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Descartes's creation doctrine and modality

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Content DESCARTES’S CREATION DOCTRINE AND MODALITY by Daniel Todd Considine _________________________________________________________________ A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (PHILOSOPHY) December 2008 Copyright 2008 Daniel Todd Considine ii DEDICATION to Gideon iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the members of my committee—Jim Van Cleve, Ed McCann, and Arnold Heidsieck—for their help in beginning and completing this project. I would especially like to thank Jim for his extensive written critiques on every chapter. While the virtues of my dissertation are a direct result of having worked with this committee, the mistakes are my own. I would also like to thank Gideon Yaffe, Larry Nolan, David Manley, and Dallas Willard for their helpful comments on various portions of the dissertation. Although I doubt whether any of them will agree with my arguments, my project has been improved immensely in my conversations and correspondence with them. Special thanks to Cliff Ando and Ray Jennings for help with Latin, and to Esther Kroeker and Shoba Sadagopan for helping me translate Descartes’s French. I am grateful to have worked around such supportive family, friends, and colleagues. I would like to thank my parents for their love and support. Special thanks to my fellow graduate students at USC for listening to my early chapter drafts, especially Daniel Yim, Walter Hopp, and Brian Glenney, and to my colleagues at Metropolitan State College of Denver for allowing me to finish up this project. And finally, I would never have been able to finish this dissertation without the generosity, patience, and support of the love of my life, Sharon: Sei tutto per me. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication ii Acknowledgments iii Abstract v Introduction 1 Chapter One: The Creation Doctrine and Possibilism 19 Chapter Two: The Conceptualist Analysis of the Creation Doctrine 53 Chapter Three: The ‘No-Theory Theory’ of Cartesian Modality 84 Chapter Four: The Conception of God 126 Chapter Five: The Ontological Status of the Eternal Truths 200 Bibliography 250 v ABSTRACT My dissertation is an exploration of Descartes’s “creation doctrine”. I seek to provide an explanation of what the doctrine means and how it fits within his philosophical system. The creation doctrine states that eternal truths, such as the truths of metaphysics, mathematics, and logic, are freely created by, and depend entirely upon, God. Thus, principles and axioms which we normally hold to be absolutely necessary are not only established by God (thus implying that they came into existence), but also are established by a free act of God (thus implying that they are contingent on a will). I address this subject in response to recent criticism that Descartes’s doctrine commits him to incoherence. I believe that Descartes’s doctrine can be interpreted more judiciously than has been done in the literature, given his apparent commitments to certain methodological, philosophical, and theological principles. The first half of my dissertation is the negative project of delineating the views which we should not take regarding Descartes’s doctrine. The second half is the positive project of what I think Descartes is trying to say in this doctrine, and how this doctrine fits into his philosophical system. The doctrine is important as I believe it is the foundation for Descartes’s views about modality, which I argue is a form of modal realism, and is an elaboration of Descartes’s precise theological views, which holds that God’s nature is entirely simple and immutable. 1 INTRODUCTION In several letters to Marin Mersenne, and in his Replies to the Sixth Set of Objections to the Meditations, Descartes makes the startling claim that “eternal truths” – such as metaphysical truths, the truths of mathematics, and the principles of logic – are freely created by and depend entirely upon God. This has come to be known as Descartes’s “creation doctrine”. 1 Representative of his claim are such passages as these: 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 Styx and the Fates. (Letter to Mersenne, 15 April 1630, AT I 145; CSMK 23) 2 [The eternal truths] are true or possible only because God knows them as true or possible. They are not known as true by God in any way which would imply that they are true independently of him. (Letter to Mersenne, 6 May 1630, AT I 149; CSMK 24) It is self-contradictory to suppose that the will of God was not indifferent from eternity with respect to everything which has happened or will ever happen; for it is impossible to imagine that anything is thought of in the divine intellect as good or true… prior to the decision of the divine will to make it so. … Hence we should not suppose that eternal truths ‘depend on the human intellect or on 1 I follow Margaret Wilson in calling the doctrine by this name. See her Descartes (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), especially Chapter 3. 2 References to Descartes’s works are as follows: the first is to Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (eds.) Oeuvres de Descartes (Paris: J. Vrin, 1897-1957), 12 vols., abbreviated ‘AT’, followed by volume and page number; the second is to the English translation by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (eds.) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 2 vols., abbreviated ‘CSM’, followed by volume and page number. A third volume of Descartes’s correspondence is translated and edited by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny (eds.) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), vol. 3., abbreviated ‘CSMK’, followed by page number. 2 other existing things’; they depend on God alone, who, as the supreme legislator, has ordained them from eternity. (Sixth Set of Replies, AT VII 431-436; CSM II 291-294) According to this doctrine, principles and axioms which we normally hold to be absolutely necessary, such as ‘2+2=4’, ‘It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be at the same time’, ‘Nothing comes from nothing’, are not only established by God – suggesting that they came into existence – but also are established by a free act – suggesting that they could have been otherwise. Normally, we would think that these kinds of propositions enjoy a necessity and timelessness independently of how God chose to create them. After all, these truths are eternally true: they have always been true and will always be true. Indeed, it is impossible to conceive how their opposites could be possible. But Descartes claims that these truths are created freely. The question immediately arises: how could something eternal be both created and contingent? One might be initially inclined to respond that Descartes is not being sincere in his supposed “doctrine” about the creation of the eternal truths: perhaps, it could be argued, he was merely being pious in his letters to Father Mersenne and to the theologians of the Sixth Objections, and did not intend any metaphysical consequences for this claim. Or one could be inclined to say that although he initially proclaimed his doctrine to Mersenne in the early letters, he later abandoned the doctrine because it did not appear in a substantial way in any of his published works. The first difficulty can be easily dismissed by taking account of the numerous letters to Mersenne in which this doctrine is discussed, and in several 3 letters to other correspondents. On a close inspection of those letters, it is difficult to deny Descartes’s sincerity in holding this view, not to mention the number of times he proclaims it. This helps to challenge the second difficulty, for the doctrine is stated in several letters two years before Descartes died, and the published works do seem to contain references to the doctrine, though no exhaustive account or defense of the doctrine is given. Given the texts, it does seem that Descartes is sincerely advancing this creation doctrine. How then are we to account for it? What is especially notable about the doctrine is that in all the passages where it is discussed, many other philosophical and theological theses seem to be tied crucially to it. 3 First, Descartes claims that the eternal truths are eternal only because God establishes them as eternal; God does not perceive these truths as eternally true, and then will them to be true in our world. Thus, we have a claim about the causal story of these truths: God causes them to be eternally true. They do not have any necessity prior to God’s willing them; their truth and necessity come entirely from God’s making them so. There is no temporal or rational priority of these truths beyond or before God’s understanding and willing them to be as they are. This thesis is troublesome because it seems to postulate a beginning for the eternal truths: they began to be true when God established them. As we will see, Descartes holds 3 The theses I outline below are similar to those that Gregory Walski argues for in “The Cartesian God and the Eternal Truths,” in Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, Volume I, eds. Daniel Garber and Steven Nadler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 23-44. I tend to favor Walski’s view that the creation doctrine is composed of these theses, though there is no substantial evidence that Descartes makes this argument. At the very least, these other theses always arise in Descartes’s discussion of the creation doctrine, and so it is clear that they bear some important relation to it. 4 that God wills them from all eternity, so there is a sense in which there is no beginning for such truths. Second, these truths depend upon God, even though they are created as eternal truths. Their dependent status is no different than that of all other creatures, though they possess eternality unlike finite creatures, such as human bodies. Their eternality in no way undermines God’s complete control over these truths; though eternal, they are still dependent on God such that if God had not created these truths, they wouldn’t have any being or truth. Some commentators have called this the dependency thesis about the eternal truths, noting that it is stated in direct opposition to many scholastic claims to the contrary. For instance, the Spanish theologian Francisco Suarez (1548-1617), who we know that Descartes read, held that the eternal truths would be true even if per impossibile God did not exist. And it seems that Descartes’s objectors in the Meditations hold something like this as well. Descartes seems to think that denying the dependency thesis puts an irrational constraint on God’s omnipotence. Since God alone is responsible for establishing the eternal truths, the eternal truths would not be true if per impossibile God did not exist. Third, God acts freely in creating these truths, such that nothing compels him to choose one alternative over another. Yet at the same time, God’s will is immutable and eternal. 4 In the first of three letters to Mersenne in 1630, Descartes 4 This apparent incompatibility is an issue I will treat separately. For now, it is important that Descartes argues that the two notions of freedom and immutability in God’s will are compatible. One could argue that in the act of creation, God freely wills in such a way that the creation is permanent, 5 engages in a dialectic with an imaginary opponent on the subject. He writes: It will be said that if God had established these truths he could change them as a king changes his laws. To this the answer is: Yes he can, if his will can change. ‘But I understand them to be eternal and unchangeable.’ – I make the same judgment about God. ‘But his will is free.’ – Yes, but his power is beyond our grasp. In general we can assert that God can do everything that is within our grasp but not that he cannot do what is beyond our grasp. It would be rash to think that our imagination reaches as far as his power. (AT I 145- 146; CSMK 23) The opponent holds that if God had really established the eternal truths, then he could not change them. For if the eternal truths are eternal, then they must not be subject to change. But if this were the case, then either God’s power would seem to be limited by a creation of his that was beyond his control, or God wasn’t truly free in choosing to create these eternal truths. In defense, Descartes argues that God’s will is free and eternal and immutable, and neither is an obstacle or hindrance to the other. Fourth, Descartes argues that God’s will and intellect are identical. Descartes thinks that it is a limit on God’s power to say that there are some things which God understands but does not will, for if everything depends upon God and comes about because of God, then anything in his intellect is a product of his own creation. Further, Descartes believes that God is a simple being: he is the only God, and he is not a composite substance. Therefore, there can be no real distinction between or at least its degree of permanence is established in the initial act of willing. Had God actually wished to have overturned, say, the eternal truths later, he wouldn’t have made them eternal. So in one sense, it is correct to say that God’s freedom is compatible with his immutable will; but the other sense of God being unable to change his creation once it is established is the difficult part. 6 God’s will and intellect. He says as much in the second letter to Mersenne on 6 May 1630: If men really understood the sense of their words they could never say without blasphemy that the truth of anything is prior to the knowledge which God has of it. In God willing and knowing are a single thing in such a way that † by the very fact of willing something he knows it and it is only for this reason that such a thing is true † . … [S]ince God is a cause whose power surpasses the bounds of human understanding, and since the necessity of these truths does not exceed our knowledge, these truths are therefore something less than, and subject to, the incomprehensible power of God. (AT I 149-150; CSMK 24) 5 This tenet of divine simplicity distinguishes Descartes from both scholastic views and other early modern views (especially Leibniz) on the status of the eternal truths. Descartes’s claim here is quite explicit that all truth and possibility come from God’s willing. Something is true or possible because God wills it to be true or possible, yet this act of willing is not something different from his understanding that it is true or possible. Nothing is independent of God, not even necessary or eternal truths, because by understanding these truths, God also wills them to be true. This doctrine of divine simplicity plays a pivotal role in our coming to understand Descartes’s doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths, as well as the theory of modality that this doctrine seems to suggest. For it seems that if God’s intellect is infinite in scope (i.e., there is nothing which God cannot understand), and yet God’s understanding and willing are one and the same thing, then it follows that God must will or 5 In the CSMK text, the phrases flanked by daggers indicate that the original wording is in Latin, unlike the rest of the letter written in French. Some scholars have been concerned to answer why Descartes wrote this way, and several argue that he is addressing a specific doctrine which conflicts with his own. For an illuminating discussion of the history of identifying this “unnamed adversary”, see T. J. Cronin, “Eternal Truths in the Thought of Descartes and of his Adversary,” Journal of the History of Ideas 4 (1960): 553-559. 7 establish the eternal truths since there is nothing that God understands but does not will. Fifth, Descartes identifies the eternal truths with the essences of created things. To Mersenne, Descartes writes: “it is certain that [God] is the author of the essence of created things no less than of their existence; and this essence is nothing other than the eternal truths” (AT I 152; CSMK 25). This is a rather surprising claim, for essences seem to be different kinds of things than eternal truths: the latter seem to be what is true about the former, but not in a way in which they are identical. Truths are said of an essence, not that an essence just is its truths. Descartes claims that God is responsible for the essences of creatures in the same way that he is responsible for their existence. But, this identity is nonetheless stated, and if God creates essences, and essences are the eternal truths, then God creates the eternal truths. Furthermore, Descartes briefly indicates how God wills the eternal truths: “from all eternity he willed and understood them to be, and by that very fact he created them”. This helps to ground the eternality of the eternal truths. Finally, the extent of God’s power surpasses human understanding. While we can understand some aspects of God and his creation, our intellectual scope does not extend as far as God’s infinite understanding. Nor should we ever imagine that God’s “faculties” operate in the same way that our human faculties do. In the early letter to Mersenne, Descartes reveals his motivation for unveiling the doctrine in the course of presenting his physics: “I want people to get used to speaking of God in a manner worthier, I think, than the common and almost universal way of imagining 8 him as a finite being” (AT I 146; CSMK 23). 6 Thus, confronted with the puzzling claim that while free, God’s will is also immutable, Descartes argues that God’s ability to act given such a will is something only God can comprehend. His power is, for us, incomprehensible, but our inability to comprehend God’s power poses no actual limit to that power. Thus, the power by which God brings about eternal truths – that is, completely freely – is compatible with our inability to understand that power. But given all these additional theses concerning the creation doctrine, there is a problem. It seems that the doctrine results in an incoherence. If God freely creates the eternal truths, there is a sense in which they are not really necessary. When we understand something to be necessary, it follows that it could not have been otherwise, or similarly, that its negation is impossible. We say that twice four is necessarily equal to eight, because it is impossible otherwise. Now if God had a free choice in creating the eternal truths, it seems that he could have chosen otherwise. According to Descartes, God’s freedom is not limited by what is in his understanding. Even though God’s understanding is infinite in scope and capacity, his freedom is unconstrained by any considerations or alternatives. In the letter to Mersenne, 27 May 1630, Descartes affirms that “[God] was 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 6 Cf. an earlier letter to Mersenne, 18 December 1629: “As it is, almost all our words have confused meanings, and men’s minds are so accustomed to them that there is hardly anything which they can perfectly understand” (AT I 81; CSMK 13), and a letter to Isaac Beeckman, 17 October 1630: “Philosophers and theologians are accustomed, when they want to show that something’s being the case is repugnant to reason, to say that not even God could make it the case. This way of speaking has always seemed too bold to me” (AT I 165; CSMK 27). 9 world” (AT I 152; CSMK 25). This second option, refraining from creating the world, is not problematic, because the existence of the world we hold to be a contingent matter anyway; it is the first option concerning geometry that causes difficulty since that truth is a necessary one. This difficult doctrine concerning God’s freedom to choose otherwise in establishing the eternal truths is repeated fourteen years later. In a letter dated 2 May 1644 to the Jesuit priest Denis Mesland, Descartes writes that “God cannot have been determined to make it true that contradictories cannot be true together, and therefore that he could have done the opposite” (AT IV 118; CSMK 235). This indicates that God could have chosen either different truths to be eternally true, or chosen not to create eternal truths at all. God’s freedom, Descartes thinks, consists in freedom of indifference: “that state of the will when it is not impelled one way rather than another by any perception of truth or goodness” (AT IV 173; CSMK 245). He writes, “It is self-contradictory to suppose that the will of God was not indifferent from eternity with respect to everything which has happened or will ever happen; for it is impossible to imagine that anything is thought of in the divine intellect as good or true, or worthy of belief or action or omission, prior to the decision of the divine will to make it so” (AT VII 431-432; CSM II 291). As a result, God’s creation of the eternal truths is creation ex nihilo. But if this is the case, necessity seems to be destroyed by bringing God’s creative power into consideration. According to Harry Frankfurt, the eternal truths are “inherently as contingent as any other propositions”, because even for God, these 10 truths hold no necessity. 7 Any proposition can be brought about by God, even those which we deem logically impossible. Thus, all eternal truths seem to lose their eternal and necessary status. And since Descartes seems to affirm that even the eternal truths could have been different than they now are (because God could have made them differently), calling them ‘necessary’ would be misleading. As E. M. Curley summarizes the problem: “Take any contradiction you like, God could have made it true. Hence it could have been. Hence, it is possible, even if false. Hence, anything is possible, there are no necessary truths”. 8 This is in direct conflict with Descartes’s assertions elsewhere that some truths are perceived clearly and distinctly as necessary truths, such as God’s existence. 9 Further, if this interpretation is correct, then many of Descartes’s other arguments would seem to lose their foundation of certainty: the mind-body distinction, the truth rule, and the proof of God’s existence, to name just a few. For any of these conclusions, the opposite would always be possible, given God’s free will; thus, while there might be a sense of certainty of the conclusion, the conclusion could nonetheless be false. And this would seem to undermine the entire force of Descartes’s quest for certainty of human knowledge. Descartes seems to have faced opposition to his view almost immediately. In the letters to Mersenne, one senses Mersenne’s difficulty in understanding what 7 Harry Frankfurt, “Descartes on the Creation of the Eternal Truths,” Philosophical Review 86 (1977): 42. 8 E. M. Curley, “Descartes on the Creation of the Eternal Truths,” Philosophical Review 93 (1984): 571. 9 This is stated in the Fifth Meditation: “It is the necessity of the thing itself, namely the existence of God, which determines my thinking in this respect” (AT VII 67; CSM II 46). 11 Descartes means by his doctrine: Descartes repeats the same points over several letters in response to Mersenne’s supposed persistent questioning concerning the creation doctrine. In the Fifth Objections, Gassendi objects to Descartes’s argument that natures other than God’s can be immutable and eternal. Descartes replies to Gassendi that the essences of things such as triangles are immutable and eternal “since the will and decree of God willed and decreed that they should be so” (AT VII 380; CSM II 261), but his replies have seemed to many to be too dismissive of Gassendi’s legitimate worry. And the sixth objectors, having seen both the Fifth Objections and Descartes’s Replies, maintain that Descartes was wrong about his creation doctrine, since they claim eternality implies independence. In 1675, Nicholas Malebranche, one of Descartes’s loyal supporters, rejected this doctrine because he felt it would upset science, morals, and religion: “God can do nothing and can rule nothing without knowledge, and that therefore His volitions suppose something”. 10 Malebranche thought that God wills in accordance with uncreated eternal truths in his intellect. In 1686, Leibniz followed Malebranche in insisting on the separation of God’s will and intellect, arguing that God chooses the best moral and metaphysical truths out of all the possible truths, possibilities which reside crucially in God’s intellect. The problem is made more formidable by the fact that the doctrine gets its fullest exposition only in Descartes’s correspondence and in the Objections and Replies to the Meditations; it does not appear as a philosophical argument or thesis 10 Nicolas Malebranche, The Search After Truth, trans. T.M. Lennon and P. J. Olscamp (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980), 586. 12 in the body of any of his main published works: The Regulae, The World, Discourse on the Method, The Meditations, or The Principles of Philosophy. Some early commentators, such as Ferdinand Alquié and Émile Bréhier, maintain that Descartes meant to leave this doctrine out of his “finished” works. 11 More recent commentators, such as Harry Frankfurt and James Van Cleve, 12 have felt that the doctrine commits Descartes to an incoherent position, and so Descartes himself may have recognized compelling reasons for cutting the doctrine from his official systematic view. Could Descartes have simply been mistaken about this doctrine? As Jonathan Bennett has put it, perhaps Descartes simply had a “blind spot” with respect to this doctrine undermining the rest of his philosophical system. 13 After all, the majority of Descartes’s explicit statements of the doctrine come from his correspondence, not from his philosophical works. It could very well be the case that Descartes’s never intended to maintain this doctrine in his philosophy, that the creation doctrine was something that Descartes only put forth as an aside to, and thus not a part of, his main philosophical beliefs. One scholar, A. Koyré, has argued that Descartes “changed his mind” about the doctrine: at first, emphatically proclaiming it to Mersenne in 1630, but then subsequently abandoning it at the latest by 1649. 14 Other scholars have argued that Descartes indeed seems committed to the doctrine, 11 As noted by Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, “From Metaphysics to Physics,” in Essays on the Philosophy and Science of René Descartes, ed. Stephen Voss (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 252n3. 12 James Van Cleve, “Descartes and the Destruction of the Eternal Truths,” Ratio 7 (1994): 58-62. 13 Jonathan Bennett, “Descartes’s Theory of Modality,” Philosophical Review 103:4 (1994): 639-667. 14 See A. Koyré, Essai sur l’idée de Dieu et les preuves de son existence chez Descartes (Paris, 1922), 19-21. This reference to and discussion of Koyré’s position is from Frankfurt (1977), 37-38. 13 in light of its incoherence. The extent to which they think Descartes is committed to incoherence is variable, but they nonetheless believe that Descartes is definitely committed to the doctrine and its unfortunate consequences. But this leaves many questions unanswered: how are we to understand the eternality of such truths given that they could have been otherwise? Doesn’t this entail an incoherence? For if they are created by God’s free will, there is a sense in which they could have been otherwise; and surely, nothing which could have been otherwise is necessary, if necessity is understood as that which cannot have been otherwise. And how do we account for Descartes’s insistence that God is no deceiver: surely, no benevolent God would make it false that eternal truths are necessarily true, while at the same time allow us to clearly and distinctly perceive that they are necessarily true. How is Descartes’s position defensible? And is it a legitimate way out of the problem when Descartes suggests that the power of God in this respect is beyond our comprehension? Is Descartes simply hiding behind his piety? My dissertation attempts to answer these questions. It is a defense of the coherence of Descartes’s creation doctrine, as well as an explanation of what the doctrine means and how it fits within his philosophical system. I address this subject in response to the recent criticism that Descartes’s doctrine is self-defeating. I believe that Descartes’s doctrine can be interpreted more judiciously than has been done in the literature, given his apparent commitments to certain methodological, philosophical, and theological principles. The first half of my dissertation is the negative project of delineating the views which we should not take regarding 14 Descartes’s doctrine. In this section, I discuss how Descartes’s theory of modality is distorted by several views in the contemporary literature. The second half is the positive project of what I think Descartes is trying to say in this doctrine, and how this doctrine fits into his philosophical system. Descartes begins his metaphysical investigations guided by certain rules of method; I believe that many commentators have failed to keep these methodological principles carefully in mind when interpreting Descartes’s creation doctrine. Given these, as well as Descartes’s theological and philosophical assumptions, assumptions which also seem to commit Descartes to this doctrine, a more illuminating interpretation can be offered. In Chapter One, I discuss two interpretations of Descartes’s creation doctrine and explain why they do not suffice: Universal Possibilism and Limited Possibilism. These interpretations introduce rather well the prima facie problem of coherence with Descartes’s doctrine. But both theses run contrary to a basic principle underlying the creation doctrine: that all truth and modality depends upon God. Universal Possibilism interprets Descartes’s doctrine to hold that there really are no necessary truths: given any proposition, p, it is possibly true. So any necessarily false proposition, such as 4x2=7, is possibly true under Universal Possibilism. This is because in the creation doctrine, Descartes argues that God’s will is entirely free, and all truths, even eternal truths, depend on his willing them to be so. So it is possible that God could have done otherwise in creating 4x2=8; that is, he could have made 4x2=7 because he is not constrained by any reasons. Or so the Universal Possibilist argues. 15 The proponent of Limited Possibilism, dismayed by this consequence, offers a more mitigated form of possibilism, such that for any necessary truth, it is not necessarily necessary. That is, God does indeed will some truths to be necessary truths: our intuition that 4x2=8 is necessary is preserved on this view, unlike Universal Possibilism. But the Limited Possibilist proponent holds that these necessary truths could have been otherwise, because, again, they are willed freely by God, and so they are not necessarily necessary. But this interpretation falters as well on the principle that all modality is determined by God. Therefore, a precise account of Descartes’s theory of modality is needed if the creation doctrine is to be rendered coherent. In Chapter Two, I address the interpretation that Descartes is a conceptualist about modality. The conceptualist maintains that modal concepts, such as necessity, impossibility, and possibility, are strictly features of our minds: they do not describe features of the world. The view dissolves the problem of incoherence by explaining away any discrepancies between what God wills and what is necessary, for what is necessary is only our perception of the matter. Though the leading proponent of this view, Jonathan Bennett, gives an admirable defense of his interpretation, I do not believe that it describes Descartes’s view of modality. Descartes does not endorse a thoroughly subjective view of modal concepts as Bennett claims. To be sure, the concepts of necessity and possibility are features of the human mind, in the sense that we understand the world and its relations via these concepts; but Bennett’s stronger thesis is that this is all there is to modality for Descartes. I argue that 16 Descartes holds an objective theory of modality such that necessity and possibility are properties of the way the world is, not simply the way the world appears to human minds. On the Cartesian theory, a necessary relation appears to us as necessary not solely because of the structure of our minds, but because that is the way the relation exists objectively. In Chapter Three, I consider the recent view put forward by Alan Nelson and David Cunning that Descartes holds a “no-theory theory” of modality. Specifically, Nelson and Cunning argue that Descartes’s doctrine of divine simplicity rules out his having held a modal theory about possible objects. I believe the creation doctrine passages, as well as other relevant texts, provide us with enough evidence to argue that Descartes does hold a specific theory of modality: the way the world is or could have been consists in the way God willed to create the world in all of its aspects, including the possible ways the world could have been. As long as these possibilities are willed by God, there is no incompatibility between their being and God’s simplicity. In Chapter Four, I begin the positive project of constructing a new interpretation of Descartes’s creation doctrine. I maintain that the doctrine is entailed by certain theses about the nature of God. In all the passages where the creation doctrine is expressed, divine simplicity, freedom, and omnipotence play an unmistakably crucial role. One defining feature of the doctrine is Descartes’s repeated claim that there is no distinction between God’s willing and understanding. He believes that a proper understanding of this simplicity of God is the key to 17 understanding the creation doctrine. I spend considerable time investigating what Descartes means by this claim. A second defining feature of the doctrine, and perhaps the source of most of its problems, is the claim that God freely creates the eternal truths, so a proper understanding of God’s freedom as Descartes conceived it is needed. One of my central concerns is to relax the tension between Descartes’s statement to Mesland that God “could” have done otherwise in creating the eternal truths, and the “common notion” that the eternal truths cannot be otherwise than they are. I believe the problem lies in understanding this “could”, as some commentators have already noticed. The “could” should only be taken as a reference to God’s absolute freedom of indifference, a kind of freedom which a limited intellect cannot have an adequate grasp of, but which we can have a clear and distinct conception about. As I argue, since Descartes conceived God to be an absolutely simple being, one need not draw a distinction between God’s freedom and his omnipotence. In Chapter Five, I consider the debate over the ontological status of the eternal truths. I want to argue that Descartes must have conceived eternal truths as (1) separate from and not dependent on human minds, (2) separate from but not independent of God, and (3) separate from corporeal substance; thus, Descartes seems committed to a Platonic view about these truths. I reject both the conceptualist and neo-Platonic interpretations of the ontology of the eternal truths. My argument for a Platonic understanding of the eternal truths is fueled partly from Descartes’s own motivation for advancing the doctrine: Descartes thought the creation doctrine was foundational to his physics. In his work The World, Descartes 18 claims that the three laws of nature he will deduce follow from certain principles about God, and he calls these principles the eternal truths. These remarks are stated again in the Principles. The methodology by which Descartes conducts his metaphysical inquiry is again applied in this case to the foundation of the laws of physics: “we must bear in mind the infinite power and goodness of God, and… we must always remember that our mental capacity is very mediocre” (AT IXA 80; CSM I 248). And given an early letter to Mersenne from 15 April 1630, Descartes clearly states that “it is God who has laid down these laws in nature just as a king lays down his laws in his kingdom”. These laws turn out to be mathematical truths, which are eternally true. Thus, we see how Descartes conceived God’s decrees to form the foundation of his physics, decrees which are independent of human minds. Moreover, we get a better idea of the kind of realist modality that Descartes must have endorsed. 