concern things which could exist (or events which could happen, facts
which could obtain, etc.) but which in fact do not. The celebrated and
straightforward way to go—understanding the modal concepts included in these
propositions as quantifiers over possible worlds—enables her to make the
intuitive distinctions between impossibilities, necessities, contingent truths,
and contingent falsities. Nevertheless, if our contemporary modal metaphysician
strives to follow her intuition that everything there is is actual, she has to
make a choice between three alternatives: (i) she can argue, contrary to
Quine’s (1953, 13) famous view, that quantification does not involve
ontological commitment; (ii) she can formulate semantics for modal propositions
without quantifying over possible worlds; (iii) she can provide an account on
which the commitment to possible worlds is metaphysically innocuous. Whichever
route she takes, she is confronted with the challenge of arguing that her
actualist analysis of modal statements is consistent with our intuitions of
contingency. According to the actualist interpretation of Descartes’s modal
views, Descartes has resources to carry out an analysis of this sort.
3.
Closing the Stage
We
may say that the actualist interpretation sheds useful light on the difficulty
of understanding what modal values truths are capable of possessing in
Descartes’s philosophy. The difficulty is highlighted by the apparent
implications of, on the one hand, his discussion of clarity and distinctness,
and, on the other hand, his view of eternal truths as products of God’s
creative acts of will. The former suggests the necessity of all truths, whereas
the latter points towards the opposite direction. If the actualist
interpretation I have been discussing here is plausible, Descartes’s views on
modality express a fascinating blend of necessitarianism and universal
contingentism: Metaphysically speaking, all truths are non-modally contingent,
whereas epistemically speaking every proposition we assess as true is
necessary. And as far as necessitarianism is a doctrine according to which all
truths are metaphysically necessary,
Descartes endorses no such doctrine.
Abbreviations and Bibliography
Abbreviations
AG =
Leibniz, G. W. Leibniz: Philosophical
Essays, ed. R. Ariew and D. Garber.
AT =
Descartes, R. Oeuvres de Descartes,
11 vols., ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery.
CSM =
Descartes, R. The Philosophical Writings
of René Descartes, 2. vols., ed. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D.
Murdoch.
CSMK
= Descartes, R. The Philosophical
Writings of René Descartes, vol. 3, ed J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch,
and A. Kenny.
E =
Spinoza, B. Ethics. In Spinoza: Ethics, Treatise on the Emendation
of the Intellect, and Selected Letters, trans. S. Shirley.
L =
Leibniz, G. W. Philosophical Papers and
Letters, ed. L. E. Loemker.
THN =
Hume, D. A Treatise of Human Nature.
Adams,
R. M. 1974. ‘Theories of Actuality’, Noûs
8: 211-31.
Alanen,
L. 1988. ‘Descartes, Omnipotence, and Kinds of Modality’, Doing Philosophy Historically, ed. P. Hare, 182-96.
Alanen,
L. 1999. ‘Intuition, Assent and Necessity: The Question of Descartes’s
Psychologism’, Norms and Modes of
Thinking in Descartes, ed. T. Aho and M. Yrjönsuuri. Acta Philosophica Fennica 64: 99-121.
Bennett,
J. 1990. ‘Truth and Stability in Descartes’s Meditations’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 16 (supp. vol.): 75-108.
Bennett,
J. 1994. ‘Descartes’s Theory of Modality’, The
Philosophical Review 103: 639-67.
Bennett,
J. 1996. ‘Spinoza’s Metaphysics’, The
Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed. D. Garrett, 61-88.
Bergmann,
M. 1996. ‘A New Argument from Actualism to Serious Actualism’, Noûs 30: 356-59.
Carriero,
J. 1990. Descartes and the Autonomy of
Human Understanding.