19 CHAPTER ONE THE CREATION DOCTRINE AND POSSIBILISM As we saw in the Introduction, an immediate problem with Descartes’s creation doctrine is that it seems to involve Descartes in an incoherence. Specifically, the doctrine appears to suggest that necessary truths are not really necessary. There seems to be an incompatibility between God’s freedom and omnipotence and the necessity of the eternal truths, which we believe that we clearly and distinctly perceive. I want to argue that though Descartes is committed to this doctrine – in fact, I believe it follows strictly from his views on God – the interpretation of this doctrine need not commit Descartes to any incoherence. I believe a fundamental mistake has been made in the interpretations of Descartes’s doctrine, especially those that call his doctrine incoherent or “counterintuitive”. 1 In this chapter, I want first to review two interpretations of the creation doctrine: the thesis of universal possibilism and the thesis of limited possibilism. In reviewing these interpretations, I want to argue that they fail as adequate interpretations of Descartes’s doctrine because they violate some basic tenets of the doctrine. Second, I want to offer the beginning sketches of my own interpretation which I believe saves Descartes’s system from incoherence. I argue that above all, we must keep in mind Descartes’s insistence on three core ideas which underlie his doctrine: (1) our ability 1 Alvin Plantinga concludes that Descartes’s doctrine is only “strongly counterintuitive”, and neither unintelligible nor incoherent. See his Does God Have a Nature? (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980). 20 to have clear and distinct perceptions of the eternal truths, (2) God’s simplicity, freedom of indifference, and omnipotence, and (3) the incomprehensibility of God’s power, especially with respect to his establishing eternal truths and modality generally. It is only in light of these ideas that we can make proper sense of the creation doctrine, and that this sense need not imply any incoherence for his view of modality. Universal Possibilism Universal Possibilism is put forward as an interpretation of what Descartes’s creation doctrine implies about modal claims. It is the position that is a primary source of the incoherence problem for Descartes’s doctrine. We can define the view as follows: for any proposition P, it is possible that P. 2 Thus, for all we know, any proposition at all might be possibly true, including (importantly) those propositions we perceive to be necessarily false. And if any proposition is possible, then all necessary truths are reducible to possibly false statements, because their opposites could equally be possibly true. As James Van Cleve concisely puts it, “nothing is necessary and everything is possible”. 3 The principal motivation for this interpretation is Descartes’s claim to Mesland in 1644 that God could have brought it 2 This formulation of universal possibilism is Dan Kaufman’s, whose arguments against universal possibilism and limited possibilism are similar to mine. See his “Descartes’s Creation Doctrine and Modality,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 80:1 (2002): 24-41. The terms ‘Universal Possibilism’ and ‘Limited Possibilism’ are from Plantinga (1980). I will abbreviate the central view of Universal Possibilism as (p) ◊p, where ‘◊’ is the modal operator, ‘possibly’. I will also use the symbol ‘□’ for ‘necessarily’. 3 Van Cleve (1994), 61. 21 about that an eternal truth is false: “God cannot have been determined to make it true that contradictories cannot be true together, and therefore that he could have done the opposite” (AT IV 118; CSMK 235). Descartes claims here that even though God did in fact make contradictories false together, God could have done the opposite; that is, Descartes is claiming that God could have made contradictories true together. So much for the law of non-contradiction. What seems to be motivating Descartes’s statement to Mesland is his view that God’s actions are never constrained; indeed, they are entirely free. Nothing that God knows can determine any of his actions; to say otherwise is to posit something that exists prior to God’s creating it. That is, anything that God knows God must have created, because otherwise there would be something that God did not create and which, it seems, would not depend on him. 4 What is more, as there are no prior conditions of truth or goodness before God acts, it would seem that any action at all may follow from God’s will. So any state of affairs seems to be possible, because God could have brought about that state of affairs, even those states of affairs that we understand to be logically impossible. This follows from the simple thesis that God is omnipotent: everything is within his power and under his control. To his Sixth Objectors, Descartes writes: “If anyone attends to the immeasurable greatness of God, he will find it manifestly clear that there can be nothing whatsoever which does not depend on him” (AT VII 435; CSM II 293). This same statement about God was proclaimed to Mersenne eleven years earlier: “Indeed to say that these 4 This notion of dependence is vague. I discuss what Descartes understands by the term in Chapter Four. 22 [mathematical, i.e., eternal] truths are independent of God is to talk of him as if he were Jupiter or Saturn and to subject him to the Styx and the Fates” (AT I 146; CSMK 23). A contradiction results when we try to conceive of God as a being who is subject to any other being or principle. Since God’s omnipotence is not to be contested according to Descartes (for both theological and philosophical reasons), it follows that everything depends on God. Furthermore, God’s power is unlimited: not even the laws of logic provide limits to God’s power, according to Descartes. So in creating the eternal truths that he did in fact create, it indeed seems that God could have done otherwise. Thus, it isn’t “impossible” for God to have created an impossible state of affairs, such as ‘P & ~P is true’, or ‘4x2≠8’, had he so chosen, and this would also seem to account for its possibly being true. Likewise, because everything is under God’s control, any necessary truth is always such that God could have made it false. If we look again at the letter to Mersenne, 27 May 1630, we see Descartes saying something very much like universal possibilism. He writes that “[God] was 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”. Compare this to what he writes to Mesland: “God cannot have been determined to make it true that contradictories cannot be true together, and therefore that he could have done the opposite”; and to the Sixth Objectors: “Again there is no need to ask how God could have brought it about from eternity that it was not true that twice four make eight, and so on; … I also understand that it would have been very easy for God to ordain certain things such that we men cannot 23 understand the possibility of their being otherwise than they are” (AT VII 436; CSM II 294). This sounds similar to saying that God could have created eternal truths other than he did, and it is in this sense of “the other way God could have acted” that gives us the strange view that the eternal truths are not necessary. As Harry Frankfurt has pointed out, Descartes seems to be aware of this strange situation regarding the eternal truths. Frankfurt thinks this awareness is why Descartes “transforms the difficulty into a thesis” about the incomprehensibility of God. 5 Descartes writes that “there is no need to ask how God could have brought it about from eternity that it was not true that twice four make eight… for I admit this is unintelligible to us” (AT VII 436; CSM II 294). This follows from Descartes’s belief that God’s infinite nature is such that the finite human intellect simply cannot grasp it: “it is possible to know that God is infinite and all powerful although our soul, being finite, cannot grasp or conceive him” (AT I 152; CSMK 25). So we can grasp all those truths that God has willed to be eternal, though we cannot grasp the power with which God creates them; specifically, we cannot grasp how God can will them to be true from all eternity given that his will is totally indifferent. Nor can we grasp 6 that God could have made the eternal truths other than he did. But this inability to conceive how God could have acted otherwise is merely an indicator of the limits of our intellects. Thus, it looks as though Descartes must accept universal possibilism, because given God’s unlimited power and his absolute freedom of 5 Frankfurt (1977), 43. 6 Descartes makes a careful distinction between ‘understand’ and ‘grasp’. Cf. First Replies (AT VII 112; CSM II 81); Letter to Mersenne, 27 May 1630 (AT I 152; CSMK 25); Principles I.19 (AT VIIIA 12; CSM I 199), and I.41 (AT VIIIA 20; CSM I 206). I take up this distinction in Chapter Four. 24 indifference, God could make any proposition false, even the eternal truths. And if the eternal truths could have been false, then they are not necessary. But is Universal Possibilism Descartes’s view of modality? I believe the universal possibilist interpretation suffers several problems when applied to Descartes’s creation doctrine and his general statements about modality. First, we have a direct conflict with the statement of universal possibilism itself: Descartes never claims that there are no necessary truths, or that any proposition at all is possible. 7 There are several passages where Descartes claims that some truths are indeed necessary truths. To Mesland, Descartes writes that “even if God has willed that some truths should be necessary, this does not mean that he willed them necessarily” (AT IV 118; CSMK 235). 8 This indicates that God has willed some truths to be necessary truths, though he was not necessitated to will them. Although 7 Curley (1984) and Kaufman (2002) make this observation as well. Kaufman, interestingly, thinks that Descartes’s commitment to this point is more controversial than his commitment to the claim that the eternal truths are freely created by God. See Kaufman (2002), 25. An important distinction must be made, though, between the charge that Descartes’s doctrine commits him to the (unwelcome) consequence that there are no necessary truths, and the charge that Descartes denies that there are necessary truths. Universal Possibilism, as I see it, is making the first sort of charge. However, I believe that Descartes’s avowals that there are necessary truths will help determine how we are to interpret his creation doctrine, such that there are no unwelcome consequences such as Universal Possibilism: when Descartes says that P is a necessary truth, he doesn’t secretly mean that P is possibly false. 8 Some may object to this passage because the translation into English is not definitive. The original French is: “Et encore que Dieu ait voulu que quelques veritez fussent necessaires…” (AT IV 118). Anthony Kenny translates this as: “And even if God has willed that some truths should be necessary…” (CSMK 235). But Kaufman has recently suggested we translate ‘encore que’ as ‘even though’. See his (2002), 27. On Kenny’s translation, the first clause is stated as a subjunctive conditional, so one cannot assuredly say that God has created some necessary truths; the claim is only ‘had God willed some truths to be necessary…’. On Kaufman’s rendering, we get the firm statement that God indeed has willed some truths to be necessary. But even if Kenny’s translation into the subjunctive mood is correct (and I think it is), there is other textual support to be found for the claim that Descartes believes there are necessary truths. Interestingly, the phrase “encore que” comes up in the Discourse (AT VI 43; CSM I 132), and applying Kaufman’s translation of ‘even though’ would sound wrong. Cf. “encore que” in The World (AT XI 34; CSM I 91). See also note 9 below. 25 the main point of this passage is, I think, to demonstrate the freedom of God’s will with respect to necessary truths, we get the positive claim that there are necessary truths. In the Fifth Meditation, Descartes writes that “It is not that my thought [that existence is inseparable from God] makes it so, or imposes any necessity on any thing; on the contrary, it is the necessity of the thing itself, namely the existence of God, which determines my thinking in this respect” (AT VII 67; CSM II 46). There is no explicit mention here of a truth being necessary, but God’s existence is under consideration, and that existence contains necessity. Thus, a statement such as ‘God exists’ is a necessary statement (i.e., it cannot possibly be false), and is a fortiori a necessary truth. Descartes goes on to say several lines later that “I plainly see that it is necessary that [God] has existed from eternity and will abide for eternity” (AT VII 68; CSM II 47). So it is a necessary truth that God has existed from and will exist for eternity. In the Discourse, Descartes writes that the laws of nature “are such that, even if God created many worlds, there could not be any [world] in which they [the laws of nature] failed to be observed” (AT VI 43; CSM I 132). 9 A slightly more difficult passage because it mentions neither ‘necessary’ nor ‘truth’, it is still suggestive that the laws of nature are necessary truths in the special sense that there is no world God could create in which these laws of nature would not be true. And in the Sixth Replies, Descartes argues that “it is because [God] willed that the three angles of a triangle should necessarily equal two right angles that this is true and 9 The French original uses “encore que”, which if translated as “even though” would have Descartes claiming that God has indeed created many worlds. Kenny, therefore, seems to win the translation battle from note 8. 26 cannot be otherwise” (AT VII 432; CSM II 291). Though the term ‘necessarily’ occurs in the middle of the proposition, it is what Descartes says in the last clause that is important: the proposition about the triangle is true and cannot be otherwise. Now these passages merely show that Descartes argues opposite the thesis of universal possibilism: he does not argue that there are no necessary truths. By themselves, these passages do not absolve Descartes from committing an inconsistency, however, because Universal Possibilism is meant to show that Descartes is being, at the very least, inconsistent in what he says about the creation doctrine. As I stated in footnote 7 above, Descartes may never have intended to argue for Universal Possibilism, though his statements about the creation doctrine and modality may have ended up entailing that thesis. Second, there are several other arguments in Descartes’s writings that run counter to there really being no necessary truths. These have been called “systematic reasons” 10 for rejecting universal possibilism. The worry is that universal possibilism will undermine other parts of Descartes’s system which we would be unwilling to reject. One important consideration Curley raises concerns Descartes’s truth rule, that whatever I clearly and distinctly perceive is true. If universal 10 Curley (1984), 571. See also David Cunning, “Descartes’ Modal Metaphysics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/descartes-modal/>. Generally, any argument of Descartes’s that relies on a necessary truth as a premise in order to establish that a particular proposition is necessary would seem to fall into doubt on the present interpretation. For example, all of the arguments in Descartes’s physics depend on necessary truths. The argument for the claim that there are no vacuums (Principles 2, 18) depends on the premise that matter is extension; but this in turn depends on the claim that something cannot be both material and not material; and this can only be established by relying on the necessity of the law of non-contradiction. My thanks to Gideon Yaffe for providing this example. 27 possibilism is true, then there would be truths which we clearly and distinctly perceive to be necessary (e.g., mathematical truths), but which would, by universal possibilism, not be necessary. The truth rule guarantees the truth of any proposition which we clearly and distinctly perceive, and if we can clearly and distinctly perceive something as a necessary truth, then that truth is necessary. But under universal possibilism, the truth rule would be inconsequential, for it would not guarantee the truth of our clear and distinct perceptions. This, I think, shows that there is a problem with universal possibilism, not with the truth rule. The truth rule is fundamental to Cartesian epistemology 11 and constitutes that epistemology, unlike the thesis of universal possibilism, which is proposed merely as an interpretation of Descartes’s claims about eternal truths and modality. The truth rule, as well as all the other arguments from the Meditations which rely on that rule, would have to be abandoned at too costly a price. Finally, I believe universal possibilism errs in its very formulation. It seems to violate some basic principles that Descartes makes with respect to the creation doctrine. First, when he addresses the difficulties in conception raised by the doctrine, Descartes carefully reminds us that we can affirm nothing about God which we do not clearly and distinctly perceive to be true of him. Thus, we should not make any strict claims (where these claims are understood as setting limits) about what is possible or impossible for God, for our minds are by their nature incapable of clearly and distinctly perceiving this. This, however, is more a guideline than a hard- 11 This point is also made by Kaufman, who says that the truth rule is “the most important epistemic principle in the Meditations” (2002, 29). 28 and-fast principle: if we conceive P to be possible, we can safely assume that God, as an omniscient being, can perceive P as (at least) possible. This is justified by the principle that Descartes often invokes about the nature of finite beings and infinite beings: an infinite being is capable of perceiving everything that a finite being can perceive, but not vice versa. To talk of something being possible for x is to ascribe a modal limit for x. In the case I’ve mentioned, there is no problem in ascribing this power to God, since not only is God capable of perceiving as possible anything that we can perceive as possible, but there is no power which we can positively say God does not possess. But we cannot claim that if we conceive that P is not possible, then likewise for God P is not possible. In fact, everything that is necessary, possible, or impossible comes from God: “God alone is the true cause of everything which is or can be” (AT VIIIA 14; CSM I 201). That is, everything which exists or has being, either actually or possibly, is so because of God. It may be the case that God is not subject to these modalities, or modalities of any kind. Since we do not understand this aspect of God, we cannot make any positive claims about it. But we do understand clearly that all things depend on God; this stems from our understanding of God’s nature, achieved through the a priori investigation of our idea of God. And it is only what we clearly and distinctly understand that is to be granted certainty. Thus, because we clearly and distinctly understand that (1) certain truths are necessary truths, and (2) all things depend on God, we can be certain that these truths are necessary truths created by God. But we cannot clearly understand how God creates these truths 29 given his freedom: we are less certain of how it can be true that God could have made contradictories true together than we are of the claim that absolutely everything depends on God’s will. Since the latter takes priority over the former, it follows that even the eternal truths must depend on God’s will. The important point is that we know that the eternal truths depend on God’s will; but we do not know how the eternal truths could have been otherwise. The latter is a further, but illicit, speculation of the former, a speculation that is conducted by the imagination, not the understanding. And Descartes warns us that given our finite minds, we should not endeavor to solve this inference. In a letter to Mesland, Descartes says that when we come upon the difficulty of attempting to conceive how it is possible for God to have made contradictories true together, we must conclude the following: [T]he power of God cannot have any limits, and that our mind is finite and so created as to be able to conceive as possible the things which God has wished to be in fact possible, but not be able to conceive as possible things which God could have made possible, but which he has nevertheless wished to make impossible. The first consideration shows us that God cannot have been determined to make it true that contradictories cannot be true together, and therefore that he could have done the opposite. The second consider- ation assures us that if this be true, we should not try to comprehend it, since our nature is incapable of doing so. (AT IV 118; CSMK 235) 12 12 I think this passage from the letter to Mesland can be backed up by what Descartes writes in the Fourth Meditation: “it occurs to me first of all that it is no cause for surprise if I do not understand the reasons for some of God’s actions; … For since I now know that my own nature is very weak and limited, whereas the nature of God is immense, incomprehensible and infinite, I also know without more ado that he is capable of countless things whose causes are beyond my knowledge. … [T]here is considerable rashness in thinking myself capable of investigating the <impenetrable> purposes of God” (AT VII 55; CSM II 38-39). This is a rashness that Descartes repeatedly claims that he wants to avoid. 30 Descartes here is giving us a “guideline” 13 for solving the problems raised by the creation doctrine. It is the first two considerations which we can be sure about; but anything beyond these considerations that involve confusions and obscurities must never be admitted as true, not if we are seeking metaphysical certainty for our beliefs. The second consideration states that we are simply unable to conceive as possible what God could have made possible. To be able to conceive such a state of affairs as possible requires that we be able to grasp how the power of God is unlimited. A few lines later in the same letter, Descartes writes: I agree that there are contradictions which are so evident that we cannot put them before our minds without judging them entirely impossible, like the one you suggest: ‘that God might have brought it about that his creatures were independent of him’. But if we would know the immensity of his power we should not put these thoughts before our minds… (AT IV 119; CSMK 235) The last line sounds merely pious, but it is just a restatement of what he says in the previous passage: it is the limited nature of our intellects and the unlimited nature of God’s intellect which restricts us from adequately grasping the possibility of propositions such as ‘God might have brought it about that his creatures were independent of him’; because we cannot grasp the “possibility” of this proposition, we cannot say with any certainty that it is a possibility. So, in a sense, the 13 The general idea of providing a “guideline” or “method” for proper philosophical investigation is almost synonymous with Cartesian philosophy. An interesting passage from the Principles helps to explain the passage here: “it is very clear that the best path to follow when we philosophize will be to start from the knowledge of God himself and try to deduce an explanation of the things created by him. This is the way to acquire the most perfect scientific knowledge, that is, knowledge of effects through their causes. In order to tackle this task with a reasonable degree of safety and without risk of going wrong we must take the precaution of always bearing in mind as carefully as possible both that God, the creator of all things, is infinite, and that we are altogether finite” (AT VIIIA 14; CSM I 201). This passage will in turn support Descartes’s idea that the creation doctrine is crucial to his physics, which I discuss in Chapter Five. 31 conceptual problems that arise should not concern us at all, because our intellects are incapable of grasping certain aspects of God’s creation. But this is not to admit that God has in fact made these propositions possible. Universal Possibilism attempts to circumvent the thesis that there are no modal limits for God by arguing that there is simply no necessity. It is essentially to place a restriction on God’s power, thus violating the further thesis that God’s power is beyond human comprehension. Secondly, according to Descartes, we must always keep in mind that all things depend on God, even all necessity and possibility. This is something that we can clearly understand, and so we can be certain about it. But it is a violation of this principle to claim that something is possible, such as ‘4x2≠8’, prior to God’s willing it, or despite God’s willing that ‘4x2=8’ is necessary. We know that ‘4x2=8’ is a necessary truth, and so it makes little sense to say that ‘4x2≠8’ is possible. To say that ‘God could have made 4x2≠8’ really means ‘4x2≠8 is possible’ contradicts the claim by Descartes that all modality depends on God’s will. This would require a sense of ‘possible’ which is independent of God’s willing it. It is incorrect on Descartes’s system to say that something is possible prior to, or independent of, God’s willing it. Thus, for anything that is possible or necessary, it is so because God wills it to be so. 14 But this is not to say that his assertion that “God could have done the opposite” in creating eternal truths is wrong or inconsistent: that ‘could’ needs to be understood in terms of something besides possibility. Following an argument by Dan Kaufman, I think that the correct interpretation of this ‘could’ is to 14 From the Principles: “God alone is the true cause of everything which is or can be…” (AT VIIIA 14; CSM I 201). 32 understand it strictly in terms of divine freedom. 15 It is no rebuttal to say that God must have willed that ‘4x2≠8’ is possible, for this involves God not only in determinism but in deception. One of the important divine attributes that Descartes argues is God’s benevolence, an attribute that is just as important as (and as we will see, “identical to”) his power and freedom. God’s benevolence rules out his giving us innate ideas (in the guise of certainty) about truths such as ‘4x2=8’ while at the same time making it possible that 4x2≠8. And necessitating God’s actions is to ascribe a Spinozistic conception of God to Descartes, which is clearly contrary to his view of absolute divine freedom. I now turn to a consideration of another form of possibilism, Limited Possibilism. We will see that several of the problems plaguing Universal Possibilism apply also to Limited Possibilism; however, the latter view attempts to overcome some of these problems. For now, we should notice that as an interpretation of Descartes’s doctrine, Universal Possibilism essentially creates problems for the general Cartesian system more than it helps to specifically explain the creation doctrine. It contradicts at least two key claims that underscore the doctrine: that there are no modal limits for God, and that all modality comes from God. Limited Possibilism An alternative position to Universal Possibilism is a mitigated form of possibilism, called Limited Possibilism. It can be seen as a way of saving 15 I will discuss this idea in Chapter Four. 33 Descartes’s creation doctrine from the strict denial that there are necessary truths – a consequence which as we saw above is detrimental to both Descartes’s avowals of the reality of necessary truths and the systematic considerations including, importantly, the Fourth Meditation truth rule – as well as a “charitable” way of interpreting the difficult passages where the doctrine is being defended. The thesis is concerned to interpret the seemingly conflicting ideas that (1) the eternal truths are necessary, and (2) God could have acted otherwise in creating them. It attempts to reconcile the necessity of eternal truths with the possibility of God’s making them otherwise by introducing the concept of “iterated modalities”. 16 The idea is that eternal truths are necessary, but they are not necessarily necessary. That is, God did not act out of necessity in willing these truths to be necessary. Although they are necessary, they might have not have been created that way. God could have chosen otherwise in willing, say, that ‘4x2=8 is necessarily true’. So it is possible, in some sense, that ‘4x2’ could have equaled something other than ‘8’. Peter Geach, the earliest proponent of the Limited Possibilism interpretation, explains Descartes’s position as follows: Descartes held that the truths of logic and arithmetic are freely made to be true by God’s will. To be sure we clearly and distinctly see that these truths are necessary; they are necessary in our world, and in giving us our mental endowments God gave us the right sort of clear and distinct ideas to see the necessity. But though they are necessary, they are not necessarily necessary; God could have freely chosen to make a different sort of world, in which other things would have been necessary truths. The possibility of such 16 The idea of “iterated modality” comes from Curley (1984), who wishes to replace Universal Possibilism (what he calls the “standard view”) with a more charitable interpretation preserving the necessity of the eternal truths. I hesitate, however, in calling Curley a committed proponent of Limited Possibilism due to his own reservations about the thesis which he expresses on p. 581 n 22. 34 another world is something we cannot comprehend, but only dimly apprehend; … 17 If there are other possible candidates for necessary truths of our world, this is the sense in which the actual eternal truths are not necessarily necessary: by the very fact that some other truths could have been willed by God to be the eternal truths of our world, the actual eternal truths of our world are not necessary in any absolute sense. If it is merely God’s will which determines certain truths as necessary, then it seems that the eternal truths are only contingently necessary truths. Building upon the insight that Geach makes, Curley calls our attention to the 2 May 1644 letter to Mesland, which he believes provides strong textual support for Limited Possibilism: And even if God has willed that some truths should be necessary, this does not mean that he willed them necessarily; for it is one thing to will that they be necessary, and quite another to will this necessarily, or to be necessitated to will it. Curley claims that here Descartes is making an “explicit” reference to iterated modalities. 18 There is an obvious avowal that the truths are necessary (ignoring the ‘even if’ momentarily): “God has willed that some truths should be necessary”; but, more importantly, there is the additional claim that in willing these truths, God did not act necessarily: “this does not mean that he willed them necessarily”. That is, it is not necessary that the eternal truths are necessary. According to Curley, in this passage, “there are some propositions which are in fact impossible, but which might have been possible, and that others are in fact necessary, but might, nevertheless, not 17 P. T. Geach, “Omnipotence,” Philosophy 48 (1973): 10. 18 Curley (1984), 582. 35 have been necessary”. 19 And this can be interpreted as suggesting an iterated modal claim about the eternal truths. Another supporting text, which Alvin Plantinga provides, 20 comes from the Sixth Replies: God did not will the creation of the world in time because he saw that it would be better this way than if he had created it from eternity; nor did he will that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two right angles because he recognized that it could not be otherwise, and so on. On the contrary, it is because he willed to create the world in time that it is better this way than if he had created it from eternity; and it is because he willed that the three angles of a triangle should necessarily equal two right angles that this is true and cannot be otherwise… (AT VII 432; CSM II 291) Again, there seems to be an explicit claim that there are indeed necessary truths; but there is also the claim that these necessary truths could have been different, had God willed differently. As a way of vindicating Descartes’s obscure doctrine, Curley provides a detailed argument, drawn from the texts, that Descartes actually held Limited Possibilism. Here is his argument: 21 (1) (a) (p) (Wap → ◊~Wap) (2) (p) (p ↔ Wgp) 22 19 Ibid., 583. 20 Plantinga (1980), 105. Interestingly, though, Plantinga does not see the textual evidence distinctly favoring either Universal Possibilism or Limited Possibilism. He remarks that the evidence is “ambiguous”, though he thinks that it “favors the former”. This is rooted in the idea of the total dependence of everything upon God, including the truth and modal properties of all statements. Because every truth is within God’s control, no truth can be necessary. See his argument, 110-114. 21 Van Cleve (1994) reconstructs the argument this way, though I have replaced the modal operators with ‘◊’ and ‘□’. I use Van Cleve’s reconstruction because it employs a clearer notation than Curley’s, and I will comment later on Van Cleve’s arguments against Curley. 22 Actually, Van Cleve believes that the texts rather support the more specific premise (2´´): (p) (□p ⊃ [p → Wgp]). Against Kaufman, I do believe that the 6 May 1630 letter to Mersenne supports Van Cleve’s premise. Only the weaker claim is being made that if p is an eternal truth, then it is true only because God knows it as true. See Kaufman’s comments (2002), 34. This way of reading the premise from the Mersenne letter, however, casts doubt on one direction of Curley’s biconditional: Wgp → p. If we use Mersenne’s letter to support p → Wgp, where the entailment is drawn from the term 36 (3) □p (4) □p → Wg□p (5) Wg□p → ◊~Wg□p (6) ◊~Wg□p (7) ◊~□p (8) (p) (□p ⊃ ◊~□p) (9) (p) ~□□p, or equivalently, (p) ◊◊p Premise (1) expresses the “general logical truth about acts of will”: if some agent, a, wills that p (Wap), then it is possible that a not have willed p, provided that the agent possesses free will when willing p. 23 Premise (2) is a statement about God’s omnipotence: “for any proposition, it is true if and only if God wills it to be true”. 24 Premise (3) stands for any eternal truth (p is necessary); premise (4) reads “if p is necessary, then God wills it so” and follows from (2) and (3); premise (5) reads “if God wills that p is necessary, then it is possible that God not have willed that p is necessary” and follows from an instantiation of ‘p’ to ‘□p’ in premise (1); and premise (6) concludes the outcome of (3), (4), and (5). Premise (7) is tricky: it says, “it is possible that p is not necessary”. 25 Curley writes that (6) entails (7) because p ‘because’, then likewise we should be able to use similar language to support Wgp → p: “God wills p because p is true”. But this is precisely what Descartes is rejecting in his proclamation of the creation doctrine. Van Cleve has suggested to me in discussion that the ‘because’ here need not be equally applicable to interpreting Wgp → p: the two relata of the biconditional are mutually entailing without having the ‘only because’ running both ways. In my discussion of Curley’s argument, though, I leave this premise untouched. 23 Curley (1984), 580. 24 Ibid. 25 I say that this premise is “tricky” because some may reject the proof at this step as it seems to contradict premise (3). But this would only be a contradiction if (7) stated ‘~□p’, or if we assumed 37 is necessary only if God wills it to be necessary, which was stated in premise (2). If it is possible that God did not will that p is necessary, then it seems that it is possible that p is not necessary. Both Curley and Van Cleve invoke the principle from modal logic, ‘(r → q) → (◊~q → ◊~r)’, though Curley invokes it for justifying premise (8), Van Cleve for premise (7). Van Cleve’s version then adjusts Curley’s premise (8) by replacing the entailment relation with the weaker material implication, since a statement of logical entailment doesn’t follow from the preceding premises, especially in conditional proofs like this one. So if the conclusion is correct, then we have an interpretation that preserves Descartes’s statements that there are necessary truths, yet allows for understanding how those necessary truths are not necessarily necessary. Limited Possibilism is a very appealing interpretation, primarily because it strives to save Descartes from inconsistency. Some scholars have remarked that even as a general thesis about modal truths, Limited Possibilism is a more tenable view than Universal Possibilism. 26 Yet it cannot be correct as an interpretation of Descartes, because it violates several theses central to the creation doctrine. First, Limited Possibilism makes the same mistake that Universal Possibilism makes about (3) to be ‘~◊~□p’. The modal operators here are crucial. I offer below an argument for understanding the eternal truths as captured better by ‘~◊~□p’ rather than simply ‘□p’, as many in the literature have done. I think that the synonymy of ‘necessary’ and ‘eternal’ is a mistake in interpreting Descartes’s creation doctrine. ‘Eternality’ is a concept that is not adequately captured by ‘□p’. However, I do not think that ~◊~□p can be plugged into Curley’s proof, because premise (1) is doubtful. I explain below. 26 Plantinga, Curley, and Kaufman make this point. See Kaufman’s explanation, (2002), 33-34. But Van Cleve argues that Curley’s premises for Limited Possibilism entail Universal Possibilism instead. He takes Curley’s proof and deduces (p) ◊p from the same initial premises. I discuss Van Cleve’s argument below. 38 postulating modalities independently of God. Universal Possibilism states that despite what God has willed to be necessary, it is possible that these truths are false, because God could have acted differently. The second modal term here, ‘possible’, makes no sense on Descartes’s understanding, because the term is being asserted outside of, or despite, God’s will. If God willed that p be an eternal truth, then there is no possibility of it’s being false, or, to be more precise, there is no possibility of it’s not being necessary. This is what being an eternal truth is all about: it has been, is, and always will be necessarily true. The modality of the eternal truths has already been established by God, 27 and all modality depends on or comes from God; something cannot be possible or necessary without God having made it so. So if one argues that it is still possible that God could have acted differently, i.e., these truths are possible because God could have made these statements false, it is this further claim that comes in conflict with Descartes’s assertion that all possibility and necessity comes from God, and that we can admit what is within God’s power to do only if we clearly and distinctly understand it to be possible. One might object to this defense by claiming that God just set things up this way, that is, God has willed that there are no necessary truths, even though we perceive certain truths as necessary truths. 28 Given God’s freedom of indifference in willing the eternal truths, their opposites are indeed possible, though we do not see 27 Perhaps we can even say, on behalf of Descartes, that the modality of the eternal truths continues to be created by God, if we take seriously his remarks in The World that all of God’s actions are continuous. See his discussion at AT XI 37-44; CSM I 92-96. 28 This is the claim made by the conceptualist view of Descartes’s modality, which I discuss in the next chapter. 39 this possibility until we examine God’s creative power. But how then are we able to clearly and distinctly perceive these necessary truths as necessary truths? Recall that the truth rule guarantees the truth of our clear and distinct perceptions: if I clearly and distinctly perceive that x, then x is true. If God really did will for the necessary truths to only appear necessary, this would involve God in deception, a consequence strictly forbidden in Cartesian philosophy. Likewise, Limited Possibilism claims that eternal truths are not necessarily necessary. It is the first modal term, ‘not necessarily’, which looks suspicious. It is supposed to refer specifically to God’s freedom: God wasn’t necessitated to will the eternal truths that he did. But we are confronted with the same problem again. How can something be necessary or possible for God, without God willing that necessity or possibility? If we claim that the eternal truths are not necessarily necessary, then this iterated modality would have to have been determined by God. And, if this point is pressed, we return to the problem that God would have acted deviously in making eternal truths only appear necessarily necessary. I think that this objection points to the importance of Descartes’s proposed method for proper metaphysical investigations. He writes in the Second Replies that “when we are dealing solely with the contemplation of the truth, surely no one has ever denied that we should refrain from giving assent to matters which we do not perceive with sufficient distinctness” (AT VII 149; CSM II 106). That is, Descartes believes that we should give our assent only to those ideas which are clear and 40 distinct; 29 all other ideas which do not measure up to the level of clarity and distinctness, we should refrain from judging. And those ideas which are sufficiently clear and distinct, we should affirm as metaphysical truths. So our metaphysics will include only ideas which are clear and distinct. In the case of the proposition that the eternal truths are not necessarily necessary, or that it is possible that these truths are false, there is confusion, for we cannot comprehend how or why a non-deceiving God would have set things up this way. Therefore, these proposed solutions cannot be warranted given that God is no deceiver, and that we perceive the eternal truths to be necessarily true. Additionally, we should keep in mind Descartes’s insistence that even though the will of God was absolutely free in creating the eternal truths, the eternal truths are necessary, that is, the eternal truths are grounded in something necessary, not contingent. This is emphasized in the 15 April 1630 letter to Mersenne, where Descartes seems to be responding to an anticipated objection similar to the one I’ve raised: It will be said that if God had established these truths he could change them as a king changes his laws. To this the answer is: Yes he can, if his will can change. ‘But I understand them to be eternal and unchangeable.’ – I make the same judgment about God. ‘But his will is free.’ – Yes, but his power is beyond our grasp. The worry here seems to be admitting both that the eternal truths are unchangeable, and that they are freely established by God, for the latter claim implies that God can 29 Distinctness presupposes clearness. A perception is clear “when it is present and accessible to the attentive mind”, while a distinct perception is both a clear one and is “sharply separated from all other perceptions that it contains within itself only what is clear” Principles I, 45 (AT IX 21-22; CSM I 207-208). 41 change them. What Descartes is emphasizing is that for God, this conjunction is acceptable, though it is difficult to accept for finite intelligent agents with free wills. We must understand God in such a way that (1) he freely creates the eternal truths, and (2) the eternal truths are unchangeable. But we would never judge that any product of our finite wills would be unchangeable. Jean-Marie Beyssade explains Descartes’s aim here rather well: The incomprehensibility of the divine power, far from extending contingency to the domain of mathematical truths, where we perceive only necessity, is invoked, on the contrary, to safeguard necessity, where we can only imagine contingency. It is true that our imagination can only represent the work of a free will as contingent. … But the Cartesian reminds us that our inability to imagine a will which is free, and nevertheless immutable, and creative of truths truly necessary, does not prove [that there can be no such thing]. 30 Thus, the necessity of the eternal truths is “safeguarded” in the incomprehensibility of God’s power; in this passage, that power is expressed both in the statement about God’s incomprehensible power and about God’s establishing the eternal truths. So while God’s will is entirely free in creating the eternal truths, they are necessary due to the immutability of God’s decrees. This is where I believe Van Cleve goes wrong in his argument that Descartes grounds his doctrine of necessity (in this case, the origin of the eternal truths) in something contingent. His worry is that the attempt to do this contravenes the axiom of the modal system S4, ‘□p → □□p’. Descartes’s doctrine, because it grounds all modality in God’s contingent will, denies the entailment in the modal axiom, □□p: the necessity of an eternal truth does not entail that it is necessarily necessary. This 30 J.-M. Beyssade, La philosophie première de Descartes (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 112, quoted in Curley (1984), 576. 42 is the position of Limited Possibilism, which indeed seems to abrogate the modal axiom, replacing it with ‘□p → ~□□p’. Van Cleve claims that a theory that attempts this “leads directly to Universal Possibilism”. 31 In the first section of his paper, Van Cleve claims that from the same premises that Curley gives in support of Limited Possibilism, one can argue for the “stronger conclusion”, ‘(p) ~□p’, or similarly, ‘(p) ◊p’. His claim is that not only is the necessity of an eternal truth grounded on some contingent factor, but its truth is as well. So in the argument for Limited Possibilism given above, we can reach a similar argument for Universal Possibilism by deleting the modal operator ‘□’ from premises (3)–(8): (1) (a) (p) (Wap → ◊~Wap) (2) (p) (p ↔ Wgp) (3) p (4) p → Wgp (5) Wgp → ◊~Wgp (6) ◊~Wgp (7) ◊~p [from the modal principle] (8) (p) (p ⊃ ◊~p) (9) (p) ~□p, or equivalently, (p) ◊p Van Cleve thinks that, generally, if one can make necessity dependent on some factor F, then one can make the truth of what is necessary also dependent on that 31 Van Cleve (1994), 62. 43 factor. 32 Thus, in the argument above, we are allowed to eliminate the modal operator given this general fact about necessity, and argue directly for Universal Possibilism. Now, I think that Van Cleve is right about his ‘factor dependence’ principle. It is trivially true that if the necessary truth of P depends on F, then the truth of P depends on F. But I disagree that the factor in Descartes’s doctrine is a contingent factor. In the 15 April 1630 letter to Mersenne just quoted above, notice that the word ‘contingent’ is not stated, and that the claim ‘God’s will is eternal and unchangeable’ is made. When the opponent retorts that God’s will is free, Descartes insists on recognizing our intellectual limits when it comes to God’s freedom. Because God’s will and intellect are one and the same, and this fact is impossible for us to “grasp” (though we can understand it), it will be just as difficult to “grasp” the power of God’s freedom. But it is apparent that Descartes sees no incompatibility between God’s free will and his immutability. It seems that we are not to understand anything contingent about God’s free will, only that his will is immutable. In fact, Descartes makes several references to divine immutability. In The World, he writes that “it is easy to accept that God, who is, as everyone must know immutable, always acts in the same way” (AT XI 38; CSM I 93). Later, he asks (rhetorically) “what more firm and solid foundation could one find for establishing a truth, even if one wished to choose it at will, than the very firmness and immutability which is in God?” (AT XI 43; CSM I 96, my emphasis). In the Meditations, we see that 32 Ibid. 44 Descartes’s idea of God represents him as “eternal, infinite, <immutable>”, among other attributes. 33 And an even more forceful claim is made in the Conversation with Burman: For although God is completely indifferent with respect to all things, he necessarily made the decrees he did, since he necessarily willed what was best, even though it was of his own will that he did what was best. We should not make a separation here between the necessity and the indifference that apply to God’s decrees; although his actions were completely indifferent, they were also completely necessary. (AT V 166; CSMK 348) So it does not seem that Descartes is grounding his modal theory on anything contingent, for he does not think that the will of God (and especially the decrees of God) contains any contingency. The upshot is that premise (1) of Van Cleve’s argument cannot be instantiated for Descartes’s God. 34 Van Cleve accepts the general principle about the “contingency of volition”, but this principle is not so general given that God’s will is unchanging. Descartes happily admits that all conditions of truth and possibility depend on God’s will: “God alone is the true cause of everything which is or can be” (AT VIIIA 14; CSM I 201). The basis upon which God acts turns out to be necessary with respect to the creation of eternal truths, yet this is wholly distinct from saying that God was necessitated (i.e., determined) to act the way he did. I think what all this shows is that the factor dependence principle, the S4 axiom ‘□p → □□p’, and the modal principle ‘(r → q) & 33 AT VII 40; CSM II 28. The bracketed text indicates the added 1647 French version of the Meditations, published with Descartes’s approval. It is interesting to note that ‘immutability’ in this passage does not appear in either the first or second edition of the Latin version. This happens again three pages later: “by the word ‘God’ I understand a substance that is infinite, <eternal, immutable,> independent, …” (AT VII 45; CSM II 31). In the Fifth Meditation, Descartes again writes that his idea of God is “an image of a true and immutable nature” (AT VII 68; CSM II 47). 34 I make the same claim against Curley’s argument below. I address the point here in response to Van Cleve’s explicit argument that necessity is being grounded in a contingent factor. 45 (◊~q → ◊~r)’ are all compatible with Descartes’s creation doctrine. I do not dispute Van Cleve’s reduction of Limited Possibilism to Universal Possibilism; that seems correct in light of the factor dependence principle. But I dispute his acceptance of premise (5) for it does not apply to the divine agency according to Descartes. Returning to my objections to Limited Possibilism, it seems that, secondly, Limited Possibilism conflicts with the important view Descartes holds concerning God’s omnipotence. Descartes believes that absolutely everything depends on God. If God so chooses, he could violate the laws of logic: “the power of God cannot have any limits” (AT IV 118; CSMK 235, my emphasis). This is not to say that God can do absolutely anything, as some scholars 35 have held Descartes to be saying; Descartes is careful not to make this bold claim. Rather, he suspends any judgment about the extent of what God can do. His argument is that since we cannot impose any limits to God given his omnipotence, we are not in any position to say what God can or cannot ultimately do. The only exception is that we can affirm that God can bring about anything which we clearly and distinctly conceive to be true or possible. So, God does not recognize the laws of logic to be true and eternal and will according to them; rather, it is because he wills them that they are true and eternal. The interpretation that Limited Possibilism is making places a limit on God’s power: it claims that God cannot make the eternal truths necessarily necessary, even though, according to Descartes, all modality is within God’s control. If all modality is within God’s control, then the thesis of Limited Possibilism puts a constraint on God’s 35 Most notably, Margaret Wilson (1978). 46 power. Because of this conflict, and Descartes’s unwillingness to assign limits to God, it looks like Limited Possibilism must go. One might object to this defense by pointing to Descartes’s letter to Regius, June 1642, where he seems to acknowledge that something is indeed impossible for God: God can surely bring about whatever we can clearly understand; the only things that are said to be impossible for God to do are those which involve a conceptual contradiction, that is, which are not intelligible. (AT III 567; CSMK 214) This is a troubling statement, especially given Descartes’s insistence that we cannot assert that God “cannot do what is beyond our grasp” (AT I 146; CSMK 23), and given his statement that we should never “say of anything that it cannot be brought about by God” (AT V 224; CSMK 358). But this passage should not to be taken as a literal claim about what God cannot do. We should keep in mind that Descartes is engaged here in a discussion about the distinction between substances known on the basis of conceiving them as separate. He explains to Regius that the only way we know they are distinct is through our understanding. Then he continues: “And God can surely bring about whatever we can clearly understand”. This is part of the well- known Sixth Meditation argument for the distinction between mind and body; the context, then, is quite specific to that topic, and not to the subject of God’s ability. 36 36 I borrow the idea of the “significance of context” from Marleen Rozemond, “Descartes’s Ontology of the Eternal Truths,” in Contemporary Perspectives on Early Modern Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Vere Chappell, eds. Paul Hoffman, David Owen, and Gideon Yaffe (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2008), 41-63. 47 Also, consider the claim, ‘God can bring about whatever we can clearly understand’. This can be stated in the hypothetical as ‘If we can clearly understand something, then God can bring it about’. Transposing this, we get ‘If God cannot bring something about, then we cannot clearly understand it’. And this sounds like what Descartes is saying in the second part of the above passage. The confusion comes from the ‘cannot’, because it seems that this is suggesting there is something that God cannot do, when Descartes is merely trying to say that God is at least capable of bringing about what we clearly and distinctly understand; those things which cause a contradiction in our minds are things God does not deem true. As a last point, notice that Descartes writes, “the only things that are said to be impossible for God…” (my emphasis). This might indicate that he does not stand behind the saying himself and was cautiously keeping away from the stronger (and perhaps blasphemous) phrasing ‘the only things that are impossible for God’. Despite this, however, Descartes continues the discussion, and now seems to be referring directly to God’s ability: “even if God conjoins and unites them as much as he can, he cannot thereby divest himself of his omnipotence and lay down his power of separating them” (AT III 567; CSMK 214). Although this sounds again like an affirmation that God cannot do something, in this case, discard his omnipotence, it is a general claim that omnipotence is part of God’s nature. It is an eternal truth about God, not about something God creates. 37 37 What is more, the remark is made in the subjunctive, so it may carry no textual weight against my point. 48 Third, the proof offered by Curley contains two doubtful premises. Consider premise (1). It is supposed to be a “general logical truth about acts of will” according to Curley. This implies that for any agent possessing a will, it follows strictly that ‘it is possible that a not will p’. I agree that this general principle is applicable to an agent of whose will we have a sufficient understanding, i.e., a human will; however, I do not think it is reasonable to extend this principle to God’s will on Descartes’s understanding. We know from the Fourth Meditation that Descartes does not understand the human will to be the same as God’s will: “God’s will is incomparably greater than mine, both in virtue of the knowledge and power that accompany it and make it more firm and efficacious, and also in virtue of its object, in that it ranges over a greater number of items” (AT VII 57; CSM II 40). And in the Sixth Replies, Descartes writes: As for the freedom of the will, the way in which it exists in God is quite different from the way in which it exists in us. … [T]he supreme indifference to be found in God is the supreme indication of his omnipotence. … Hence, the indifference which belongs to human freedom is very different from that which belongs to divine freedom. (AT VII 431-32; CSM II 291-92) 38 It is true that Descartes makes an analogy between God’s will and the human will, saying that the two kinds of will are the same “when considered as will in the essential and strict sense”, but this “essential and strict sense” turns out merely to be the ability “to affirm or deny, to pursue or avoid” (AT VII 57; CSM II 40). In terms of its scope, our will is no different from God: we are able, in principle, to cast 38 Cf. the letter to Mersenne, 21 April 1641: “indifference in our case is rather a defect than a perfection of freedom; but it does not follow that the same is the case with God” (AT III 360; CSMK 179). 49 judgment on anything that is put before our minds. The most obvious differences between God’s will and ours, however, are that (1) God’s will is a creative will: God creates simply by willing (humans do not possess this power); and (2) God’s will is a single, simple faculty of both intellect and will. This follows from God’s simplicity, a thesis that is repeated throughout Descartes’s explanation of the creation doctrine. So premise (1) fails to be a general principle, which is unfortunate since the instantiation at (5) is then unwarranted. Premise (3) fares no better. It is quite possible that all Universal Possibilist and Limited Possibilist proponents accept premise (3) as the correct understanding of ‘eternal truth’. As I stated in footnote 25 above, I believe the statement ‘□p’ fails to capture the meaning of ‘eternal truth’, especially Descartes’s precise meaning of that notion. Given Descartes’s scarce and scattered discussion of eternal truths, there is no easy translation of the notion. As I will discuss below in Chapter Five, Descartes often equates ‘eternal truths’ with ‘primary notions’, ‘common notions’, and ‘essences’. Because of the richness here, saying that the eternal truths are necessary truths doesn’t convey a sufficient understanding of them. I believe that Descartes intends for eternal truths to be construed as necessarily necessary, given (1) our clear and distinct perceptions of them as eternal, (2) their dependence on God’s immutability (which will include his simplicity, freedom, and omnipotence), and (3) our finite understanding of God. Most commentators on the creation doctrine have not taken such a strong stand on defining ‘eternal truth’ mainly because Descartes gives no explicit definition. In light of this, I do not think we should limit our 50 understanding of what Descartes means by ‘eternal truth’ to just ‘necessary truth’. I think that the creation doctrine implies a stronger reading: ~◊~□p, that it is impossible for p not to be (or have been) necessary. 39 I think that given Descartes’s views on God and the kind of clear and distinct perception he can have of propositions such as the eternal truths, nothing else could be meant by ‘eternal truth’. My reading does not suffer the same objection concerning the modal operator occurring outside the scope of God’s will, because it is the product of a clear and distinct perception about the particular eternal truth: they are such that it is impossible that they could fail to be necessary in any way. And on this new interpretation, there is no conflict about its truth status. However, this interpretation needs to be reconciled with Descartes’s troubling statement to Mesland that “God cannot have been determined to make it true that contradictories cannot be true together, and therefore that he could have done the opposite” (AT IV 118; CSMK 235). I will consider this doctrine of God’s freedom in Chapter Four. A prima facie reason that these two claims do not conflict is that Descartes, in the Mesland letter, is emphasizing God’s freedom with respect to his original choice to will the eternal truths. Once willed, they are continually sustained by God (indeed, they are eternally sustained). So to say that God could 39 James Van Cleve and Ed McCann have suggested to me that there is no difference between my assertion ‘~◊~□p’ and ‘□□p’. I am willing to accept this identity of modal logic, especially because it stresses the immutability of eternal truths as Descartes conceives them. My only reservation is that it advances an iterated modality akin to Curley’s argument for Limited Possibilism, which I find problematic as it runs the risk of attributing a modal status to God’s will. As I suggest in this paragraph, as long as the necessity operator is seen as being under God’s control, then there is no problem in identifying an eternal truth as ‘□□p’ or, alternatively, as ‘~◊~□p’. 51 have done otherwise or that God can change them is really only to say that had God willed different eternal truths, these would be eternally true. But this is not to say that these other truths are possible: their possibility is ruled out by the fact that there are eternal truths. Their content establishes them as eternally true. Had God established different eternal truths, there would have been a different modality, such that our current concepts of ‘possible’ and ‘necessary’ cannot reach to. We cannot evaluate a different set of standards by the current standards we have been created with. This line of reasoning runs dangerously close to simply admitting that there is some sense in which the negation of an eternal truth is possible, as well to admitting a conceptualist view of modality. Coupled with this problem is Descartes’s (apparently serious) admonition that “even if this be true [i.e., that God could have willed otherwise], we should not try to comprehend it, since our nature is incapable of doing so” (AT IV 118; CSMK 235). Is Descartes claiming that there are certain possibilities which are something conceivable only to God, but which we know nothing about? I think not, but this turns on a precise understanding of Descartes’s belief that there is an incompatibility between saying “God could have made contradictories true together” and “contradictions are possible”, or that the first implies the second. The first deals with our mediocre understanding of divine freedom, and is often Descartes’s way of stating that he cannot clearly and distinctly understand how something could be either possible or impossible for God; the second to metaphysical possibilities (or in this case, impossibilities), something 52 which he can clearly and distinctly perceive. I will return to this problem below, after I consider the last thesis of conceptualism. I have shown in this chapter that both Universal and Limited Possibilism face serious difficulties as interpretations of the creation doctrine, both with respect to their individual claims about how the eternal truths are contingent, and with respect to their possibilist form. Both theses attempt to make a modal claim about eternal truths which oversteps two pivotal principles of the creation doctrine: that all modality comes from God, and that there are no modal limits for God. And both theses seem to take a limiting view of what Descartes’s means by ‘eternal truth’. Thus, these theses are not adequate interpretations of Descartes’s difficult doctrine; we must search for a better understanding of it and how it fits into his metaphysical, theological, and physical system along another interpretation. Before I begin that, I turn to the view that Descartes holds a conceptualist understanding of modality. 53 CHAPTER TWO THE CONCEPTUALIST ANALYSIS OF THE CREATION DOCTRINE In this chapter, I describe the conceptualist interpretation of the creation doctrine and offer several reasons why we should reject it. This interpretation has been advocated by Jonathan Bennett and defended recently by Timo Kajamies. 1 Bennett’s proposed solution to problems arising from the creation doctrine is that we read the modal terms in the doctrine entirely subjectively, and this interpretation is supported in turn by some of the relevant texts. Bennett’s interpretation, however, relies primarily on passages which do not provide adequate support for his view, while other passages can be brought to bear on the matter which show that Descartes never intended a strictly subjective view of modality. Against Bennett and Kajamies, I argue that Descartes must hold an objective or realist understanding of modality, though he does concede that our modal concepts guide our understanding. Of course, our concepts of modality are conceptual and thus subjective. But Bennett and Kajamies argue that Descartes defines ‘necessity’ and ‘possibility’ strictly subjectively. What my interpretation advocates is the reverse of what the conceptualist theory holds: the objective modalities determine or condition our modal concepts, not that our modal concepts determine or constitute the objective world. The latter view, I contend, is not Descartes’s view of modality. 