Carriero,
J. 1991. ‘Spinoza’s Views on Necessity in Historical Perspective’, Philosophical Topics 19: 47-96.
Cunning,
D. 2002. ‘Descartes’s Modal Metaphysics’, Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-modal/).
Curley,
E. 1975. ‘Descartes, Spinoza, and the Ethics of Belief’, Spinoza: Essays in Interpretation, ed. E. Freeman and M.
Mandelbaum, 159-89.
Curley,
E. 1984. ‘Descartes on the Creation of the Eternal Truths’, The Philosophical Review 93: 569-97.
Curley,
E. 1988. Behind the Geometrical Method: A
Study of Spinoza’s Ethics.
Divers,
J. 2002. Possible Worlds.
Doney,
W. 1955. ‘Descartes’s Conception of Perfect Knowledge’, Journal
of the History of Philosophy 8: 387-403.
Fitch,
G. W. 1996. ‘In Defense of Aristotelian Actualism’, Philosophical Perspectives
Garrett,
D. 1991. ‘Spinoza’s Necessitarianism’, God
and Nature: Spinoza’s Metaphysics, ed. Y. Yovel, 191-218.
Garber,
D. 1992. Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics.
Gaukroger,
S. 1995. Descartes: An Intellectual
Biography.
Geach,
P. T. 1973. ‘Omnipotence’, Philosophy
48: 7-20.
Gewirth,
A. 1941. ‘The Cartesian Circle’, The
Philosophical Review 4: 368-95.
Gewirth,
A. 1970. ‘The Cartesian Circle Reconsidered’, Journal of Philosophy 67: 668-85.
Hoffman,
P. 1996. ‘The Unity of Descartes’s Man’, Philosophical
Review 95: 339-70.
Kajamies, T. 1999. ‘The Concept of Power and the Eternity of the
Eternal Truths in Descartes’, The
Southern Journal of Philosophy 37: 189-200.
Kajamies, T. 2004. ‘Mais sa volonté
est libre: Some Motives for Modal Voluntarism’, SATS: Nordic Journal of Philosophy 5: 105-18.
Kenny,
A. 1970. ‘The Cartesian Circle and the Eternal Truths’, Journal of Philosophy 67: 685-700.
Kenny,
A. 1972. ‘Descartes on the Will’, Cartesian
Studies, (ed. R. J.
Larmore,
C. 1984. ‘Descartes’s Psychologistic Theory of Assent’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 1: 61-74.
Lewis,
D. 1973. Counterfactuals.
Linsky,
B. and E. Zalta. 1994. ‘In Defense of the Simplest Quantified Modal Logic’, Philosophical Perspectives 8: 431-58.
Loeb,
L. 1995. ‘The Cartesian Circle’, The
McMichael,
A. 1983. ‘A Problem for Actualism about Possible Worlds’, The Philosophical Review 92: 49-66.
Nelson,
A and D. Cunning. 1999. ‘Cognition and Modality in Descartes’, Norms and Modes of Thinking in Descartes
(ed. T. Aho and M. Yrjönsuuri). Acta
Philosophica Fennica 64: 138-53.
Osler,
M. 1995. ‘Divine Will and Mathematical Truth: Gassendi and Descartes on the
Status of the Eternal Truths’, Descartes
and His Contemporaries: Meditations, Objections, and Replies (ed. R. Ariew
and M. Grene), 145-58.
Quine,
W. V. O. 1948. ‘On What There Is’. Reprinted 1953 in his From a Logical Point of View, 1-19.
Rozemond,
M. 1998. Descartes’s Dualism.
Rubin,
R. 1977. ‘Descartes’s Validation of Clear and Distinct Perception’, Philosophical Review 86: 197-208.
Salmon,
N. 1987. ‘Existence’, Philosophical
Perspectives 1: 49-108.
Schouls,
P. A. 1989. Descartes and the
Enlightenment.
Sleigh,
R., Chappell, V., and Della Rocca, M. 1998. ‘Determinism and Human Freedom’, The
Williams,
B. 1978. Descartes: The Project of Pure
Enquiry.