1 Bennett (1994); Timo Kajamies, “The Concept of Power and the Eternity of the Eternal Truths in Descartes,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 37 (1999): 189-200. 54 According to the conceptualist analysis of modality, modal concepts – e.g., necessity, impossibility, and possibility – are strictly features of our minds: they do not describe features of the world. 2 Modal concepts refer only to how objects, facts, or states of affairs relate to our understanding of such objects, facts, or states of affairs. That is, modal concepts are to be understood or defined only conceptually. A proposition or state of affairs as such (whether mathematical, or physical) contains no necessity; only our thought imposes necessity onto it. As W. V. Quine once put the matter, “necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about”. 3 The interpretive problem is whether this is the case for Descartes’s theory of modality. An early proponent of the conceptualist interpretation, Margaret Wilson, writes, “Descartes did regard the ‘necessity’ we perceive in mathematical propositions as in some sense and degree a function of the constitution of our minds”. 4 And according to Bennett, who bases his argument on Wilson’s discussion, the modal concepts in Descartes’s philosophy “should be understood or analyzed in terms of what does or does not lie within the compass of our ways of thinking”. 5 Bennett believes that Descartes really intends a subjective meaning for the concepts 2 The conceptualist view was first stated by Margaret Wilson (1978), 125-131. The view can also be found in Jacques Bouveresse, “La théorie du possible chez Descartes,” Revue International de Philosophie 146 (1983): 293-310; Hidé Ishiguro, “The Status of Necessity and Impossibility in Descartes,” in Essays on Descartes’s Meditations, ed. Amelie Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 459-471; Lilli Alanen, “Descartes, Conceivability, and Logical Modality,” in Thought Experiments in Science and Philosophy, eds. Tamara Horowitz and Gerald J. Massey (Savage, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991), 65-84. The view gets its fullest development and defense by Bennett (1994) and Kajamies (1999). 3 W. V. Quine, “Grades of Modal Involvement,” in Ways of Paradox and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 176. 4 Wilson (1978), 125. 5 Bennett (1994), 647. 55 ‘possible’, ‘necessary’, and ‘impossible’, especially regarding the creation doctrine, as such an interpretation dissolves most of the problems of coherence surrounding the doctrine. To countenance an objective modality in addition to our concept of that modality, says Bennett, is to go beyond what “we are entitled to give to our modal statements”. 6 Bennett is concerned to square Descartes’s contention that God could have made necessary truths false with the rest of his philosophical theses, such as the truth rule and the argument for the distinction between mind and body. If the view that God could have made necessary truths false entails universal possibilism, or worse, that our judgments on the basis of our clear and distinct perceptions of any necessary truth could be false, then Descartes would be undermining his other philosophical arguments simply because of adherence to this thorny doctrine. For example, if the creation doctrine – which Bennett also refers to as the “voluntarist” thesis – is brought to bear on the cogito argument from the second meditation, we could never rely on the truth of the premise 7 that whatever thinks must exist, and so could never get to “I exist”. But rather than rejecting the creation doctrine as some “blind spot” which Descartes should have avoided, Bennett seeks to accommodate the doctrine, especially following Descartes’s own emphatic endorsement of it to Mersenne in 1630. 6 Ibid. 7 There are some scholars who believe the cogito is not an argument and so would not contain any premises. See Jaakko Hintikka, “Cogito Ergo Sum: Inference or Performance?,” Philosophical Review 71 (1962): 3-32, and Hintikka, “Cogito Ergo Sum as an Inference and a Performance,” Philosophical Review 72 (1963): 487-496. 56 Bennett believes that Descartes has two aims in his creation doctrine: to offer a thesis about God’s omnipotence, and to offer a “philosophical analysis of modal concepts”. 8 Bennett first explores Descartes’s use of the term ‘omnipotence’, immediately taking issue with those authors 9 who have interpreted Descartes to mean by ‘omnipotence’, the ability to do absolutely anything despite the laws of logic. Bennett claims that in all the crucial voluntarist texts, one cannot conclude that Descartes ever argued that God can do anything. Instead, the most we can conclude is that by ‘omnipotence’, Descartes never intends any meaning beyond the claim that God is “‘great’ in such a way that everything that exists depends upon him”. 10 Bennett believes this amounts to the claim that there are no “independent principles” which constrain God’s actions. Thus, Bennett reduces the notion of omnipotence to dependency. What I think counts in Bennett’s favor in this interpretation of omnipotence are two insightful observations. First, he reminds us of Descartes’s warning from the Preface to the Meditations about those who claim to be able to grasp God’s nature, such as his omnipotence. Though Descartes’s target there is the atheist, the point can be generalized to anyone “arrogantly supposing our own minds to be so powerful and wise that we can attempt to grasp and set limits to what God can or should perform” (AT VII 9; CSM II 8). Bennett argues that defining ‘omnipotence’ as ‘God 8 Bennett (1994), 644. 9 Namely, Wilson (1978) and Geach (1973). 10 Bennett (1994), 642. 57 can do anything’ is implicitly claiming to grasp what God can or should do, and so this cannot be a faithful rendering of the term. 11 Second, in the letter to Arnauld of 29 July 1648, Descartes proclaims “I do not think that we should ever say of anything that it cannot be brought about by God. For since every basis of truth and goodness depends on his omnipotence, I would not dare to say that God cannot make a mountain without a valley, or bring it about that 1 and 2 are not 3” (AT V 224; CSMK 358-9). Bennett argues that the first sentence of this passage cannot be interpreted as saying ‘God can do anything’. He says that there is a difference between these two claims: (i) For all x, God could do x. (ii) For no x, ought we to say that God could not do x. The first claim cannot be what Descartes means, based on what was said in the previous paragraph: we are making a claim to knowledge about an aspect of God which is beyond our understanding and is therefore unjustified. We must always remember, Descartes urges, “that our minds must be regarded as finite, while God is infinite and beyond our comprehension” (AT VII 9; CSM II 8). Thus we cannot be sure that God can do anything, especially what is logically impossible, such as making a mountain without a valley. Looking back at the first sentence of the letter to Arnauld, Bennett’s proposed reading is more accurate: Descartes is merely stating that we should never say of anything that God couldn’t bring it about. Omnipotence in this sense is making a claim about the limits of our conception rather than a claim 11 Ibid., 644. 58 about what God can do. And this is precisely what (ii) captures. Bennett strategically opens his interpretation with omnipotence because it will serve as a demonstration for interpreting modal terms in the voluntarist texts in a similar reductive fashion. That is, modal terms like ‘possibly’ or ‘necessarily’ will not refer to the limits of God’s conception or to how the world and its properties exist; instead, they will refer to the limits of our own conception of things. Despite Bennett’s criticism of Wilson for her interpretation of Descartes’s account of omnipotence, he develops his view of Descartes’s modal theory from a line of argument he finds in Wilson. Wilson had suggested in passing that Descartes may have held a subjectivist theory of modality, such that modal concepts were to be analyzed only in terms of the “structure and workings of our own minds”. 12 Noticing this, Bennett believes it is the key to settling the problem of incoherence in the texts. For if modality is understood as a feature of our own minds, we avoid the problem of claims such as ‘God could have brought it about that 2+2=5’, for these claims would no longer be analyzed in terms of objective possibilities. According to Bennett, the texts on the creation doctrine usually find Descartes making two complementary claims: (1) a thesis relating necessary truths to God; and (2) a thesis relating necessary truths to us. The way we understand the first thesis will affect the coherence and function of the second. Now, we could be tempted to take an example of (1) to be the proposition, 12 Wilson (1978), 125. 59 ‘It is not impossible for God to make 2+2=5’, and an example of (2) to be the proposition, ‘We cannot conceive that 2+2=5’. We could then explain (1) and (2) as entailing, respectively: (1′) that 2+2 might have been equal to 5 because God could have created it so; and (2′) that we incorrectly think that 2+2≠5 because we cannot conceive how 2+2 could equal 5. According to Bennett, (1′) and (2′) would be the wrong way to construe these theses, because the two would not be compatible. The first indicates one modal truth about the statement ‘2+2=5’ (namely, that it is possible because God could have made it so), and the second indicates another modal truth (namely, that it is impossible because we cannot conceive it so). How, then, are we to construe these theses under Bennett’s proposal? He proclaims that (2) “provides all the content we are entitled to give to our modal statements”. 13 As a consequence, we are not entitled “to think of modal truths as a part of what God has to reckon with”; thus, thesis (1) can only be a statement about our concepts as well. 14 But certainly we do not want to admit that God needed to consider possible alternatives, or even that he had to deliberate before he chose to create anything. This is not what Bennett is claiming. Rather, I think his point is that in Descartes’s statements such as ‘God could have brought it about that...’, the term ‘could’ does not refer to any objective possibility; it refers strictly to our power 13 Bennett (1994), 647. 14 Ibid. 60 of conception. Bennett’s reading turns (2) into a thesis about modal epistemology, where modality is understood epistemically. Bennett further believes that the modal concepts are the way we conceive them to be due to the way that God willed to create us. That is, God makes it “necessarily true that 2+2=4 by making us unable to conceive otherwise”. 15 Bennett points to a passage from Descartes’s Second Replies as providing the best evidence for his subjective reading of Cartesian modality: If by ‘possible’ you mean what everyone commonly means, namely ‘whatever does not conflict with our human concepts’, then it is manifest that the nature of God, as I have described it, is possible in this sense, since I supposed it to contain only what, according to our clear and distinct perceptions, must belong to it; and hence it cannot conflict with our concepts. Alternatively, you may well be imagining [fingere] some other kind of possibility which relates to the object itself; but unless this matches the first sort of possibility it can never be known by the human intellect, and so it does not so much support a denial of God’s nature and existence as serve to undermine every other item of human knowledge. (AT VII 150- 151; CSM II 107, my emphasis) 16 This passage is indeed a strong textual basis for the conceptualist view. Descartes appears to be rejecting a definition of ‘possible’ which posits possibilities outside the mind. Bennett and Kajamies both interpret this passage as claiming that modality relating to objects themselves is a “contrivance”. Whereas CSM translate the Latin verb fingere as “imagine”, Bennett uses “invent”, suggesting that the proposed 15 Ibid., 649, my emphasis. 16 Bennett will translate the Latin differently than CSM; I take up this difference below. 61 definition has no basis in reality. 17 In whatever way we translate this verb, the conceptualist’s point is clear: modal concepts should only be understood as features of our minds, not as features of an independent reality. As Bennett says, for Descartes, “all modal truths are at bottom truths about what we can conceive”. 18 Possibilities and necessities that are postulated divorced from our conception are simply “contrivances”. Timo Kajamies explains that the conceptualist analysis takes ‘possibility’ to mean the same thing as ‘conceivability’. 19 Our conceiving that some state of affairs X is possible is not about (i.e., does not refer to) some possible state of affairs in the world, though our conception may represent this to us as being so. There is no absolute possibility that our conception is about because the nature of possibility is only conceivability. Kajamies argues that Bennett’s position on modal expressions can be captured by the following three definitions: M1: P is impossible = df for all subjects s: if s has P clearly and distinctly in mind, s is psychologically unable to assent to P. M2: P is necessary = df for all subjects s: if s has P clearly and distinctly in mind, s is psychologically unable to dissent to P. M3: P is possible = df for all subjects s: if s has P clearly and distinctly in mind, s is psychologically able to assent to P. 20 17 I favor Bennett’s revised translation of this word, as I think it more fitting for the context, but the passage I’ve quoted retains the CSM translation. However, as I will argue below, I do not think that “invent” supports the conceptualist reading in the way Bennett wants. 18 Bennett (1994), 648. 19 Kajamies (1999), 190. 20 I find Kajamies’s reconstruction of Bennett’s definition of modal terms highly problematic. I highlight such problems below. 62 From these definitions, we see how all modality is reducible to the language of conception for a subject and the appropriate judgment or attitude one takes toward some proposition. Modality, though it is established by God, is established as a feature of the human mind, and refers only to how our minds relate to things in the world. Modalities and modal expressions signify nothing more than a particular psychological state. Both Bennett and Kajamies think this reading of modality strengthens the import of Descartes’s view in other passages that possibility and other modal notions are to be understood in terms of conceivability. Consider again Descartes’s letter to Arnauld, quoted in part above. The letter continues: “I merely say that [God] has given me such a mind that I cannot conceive a mountain without a valley, or an aggregate of one and two which is not three, and that such things involve a contradiction in my conception” (AT V 224; CSMK 358-9). Instead of saying “it is impossible that there can be (or, God can make) a mountain without a valley”, Descartes knows he can only admit what is conceivable under a clear and distinct perception: “that such things involve a contradiction in my conception”. We can only assert that we cannot conceive a contradiction, but this is based on our inability to conceive it. Compare this to his letter to Gibieuf, 19 January 1642: we cannot have any knowledge of things except by the ideas we conceive of them; and consequently, that we must not judge of them except in accordance with these ideas, and we must even think that whatever conflicts with these ideas is absolutely impossible and involves a contradiction. (AT III 476; CSMK 202) 63 Thus, we call something impossible or contradictory only because of the conflict of ideas in attempting to conceive them. Possibility, so the argument goes, is defined or understandable only in terms of what is conceivable. But are we really to believe that Descartes was himself a subjectivist about modality? Besides the Second Replies passage, what other textual evidence does the conceptualist have for attributing this view to him? Bennett believes that, broadly speaking, there is “in Descartes a wide, deep, vivid streak of subjectivism or pragmatism about truth—a willingness to treat results about the settlement of belief as though they were results about how things stand in reality, or as though the former mattered and the latter did not”. 21 If we take Descartes’s words to Gibieuf above seriously, especially his comment that we must never judge of things except in accordance with our ideas about them, this proposal by Bennett is forceful. Bennett’s general claim is that both a subjectivist and an objectivist strand are present in the texts, and because both strands are there, either could be a candidate upon which to interpret Descartes’s voluntarist thesis. The objectivist strand is present, says Bennett, in Descartes’s proof of the truth rule, but the argument there is tenuous. 22 Bennett chooses the subjectivist strand to interpret modality because he believes it “harmonizes as well as anything can with the rest of Descartes’s work”. 23 After all, the Meditations themselves are presented from a first-person point of view; what could be more subjective than that? Thus, the conceptualist interpretation of 21 Bennett (1994), 652. 22 Cf. Descartes’s rather subjective view on truth in his 16 October 1639 letter to Mersenne (AT II 597-8; CSMK 139). 23 Bennett (1994), 652. 64 modality does not imply that Descartes was a thorough subjectivist with regard to all matters philosophical; as Bennett sees it, the conceptualism about modality comports with other subjectivist strands as well as the objectivist strands in Descartes’s works. Conceptualism of modality has several advantages over the two views of possibilism I reviewed in the last chapter. First, it escapes the problem of interpreting Descartes’s talk of necessity as implying that there are no necessary truths; the view that there are no necessary truths is simply irrelevant to conceptualism, because modality is only relevant in relation to a mind. So while conceptualism could be made to agree with the argument of Universal Possibilism that there are no necessary truths, when that means an independent reality or class of necessary truths, it departs from that view considerably, because it does not reduce necessity to possibility. Conceptualism thus maintains a coherent understanding of Descartes’s avowals of the existence of necessary truths. Its main advantage consists in its attempt to give a coherent interpretation of the creation doctrine. Second, as hinted above, it does seem to solve the conflict between (1) God’s freedom in establishing the eternal truths that he in fact established (i.e., that God could have willed different truths), and (2) our conception that these truths are immutable. We do not need to know anything about what God does in fact establish, because if modality is simply how we relate to the objects of our perception, then it no longer matters whether when we conceive ‘it is necessary that 2+2=4’ that there is something in reality (an essence? a truth?) corresponding to that conception. It is sufficient that we conceive it as clear and distinct for us to judge of it accordingly. 65 Descartes seems to confirm this in the passage quoted from the Second Replies: the kind of possibility that does not take into account our conception of it “can never be known by the human intellect”. Third, the view does account for an apparent distinction between the eternal truths of logic, morality, and metaphysics which God creates for our world, and the eternal truths concerning God himself. Bennett calls this the “Bootstraps Problem”: how is it that God creates all eternal truths, and yet Descartes explicitly claims that the eternal truth that God exists is “the first and the most eternal of all possible truths” (AT I 150; CSMK 24)? 24 Does God will himself into existence? Does God create his own essence as an omnipotent being? On Bennett’s conceptualist interpretation, the Bootstraps problem disappears: “Necessarily God exists” amounts to no more than the claim, “when we are thinking clearly it is inconceivable to us that God should not exist”. 25 On this reading, any necessary statement amounts to saying that ‘it is inconceivable for us that ...’. There is no discrepancy between truths of the first sort and truths of second, because they are interpreted solely in terms of what is conceivable or inconceivable for us. While I think that Bennett’s interpretation makes significant progress in resolving the tension implicit in the creation doctrine, the view becomes problematic because it does not cohere with additional passages from the texts. First, however, I should note that Bennett’s stated aim is to square his conceptualist interpretation only with the voluntarist texts, that is, those passages where the creation doctrine is mentioned. He does not argue for the subjective interpretation such that it should 24 See Bennett (1994), 649. 25 Ibid. 66 apply to every instance of ‘necessity’ or ‘possibility’, but only to the relevant voluntarist texts. He also qualifies this caveat with the further claim that his interpretation “fits nearly everything in the voluntarism texts: this late in the day nobody will discover that the texts consistently express a single view”. 26 Bennett claims there are voluntarist passages where his interpretation will fail to express or accommodate the conceptualist interpretation. While I think that this aim does generate a successful argument for the coherency of the creation doctrine, Bennett’s focus seems to narrow. There is no prima facie reason for reading the “voluntarist” texts in isolation from other texts which have a bearing on Descartes’s views about modality. If Bennett wants to focus exclusively on the voluntarist texts, then his conclusion that all modality is strictly subjective for Descartes is unwarranted. He can only claim that modality is subjective in those passages where the creation doctrine is stated. Obviously, Descartes does talk about necessity and possibility in other texts; so why shouldn’t these texts have a bearing on how we understand the creation doctrine where those same concepts are stated? Are we to assume from the start that Descartes employs different definitions for modal terms given the subject under discussion? Bennett seems to be advocating that in the voluntarist texts Descartes takes modal terms conceptually, but in all other cases he could understand them objectively, or at least non-conceptually. This is an ill-considered strategy. Given Bennett’s proposed goal of squaring the voluntarist texts with his conceptualist interpretation, his strategy is to demonstrate how this interpretation is 26 Ibid., 641. 67 implied or supported by several passages. As stated above, he thinks the strongest evidence for his interpretation is the passage from the Second Replies, but he translates that passage a bit differently than CSM. The difference, if correct, would weigh heavily in Bennett’s favor: If by possible you mean what everyone commonly means, namely whatever does not conflict with our human concepts, then it is manifest that the nature of God, as I have described it, is possible in this sense because... [etc., etc.]. Alternatively, you may well be inventing some other kind of possibility which relates to the object itself; but unless this matches the first sort of possibility it can never be known by the human intellect, and so it... will undermine the whole of human knowledge. 27 The troubling word here is ‘inventing’: if this is the correct translation from Latin, then Bennett’s case is strong. That translation indicates that a possibility inhering in the object is an invention, or contrivance, and is thus not a genuine possibility. This passage, as Bennett would have it, presents us with a dilemma: either ‘possibility’ means “whatever does not conflict with our human concepts”, or it means something invented and hence not a real option. The intended solution is to admit the former and reject the latter. But this disjunction is true only if ‘invented’ is what Descartes meant. The Latin word is fingere, and CSM translate it as ‘imagine’. A further question we might ask is whether ‘imagine’ amounts to something like ‘invent’, and if so, then we are back to a case for Bennett’s translation. The situation seems to result in a stalemate, for either candidate is likely. 28 Now, Bennett does admit that either way we translate the word, “Descartes is treating the ‘possibility which relates 27 Ibid., 648. 28 A non-philosophical reason for preferring ‘imagine’ is that Descartes would have been outwardly insulting his Second Objectors if he meant ‘inventing’. 68 to the object itself’ as a contrivance”. 29 But a correct rendering of that word seems crucial to resolving this issue, especially if Bennett is taking this passage to provide the strongest evidence for his view. Nonetheless, we may admit Bennett’s translation. There is another reason I do not think that Bennett’s conclusion, that Descartes treats ‘possibility which relates to the object’ as a mere invention, is justified. This passage only claims that objective possibility is a contrivance when it fails to “match” the first sort of possibility. There is no sweeping rejection of objective possibility here. Descartes is saying to the authors of the Second Objections that if they are talking about an objective possibility that is thoroughly divorced from a subjective understanding of that possibility (via a human concept), then that kind of possibility will be meaningless, for it would be unknowable. In this sense, objective possibility is a contrivance. It is akin to asking someone to imagine a number divorced from our conception of that number. But this does not entail the stronger claim that Bennett wants, namely, that all objective possibilities are contrivances. In this passage, Descartes allows that objective possibility may “match” with a subjective understanding of that possibility, and in such cases, one may speak coherently of an objective possibility. There is no easy way to understand what Descartes means by an objective possibility “matching” a subjective understanding of possibility, but I do not think that “equals” is the right way to render it, as Bennett seems to be doing. 29 Bennett (1994), 648. 69 One way we might construe this matching of the subjective to the objective is through Descartes’s remarks to an unknown correspondent regarding the foundations of our thoughts. Though the letter discusses distinctions (which I treat in the next chapter), Descartes makes a comment which seems to put importance on distinguishing our thoughts from the objects of those thoughts. He writes: I do not recognize any distinction made by reason ratiocinantis – that is, one which has no foundation in reality – because we cannot have any thought without a foundation; ... It seems to me that the only thing which causes difficulty in this area is the fact that we do not sufficiently distinguish between things existing outside our thought and the ideas of things, which are in our thought. (AT IV 349-50; CSMK 280) Descartes admonishes us to always distinguish carefully between our ideas of things and the existence of those things in reality, that is, outside our thoughts about them. Why is this important? In the context of this letter, one should distinguish carefully so as to avoid postulating non-existent entities of which one may (mistakenly) think one has a clear perception. Now, this passage does not mention possibility or any modal terms, so there is no direct support for the Second Replies claim. However, since Descartes is speaking generally about thoughts being grounded in an external reality, this would seem to apply to any thoughts about possible or necessary states of affairs. As we will see in the next chapter, this foundation does not need to be an exact resemblance to our thought, that is, our thoughts do not need to exactly mirror reality; rather, the main point is that there must be some foundation for the thought, else Descartes does not recognize that we can even have such thoughts. 70 Another way we might understand this matching can be found in the 30 September, 1640 letter to Mersenne. Descartes accepts a general principle about conceivability and possibility, yet the language would seem to indicate that he allows for both a subjective and objective understanding of possibility and how they match up: I entirely agree with the argument… that whatever we conceive distinctly to be possible is possible, and that we conceive distinctly that it is possible that the world has been made, and therefore it has been made. (AT III 191; CSMK 154) The subjective reading is contained in the phrasing ‘whatever we conceive distinctly to be possible’, and the objective reading is captured by ‘is possible’. The principle holds that when we conceive the matter to be possible (subjectively), it is possible (objectively). It seems apparent that Descartes intends two kinds of possibility here, yet it is not clear that one is being reduced to or equated with the other. Rather, conceiving as possible is an indication of or guide to the objective possibility. Of course, the way we come to know possibilities is through our concept of possible, which as indicated above, is to conceive the matter as being possible. So we might take this passage to support the one in the Second Replies such that there must be a proper match between possibility-as-we-conceive-it and possibility-as-it-is for the latter to have any meaning or value. Several other passages do not cohere well with Bennett’s view. Consider those passages stating the truth rule, that whatever I clearly and distinctly perceive to be true, is true. Descartes sometimes replaces truth with modal operators in the 71 principle: whatever I clearly and distinctly perceive to be necessary, is necessary; or, as we just saw above, whatever I clearly and distinctly perceive to be possible, is possible. The former principle is apparent in the case of God’s existence argued in the Fifth Meditation. Descartes determines that God is the only being for whom existence is necessary. Now, if we were to apply Bennett’s conceptualist view, that there is only a subjective rendering of modal statements, the statement about God would amount to a simple tautology about my clear and distinct perceptions: whatever I clearly and distinctly perceive as necessary for God, is what I clearly and distinctly perceive as necessary for God. 30 This surely is not what Descartes has in mind, either in the truth rule or in the principle about subjective and objective modalities. The problem seems to lie in the illicit step of reducing the objective to the subjective. Bennett may object that we are using an example outside the voluntarist texts; yet, the reduction can be demonstrated of any passage, especially those passages in the voluntarist texts. This example of God’s necessary existence may be the biggest difficulty for the proponent of conceptualism about modality. In the Fifth Meditation, Descartes clearly claims that God is the only being whose essence is necessary existence: “apart from God, there is nothing else of which I am capable of thinking such that existence belongs to its essence. ... For what is more self-evident than the fact that 30 Perhaps the principle becomes, under Kajamies’s reading of modal terms: whatever I clearly and distinctly perceive to be undissentable, is undissentable. If this is the case, conceptualism becomes even more suspect, for this principle makes no claim to get beyond mere psychological states. It safeguards psychological certainty at the expense of an abandonment of truth, or as Descartes defines ‘truth’, “the conformity of thought with its object” (AT II 597; CSMK 139). 72 the supreme being exists, or that God, to whose essence alone existence belongs, exists?” (CSM II 47; AT VII 68-69). Admittedly, this passage sounds deeply subjective, for Descartes argues that God’s essence is existence because he conceives of it so. But I think the subjective tone is merely stylistic. After all, this passage is from the Meditations, and they are meant to be written in the first person, as a way to guide the reader in following the author’s own thoughts on the various philosophical topics. On a closer reading, it is apparent that these claims are not argued subjectively, even though they are expressed subjectively. First, Descartes says that there is no other being or object he can think of such that its essence is to exist. This is akin to saying that he cannot produce any other examples of a being whose essence is to exist. He is not claiming that his thinking this way makes it the case that God is the only being whose essence is to exist. Consider this earlier passage in the same Meditation: But from the fact that I cannot think of God except as existing, it follows that existence is inseparable from God, and hence that he really exists. It is not that my thought makes it so, or imposes any necessity on any thing; on the contrary it is the necessity of the thing itself, namely the existence of God, which determines my thinking in this respect. (CSM II 46; AT VII 67) It is clear that God’s necessary existence is what determines Descartes to think in this way about God. To be sure, Descartes begins with a subjective claim: his conception that God cannot but exist. But the conclusion does not refer to his thought; it is a metaphysical claim. But what is more devastating for the conceptualist is Descartes’s explicit claim that his thought does not impose necessity 73 on any thing, especially the necessity of God’s existence. It is the objective or mind- independent necessity which determines one’s thought, and thus determines or constitutes one’s clear and distinct perception of the matter. Bennett comes close to addressing this objection. 31 He raises this idea about God’s existence in solving the bootstraps problem, but cashing out the proposition, ‘Necessarily God exists’, as something about our conceptions seems to miss what Descartes says about God’s essence. On Bennett’s view, this statement might read: ‘we can’t but conceive God as existing’, and this seems too limiting. Descartes makes the stronger claim that God necessarily exists despite what we might believe. After all, Descartes would surely hold that God exists despite what the atheist believes. Bennett writes, “Running through [Descartes’s] thought was an intensely subjectivist strand, in which issues about what is really the case are displaced by or even equated with issues about what to believe or about what can be believed”. 32 Perhaps Bennett is right that Descartes often put propositions about what is really the case in terms of what to believe, but Descartes does not equate them nor reduce one to the other. It is rather that we must put metaphysical propositions (i.e., the objective modal claims) in the language of our conception because they are unjustified or unthinkable otherwise. But there is no implied reduction taking place. I will return to the important issue of metaphysics and epistemology with respect to this problem in just a moment. 31 Bennett (1994), 649-650. 32 Ibid., 651, my emphasis. 74 Continuing this line of criticism, we might object that Bennett has confused Descartes’s de re proposition about the necessity of God’s existence with a de dicto reading. The Fifth Meditation claim about God is not captured merely by the claim: (D) It is necessarily true that God exists. The force of Descartes’s meditation about God is what he discovers about God’s nature, namely: (R) God exists necessarily. The difference between these two statements can be understood as the familiar distinction between de re and de dicto claims. (D) makes the claim that a certain dictum or proposition – God exists – is necessarily true, while (R) makes the claim that a thing (res) or being has a certain property necessarily. 33 Descartes determines that God’s essence is existence, but because an essence involves an essential property, Descartes holds that necessary existence is contained in the concept of God. In his Second Replies, he writes: Existence is contained in the idea or concept of every single thing, since we cannot conceive of anything except as existing. Possible or 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. (AT VII 166; CSM II 117) This passage, I believe, shows that Descartes took necessary existence to be a feature or property of God, and so such a de re modal claim is different in meaning from a de dicto claim. Whether ‘existence’ in this passage amounts only to our conception of it, the assertion is quite clear that necessary existence is contained or is a property 33 My understanding of the distinction between de re and de dicto comes from Alvin Plantinga, “De Re et De Dicto,” Nous 3 (1969): 235-258. 75 of our concept of God. Now, Descartes would not posit that (D) is a false claim about God; it is also true, and it could be true in the sense that Bennett would consider it: as a proposition about our own minds. On the standard distinction between de re and de dicto modal claims, de re modal statements entail that the truth of the corresponding statement is also true de dicto; but not vice versa. Thus, if (R) is true, then (D) is true; but if (D) is true, it does not follow that (R) is likewise true. The de dicto claim does not commit one to the existence of a being who has an essential property. Furthermore, (D) does not capture what the Second Replies passage states about an important property of God. How, then, does Bennett reduce the de re claim to a de dicto claim? The conceptualist reading takes the modal terms to be indications of our conceptions only, not to belong to the objects themselves. The proposition in the de dicto modal claim is the proposition for some subject who is thinking it. In an attempt to deny objective necessities, the conceptualist must deny a de re claim such as (R). Claims such as (R) express what is necessary or essential to some object. But for the conceptualist, necessity can reside only in the way we think about God. The modal import is better captured under the claim (D), where the modal operator ‘It is necessarily true’ expresses better the psychological state of the subject. The subject has a belief – God exists – and, because he is unable to dissent from such a belief, calls it necessarily true. Necessity or essentialism about objects are thus reduced to or understood solely in terms of subjects and their corresponding beliefs. 76 Bennett could respond here that he is not denying de re modal claims in Descartes’s thought. Rather, the necessity of the res is simply the object as it is in our thought. After all, the passage from the Second Replies talked of necessity in our concept of God, not necessity in God himself. This is still on the level of human concepts and attributions of necessity or possibility to concepts. There is no reduction since de re modal claims are about things in our conception. However, this rebuttal cannot possibly fit Descartes’s conception of truth quoted earlier that truth is the “conformity of thought with its object”. Now, Descartes could very well mean by “object of thought” the objective reality of some idea; that is, the object as it exists in the intellect, not as it exists outside the mind. But given Descartes’s statement to Gibieuf that “I can have no knowledge of what is outside me except by means of the ideas I have” (AT III 474; CSMK 201), and to More that the human mind “is not the measure of reality or of truth” (AT V 274; CSMK 364), it is problematic for Bennett to insist that the extent of necessity or possibility resides solely in our modes of thought. Again, Descartes believes and proclaims that his intellect determines what he should believe to be true, 34 but the necessity he perceives is not a reflection merely of his own mode of thinking. Furthermore, we may say that the definition of ‘P is necessary’ that Bennett gives does not capture Descartes’s sense of modality. Consider the proposed definition by Kajamies, that ‘P is necessary’ means ‘s is psychologically unable to 34 The letter to More, 5 February 1649, continues: “but certainly [the mind] should be the measure of what we assert or deny”. 77 dissent to P’. 35 Definitions are meant to provide both necessary and sufficient conditions for some word, such that the definiens – the words or phrases doing the defining – provide both necessary and sufficient conditions for the definiendum – the word to be defined. On this principle, it follows that if some subject s is psychologically unable to dissent to P, then P is necessary. Notwithstanding the vagueness of the phrase ‘psychologically unable to dissent to’, there may be some instances of P which I am unable to dissent to but which we would hesitate to call necessary. For example, I am unable to dissent to the proposition that I am sitting before the fire right now, as Descartes demonstrated in the First Meditation. It is not psychologically possible for me to conceive clearly and distinctly that I am sitting before the fire, and yet deny that I am sitting before the fire. But this surely does not make the proposition that I am sitting before the fire a necessary one. Another challenge to the conceptualist view relevant to the texts containing the creation doctrine is Descartes’s claim that all truth and possibility come from God. Recall that Descartes writes that eternal truths “are true or possible only because God knows them as true or possible”. If possibility (or necessity) is only in our intellect, then what of its source? Either the conceptualist accepts that possibility and necessity come from God, but that they aren’t actualized for him, or possibility and necessity do not come from God. The latter is surely unwarranted: no scholar would deny this tenet. The former accepts this tenet, but denies that the concepts of possibility and necessity amount to anything for God. This is troubling for it restricts 35 For the sake of brevity, I shorten Kajamies’s original formulation. 78 two concepts from God’s intellect, and makes the even stronger claim that there are some things that humans know that God does not know. To be sure, if I know that x, and x is the statement ‘it is necessary that 2+2=4’, then God knows that x as well. Perhaps God knows this mathematical truth in a different way than I do; but surely, at a basic level, he is capable of grasping that truth in the same way that I grasp it, that is, as a necessary truth. Thus, it seems too dismissive to argue that possibility or necessity are absent from God’s intellect. To put it another way, it is wrong to claim that God cannot know possibility and necessity in the way that humans can know them. Again, we are back to the initial criticism given by Bennett about those who profess to grasp the extent of God’s knowledge. A final example that can be raised against Bennett’s interpretation, but which may be dismissed by him since it does not deal with voluntarism directly, is Descartes’s understanding of necessity in physics. It seems apparent that the necessity in Cartesian physics is something in the world, not in the mind. Were humans – understood as “a combination of mind and body” – to be destroyed and the world preserved, the laws of nature would be exactly as they are now: necessary laws following from God’s immutable will. Descartes comes close to saying something like this in The World: “the intelligences, or the rational souls, … will not disrupt in any way the ordinary course of nature” (AT XI 48; CSM I 97). Neither human actions nor human thoughts can change the immutable laws of nature, as they follow from God’s will. Thus, there is a kind of necessity that is present in the world, despite what we think or how we interact with that world. Take Descartes’s claim in 79 Principles 2, 18 (CSM I 230) concerning the impossibility of a vacuum. The passage contains many modal claims: (1) “Seeing no necessary connection between a vessel and the body contained in it”; (2) “there is a very strong and wholly necessary connection between the concave shape of the vessel and the extension, taken in its general sense, which must be contained in the concave shape”; (3) “For when there is nothing between two bodies they must necessarily touch each other”. The first is characteristically put in terms of our conception of the connection. This is a kind of passage that Bennett would use to support his view. However, this passage is run together with claims (2) and (3), which are not “conceptually” stated. It would be far-fetched to interpret (2) as pertaining strictly to our conception of the connection between shape and extension: the necessary connection is between shape itself and extension itself, not our conception of shape and extension. But this does not mean that there is no necessary connection between our ideas of shape and extension. There is such a connection, but it is the objects themselves which guarantee the necessary connection we conceive in our understanding (assuming we are clear and distinct on the matter). Bennett’s Descartes begins to sound like Hume, who postulates necessity as merely a mode of our thought. Turning to Kajamies’s definitions of modal terms, there are several problems with his reconstruction of Bennett’s argument, and thus with the conceptualist interpretation generally. First, when Bennett defines the primary modal terms – 80 necessary, possible, impossible – he offers a definition for ‘impossible’ only; he leaves the other modal terms to be inferred from the first: Roughly speaking: ‘It is absolutely impossible that P’ means that no human can conceive of P’s obtaining while having P distinctly in mind; and similarly for P’s possibility and its necessity. In each of these analyses, ‘no human can’ must be understood in causal, psychological terms... (Bennett, 647) It is not clear how Bennett would complete the definitions for ‘possible’ and ‘necessary’, though we could probably define these on his behalf as follows: (P) ‘It is possible that P’ = humans can conceive of P’s obtaining while having P distinctly in mind. (N) ‘It is necessary that P’ = all humans must conceive of P’s obtaining while having P distinctly in mind. As Bennett reminds us, the phrases ‘can conceive’ (or, ‘must conceive’) are to be understood causally and psychologically. But we get a different picture on Kajamies’s account. He fills in the remaining definitions, but strays from the guiding definition provided by Bennett. Kajamies substitutes ‘assenting to P’ for ‘conceiving that P obtains’. Under Descartes’s theory, the first is an act of the will while the second is an act of the understanding. Bennett’s definition merely states the conditions for how the understanding perceives the proposition; it is an additional step to specify how the will accepts the proposition. Albeit, the will is essential in the judgment that some proposition P is necessary, or possible, or impossible; but the modality lies in the understanding on Bennett’s account. Kajamies confines modality to the will. 81 Second, where Bennett is quite careful to withhold God from being subject to modal concepts, Kajamies’s definitions inadvertently include God. He defines each modal term by specifying an explicit domain (“for all subjects s”). This may have been an oversight on Kajamies’s part, but given that Bennett restricts his domain to human subjects, and Kajamies’s aim is to defend Bennett’s argument, it is strange that Kajamies failed to take this into account. At the very least, this oversight implies that the proposed definitions cannot constitute Descartes’s modal theory. Third, it is not clear that the proposed modal theory can accommodate a satisfactory system of modal logic. One pitfall can be seen in the fact that on Bennett’s and Kajamies’s definitions, the direct relationships between the modal concepts cannot fit the standard square of opposition. ‘Possible’ and ‘impossible’ should be contradictories, but on the conceptualist account they seem to be contraries: while they cannot both be true, they could both be false. ‘Impossible’ is the opposite of ‘possible’ such that when one is true, the other is false, and vice versa. But according to the conceptualist, ‘possible’ and ‘impossible’ are defined in terms of psychological conditions such that it could turn out that the subject would be both able to assent to P and unable to assent to P. Another pitfall is that the definitions cannot accommodate propositions which are too complex for any human to clearly and distinctly have in mind. Such propositions could not, strictly speaking, be classified on this scheme, though we would be inclined to classify them as either necessarily true or necessarily false. 82 Consider Goldbach’s conjecture that every even number is the sum of two primes. 36 If the conjecture is true, it is necessarily true; and if it is false, then it is necessarily false. The truth is not apparent, and may never be apparent for an ordinary mind to grasp; but this does not rule out our ability to classify the conjecture as either necessarily true or necessarily false. There is a further problem I find with Bennett’s proposal, but which does not point to any particular passages which conflict with the conceptualist view of modality. Rather, I find that Bennett fails to appreciate the difference between epistemology and metaphysics in Descartes. Bennett’s view has modality strictly guided by epistemology, whereas many of the results of knowledge conducted in the Meditations are supposed to be truths about the world. Metaphysics is not supposed to be about our concepts, and modality is supposed to be the result of metaphysics. There is a conceptual notion of necessity and possibility to be sure: this is evidenced by the Second Replies passage that Bennett crucially relies on. But Descartes is not rejecting a metaphysical account of modality; he is merely saying that a metaphysical account of modality divorced from our conceptual understanding of it will be meaningless (i.e., unwarranted). Incidentally, Bennett generalizes this passage on possibility to cover all modal concepts. This is hasty; at most Bennett can only claim that possibility is merely a conceptual matter. He cannot claim the same for necessity and impossibility on this passage alone. Additionally, to argue that Descartes really thought that there was only conceptual modality is to indirectly 36 I borrow this example from Kenneth Konyndyk, Introductory Modal Logic (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 15. 83 claim to know that God never created metaphysical modalities. The troubling aspect is that Descartes speaks in the subjective or conceptual language in discussing possibility and necessity. I think this is because he was trying to convey the certainty we can have of our concepts; this certainty is the assurance that our concepts hook up to the mind-independent world in the way we conceive them when we are clear and distinct about them. 84 CHAPTER THREE THE ‘NO-THEORY THEORY’ OF CARTESIAN MODALITY I now want to consider an argument that rejects the interpretation that modal concepts in Descartes’s philosophy describe a modal theory of any sort. We saw in the previous chapter that Descartes’s modal concepts were thought to define the range of strictly human cognitive abilities; this interpretation had the benefit of offering a comprehensive view of Descartes’s use of modal terms, because it attempted to define modal concepts as epistemic boundaries which were not incompatible with the way God chose to create the world. That view, I argued, violates some of Descartes’s core metaphysical assumptions, namely, that God is the source of all modality, and that what is possible and necessary are not descriptions of human cognition, but rather that human cognition is determined by what is objectively possible and necessary, according to God’s will. While the conceptualist interpretation fails in these two ways, it is an admirable theory of Cartesian modality in the secondary literature, for it attempts to fit modal terms as well as the creation doctrine under one coherent model. The present view, however, makes the bold attempt to interpret Descartes as holding no theory about modality. If correct, this interpretation would render the creation doctrine inert with respect to modality in Descartes’s philosophy. This is my principal concern, for I want to argue that the creation doctrine is the source of our understanding of Descartes’s modal theory. I begin by describing in some detail the no-theory theory view of Cartesian modality 85 as argued by Alan Nelson and David Cunning, and how this is tied to the creation doctrine. 1 I then offer several reasons why this view does not suffice as an interpretation of Descartes’s view of modality. My principal argument is that Descartes cannot be an ontological actualist given his distinction between actuality and possibility. Nelson and Cunning argue for what they call a “no-theory theory” of modality for Descartes: that Descartes posits no modal theory, has no use for a modal theory, and has “systematic reasons” for refusing to admit a modal theory. 2 The systematic reasons they claim Descartes holds are those parts of his philosophical system which either argue against any modal theory or are in tension with one. Descartes never explicitly admits or denies that he has a particular modal theory, or that he has no need generally of modal theory. So there is no part of his system that indicates an outright rejection or avowal of modality. The texts are rich with modal terms, indicating that he operates with some idea of modal concepts. 3 Nelson and Cunning’s strategy, however, is to show that of all the possible ways a philosopher can be said to have a theory of modality, none apply to Descartes, and so he must have held no theory. Their no-theory theory is based on their interpretation of Descartes as having advocated a robust “ontological actualism”, namely, that the 1 Alan Nelson and David Cunning, “Cognition and Modality in Descartes,” Acta Philosophica Fennica 64 (1999): 137-153. 2 These terms are Nelson and Cunning’s. 3 These three claims entail that on Descartes’s system, there is no phenomenon of modality to be explained. Thus, for Descartes there are no true sentences of the form, ‘possibly P, but not actually P’. Nelson and Cunning’s view does not seem to be that Descartes accepts modal phenomena, but that there is no need to explain it. 86 only things that have being are actual beings (as opposed to possible beings). For Descartes, the only actual beings are God and things that God has created. 4 Thus, possible beings or objects have no place in Cartesian metaphysics. Nelson and Cunning begin their argument by determining what constitutes having a modal theory. On their view, it seems that a theory of modality can be (1) a theory of possible objects or beings; (2) a theory of necessities and possibilities attaching to propositions; or (3) a theory of different ways the world could have been. 5 Their argument proceeds to address each of these points in an effort to demonstrate how none apply to Descartes, though they give most of their attention to modality as a theory of possible objects. The first consideration is whether a theory of modality is evidenced by Descartes’s ontological commitments. If Descartes were to hold an ontological theory that included possible objects or beings, then a theory of modality – at least for possibility – would be clear. Such an ontological theory would include, among other types of beings, possible beings, and would be considered a possibilist ontology. A possible being is usually described in opposition to an actual being, that is, a possible being is a non-actual being, an object that has being in some potential sense, but not actual being. Since for Descartes all objects are – indeed, everything is – created by God, we may define ‘object’ here simply as that which God has created. Whether all objects are actual, whether all that God creates is actualized, remains to be investigated, for the debate hangs crucially on whether there are possible objects at all for Descartes. Such a view 4 Nelson and Cunning (1999), 140. 5 Ibid., 137. 87 would imply that not all of God’s creations have actual being, and that not every act of creation is an actualization. Additionally, whether ‘being’ is synonymous with ‘object’ for Descartes is an issue I investigate below. Initially, it seems that if we define ‘object’ as ‘created by God’, and if we assert that God is a being (the “supreme being”), as Nelson and Cunning do, then ‘object’ and ‘being’ are not identical. According to Nelson and Cunning, if Descartes holds a possibilist ontology, then it will be either non-reductive or reductive. Non-reductive possibilism states that actual objects and possible objects have being in a “univocal sense” of the word ‘being’. 6 Possible being is of course different from actual being, but being is the same for each. As stated above, for Descartes, ‘being’ amounts to ‘created by God’. Thus, a possible being is a creation of God, but a creation as a possibility, while an actual being is an actual creation of God; the two kinds of being are the same to the extent that each is created by God. Actual being is usually predicated of the things that exist in this world as opposed to other, possible worlds. The important point is that on a possibilist ontology, possible objects are something – they are not nothing – and they are something to the same extent as actual objects are something. Reductive possibilism, on the other hand, states that being is different for possible and actual objects. This kind of possibilism defines possibilities strictly in terms of “features of God”, not features of God’s creations. Nelson and Cunning point to Leibniz as a paradigm example of reductive possibilism: on Leibniz’s system, actual 6 Ibid. 88 objects refer to God’s creations, while possible objects refer to “concepts in God’s understanding”. 7 Leibniz’s view is properly called reductive because, according to Nelson and Cunning, he sought to “reduce philosophical talk of possibility into talk about the actual divine concepts,” thereby reserving the term ‘substance’ for actual being outside of the divine mind. 8 Possible beings on this scheme are not substances, they are only features of God; therefore, actuals and possibles have different sorts of being. So, the first question is whether Descartes holds a form of reductive possibilism, a form of non-reductive possibilism, or neither. Nelson and Cunning determine that Descartes can hold neither, reasoning that if Descartes holds a possibilist ontology at all, possibility must concern either features of God or features of created things. And since, as they argue, there is no theory of modality concerning either features of God or of created things, Descartes has no modal theory; according to them, this test of possibility of a Cartesian modal theory fails for both reductive and non-reductive possibilism. Their disjunctive premise is motivated by their assertion that Descartes has “uncontroversial ontological commitments”, meaning that “God and his creatures, i.e., substances and their modes, exhaust Descartes’s ontology”. 9 I will investigate this assertion after I have considered the arguments against both reductive possibilism and non-reductive possibilism. I first outline Nelson and Cunning’s arguments against reductive possibilism and then give 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 138. 9 Ibid. 89 my rebuttal. Though I do not want to endorse the view that Descartes is a reductive possibilist, I think that Nelson and Cunning’s arguments against it do not suffice to reject this interpretive option. Reductive Possibilism Consider first the claim that possibility concerns features of God. Nelson and Cunning argue that if Descartes has a modal theory “based on features of God, this theory would be akin to Leibniz’s reductive possibilism”, such that possibilities themselves somehow “reside” in God. 10 This is not to say that possibility emanates from God, for that claim would be to advocate non-reductive possibilism, as Nelson and Cunning point out. To say that God could have made the world differently or could have created various other objects or truths is simply to say that these possibilities are concepts in God’s understanding, what God merely comprehends or entertains. They are not things which God has willed, for then they would be actual. We can understand better how Leibniz is a reductive possibilist by considering the distinction he draws between God’s will and intellect, a distinction which allows for God to entertain mere possibilities without willing them: [I]t seems that every act of willing supposes some reason for the willing and this reason, of course, must precede the act. ...I find so strange those expressions of certain philosophers who say that the eternal truths of metaphysics and Geometry, and consequently the principles of goodness, of justice, and of perfection, are effects only of the will of God. To me it seems 10 Ibid. 90 that all these follow from his understanding, which does not depend upon his will any more than does his essence. (Discourse on Metaphysics, §2) 11 For Leibniz, the divine understanding takes precedence over the divine will: the divine will depends upon the understanding, because God always acts in the most perfect way – morally, rationally, justly, and orderly. The divine understanding determines the divine will such that God’s acts always follow from, or are in accord with, his perfect, rational nature. Furthermore, if features of God’s understanding do not in any way depend on his will, but God’s will depends upon his understanding, then the features of his will cannot be the same as features of his understanding. Leibniz can account for possibles by placing them in the divine intellect, but as uncreated (i.e., unwilled) concepts. They exist as reasons for acting, though they are not necessarily acted upon. Descartes’s conception of God makes no distinction between the intellect and will. Because God is a simple and perfect being, there can be no division between God’s faculties. For God, there is only one faculty. Descartes makes several pronouncements of this thesis, which I will call the Divine Simplicity thesis, most notably of which are the following: the unity, simplicity, or the inseparability of all the attributes of God is one of the most important of the perfections which I understand him to have. (Third Meditation, AT VII 50; CSM II 34) our understanding tells us that there is in God an absolute immensity, simplicity and unity which embraces all other attributes... (Second Replies, AT VII 137; CSM II 98) 11 Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, trans. George R. Montgomery (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1973), 4-5. 91 In God, willing, understanding and creating are all the same thing without one being prior to the other †even conceptually†. (Letter to Mersenne, 27 May 1630, AT I 153; CSMK 25-26) if we would know the immensity of [God’s] power we should not... conceive any precedence or priority between his intellect and his will; for the idea which we have of God teaches us that there is in him only a single activity, entirely simple and entirely pure. ... [I]n God seeing and willing are one and the same thing. (Letter to Mesland, 2 May 1644, AT IV 119; CSMK 235) The first two of these passages talk of the simplicity of God’s nature generally. But given the unity and simplicity of God, he is not to be understood separately from his nature. 12 So if we can speak of God’s faculties, we are to draw no distinctions among them. The last two passages mention specifically the simplicity of God’s faculties. Now, if Descartes rejects this division between understanding and will in God, arguing instead for a conception of divine simplicity such that God’s intellect and will are a single faculty, it would seem that the divine intellect could not contain uncreated concepts, for God would not be able to entertain some possibility without subsequently willing it. Every concept in the divine understanding would be willed on Descartes’s account, since for God to understand something is for him to will it. Nelson and Cunning point to both the 6 May 1630 and 27 May 1630 letters to Mersenne, as well as the following passage from the Principles, where Descartes seems to admit the divine simplicity thesis, to support this interpretation: And even [God’s] understanding and willing does not happen, as in our case, by means of operations that are in a certain sense distinct from one another; we must rather suppose that there is always a single identical and perfectly simple act by means of which he simultaneously understands, wills, and accomplishes everything. (AT VIII 14; CSM I 201) 12 For an illuminating discussion of the implications of identifying God with his own nature, see Alvin Plantinga (1980). 92 Thus, there can be no uncreated or unwilled concepts in the divine understanding. These uncreated concepts, or possibilities, would always be willed, and would thus always be actualized. Descartes does appear to be strongly in favor of the divine simplicity thesis, even more so than Leibniz. Whereas Leibniz describes divine simplicity in terms of the means by which God acts – the divine decrees 13 – Descartes understands God’s simplicity to be part of God’s nature, specifically with regard to his faculties. The distinction we tend to make between God’s will and intellect is the result of our finite, limited capacity to understand God’s nature. Since we recognize our own faculties of understanding and willing to be distinct, we often mistakenly attribute the same distinction to God. So it seems that on this distinction between Descartes’s and Leibniz’s views about God, Descartes cannot coherently maintain a reductive possibilism, because possible objects cannot inhere in God’s understanding without being willed. Nelson and Cunning’s main argument against the reductive possibilism interpretation can be reconstructed as follows: (1) If God knows an item in his intellect, then he wills it. (2) If God wills something, then it is no longer a mere possibility. (3) Therefore, if God knows an item in his intellect, then it is no longer a mere possibility. (4) God knows every item in his intellect because he is omniscient. (5) Therefore, there are no items enjoying mere possibility in the divine 13 See Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, §5. 93 intellect. From (5) it follows that Descartes isn’t a reductive possibilist, because possibilities are not features of God. The only way that Leibniz is a reductive possibilist is because he rejects (1): possible objects on his view have a different form of being by virtue of their inhering in God’s understanding alone. As long as God does not exert his will on those items of his understanding, they remain mere possibilities. They are simply ideas that God does not act upon. God is still omniscient on this view, for there is nothing in his intellect he does not know. But comparing this account to Descartes’s, it seems that Descartes must have God exerting his will on every item in his intellect, by virtue of both the simplicity of his faculties and the “perfectly simple act” of his will. Thus, for Descartes, God necessarily wills every item in his intellect, thereby actualizing everything he knows, and leaving no room for possibility. Nelson and Cunning consider an objection to premise (2) that perhaps God creates possible objects as possibles, not actuals. According to this objection, possible objects can reside in God despite his actualizing them by his will. On this account, God does indeed will these possibilities, consistent with what the divine simplicity thesis claims, but they are not willed as actual: God creates “possibles qua possible”, he creates “things possible as such”. 