NOTES
[1]
In this paper I shall work under the assumption that Spinoza is a
necessitarian. It should be noted, however, that although it is unquestionable
that Spinoza is a causal determinist, there is no consensus among scholars
concerning the question whether Spinoza should be interpreted as a
necessitarian philosopher. The main interpretive options seem to be: (i)
Spinoza is consistently committed to necessitarianism; (ii) he is
inconsistently committed to both necessitarianism and its denial; (iii) he is
consistently committed to the denial of necessitarianism; (iv) he is committed
to neither necessitarianism nor its denial. (Garrett 1991, 191-92; see also
Bennett 1996, 75.) According to Bennett
(1996, 76), the only way for an explanatory rationalist to explain the
occurrence of the causal chain is to claim that the entire chain is absolutely
necessary. This view sounds very strong, for it suggests that an explanatory
rationalist has no way of avoiding necessitarianism.
[2]
In Descartes’s philosophy, the denial of God-independent standards leads to the
denial of explanatory rationalism. Not so in Spinoza; his explanatory
rationalism is consistent with the denial of standards independent of God,
because Spinoza’s God acts from the necessity of its own nature
(E1p17c2)—necessity which provides the ultimate explanation of all things. In
Ep33s2 Spinoza notes that to subject, á
la Descartes, all things to the indifferent will of God is nearer to the truth than the view that
God acts for the sake of the good. This shows that Spinoza prefers Descartes’s
voluntarism to Leibniz’s intellectualism although he believes that voluntarism,
too, is untenable.
[3]
Descartes writes lucidly about automatons, human agents, and praise in Principia I.37: “The supreme perfection of man is that he acts freely or voluntarily,
and it is this which makes him deserve praise or blame. The extremely broad
scope of the will is part of its very nature. And it is a supreme perfection in
man that he acts voluntarily, that is, freely; this makes him in a special way
the author of his actions and deserving of praise for what he does. We do not
praise automatons for accurately producing all the movements they were designed
to perform, because the production of these movements occurs necessarily. It is
the designer who is praised for constructing such carefully-made devices; for
in constructing them he acted not out of necessity but freely. By the same
principle, when we embrace the truth, our doing so voluntarily is much more to
our credit than would be the case if we could not do otherwise.” (CSM I, 205,
AT VIIIA, 18.)
[4]
It is obvious that Descartes saw a close connection between the method of
leading a virtuous life and the method of pursuing the truth (See Fourth Meditation,
CSM II, 41, AT VII, 58). Descartes’s theory of error is structurally similar to
his theory of sin: both error (e.g. Fourth Meditation, CSM II, 38, AT VII, 55)
and sin (e.g. Letter to Mesland, CSMK III, 234, AT IV, 117) are based on lack
of knowledge. The reason why the theory of sin is absent from the Meditations,
Descartes tells Mesland (ibid.), is that he did not want to get involved in
theological controversies and instead wanted to stay within the limits of
natural philosophy. His basic view of evil-doing, the view that we cannot sin
unless our will is led by obscure and confused ideas, goes back to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: “every wicked man is
ignorant of what he ought to do and what he ought to abstain from” (1110b28).
Kenny (1972, 22-23) points out that Descartes expressed his view of sin as
early as in 1637. Indeed, Descartes writes to Mersenne (
[5]
Hume later made a distinction between indifference and spontaneity when he
insisted that we should distinguish “betwixt the liberty of spontaneity, as it
is called in the schools, and the liberty of indifference; betwixt that which
is opposed to violence, and that which means a negation of necessity and
causes. The first is even the most common sense of the word; and as it is only
that species of liberty which it concerns us to preserve, our thoughts have
been principally turned towards it, and have almost universally confounded it
with the other.” (THN, Bk. 2, Pt. 3, Sec. 2, Para. 1) Hume’s notion of
indifference is, however, different from Descartes’s notion. Whereas Hume’s
indifference seems to mean power to do or not to do something (see Kenny 1972,
17, 24), Descartes’s notion of indifference has to do with lack of reasons
pushing the will, or reasons balancing each other out or pushing towards
contrary directions. Indeed, Descartes explicitly admits that our will has the
power of determining us and says that it makes no difference to this power
whether it is accompanied by indifference or not (Letter to Mesland, CSMK III,
234, AT IV, 116; see also Letter to Mesland, CSMK III, 245, AT IV, 173). So,
Descartes also accepts the Humean sense of indifference in addition to his own.