14 Since the consideration under review is the claim that possibilities are a feature of God, the way God wills these possibilities cannot be the same way that he wills, say, human beings. A human 14 Nelson and Cunning (1999), 139. 94 being is a product of God’s will in the sense of being a creature or creation of God, something separate from God. Possibilities in the divine mind, however, are somehow willed but not separate from God; they remain features of God. Nelson and Cunning reply that even still, this interpretive option is no longer characteristic of reductive possibilism; it is instead a form of non-reductive possibilism. I take this to mean that to posit that God is capable of creating possibles qua possible is no longer reductive possibilism since anything which God creates becomes a creature and a separate being (i.e., not just a feature of God). Nelson and Cunning are not clear on this claim, but it seems that they are assuming that on the Cartesian view, any act of God’s willing results in a creation, a creature. This is fueled also by their contention that Descartes endorses ontological actualism, that the only kind of being is actual being. Thus, even if we attempt to maintain, as the considered objection does, that God wills the possibles qua possible, this is now a form of non-reductive possibilism. The source of the problem lies in Descartes’s acceptance of a robust thesis of divine simplicity, which rules out a reductive possibilist account. But how does the doctrine of divine simplicity rule out reductive possibilism as an interpretive option for Cartesian modality? I think that Nelson and Cunning are too hasty in their rejection of reductive possibilism, despite the objection that they address. They do make two noteworthy points that we must bear in mind. First, they are correct to acknowledge that an interpretation that describes possibilities as something separate from God would be a form of non-reductive possibilism. So if, in our philosophical search for a theory of Cartesian modality, we posit possibilities 95 as something God constructs, we are in the domain of non-reductive possibilism. Second, they are perceptive in their explanation of Descartes’s avowal of divine simplicity, especially that neither the divine will nor the divine intellect is prior to the other; some commentators have suggested that Descartes is a ‘voluntarist’, giving the divine will priority over the divine intellect. This is how Leibniz might have taken Descartes. 15 But they rightly emphasize that Descartes understood divine simplicity to entail that neither will nor intellect is prior, rather that will and intellect are identical in God. However, their reading of the divine simplicity thesis runs counter to some other metaphysical conclusions that Descartes reaches about God, notably God’s omnipotence. They claim that because the divine intellect and will are “not distinct in themselves... there is no item that is known by God without his exercising his creative power on that item”. 16 This is troubling if it is meant to put a constraint on God’s power of conception. One uncomfortable consequence of this claim is that God is incapable of merely contemplating some idea. God cannot just think on this account; necessarily, his will acts in some creative way to bring about, or “actualize” whatever it is he is thinking about. The emphasis on this kind of interpretation of divine simplicity is that God wills everything he thinks about. This puts an unwarranted constraint on God’s power. The problem seems to lie with premise (1), for it is not always true that God wills everything he comprehends if comprehension 15 For instance, see Monadology, §46: “we must not think that the eternal truths being dependent upon God are therefore arbitrary and depend upon his will, as Descartes seems to have held...” 16 Nelson and Cunning (1999), 139. 96 and willing are understood differently. A more agreeable interpretation is that for anything that God can think about, it must be the case that God willed it, in the sense that everything comes from God. This interpretation seems closer to what Descartes is trying to defend in his insistence that all things depend on God. Consider again his words to Mersenne: As for the eternal truths, I say once more that † they are true or possible only because God knows them as true or possible. They are not known as true by God in any way which would imply that they are true independently of him † . If men really understood the sense of their words they could never say without blasphemy that the truth of anything is prior to the knowledge which God has of it. In God willing and knowing are a single thing in such a way that † by the very fact of willing something he knows it and it is only for this reason that such a thing is true † . So we must not say that † if God did not exist nevertheless these truths would be true † . (AT I 149-150; CSMK 24) What is remarkable here is that we get a statement about divine simplicity following immediately after a statement about how the eternal truths gain their truth value. The main point of this declaration to Mersenne is that God does not contemplate anything which he has not willed or brought into being. We have here a definite role for the divine simplicity thesis: the simplicity of God’s faculties is the reason why the eternal truths can be true, and why all things come from God. The problem on Leibniz’s account – and the contrary view that Descartes appears to be considering in this passage – is how there are concepts in God’s intellect which he himself did not will. Descartes’s insistence that God is “the sole author on whom all things depend” (AT I 150; CSMK 25), that “there can be nothing whatsoever which does not depend on him” (AT VII 435; CSM II 293) seems to be the motivating force behind the divine simplicity thesis. Thus, it doesn’t follow from this way of reading the divine 97 simplicity thesis that God must will whatever he thinks about, in the sense of ‘bringing into being’ or actualizing whatever it is he thinks about. It is perfectly consistent to maintain that God can contemplate something, for this is only to claim that God is the author of whatever it is he is comprehending, and this interpretation involves no constraints on the power of God’s faculties. Let me explain it another way. We must take Descartes seriously when he treats thinking and creating univocally in the case of God: “In God, willing, understanding, and creating are all the same thing without one being prior to the other †even conceptually†” (AT I 153; CSMK 25-26). I take this to mean that there is always a single act with God; that is, when God thinks, there is just one act, and that act is univocally said to be thinking, willing, or creating. It is not the case that God thinks of something, and then, because of divine simplicity, acts on that idea. It is also not the case that God thinks and wills simultaneously, where there are two modes of thought occurring at the same time. 17 There are never two or more modes of thought in God, as there are when human beings think and will. We are here confronted with one of those incomprehensible aspects of the divine nature which prevents us from knowing how such simplicity in God is possible. We know that God’s faculties are a single thing, and of this we can attain clear and distinct knowledge; but we cannot grasp how thinking and willing can be unified in God. Thus, it cannot be concluded that God necessarily wills whatever he thinks if two distinct events are occurring. 17 Descartes writes in the Principles that God “simultaneously understands, wills, and accomplishes everything” (AT VIII 14; CSM I 201), but he considers this always as a single act. 98 Likewise, God’s willing cannot be reduced to actualization. It is consistent for Descartes to maintain that God can comprehend something without actualizing that thought. Surely, God can will the possibility of his thinking some thought without actualizing the content of that thought. Moreover, Descartes acknowledges things such as chimeras, objects which have no actual existence, but which are composed of simple natures with real being; and the objective reality of an idea does not consist in actual being, but is something real nonetheless. Though God acts simply in one way, the result of his willing can have a variety of effects: created substances, for example, are the result of God’s willing, but even these have different true and immutable natures. And – we can assume – God wills both possibilities and actualities, though these also have remarkably different natures. Actual objects are those that enjoy actual existence, such as substances. But Nelson and Cunning would be begging the question to assume that everything God wills is actual. And it is this error of defining willing as actualizing that seems to be at play in Nelson and Cunning’s argument. The effect of God’s willing includes actualizing, but it is not equivalent or reducible to it. Another passage which allows for reductive possibilism comes from the Conversation with Burman. Descartes suggests that God is not distinct from his own decrees, such that his decrees can be considered features of him: Whatever is in God is not in reality separate from God himself; rather it is identical with God himself. ... [T]he distinction thus introduced between God himself and his decrees is a mental one, not a real one. In reality the decrees could not have been separated from God: he is not prior to them or distinct 99 from them, nor could he have existed without them. So it is clear enough how God accomplishes all things in a single act. (AT V 166; CSMK 348) While there are several issues being discussed in this passage, one principal idea is that there can be features of God which are of his own willing: his decrees. We get an explicit statement that God’s decrees are part of him, and if they are not separable from him, they are part of his nature. If these decrees are part of his nature, then it is possible for God to contemplate them since it is possible for God to contemplate his own nature. We also get an explicit, though cryptic, statement that the decrees are identical with God himself. This could mean that the divine decrees, such as the eternal truths, are identical with God himself. But in understanding this passage, we must keep in mind Descartes’s admonition that all distinctions in God are merely mental ones which we impose. Since God is simple, there are no real distinctions in him, as between his intellect and will, or his intellect and his decrees. Thus, somehow God’s thoughts are not truly distinct from himself. Applying this to Nelson and Cunning’s argument against reductive possibilism, we see that now (2) is unjustified. Premise (2) makes sense only when intellect and will have distinct functions. It is true that possibilities become actualities when the function of God’s willing is actualization; but for Descartes, thought and will are identical. So this divine faculty is not properly said to be strictly thought or strictly will as in the case of human abilities. It is a power of God’s that is beyond human grasp, and Descartes rightly warns us about attempting to understand how this power works in the next sentence from the above passage: 100 But these matters are not to be grasped by our powers of reasoning, and we must never allow ourselves the indulgence of trying to subject the nature and operations of God to our reasoning... (AT V 166; CSMK 348) The point is that God’s faculty is such that his ideas or decrees are a feature of him, however this is accomplished. This is clearly a case of reductive possibilism. I believe these foregoing passages pose a problem for Nelson and Cunning’s claim against reductive possibilism, for it seems that Descartes can maintain possibilities as features of God even on the thesis of divine simplicity, as long as God is able to and does contemplate possibilities. But I do not think that Descartes’s theory of modality is best understood as a form of reductive possibilism; many other parts of the corpus suggest that possibilities and necessities are features of the world, or at least, not strictly features of God. Furthermore, Nelson and Cunning seem to believe that reductive possibilism just is Leibnizian reductive possibilism, so any model which does not fit the Leibnizian model is ipso facto not a candidate. That is another argument from what I’ve been considering above. In fact, they suggest that if God “creates” possibilities and these are features of himself, it is a case of non- reductive possibilism. The reason is that God wills and hence actualizes the ideas that he contemplates, and this rules out reductive possibilism. I am willing to accept Nelson and Cunning’s identification of reductive possibilism with Leibnizian reductive possibilism, and for this reason, to rule out reductive possibilism as a model for Cartesian modality, though I have reservations about God’s willing always being a case of actualizing. 101 Non-Reductive Possibilism With reductive possibilism out of the way, Nelson and Cunning consider the non-reductive possibilist interpretation. They cite Anthony Kenny 18 and Calvin Normore 19 as the primary advocates of this view, though they focus their discussion on Normore. Kenny’s argument for non-reductive possibilism interpreted Descartes as a Meinongian with regard to ontology, and they quickly dismiss this view both because of its ontological bizarreness and Kenny’s questionable use of some texts from the Fifth Meditation which Nelson and Cunning believe to be best interpreted as advancing a mathematical nominalism. I agree with Nelson and Cunning that an interpretation of Descartes as a Meinongian is problematic, if solely for the fact that there is a lack of convincing textual support. But whether Descartes is a nominalist about mathematics is debatable. I will return to a discussion of Platonism in Descartes’s philosophy in Chapter Five, for I want to argue that Descartes can be read as a Platonist about eternal truths. For now, though, we must investigate the non-reductive possibilist interpretation, and whether Descartes can fit such an interpretation. According to Nelson and Cunning, Normore claims that Descartes is a non- reductive possibilist since “possible existence depends, like actual existence, on 18 Anthony Kenny, Descartes: A Study of His Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1968), and “The Cartesian Circle and Eternal Truths” Journal of Philosophy 67 (1970): 685-700. 19 Calvin Normore, “Meaning and Objective Being: Descartes and His Sources,” in Essays on Descartes’s Meditations, ed. Amelie Rorty (Berkeley: University of California, 1986), 223-241; and “Descartes’s Possibilities” in René Descartes: Critical Assessments, Volume 3, ed. Georges Moyal (London: Routledge, 1991), 68-83. 102 being created by God”. 20 Here, ‘being created by God’ is the univocal sense of being in which possibility is not reducible to actuality. Normore draws principal support for his view from the Replies to the Second Set of Objections, Axiom X: Existence is contained in the idea or concept of every single thing, since we cannot conceive of anything except as existing. Possible or 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. (AT VII 166; CSM II 117) This passage alone does not give us non-reductive possibilism, but Normore finds a strong connection between it and what Descartes writes about the objective reality of an idea. Normore reasons that if every idea we have “contains” possible existence, then an idea of an object x implies that x possibly exists. 21 The only other idea which is different is our idea of God: the idea of God implies that God necessarily exists. All ideas, Descartes says, have objective reality: “the being of the thing which is represented by an idea, in so far as this exists in the idea. ... For whatever we perceive as being in the objects of our ideas exists objectively in the ideas themselves”. 22 Even our idea of God has objective reality; its objective reality suggests a formal cause that is infinite, and so we get one argument for God’s existence. Normore argues that on this doctrine of objective reality, the objective reality of an idea of x is the same as the objective existence of x. To say that my idea of x has such-and-such objective reality is just to say that x has objective existence in my intellect. He believes this identity leads to the “equation... of the objective 20 Nelson and Cunning (1999), 148. 21 Normore (1991), 68. 22 Second Replies, AT VII 161; CSM II 113-114. Cf. First Replies, AT VII 102; CSM II 74-75. 103 existence of the object with its possible existence”. 23 That is, the objective reality of an idea of some object is the same thing as the possible existence of that object. 24 There is no difference between an object’s possible existence and its objective existence. Normore attempts to argue for a strong connection between Descartes’s claims about the objective reality of ideas and an underlying modal theory. Nelson and Cunning reject Normore’s interpretation for two reasons. First, they find it problematic that Normore’s interpretation commits Descartes to the ontological reality of possibilities. This is in obvious tension with their view of Cartesian actualism. Nelson and Cunning tend towards ontological frugality in their interpretation of Descartes. There is, as they point out, a lack of explanation in Normore’s argument as to how possibilities fit Descartes’s basic ontology of substances and modes. By equating the objective reality of an idea with the possible existence of that thing, Normore seems to posit a new kind of reality that is not simply mental reality. As he states, “for us to have something in mind with objective reality God must have caused it to be possible”. 25 This suggests some possible realm of objects which God establishes. Now, one challenge to this view is how we can have a clear and distinct perception about some possible object. As Nelson and Cunning write “clear and distinct perceptions are always of either God or actually 23 Normore (1991), 68. 24 Ibid. Normore constructs, essentially, a syllogism: The objective reality of an idea is the same as the objective existence of its object. The objective existence of the object is the same as the possible existence of the object. Therefore, the objective reality of an idea is the same as the possible existence of the object. 25 Ibid., 80. 104 created things”. 26 It follows that one cannot have a clear and distinct perception of an unactualized possibility. An idea we can entertain about such supposed possibility will always be confused or obscure. And if an idea is confused or obscure, one cannot draw any metaphysical conclusions about it; as Nelson and Cunning put it, “[c]onfused perceptions... have no metaphysical modal import”. 27 I discuss Nelson and Cunning’s argument against clear and distinct perceptions of possibles below. Second, they reject Normore’s interpretation of Cartesian objective reality as identical with possible existence. While they commend Normore for his unique interpretation of objective reality, they believe a better interpretation lies in understanding objective reality as “an intrinsic representational feature of ideas”. 28 This kind of interpretation is motivated partly by their commitment to actualism, partly by their belief that Descartes sought to reject Medieval views about objective reality. They do not offer an thorough-going analysis of Cartesian objective reality, but we can see that a satisfactory account would construe it as “part of the ontology of thinking things instead of making it a relation between an idea and a pure possibility”. 29 The benefit of this kind of interpretation, they argue, is that the complementary notion of formal reality – at least for ideas of finite things – becomes the thinking thing itself: the mind that entertains the ideas. That is, the formal cause of our idea of God is God, because this idea contains an infinite amount of objective 26 Nelson and Cunning (1999), 149. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 105 reality, while the formal cause of the idea of a finite thing is the mind, because these ideas contain a finite amount of objective reality. And if objective reality is understood as the intrinsic representational content of ideas, then we have no need for anything beyond the dualism arrived at in the Sixth Meditation. I agree with Nelson and Cunning’s rejection of Normore’s argument that objective reality is just possible existence. There appears to be little textual support that this is what Descartes meant by ‘objective reality’. For one thing, this interpretation does not fit what Descartes establishes in the Third Meditation: But in order for a given idea to contain such and such objective reality, it must surely derive it from some cause which contains at least as much formal reality as there is objective reality in the idea. ... [T]he mode of being by which a thing exists objectively <or representatively> in the intellect by way of an idea, imperfect though it may be, is certainly not nothing, and so it cannot come from nothing. (AT VII 41; CSM II 28-29) 30 This passage is one of Descartes’s first statements of what we may call the Objective Reality Principle: the objective reality of an idea must have a cause with at least as much formal reality as the idea has objectively. The objective reality of an idea describes the way the object of thought exists in the intellect; it is a real mode of existence, just short of actual or formal existence, but it is not a possible mode of existence. Descartes clarifies this concept in the Second Replies: By [objective reality] I mean the being of the thing which is represented by an idea, in so far as this exists in the idea. ... For whatever we perceive as being in the objects of our ideas exists objectively in the ideas themselves. (AT VII 161; CSM II 113-114) 30 The brackets are CSM’s reference to the “subsequent translations approved by Descartes” for the French edition of the Meditations. The appearance of “representatively” here provides additional support against Normore’s identification of objective reality with possible existence. I explain more below. 106 Thus, I may think of a round square, and because I can form at least a confused idea of it, the idea has objective reality; but it does not have possible existence, because it is not capable of existing. Its degree of objective reality may be considerably low, as compared to the objective reality of my idea of existing things; but it possesses some degree of objective reality all the same. Objective reality goes beyond just possible existence: it is real existence, but not extra-mental. Once the view of non-reductive possibilism is rejected, Nelson and Cunning conclude that Descartes must have held no theory about possible objects, and that none of Descartes’s modal language entails any metaphysical modalities, or any theory about modal terms. But their rejection of non-reductive possibilism relies on many aspects of their positive theory, especially their argument for Cartesian actualism. I will consider first their positive theory, which involves a different interpretation of the texts containing modal language, and then I will return to my criticisms of both their arguments against non-reductive possibilism and their arguments in favor of the no-theory theory. Ontological Actualism Nelson and Cunning argue that Descartes cannot have held a theory of modality given his ontological actualism. In short, their view is that since, for Descartes, reality consists entirely of what is actual—God and his creations—a theory about possible objects is unnecessary. They base their interpretation on the texts which contain modal language; they believe that none of the instances of 107 Descartes’s use of modal language gives any evidence that Descartes means metaphysical modality, or at least, that we should draw metaphysical conclusions from his words. Whenever Descartes uses modal language—specifically, possibility—they argue, he has one of three purposes in mind: (1) to convey dependency; (2) to convey epistemic scope; (3) to convey “confused” or “false thinking”. 31 Dependency, while a metaphysical notion, is not a modal notion. Modality concerns modes of truth, however truth is to be construed. The dependency that Descartes usually has in mind is either the dependency of all creation on God, or the dependency of modes on substances. Thus, an idea depends on a mind, while my mind depends for its existence on God. As a corollary to this, Descartes’s use of “possible” also would convey the limited nature of a dependent being. Beings which depend upon something for their existence or essence are said to be limited. So, since I depend upon God for my existence, I am said to be a limited creature; and since God depends on nothing for his own existence, his nature is said to be unlimited. God is the only being who does not depend on anything. The second use, conveying epistemic scope, is prevalent in many parts of Descartes’s writing; one notable passage from the Second Replies seems to indicate that this epistemic use should be the only way to understand possibility: “If by ‘possible’ you mean what everyone commonly means, namely, ‘whatever does not 31 Nelson and Cunning (1999), 140 108 conflict with our human concepts” (AT VII 150; CSM II 107). However, this passage alone is insufficient to establish Descartes’s definition of ‘possible’. In the Conversation with Burman, we see Descartes juxtapose ‘possible’ against ‘actual’, defining it “as something which does not actually exist... but is capable of so doing” (AT V 160; CSMK 343). This passage by itself sheds considerable doubt on Nelson and Cunning’s thesis that Descartes does not hold a view of possibility. The third use – that modal terms convey confused or false thinking – is most troubling. There is a way to approach the Meditations themselves as a journey through confused and false thinking to clear and distinct thinking. The uses of ‘possible’ on this understanding would then be a strategic rhetorical device to get the meditator clear about her false conceptions of various things. Thus, the evil demon is ‘possible’ in the First Meditation precisely because all beliefs have been subjected to radical doubt, and the possibility becomes open that there may be nothing certain. Only when we have reached the Sixth Meditation can we decidedly refute the evil demon hypothesis as impossible. But this only happens once we are certain of the foundation of knowledge, which is clear and distinct perception. Given these three uses of ‘possible’, it is interesting that Nelson and Cunning focus exclusively on possibility yet draw their general conclusion for all modality. In fact, if Nelson and Cunning are right that Cartesian reality is exhausted by God and his creations, then we at least have one metaphysical modality which is God’s essence (his necessary existence), and it seems that we would need a theory about this modality. But one 109 result of their conclusion is that Descartes has no metaphysical theory of possibility, and this seems to be the focus of their paper. Nelson and Cunning determine that the strongest evidence for their interpretation of Cartesian possibility implying no theory of modality comes from three “crucial texts”: Axiom X from the Second Replies, a passage from the Notae, and a passage from the First Replies. From the first text, Axiom X, Nelson and Cunning construct an argument for the conclusion that possible existence is the same thing as contingent existence. Here is their argument: (1) Possible existence is contained in the concept of a limited thing. (from Axiom X) (2) All limited things depend on God. (3) Therefore, possible existence is contained in the concept of dependency on God. (from 1 and 2) (4) Therefore, possible existence is the same thing as contingent (dependent) existence. The upshot of this is the stronger claim that by ‘possible’, Descartes means nothing more than dependence on God. As further evidence of the truth of (4), Nelson and Cunning cite this passage from the Notae: existence is contained in the concept of God – and not just possible or contingent existence, as in the ideas of all other things, but absolutely necessary and actual existence. (AT VIII 361; CSM I 306) The important point, they argue, is that God’s independent existence is contrasted with the dependent existence of finite things. 32 Lest we think that the occurrence of 32 Ibid., 142. 110 the term ‘actual’ towards the end of this passage is an indication that Descartes is contrasting actual existence from possible existence, Nelson and Cunning urge that we read this passage as a demonstration of God’s necessary and actual existence “from our conception of him”. 33 The contrast is not between actual and possible; rather, it is between those ideas from which we can conclude that the object must exist independently (and hence be actual), and those ideas from which we can only conclude that the object must exist dependently. Thus, from the mere concept of God, we can demonstrate his existence, but we cannot do the same for other conceptions we have. Completing their textual support is this passage from the First Replies: [W]e must distinguish between possible and necessary existence. It must be noted 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. Those who carefully attend to this difference between the idea of God and every other idea will undoubtedly perceive that even though our understanding of other things always involved understanding them as if they were existing things, it does not follow that they do exist... (AT VII 116-117; CSM II 83) Again, we see that necessary existence is only contained in the idea of God. Even though there is no mention in this passage of contingent or dependent existence, Nelson and Cunning believe the same theme defines this passage as well: we can demonstrate God’s existence from our idea of him as necessarily existing, but we can do this for no other ideas. Nelson and Cunning conclude from these texts that Descartes’s modal language is never indicative of metaphysical modality, especially 33 Ibid. 111 of a realm of possibility as opposed to actuality. They argue that Descartes only intends via modal terms to express an “ontological distinction” between God and his creatures, and this ontology involves nothing more than the dependence of everything on God, which gives the creation its ontological status of pure dependency. Nelson and Cunning raise two principal objections to their view. First, given the three passages cited above, it might seem that Descartes is claiming that we clearly and distinctly perceive possible existence to be contained in our concepts of finite things. After all, Descartes does use the words “possible existence” (existentiem possibilem) in the First Replies passage, and it further seems undisputed that our clear and distinct perceptions do not give us false information. The crucial contrast would seem to lie between possible being and actual being, especially in the case of God, whose actuality is guaranteed by our clear and distinct conception of him. We cannot determine the actuality of any other conceptions because we only perceive possible being; we deduce their actuality from our conception of God. Nelson and Cunning reply that this objection rests on a mistaken notion that there is a substantial difference between perceiving the possible existence of a thing and perceiving the actual existence of a thing. They claim that there is no intrinsic and “no phenomenological difference between perceiving actual existence and perceiving some supposed, merely possible existence”. 34 34 Ibid., 143. 112 Consider their example to demonstrate this point. Take, on the one hand, a clear and distinct idea of extension. According to Descartes, this idea contains possible existence. 35 Now take a clear and distinct idea of extension as actually existing. Is there a difference between these two ideas? Phenomenologically, there is no difference: the two ideas are the same. The first idea does not involve something extra, “a spooky halo signifying merely possible existence”, as Nelson and Cunning put it. When we clearly and distinctly perceive extension, we perceive it as actually existing, albeit dependently on God. Thus, their claim is that possible existence is reducible to dependent existence. A second objection they consider involves those texts which deal with the creation doctrine. One significant theme of these texts is that given God’s infinitude, all things must depend upon God, even the “eternal truths of essences, logic, etc.”. 36 This entails that these truths have a dependency on God’s will, and so would seem to suggest a theory of modality of necessity and possibility. If God is entirely free to make these truths, then the eternal truths “could have been different from the way they actually are”, and thus “alternative eternal truths have being as pure possibilities”. 37 They are real possibilities because God seems to have the power to make these truths other than they are, to have chosen differently in creating the truths he did in fact create. To be precise, God has the power to not make 2+2 equal 4. If 35 Nelson and Cunning have it as “contingent existence”, not “possible existence”. But Descartes writes in Axiom X that concepts of limited things contain “possible or contingent existence” (AT VII 166; CSM II 117). The interpretation of this ‘or’ is crucial for Nelson and Cunning’s argument, and they are understanding the Latin ‘sive’ as “or in other words”. 36 Nelson and Cunning (1999), 143. 37 Ibid., 144. 113 these are real possibilities, then this is another form of the non-reductive possibilism that Nelson and Cunning are seeking to refute. Nelson and Cunning base their reply to this objection on a specific interpretation of the creation doctrine. Since this is the principal objection to which I focus my response, I lay out carefully their argument against it. Here is the argument they consider: (1) God’s omnipotence entails that God can do anything (e.g., God can make contradictions true). (2) God’s infinite will, his “perfect indifference”, means that he always could have done otherwise than he did. (3) Therefore, there are ways the eternal truths could have been different from the way they are now. (4) Therefore, alternative eternal truths have being as pure possibilities. The first objection they raise to this argument concerns the first premise. This premise, they claim, involves a “misreading” of the omnipotence thesis, if we read this premise as asserting that “for all X, God can do X”. 38 There are two distinct ways to interpret the meaning of God’s omnipotency: (a) for all X, God can do X; (b) for no X should we say that God cannot do X. We saw in the last chapter Bennett’s insistence that we understand Descartes as having held (b). Nelson and Cunning endorse this view, as do I. There is no substantial evidence that Descartes believed God can do anything, even the 38 Ibid. 114 impossible. For, as Bennett puts it, this is to “set limits to what God can or should perform”. 39 Nelson and Cunning argue that we should understand the first premise as the conjunction of two sub-theses: (i) God’s power extends to anything we clearly and distinctly perceive; (ii) We dare not say that God’s power does not extend to what we do not clearly and distinctly perceive. 40 Essentially, these propositions affirm that our clear and distinct perceptions are consistent with God’s power over them, and that whether or not God’s power is also consistent with perceptions that are not clear and distinct is something for which we cannot make any claims to knowledge. Thus, we can be certain that God is capable of creating those things which we clearly and distinctly perceive because in every clear and distinct perception is the perception that everything depends upon God. The question of whether the same holds true of unclear perceptions is a matter of which we must withhold judgment. To withhold our judgment that God can or cannot bring about a contradictory state of affairs is not to assign a limit to or undermine God’s omnipotency. It is merely to refrain from judging a proposition which is not clear and distinct. Thus, we can understand that God is omnipotent, but we cannot grasp the total extent of that omnipotency given our finite intellects. Now, Nelson and Cunning think that this reading of the omnipotency thesis reveals that Descartes “never positively asserts the non-reductive possibility of 39 Bennett quoted in Nelson and Cunning (1999), 144. 40 Ibid., 145. Thesis (i) comes from Descartes’s letter to Regius, June 1642 (AT III 567; CSMK 214), and thesis (ii) comes from Descartes’s letter for Arnauld, 29 July 1648 (AT V 224; CSMK 358-9). 115 God’s counterfactually doing otherwise than he has done”. 41 They argue that the real possibility of an alternative eternal truth is never warranted by what Descartes says, because he makes no claims about what could be possible given both God’s freely choosing the eternal truths and his omnipotency. Instead, we are only warranted in claiming something along the lines of (b) above, because we simply cannot hold a clear and distinct perception of an alternative eternal truth. They draw support from the Fourth Meditation rule of correct judgment, where Descartes explains the source of human error to be an extension of the faculty of will beyond the scope of the intellect. Error arises precisely because our perceptions are not sufficiently clear and distinct, yet we give our assent or dissent to the perception anyway. We avoid error, Descartes says, only when we refrain from passing judgments on those perceptions that are not clear and distinct; we withhold judgment. Now, Nelson and Cunning claim that “if one contemplates a mountain without a valley, 2+2=5, or any other manifest repugnance, then one’s thinking is obviously very confused”. 42 The truths of these propositions are confused to say the least, and therefore we cannot judge them to be true. If we are admonished not to pass judgment on these alternative truths, it seems unwarranted to claim that they are nonetheless real possibilities. Before presenting my own objections to Nelson and Cunning’s argument for a no-theory theory of modality, I want to review one final objection which they consider. This involves the existence not of possible objects or alternative eternal truths, but possible states of affairs. For example, the Sixth Meditation argument for 41 Ibid., 145. 42 Ibid., 146. 116 the distinction of mind and body appears to count in favor of the claim that there is a real possibility that mind and body are distinct. This is a possible or alternative state of affairs: the possibility that mind and body are distinct. As Nelson and Cunning put it, it is the possibility of an alternative state of affairs concerning “actual substances”. They believe that this objection is motivated by the objector’s emphasis on God’s power to bring about an alternative state of affairs that we can clearly and distinctly perceive. 43 Our clear and distinct perception is of the possibility of some state of affairs. The advantage of this kind of objection is that we are now dealing with the possibility of what can be clearly and distinctly perceived, avoiding the pitfalls of the previous objection that dealt with confused and obscure perceptions. But Nelson and Cunning think this objection falters on its emphasis on God’s power rather than “God’s veracity and the truth of whatever we clearly and distinctly perceive”. 44 Focusing on God’s veracity, they argue that the distinctness of mind and body which Descartes claims to perceive in the Sixth Meditation is not the possibility of distinctness but their actual distinctness. The modal language is explained epistemically, as the meditator’s ignorance of the proof of real distinction. Once the meditator realizes the real distinction between mind and body, she also realizes that the possibility of their distinctness was really just a function of her thought, and that she was simply considering their actual distinctness all along. 43 Ibid., 147. 44 Ibid. 117 Against the No-theory Theory Nelson and Cunning present a carefully argued, complex interpretation of Cartesian modality that is particularly difficult to contend with. The sparse and generally indirect use of modal language in the Cartesian corpus makes it hard to attribute a definite theory of modality at all to the philosopher, and Nelson and Cunning have taken this as an indication that Descartes holds no theory of modality. But I believe that, while their approach is ambitious and presents Descartes’s views in a more charitable light than either universal possibilism or limited possibilism, the no-theory theory is mistaken because it conflicts with many relevant texts and attributes a sparse ontology to Descartes. One of the principal arguments of Nelson and Cunning is to reduce the language of possibility in Descartes to dependency, a maneuver which purports to reveal the lack of any modal import of the word “possibility” and its cognates. They rely heavily on passages in which “possibly” and “contingently” occur together. I do not want to dispute their claim that Descartes often means dependency, epistemic scope, or confused thinking when he uses the word ‘possible’. However, I do not think that these three uses exhaust Descartes’s meaning of the term. I noted above that Nelson and Cunning rely on three crucial passages to support their contention that Descartes holds no theory of modality: Axiom X from the Second Replies, a passage from the Notae, and a passage from the First Replies. In their consideration of Axiom X, they conclude that possible existence is the same thing as contingent (or dependent) existence. But a close inspection of their argument that possibility is 118 reducible to dependency reveals an unwarranted conclusion. The argument attempted to conclude that possible existence is the same thing as dependent existence from the premise that possible existence is always contained in the concept of dependency. We need only note that containment is not the same as identity. The fact that all things depend upon God does not give sufficient ground to reduce possibility to dependence, or to consider the two concepts identical. For instance, I may claim that “X depends on God” without claiming that God brought about X. The power of God to bring about X would seem to indicate something about the possibility of X’s being created. But its metaphysical status of dependency is a different issue. X is a possibility before it is said to be dependent on God, though we may say that if God were to bring about X, necessarily it would be dependent on him, given the particular concept of God Descartes has. So, it appears that the most Nelson and Cunning can conclude from Axiom X is that possible existence always involves dependent existence. Furthermore, Nelson and Cunning’s use of the Notae passage to support their argument for the possibility-dependency reduction involves a critical translation of the Latin word for “or” as “or in other words”, which would support their contention that possibility is the same as dependency. In Axiom X, Descartes writes that “possible or contingent existence is contained in the concept of a limited thing”. The original Latin reads: “nempe continetur existentia possibilis sive contingens in conceptu rei limitatae...” (AT VII 166). Nelson and Cunning write in a footnote that Descartes’s use of the Latin sive in this passage is meant as “or in other words”, 119 indicating a non-exclusive disjunction. Likewise, in the Comments, we see a similar disjunction between possible and contingent existence, though the Latin connective is vel: “non possibilis duntaxat vel contingens...” (AT VIIIB 361). Vel is normally understood as an enclitic of sive, a form of weak disjunction. Weak disjunctions, also called “inclusive disjunctions”, can be understood as expressing ‘or, possibly both’. This is in contrast to the stronger disjunction between two mutually exclusive alternatives, as in the Latin aut. This sense of disjunction is normally understood to express ‘or, but not both’. 45 However, if we turn our attention to some of Descartes’s other uses of disjunction, we do not get a consistent usage for each term. Normally, when he uses aut, he expresses a strong disjunction. But his use of sive or vel changes, expressing here a weak disjunction, there a strong disjunction, and other times an undetermined pair of alternatives. In the Principles, for instance, he says that “some attributes or modes (attributa vel modi) are in the very things of which they are said to be attributes or modes” (AT VIIIA 26-27; CSM I 212). Nelson and Cunning’s reading couldn’t possibly work here, given Descartes strict separation between an attribute and a mode. I think Descartes’s usage can be justified by considering that context may be playing a role in any case of a disjunction. Even among clearly inclusive uses of ‘or’, some express ‘or in other words’, and some do not. Take the sentence, ‘if you are a student or a teacher, you may attend the event’. This is an inclusive use 45 These meanings of disjunctions come from Irving Copi, Introduction to Logic, 7th edition (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 271-272. I am also indebted to Clifford Ando and Ray Jennings for their clarifications of the Latin language regarding disjunctions. 120 of ‘or’: if you are both a student and a teacher, you may still attend the event. But it is not the ‘or’ which implies that being a student and being a teacher are the same thing. When Descartes says “possible or contingent existence is contained in the concept of a limited thing”, he may only mean ‘possible or, what is the same in this context, contingent existence is contained in the concept of a limited thing”. The disjunction itself does not imply that the two concepts are the same thing on every occasion of Descartes’s mentioning them. 46 Finally, the First Replies passage that Nelson and Cunning rely on for their reduction of possibility to dependency is interpreted incompletely. I noted above that they construe this passage to be an argument showing that God’s independent and infinite nature can be demonstrated from our conception of him. The important distinction being drawn, they claim, is between contingent existence and necessary existence, not between the merely possible and the actual. But Descartes, while emphasizing that God’s necessary existence can be demonstrated from our conception of him, does argue that our ideas of things cannot demonstrate that these things are actual even though such ideas represent them as existing: Those who carefully attend to this difference between the idea of God and every other idea will undoubtedly perceive that even though our understanding of other things always involved understanding them as if they were existing things, it does not follow that they do exist. (AT VII 116-117; CSM II 83) I take this to mean that we cannot conclude that our ideas of anything (save God) contain actual existence; that is, we cannot conclude merely from our conception of 46 My thanks to Jim Van Cleve for providing me this example to explain the multiple uses of disjunctions in Descartes. 121 things that these things do actually exist. The only conception for which we can conclude that the object does in fact exist is our conception of God. The most we can conclude is that these conceptions contain possible existence, and this is to be contrasted with actual existence. The point about our ideas representing their objects as existing could merely be a way of expressing the choice between two types of existence: possible and actual. Thus, when Descartes writes in Axiom X that “Existence is contained in the idea of concept of every single thing, since we cannot conceive of anything except as existing”, he does not mean that we must conceive of every object of our ideas as actually existing. All we may conclude is that these objects possibly exist, in the sense that they might be actually existing objects. Now, how does this discredit the reduction? Consider what Descartes continues to say in the above passage, which Nelson and Cunning neglect to acknowledge: ...it does not follow that they do exist, but merely that they are capable of existing. For our understanding does not show us that it is necessary for actual existence to be conjoined with their other properties. But, from the fact that we understand that actual existence is necessarily and always conjoined with the other attributes of God, it certainly does follow that God exists. (AT VII 117; CSM II 83; my emphases) There is an undeniable distinction being drawn here between actual existence (“they do exist”) and possible existence (“they are capable of existing”). If possible existence is understood this way, how is this the same as dependent existence? According to Nelson and Cunning, anything that is dependent has actual existence, 122 since everything that is actually exists. But this interpretation runs counter to the rest of the passage I’ve supplied. Turning to the Conversation with Burman, Descartes claims that the subject matter of mathematics is possible objects, that is, objects that don’t actually exist, but are capable of actual existence, as opposed to the objects of physics. He writes: [T]he complete and entire object of mathematics and everything it deals with is a true and real entity. This object has a true and real nature, just as much as the objects of physics itself. The only difference is that physics considers its object not just as a true and real entity, but also as something actually and specifically existing. Mathematics, on the other hand, considers its object merely as possible, i.e. as something which does not actually exist in space but is capable of so doing. (AT V 160; CSMK 343) Unless Nelson and Cunning wish to argue that Descartes’s use of “actual” existence here is different from their understanding of actualism, then I do not see how they can deny his postulating possible objects. There is a clear distinction being drawn between actual existence and possible existence, and the link is made clear through Descartes’s defining ‘possible’ as ‘not actual’. This supports the claim in the First Replies passages above that possible existence is distinct from actual existence. Another interesting claim made in this passage is that the objects of mathematics concern true and real entities which are merely possible, as opposed to actual. It is not obvious that Descartes is endorsing a realm of possibilia here; his precise wording is that mathematics considers its objects as merely possible. But given Descartes’s related claims about the certainty of mathematical proofs, it would be quite strange if he held that mathematics considers its objects as merely possible, but that there is no such thing as possible existence. 123 Other inconsistent readings of pivotal texts follow from Nelson and Cunning’s interpretation. In their treatment of the objection concerning the Sixth Meditation distinction between mind and body, they think that the argument proceeds from our perception of the actual distinctness of mind and body, not their possible separation. Descartes writes at the beginning of this Meditation that “there is no doubt that God is capable of creating everything that I am capable of perceiving [clearly and distinctly]” (AT VII 71; CSM II 50). He repeats this same idea later and applies it to his conceiving two things as distinct: “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” (AT VII 78; CSM II 54). Now, under Nelson and Cunning’s theory, this principle makes no sense, or is at least deceptively stated. According to them, Descartes should have said, ‘whatever I can conceive clearly and distinctly, God actually brings about.’ There is no possible separation of mind and body under this theory, only actual separation. Now, they acknowledge that Descartes says he can conceive the mind without the body. But Descartes must mean the he conceives the possibility of mind existing without body. Otherwise, it would follow that the mind does exist without the body, that is, as disembodied, and Descartes certainly does not believe this. As a final response to Nelson and Cunning’s claim that there is no phenomenological difference between conceiving extension and conceiving 124 extension as existing, we need merely look at Descartes’s remarks to an unknown correspondent in 1645 or 1646: we do indeed understand the essence of a thing in one way when we consider it in abstraction from whether it exists or not, and in a different way when we consider it as existing... (AT IV 349; CSMK 280) Extension, the example that Nelson and Cunning use in their objection, is the essence of corporeal things, and as Descartes tells us here, we can understand extension in two different ways: as only possibly existing (“whether it exists or not”), and as actually existing. It is clear that Descartes believes that there is phenomenological difference between these two thoughts. These two ideas are not reducible to a single idea about extension as actually existing. Our ability to abstract the property of existence from an idea about a created thing’s essence shows that we may conceive an essence in two ways: as possibly existing, or as actually existing. As I have shown, we should not conclude from Descartes’s statements about possibility that he means nothing more than actuality. At the very least, we have little evidence that he holds no theory of modality. Given Descartes’s statements in the Fifth Meditation about God, it is certain that he believes the existence of God is necessary. God’s essence, in fact, just is his existence; this is something which is not a conceptual matter. Descartes’s theory of the possible and necessary, while not generally clear, cannot be dismissed or reduced simply because a theory isn’t obvious. In fact, this dismissive attitude runs counter to Descartes’s statements in the creation doctrine that God is the efficient cause of the true and immutable natures of created substances. If absolutely everything is dependent on God, then it is vitally 125 important to discover which things are possible and which are necessary so that our knowledge is certain. It is mistaken to believe that claims involving modal operators should either be rejected or reduced. 126 CHAPTER FOUR THE CONCEPTION OF GOD In this chapter, I begin the task of constructing an interpretation which I think better fits the creation doctrine to Descartes’s philosophical system. I argue that the claims that Descartes makes about God – namely, the essential attributes of God – entail the creation doctrine. My interpretation is guided by two methodological elements which Descartes considers crucial for conducting proper philosophical investigation and explanation: first, his explicit method in drawing metaphysical conclusions, namely, to be guided at all times by (i) his own clear and distinct perceptions, including, most importantly, (ii) the clear and distinct perception that our powers of comprehension are significantly less than the power of God; second, that Descartes is providing first principles of philosophy in order to secure a foundation from which to derive truths about the world. Thus, we are furnished with an initial reason that the doctrine does not appear substantially in any of his published works: the doctrine is not a first principle of philosophy. Given these guiding criteria, which are laid out at the end of Part One of his Principles of Philosophy, we will come to see that the creation doctrine is a corollary of certain first principles about God’s nature, namely his simplicity, freedom, and omnipotence. As I noted in Chapter One, a troubling aspect of the creation doctrine is the absence of an explicit avowal of the doctrine in the major published works, such as 127 the Discourse, Meditations, and Principles. 1 I believe Descartes is guided by a strict method of providing first principles of philosophy in these works, and that the creation doctrine simply isn’t a first principle. The doctrine, however, follows from first principles which he does clearly state in these published works. 2 The doctrine also borders closely on being a theological issue, which Descartes acknowledges to Mersenne, and which may be why he chooses not to elucidate the doctrine fully. 3 What is unique about the doctrine is its appearance in Descartes’s correspondence with philosophers and theologians: in the Objections and Replies, the Conversation with Burman, and many letters. In these texts, the doctrine does not get a full explanation or argument because it is not a primary doctrine that Descartes needs to underwrite his other metaphysical concerns. Rather, the first principles of God that Descartes outlines, which are metaphysical principles, entail the creation doctrine. Thus, I believe that Dan Kaufman is correct to claim that the doctrine follows 1 I include the Meditations here only if they are considered separately from the Objections and Replies. I am inclined to see the Objections and Replies as an integral part of the Meditations, for Descartes wished his readers to see the work this way. See his comments to Mersenne, AT III 184; CSMK 153, AT III 239-40; CSMK 158-59, AT III 297; CSMK 172, AT III 340; CSMK 177, and AT III 384; CSMK 184. 2 In a letter to Mersenne, 11 November 1640, Descartes writes that in the Meditations he is dealing with “all the first things that can be discovered by philosophizing in an orderly way” (AT III 239; CSMK 158). 3 The exact relationship between metaphysics and theology is difficult to determine in Descartes. In the 15 April 1630 letter to Mersenne, Descartes writes: “Your question of theology is beyond my mental capacity, but it does not seem to me outside my province, since it has no concern with anything dependent on revelation, which is what I call theology in the strict sense” (AT I 143-44; CSMK 22). The creation doctrine is not a revealed doctrine, nor are the philosophical principles on which it is based. Descartes conducts his own reasoning about God’s nature, and this is especially clear in the Meditations, where the authority of Biblical revelation has been bracketed in the interest of demonstrating the mind’s power to arrive at certain conclusions about the world. By the time we get to the 27 May 1630 letter to Mersenne, Descartes suggests that the creation doctrine is not a theological issue. 128 necessarily from Descartes’s metaphysics. 4 Kaufman argues that Descartes’s beliefs about God’s simplicity and freedom commit Descartes to the creation doctrine. I add to his interpretation (1) that a proper understanding of God’s omnipotence is essential for understanding the creation doctrine, since this is how our intellects comprehend God’s freedom of the will, and (2) that because Descartes conceived metaphysics to be bound by particular theological concerns, the doctrine is appropriately left out of these major works that deal with strictly first principles of metaphysics. So it is to these first principles which we must turn to interpret the doctrine properly. Simplicity I noted in the previous chapter that Descartes adopts a rigorous understanding of God’s simplicity. We can better understand how rigorous he took this simplicity to be by comparing his conception to other theories about divine simplicity. Consider first the Scholastic conception of God’s simplicity, which Descartes inherits and adapts to his own philosophy: Augustine. In City of God, Book 11, Chapter 10, Augustine writes “There is, accordingly, a good which alone is simple and, therefore, which alone is 4 See Kaufman, “The Creation of the Eternal Truths and the Nature of God in Descartes,” (PhD diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2000), and (2002). 129 unchangeable—and this is God”. 5 Augustine’s reasons for calling something ‘simple’ are, we will see, different from Descartes’s: “When a nature is called simple we mean that it can have nothing that it can lose; that it cannot be different from what it has...” (Augustine 218). As we shall see, whereas Aquinas defines simplicity primarily in contrast to complexity, Augustine writes that simplicity is determined by a thing’s inability to lose any of its qualities; that is, simplicity is based on incorruptibility. He reasserts his thesis a few lines later: “whatever is authentically and truly divine is said to be simple because its qualities and its substance are one and the same” (Augustine 219). Though this sounds slightly different from his original reason, because Augustine writes that God is simple since all of his attributes are identical, it nonetheless captures the same idea that God is simple because he never loses any of his qualities. 6 One key idea in Augustine that Descartes seems to borrow is incorruptibility, or immutability. Descartes often speaks of the immutability of God’s will; 7 the reason is not difficult to see. Change indicates instability and non-unification, two concepts which Descartes finds inconsistent with and repugnant to God’s nature. So, 5 Augustine, City of God, ed. Vernon J. Bourke, trans. Gerald G. Walsh, Demetrius B. Zema, Grace Monahan, and Daniel J. Honan (Garden City: Doubleday, 1958), 217. 6 In Book 8, Chapter 6, Augustine gives another description of God’s simplicity in terms of the nature of his being: “in God, to live, to know, to be blessed is one and the same as to be” (Augustine 153). 7 For example, in the Conversation with Burman, Descartes says “it is quite unintelligible that God should be anything but completely unalterable” (AT V 166; CSMK 348). 130 God must be incorruptible. Thus, using Augustine’s reasoning, God must be a simple being. 8 Anselm. In both the Monologion, Chapter 17, and Proslogion, Chapter 18, Anselm sets out to determine the nature of God, and he discovers that God is life, wisdom, truth, goodness, blessedness, eternity, and “every true good” (Anselm 111). 9 These traits seem to conflict with his belief that God is a simple being. Primarily, Anselm wonders whether these attributes are parts of God, or whether each attribute is identical to God. He continues: “For whatever is composed of parts is not completely one. It is in some sense a plurality and not identical with itself, and it can be broken up either in fact or at least in the understanding. But such characteristics are foreign to you, than whom nothing better can be thought. Therefore there are no parts in you, Lord, and you are not a plurality. Instead, you are so much a unity, so much identical with yourself... . You are in fact unity itself; you cannot be divided by any understanding” (Anselm 111). Given that God can have no parts and must be a unity, Anselm concludes: “Therefore, life and wisdom and the rest are not parts of you; they are all one. Each of them is all of what you are, and each is what the rest are” (Anselm 111). That is, each attribute is the same as every other one, and God is identical with this unity: “since [God’s] nature is in no way a composite and yet is in every way those many good things, it must be that all those things are not several, 8 We will see later that Descartes seems to borrow another important idea from Augustine, namely, that things are so because God sees or understands them. See the last chapter of Augustine’s Confessions. 9 Anselm, Monologion and Proslogion, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996). 131 but one. So each of them is the same as all the others, whether all at once or individually” (Anselm 31). Anselm’s account of divine simplicity is closer to that of Descartes, for both philosophers agree that God can be said to have many attributes, though he is still a simple being. For Descartes, these attributes—much like the will and understanding—are a single thing in God. This is based on the principle that God cannot have any parts. Descartes defines simplicity with reference to complexity, so the principle is shared by both philosophers. What is more, God does not possess these attributes; rather, he is his attributes, since his nature is simple. Any of the attributes we project on to our idea of God are divisions of our own making, for God does not possess nor is he a multiplicity of attributes or properties. Moreover, as I will argue, Descartes agrees with Anselm that God cannot be divided even by human understanding; to do so is akin to creating an obscure and false conception of God. Aquinas. In the Summa Theologiae, I.3.7, Aquinas argues for God’s simplicity by denying that God is a composite being, much like Descartes does in the Principles. Aquinas reasons that because God cannot be composite, he must be simple: “For there is neither composition of quantitative parts in God, since He is not a body; nor composition of matter and form; nor does His nature differ from His ‘suppositum’; nor His essence from His existence; neither is there in Him composition of genus and difference, nor of subject and accident. Therefore, it is clear that God is nowise composite, but is altogether simple” (ST I, Q3, A7). Additionally, Aquinas reasons 132 that God cannot be a composite, because “every composite is posterior to its component parts, and is dependent on them; but God is the first being”, that is, God is not dependent on anything (ST I, Q3, A7). In the Summa Contra Gentiles, we get an additional reason for God’s simplicity, one which continues the theme of immutability or inseparability: “Every compound is potentially soluble in respect of its being compound, although in some cases there may be some other fact that stands in the way of dissolution. But what is soluble is in potentiality not to be, which cannot be said of God, seeing that He is of Himself a necessary Being” (SCG I.18). Necessity rules out the possibility of change—the “potentiality not to be”—and because God is necessary, he cannot change. Since he cannot change, he cannot be compound, and so he must be simple. From all of these passages, it is clear that Descartes borrows a conception of God that has a significant history in theology and philosophy. Given the above accounts from several scholastic texts, and given that the curriculum that Descartes underwent at La Flèche was based prominently on Thomistic philosophy, 10 scholastic ideas on divine simplicity will figure prominently in the Cartesian conception. But, as I will argue, Descartes holds a more rigorous version of divine simplicity than his 10 See Roger Ariew, “Descartes and Scholasticism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 60. According to Stephen Gaukroger, it is likely that Descartes never read Aquinas’s works at La Fleche; rather, he most likely read commentaries on them. See Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 53ff. Descartes, however, later becomes familiar with Aquinas’s words; he tells Mersenne that he possesses a copy of Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae; see the 25 December 1639 letter (AT II 630; CSMK 142). It is enough to establish here that (1) Descartes was familiar with Thomistic philosophy through his education at La Fleche, and (2) he borrows crucial theological ideas from the scholastic tradition. 