The main difference, I think, between Hume’s notion and Descartes’s notion is
that whereas Hume thought freedom of indifference to be a power to do
otherwise, Descartes rather thought indifference to be a state of mind during
which this power may be employed. To use the term ‘Humean indifference’ is
perhaps a bit misleading, since the notion of indifference as power of
determining oneself is already present in scholastic philosophy. Jesuit
philosophers, following Luis Molina, understood freedom in terms of the
indifference Hume refers to. (See Sleigh, Chappell, and Della Rocca, 1998,
1209.) According to Kenny (1972, 17), the contrast between freedom of
spontaneity and freedom of indifference has survived throughout the history of
philosophy.
[6]
It should be noted that, just as the notion of indifference, the notion of
spontaneity was not Descartes’s invention. In one of his letters (CSMK III,
179, AT III, 360) he refers to the theologian Guillaume Gibieuf and tells his
correspondent Mersenne that while setting forth the view that indifference is a
defect rather than a perfection of freedom he has not written anything which is
not in accord with Gibieuf’s De Libertate
Dei et Hominis, a book on which Gibieuf worked throughout the 1620’s and
which was published in 1630 (Gaukroger 1995, 138). He seems to consider
Gibieuf’s view that the essence of freedom is spontaneity as authoritative and
is confident that his own position on free will can be successfully defended by
views provided by Gibieuf.
[7]
A clear statement of the view that Descartes’s modal concepts reduce to
psychological facts can be found in Larmore (1984, 66), who writes about
Descartes’s “subordination of logic to a psychological fact”. And according to
Bennett’s (1994, 647) reading of Descartes, “it is absolutely impossible that p” means the same as “no human can
conceive of p’s obtaining while
having p distinctly in mind”, where
the ‘no human can’ is not understood as involving logical modalities, but
instead is understood in causal and psychological terms. This seems to be an
outright expression of a psychologistic reduction of modalities. Bennett
elsewhere (1990), however, labels his view as a guarded (not quite full-blooded?) version of the psychologistic
view of clarity and distinctness.
[8]
Fortunately, there is only one passage which, unfortunately, directly supports
the view that Descartes was committed to universal possibilism. In his letter to
Mesland, Descartes (CSMK III, 235, AT IV, 118) writes that “God cannot have
been determined to make it true that contradictories cannot be true together,
and therefore […] he could have done the opposite”. I am inclined to believe
that this passage should be taken as a somewhat careless way of expressing
God’s independence of the eternal truths. Because of the seemingly close
connection between Descartes’s voluntaristic view of the origin of modalities
and universal possibilism, some scholars have argued that modal voluntarism is
inconsistent (Geach 1973, 11; Curley 1988, 42). Again, some scholars have
associated Descartes’s system with a some sort of irrationalism. Frankfurt
(1977, 54), for example, writes that “Descartes vision […] is that the world may
be inherently absurd”, and that the rationality we experience “may be nothing
more than a conveniently collective form of lunacy, which enables those who
suffer from it to communicate with each other, but which isolates them all
equally from what is ultimately real”. If
[9]
I have argued elsewhere that there is also a way to defend the conceptualist
interpretation of Descartes’s modal views by taking a close look of his
earliest proclamations of modal voluntarism (see Kajamies 1999).
Copyright
© 2005 Minerva
All
rights are reserved, but fair and good faith use with full attribution may be
made of this work for educational or scholarly purposes.
Dr. Timo Kajamies teaches philosophy at the University of Turku,
Return to Minerva (Volume
9) Main Page
Go to Top of This Page