133 predecessors did, and I believe it is only this version which allows for the creation doctrine. A second comparison can be found in one of Descartes’s commentators, Leibniz. Whereas Leibniz defined divine simplicity in terms of God’s acts, Descartes conceives God’s faculties to be simple as well. In the Discourse on Metaphysics, Leibniz describes his view of divine simplicity as follows: When the simplicity of God’s way is spoken of, reference is made to the means which he employs, and on the other hand when the variety, richness and abundance are referred to, the ends or effects are had in mind. ... It is true that nothing costs God anything, just as there is no cost for a philosopher who makes hypotheses in constructing his imaginary world, because God has only to make decrees in order that a real world come into being. (Discourse on Metaphysics, §5) And in the Mondalogy, Leibniz defines ‘simple’ as “without parts”, and he calls God “the ultimate unity or the original simple substance” (Mondology, §1). However, Leibniz forges a distinction between God’s understanding and will, thus conceiving God in parts, and he does so in response to Descartes: [W] e must not think that the eternal truths being dependent upon God are therefore arbitrary and depend upon his will, as Descartes seems to have held, and after him Monsieur Poiret. This is the case only with contingent truths which depend upon fitness or the choice of the greatest good; necessary truths on the other hand depend solely upon his understanding and are the inner objects of it. (Monadology, §46) Looking back a few passages, we see the subtle distinction between will and understanding resound more prominently: [God] is the source of whatever there is real in the possible. This is because the Understanding of God is the region of the eternal truths or of the ideas upon which they depend, and because without him there would be nothing 134 real in the possibilities of things, and not only would nothing be existent, nothing would be even possible. (Monadology, §43) Leibniz is careful to note the extent to which he considers God to be simple, namely, in his acts. His doctrine suggests two important claims about the divine nature. First, Leibniz is making a claim about the simplicity of God’s behavior. He believes that God’s mere decrees, which, as he puts it, cost God nothing, are sufficient for God to create anything. In the first passage above, this is compared with the hypotheses that a philosopher might explore in “constructing his imaginary world”. The means here are the same: it is easy to conceive an imaginary world, because all one has to do is think. However, in God’s case, given the power of his will, he can create such a world merely by decreeing it to exist. Descartes would have agreed with Leibniz that God’s acts are simple in precisely this way. He states as much in The World: “it is easy to accept that God, who is, as everyone knows, immutable, always acts in the same way” (AT XI 38; CSM I 93). Descartes, however, does not limit divine simplicity to God’s acts. This points to the main difference between the two: Leibniz limits the extent to which he believes God is simple, for he imposes a strict distinction between God’s will and intellect. 11 It is on this second point which Descartes’s conception of divine simplicity significantly differs. Descartes argues that God’s intellect and will are one and the same, metaphysically and conceptually: “In God, willing, understanding and creating are all the same thing without one being prior to the other †even 11 Leibniz also proclaims this distinction in the Theodicy: “it is, in my judgement, the divine understanding which gives reality to the eternal verities, albeit God’s will have no part therein” (§184). 135 conceptually†” (AT I 153; CSMK 26). I believe we should read Descartes’s doctrine of divine simplicity in the strictest terms such that God is a simple, unified being without parts, and that even conceptual distinctions that human beings are prone to draw between God’s faculties – specifically, his will and understanding – are metaphysically false. I will argue that, strictly speaking, drawing even a conceptual distinction between God’s will and understanding is erroneous, and so cannot be the basis for drawing either philosophical or theological conclusions about God. While we now have a source for Descartes’s divine simplicity, we must further ask, why does Descartes believe God is simple? If one believes in God, must one also accept that God is simple? One answer lies in Descartes’s proof for God’s existence in the Meditations. Recall that the kind of divine being that is necessary to ground the certainty of our beliefs is one who does not depend upon anything, but on whom all else depends. In Meditation 3, once he has put forth the principle regarding the objective reality of ideas, Descartes claims that “the unity, the simplicity, or the inseparability of all the attributes of God is one of the most important of the perfections which I understand him to have” (AT VII 50; CSM II 34). Considering the idea he has of God, Descartes eventually concludes that God must exist, since the particular objective being of his idea cannot but have been produced by a formal cause as great as God. Without going into the validity of Descartes’s argument for the existence of God, we can see that the particular conception of God is essential to Descartes’s argument. The key premise, though, in 136 this argument reveals that God’s indivisibility is what grounds our conception of God being a unity, and hence a simple being. In his reply to the Second Set of Objections, Descartes reaffirms this thought, writing that “there is in God an absolute immensity, simplicity and unity which embraces all other attributes and has no copy in us” (AT VII 137; CSM II 98). Since God is a supremely perfect being, and “it is self-evident that it is a greater perfection to be undivided than to be divided” (AT VII 138; CSM II 99), God cannot be divisible. So we see that it is on pain of saying that God is divisible into parts – and so imperfect – that we must conclude that God is simple. This idea appears also in the Discourse on the Method, where Descartes reasons that since God does not depend on anything – because “dependence is manifestly a defect” and God is without defect – God is not a composite being (AT VI 35; CSM I 128). Descartes believes that if something is composite its nature must be dependent, because divisibility implies imperfection, and anything which is imperfect cannot be the source of its own existence. God is the only being who is the source of his own existence and can be said to be independent of everything else. Once Descartes has affirmed that God exists, he develops a more thorough conception of the kind of being God is. 12 In the Principles, Descartes states that the proof for God’s existence “enables us at the same time to come to know the nature of God” (AT VIII 13; CSM I 200), and he spends considerable time investigating this 12 I do not consider the validity of Descartes’s proofs for God’s existence in either the third and fifth Meditations, or the Principles. I assume only that if the argument for God’s existence is valid, then Descartes will be committed to a particular conception of God, one that will entail the doctrine of divine simplicity and the creation doctrine. 137 nature. We should not think that Descartes is caught in a kind of circularity here. It is not as though he invokes the nature of God to establish God’s existence, only to turn around and use the certainty of God’s existence to prove what kind of nature or attributes God has. Rather, it is the validity of the proof of God’s existence which indicates the truth of the premises about God. As Descartes puts it, in our proof for God’s existence, we can ascertain what kind of God it is we are proving to exist. In Principles I.22, Descartes claims that all people have been born with an innate idea of God in their minds, and that when we thoughtfully reflect on this idea, we see that the following statements are true: (1) God is eternal, (2) God is omniscient, (3) God is omnipotent, (4) God is “the source of all goodness and truth”, (5) God is “the creator of all things”, (6) God “possesses within him everything in which we can clearly recognize some perfection that is infinite or unlimited by any imperfection” (AT VIIIA 13; CSM I 200) To this list, we may add four additional claims Descartes makes earlier in the Principles: (7) God necessarily exists (I.14) (8) God is an infinite being (I.19) (9) God cannot be fully grasped by us (I.19) (10) God requires no other being to keep him in existence (I.21) 138 But where is a statement about God’s simplicity or unity? In the Principles, the doctrine of divine simplicity is only vaguely deduced from other, more certain truths about God, namely indivisibility, incorporeality, and perfection. Without saying so explicitly, Descartes argues that simplicity is a perfection we can recognize God possesses. He offers a brief argument that God must be indivisible, based on an analogy to corporeal substance, and this suggests the additional conclusion that God must be simple. At Principles I.23, he constructs the following argument: (1) Some things, while containing some perfection, are also limited. (2) The “nature of body includes divisibility along with extension in space” (AT VIII 13; CSM I 201). (3) Divisibility is an imperfection. (4) God contains no perfections which are limited by an imperfection. (5) Therefore, God is not divisible. (6) Therefore, God is not a body. While Descartes sets out in this Principle to demonstrate that God cannot be corporeal, there is an important sub-argument contained in (3) through (5), which shows us that God must be a simple being, because anything that is not divisible must be simple. Much like his scholastic predecessors, Descartes reasons that God must be a simple being in the course of establishing that God exists. Simplicity is, for Descartes, a key feature of the correct conception of God. But in the argument sketched above for simplicity based on indivisibility, there is an immediate problem. 139 Descartes often speaks of God’s attributes, indicating that God possesses or can be thought of as possessing more than one attribute. This would clearly violate the claim that God is simple, for God can be “divided”, at least in our minds, into his several attributes. Goodness, omniscience, omnipotence, and eternality – among others – are all attributes of God, and they are separable concepts that we can, it seems, clearly and distinctly understand. If anything, it seems that God would be a deceiver since our clear and distinct perception of him represents the divine nature as divisible into these various attributes. How then is it possible for Descartes to argue that God is simple? In the next section, I want to argue that a proper understanding of Descartes’s idea of divine simplicity depends on understanding his theory of distinctions. I believe that while Descartes speaks as though there are conceptual distinctions between God’s attributes, these distinctions have no metaphysical import, and involve us in obscure perceptions of God. In fact, conceptual distinctions turn out not to be distinctions at all. Thus, while incorporating them as part of the procedure of reasoning, conceptual distinctions about God do not constitute any truths about God. Descartes’s Theory of Distinctions What makes Descartes’s version of simplicity rigorous is his insistence that there can be no distinctions of any kind in God, including, most importantly, distinctions among God’s faculties. Descartes suggests in several places that there can be no true distinctions in God, on pain of attributing complexity or divisibility to 140 him. But, the kind of distinction between God’s faculties that Descartes denies makes sense only under his theory of distinctions. As he outlines in the Principles, Descartes posits three kinds of distinction: real, modal, and conceptual. Distinctions of various kinds are mentioned and incorporated in several of his works, but he provides explicit definitions in the Principles. I want to argue in this section that while we may draw supposed conceptual distinctions about God’s attributes, such distinctions involve us in obscure and confused thinking about God. But, this is not to say that Descartes fails to acknowledge the human, and perhaps unavoidable, tendency to conceive of God in various ways, ways which we may consider conceptually distinct. As we shall see, conceptual distinctions turn out not to be distinctions at all: conceptual distinctions do not hold between two distinct things. My main point is that Descartes believes that in order to have a correct conception of God, we should refrain from attributing to him any kind of distinction; but we may, in the course of arriving at our clear and distinct understanding of God, consider him or his attributes in various ways. The difference is that the clear and distinct conception itself will not involve any kind of distinction about God. We will see below in the discussion of the conceptual distinction how this works. The Real Distinction In Principles I.60, Descartes defines a real distinction as follows: Strictly speaking, a real distinction exists only between two or more substances; and we can perceive that two substances are really distinct simply from the fact that we can clearly and distinctly understand one apart from the 141 other. For when we come to know God, we are certain that he can bring about anything of which we have a distinct understanding. (AT VIII 28; CSM I 213) 13 Thus, real distinctions occur between two or more substances. We come to know that two substances are really distinct from our clear and distinct understanding of them as separate substances. Now, this definition depends on a proper understanding of what Descartes means by ‘substance’. He defines the term just a few passages earlier, at Principles I.51: By substance we can understand nothing other than a thing which exists in such a way as to depend on no other thing for its existence. And there is only one substance which can be understood to depend on no other thing whatsoever, namely God. In the case of all other substances, we perceive that they can exist only with the help of God’s concurrence. Hence the term ‘substance’ does not apply univocally... to God and to other things; that is, there is no distinctly intelligible meaning of the term which is common to God and his creatures. (AT VIII 24; CSM I 210) Given this definition, and the definition of a real distinction, we should conclude that there can be two kinds of real distinction: between God and a created substance, and between two or more created substances. The defining characteristic of substance seems to be the degree of its dependency, and on what the substance depends. Now, God depends on nothing for his existence, so he understandably fits the initial definition of substance. But Descartes allows for other kinds of things to be substances, for there are many other properties—or, as he terms them, modes— which inhere in something other than God. Descartes acknowledges that God creates everything in the world, but this only determines a causal relationship between God 13 Cf. Second Replies, Axiom X: “Two substances are said to be really distinct when each of them can exist apart from the other” (AT VII 162; CSM II 114). 142 as a creator and some property; it does not describe how these various properties exist, or what they uniquely inhere in. In the passage above, Descartes tells us that God is the only independent substance, but he also allows for created things to be substances, 14 which depend only on God for their sustained existence. Created substances get their status as substances because all modes must inhere in substances for their existence. 15 Given these definitions, it is clear that there can be no real distinctions between God and his attributes, or between God’s faculties. A real distinction in God immediately violates the argument above for simplicity based on the indivisibility of God: God could not be a simple being if he were composed of really distinct parts. Now, Descartes defines a real distinction in terms of substances, 16 and we may reject this kind of distinction as applying to God and his attributes purely on the basis that real distinctions do not hold between substances and their attributes. Of course, God is really distinct from other substances, as Descartes argues in the definition above, and Descartes also allows that instantiations of a single substance 14 Though he does so at Principles I.51 without argument. A better argument is given in the Letter to Hyperaspistes, August 1641: “[A]ll things were nothing until God created them and lent them his concurrence. This does not mean that they should not be called substances, because when we call a created substance self-subsistent we do not rule out the divine concurrence which it needs in order to subsist. We mean only that it is the kind of thing that can exist without any other created thing; and this is something that cannot be said about the modes of things, like shape and number” (AT III 429; CSMK 193-94). The reference to modes is important here, and will become clear in my exposition of the modal distinction below. 15 Cf. Principles I.11: “wherever we find some attributes or qualities, there is necessarily some thing or substance to be found for them to belong to” (AT VIIIA 8; CSM I 196). 16 We will see below that Descartes allows a looser sense of real distinction between the mode of one substance and another substance (e.g., shape vs. mind), and between two modes of different substances (shape vs. doubt). 143 are really distinct. 17 But since there is only one instantiation of the divine substance, and this substance is without parts, no real distinctions are applicable to God. The Modal Distinction Descartes’s second kind of distinction occurs at the ontological level just below substances: modes. As he defines it: A modal distinction can be taken in two ways: firstly, as a distinction between a mode, properly so called, and the substance of which it is a mode; and secondly, as a distinction between two modes of the same substance. (AT VIII 29; CSM I 213-14) Much like the real distinction, a modal distinction is recognized by a clear and distinct perception of ours. In the first instance, we recognize such a distinction when “we can clearly perceive a substance apart from the mode which we say differs from it, whereas we cannot, conversely, understand the mode apart from the substance” (AT VIII 29; CSM I 214). As an example, Descartes gives the modal distinction between motion and its corresponding corporeal substance; that is, we can distinguish between some body and the body’s motion. But we cannot properly understand the mode of motion without its being tied to some substance. In the second instance, we distinguish “one mode apart from another, and vice versa, whereas we cannot know either mode apart from the substance in which they both 17 In Principles I.60, Descartes seems to allow this, at least for corporeal substances: “each and every part of it, as delimited by us in our thought, is really distinct from the other parts of the same substance” (AT VIII 28-29; CSM I 213). By ‘parts’ I do not think Descartes means ‘modes’, for he will introduce a specific distinction regarding them. Rather, I think he is accounting for our natural belief that individual physical objects (i.e., numerical instantiations of corporeal substance) are really distinct from one another. 144 inhere” (ibid.). To use Descartes’s example again, we can draw a modal distinction between a stone’s motion and its square shape because we can understand one mode without the other. But neither motion nor square shape in a particular stone can be understood without the substance in which to inhere. Descartes is careful to point out that the same substance is required for drawing a modal distinction. Thus, distinctions merely involving modes do not necessarily constitute modal distinctions. He refers to the case of a distinction between a mode of one substance and another substance, or between two modes of different substances. For example, “the motion of one body is distinct from another body”, and the motion of one body is also distinct from the motion of another body. Likewise, the motion of a body is distinct from a mental substance, and motion and doubt are distinct. These kinds of distinctions, Descartes writes, are properly called real: “It seems more appropriate to call this kind of distinction a real distinction, rather than a modal distinction, since the modes in question cannot be clearly understood apart from the really distinct substances of which they are modes” (AT VIII 30; CSM I 214). The criterion introduced earlier in defining a modal distinction becomes clearer: we must recognize the single substance in which the modes inhere in order to have a true modal distinction. If multiple substances are involved, even if we are comparing modes, we must draw a real distinction. This clarification also emphasizes the criterion involved, for the operation of distinguishing – what Descartes is calling ‘understanding apart’ – is working in one direction but not the other. Notice that in a modal distinction, we are able to 145 conceive of the substance apart from the mode(s), but we cannot conceive of the mode(s) without the substance. In a real distinction between two created substances, we can understand either substance apart from another, that is, since neither substance depends on the other, we can understand them existing apart. Norman Wells has labeled the epistemological criteria for a real distinction as “mutual separability”, and for a modal distinction as “non-mutual separability”. 18 The first is evident from Descartes’s own remarks, especially from the Fourth Replies: “For it is of the nature of substances that they should mutually exclude one another” (AT VII 227; CSM II 159). Exclusion turns out to be an important concept for Descartes, but I will postpone discussion of it. The second is clear given the idea of mutual exclusion, for we see that exclusion fails to hold in one direction of comparison between substance and mode. That is, we can exclude substance from a mode, because a substance does not depend upon the mode and is said to be a “complete being”, whereas we cannot exclude a mode from its substance, because the mode depends upon the substance and is said to be an “incomplete being”. 19 Thus, the exclusion cannot happen both ways and is non-mutual. Whether a modal distinction is applicable to God and his modes depends on what Descartes means by “a mode properly so called” [modum propriè dictum]. As Vere Chappell has pointed out, the term ‘mode’ is extremely variable in Descartes’s 18 Norman J. Wells, “Descartes on Distinction,” in The Quest for the Absolute, ed. Frederick Adelmann (Chestnut Hill: Boston College, 1966), 104-134. 19 These terms, “complete being” and “incomplete being” are from Wells (1966). 146 texts. 20 But there are two key reasons in the writings which indicate that there can be no modal distinctions in God. First, in Principles I.56, where Descartes is trying to be exact in his terminology, he characterizes a mode as how a substance is “affected or modified” (AT VIII 26; CSM I 211). A mode, then, refers to modification or variability in a substance. A few lines later he claims that “we do not, strictly speaking, say that there are modes or qualities in God, but simply attributes, since in the case of God, any variation is unintelligible” (ibid.). This same idea is repeated in a letter to an unknown correspondent of 1645 or 1646, where Descartes says that “existence, duration, size, number and all universals are not, it seems to me, modes in the strict sense; nor in this sense [i.e., the strict sense] are justice, mercy, and so on modes in God” (AT IV 349; CSMK 280, my emphasis). The main idea in the strict sense of ‘mode’ is variability, and since God is not variable, he cannot be said to have modes. Second, Descartes’s criterion for understanding a modal distinction holds that a substance can be understood without the mode, but the mode cannot be understood without the substance. If we take God and the property of goodness, then it is clear that we have no modal distinction: God (substance) cannot be understood without goodness (the supposed mode), or any other “mode” we choose. This is because, as Descartes states, it is misguided to conceive of God with properties which are variable or accidental. 20 Vere Chappell, “Descartes’s Ontology,” Topoi 16 (1997): 111-127. Chappell identifies at least four different senses under which Descartes understands the word ‘mode’: (1) as a synonym for ‘attribute’; (2) as members of the subclass of attributes; (3) as a form of something more general; and (4) as a manner or way. 147 The Conceptual Distinction The third kind of distinction is remarkably similar in definition to the modal distinction yet turns on a precise understanding of ‘attribute’. Descartes writes: a conceptual distinction is a distinction between a substance and some attribute of that substance without which the substance is unintelligible; alternatively, it is a distinction between two such attributes of a single substance. (AT VIII 30; CSM I 214) Again, clear and distinct perceptions are how we recognize these distinctions, though in a conceptual distinction, it is our inability to form a clear and distinct understanding of the separability between the two concepts in question which leads us to an understanding of the supposed distinction. The difference between ‘attribute’ and ‘mode’ is crucial, for Descartes admits at the end of this section (Principles I.62) that he had originally combined the modal and conceptual distinctions in his First Replies to Caterus. Now he is explaining that there is a difference between these two kinds of distinction, and they rely on the difference between ‘attribute’ and ‘mode’. Descartes distinguishes these, along with ‘quality’, a few passages earlier, at Principles I.56: By mode, as used above, we understand exactly the same as what is elsewhere meant by an attribute or [vel] quality. But we employ the term mode when we are thinking of a substance as being affected or modified; when the modification enables the substance to be designated as a substance of such and such a kind, we use the term quality; and finally, when we are simply thinking in a more general way of what is in a substance, we use the term attribute. (AT VIII 26; CSM I 211) There are several confusing aspects to this definition. The first concerns the term ‘mode’. In this passage, Descartes is referring back to I.55, where he characterized 148 order and number as modes or “ways of thinking” about things which are ordered or numbered. In this sense, certain modes are not to be distinguished from the substances in which they inhere. But as the definition later explains, certain properties should not be called modes, especially those properties which undergo no changes. “[T]hat which always remains unmodified – for example existence or duration in a thing which exists and endures – should be called not a quality or a mode but an attribute” (AT VIII 26; CSM I 211-12). Now the definition of a conceptual distinction clearly concerns ‘attribute’, so we must understand ‘attribute’ here in the broad sense Descartes advises. One important way we understand a substance is through perceiving an attribute of that substance (AT VIII 25; CSM I 210). But under the general definition of attribute, it seems that a mode of a substance can be considered an attribute. Thus, Descartes classifies modes generally as attributes of a substance, but those attributes which are subject to modification or alteration are properly termed ‘modes’. The second difficulty surrounds the term ‘attribute’. One may think that Descartes defines ‘attributes’ as the essential properties of a substance. Indeed, he seems to suggest this in several passages. At Principles I.53, he says that we can know a substance “through any attribute at all; but each substance has one principal property which constitutes its nature and essence, and to which all its other properties are referred” (ibid.). This suggests that there may be more than one attribute in any given substance, but that there is always one principal attribute which constitutes the essence of that substance. For corporeal substance, the principal 149 attribute is “extension in length, breadth and depth”, and for mental substance, the principal attribute is thought (ibid.). All other attributes of a substance may be essential properties, but these attributes do not constitute the essence of the substance. These other attributes “refer” to the principal attribute, that is, all other attributes logically presuppose the principal attribute. But Descartes confuses the discussion, for he then suggests that all other non-principal attributes are merely modes. His example of corporeal substance demonstrates this: “[e]verything else which can be attributed to body presupposes extension, and is merely a mode of an extended thing” (ibid.). This would seem to indicate that each substance can have only one attribute, which is just the principal attribute. Any other “attributes” are then not essential, even though they refer to the principal attribute. But, according to the definition of a conceptual distinction, a single substance may contain two (or more) essential attributes. Thus, once the theory of distinctions is presented in the Principles, the terminology it depends on is plainly complicated. In the letter to the unknown correspondent, Descartes attempts to clarify his discussion of modes and attributes, claiming that attributes are those properties “without which the things whose attributes they are cannot be” (AT IV 348-9; CSMK 280). This is similar to his statement at Principles I.62 that an attribute is a property of the substance without which the substance is unintelligible, though existence and intelligibility are the differing criteria between the two. But it seems as if conceivability is the key to settling what an attribute amounts to. Descartes explains that 150 existence, duration, size, number and all universals are not, it seems to me, modes in the strict sense... . They are referred to by a broader term and called attributes, or modes of thinking, because we do indeed understand the essence of a thing in one way when we consider it in abstraction from whether it exists or not, and in a different way when we consider it as existing; ... (AT IV 349; CSMK 280, my emphasis) The same properties of body that Descartes considered in his definition of attributes – existence and duration – are here considered as modes of thinking. So it seems that attributes in Descartes’s philosophy, when he is speaking accurately, refer to conceptual determinations of substances. What this means for the conceptual distinction is that it is, as Lawrence Nolan puts it, not “an ontological distinction. The real and modal distinctions obtain in things (in rebus) outside our thought, whereas a [conceptual] distinction is confined to our thought and produced by means of reason – hence the term distinctio rationis”. 21 Nolan’s solution to the confusion surrounding the term ‘attribute’ is to argue that attributes are identical to their substances, such that attributes are reducible to substances in reality, though in our thoughts, attributes are merely names for those substances. 22 The letter to the unknown correspondent corroborates this reading of the conceptual distinction as one made by human reason. The letter continues with Descartes acknowledging 21 Lawrence Nolan, “Reductionism and Nominalism in Descartes’s Theory of Attributes,” Topoi 16 (1997c): 131. While CSM translate ‘distinctio rationis’ as ‘conceptual distinction’, Nolan translates it as ‘rational distinction’. I use the translations interchangeably. 22 Nolan (1997c), 130. I favor Nolan’s interpretation of the conceptual distinction, though I have reservations about the extent to which he believes Descartes is a conceptualist about attributes. One obstacle to his interpretation is Principles I.57: “[S]ome attributes or modes are in the very things of which they are attributes or modes, while others are only in our thought” (AT VIII 26-27; CSM I 212). 151 in article 60 of Part One of my Principles of Philosophy where I discuss it explicitly, I call it a conceptual distinction – that is, a distinction made by reason ratiocinatae. I do not recognize any distinction made by reason ratiocinantis – that is, one which has no foundation in reality – because we cannot have any thought without a foundation; ... (AT IV 349; CSMK 280) From this letter, it is apparent that Descartes borrows significantly from his scholastic predecessors, particularly the 16th-century Spanish priest and theologian, Francisco Suarez. Suarez had postulated a similar theory of distinctions, in which, compared to Descartes’s theory, we can recognize obvious parallels. In defining a conceptual distinction, Suarez writes: Mental distinctions are usually considered to be of two kinds. One, which has no foundation in reality, is called a distinction of the reasoning reason (distinctio rationis ratiocinantis), because it arises exclusively from the reflection and activity of the intellect. The other, which has a foundation in reality, is called by many a distinction of the reasoned reason (distinctio rationis ratiocinatae), although this is a highly improper term and can be equivocal. For this type of mental distinction can be understood as pre- existing in reality, prior to the discriminating operation of the mind, so as to be thought of as imposing itself, as it were, on the intellect, and to require the intellect only to recognize it, but not to constitute it. (DM 7.1.4; Vollert 18) 23 The first kind of mental distinction presented here, the distinction of the reasoning reason [distinctio rationis ratiocinantis], is said to have no foundation in reality, meaning that the mind, in conceiving the distinction, operates only with regard to its own reflection on the object, regardless of what exists outside the mind. As Suarez explains, this distinction “has its origin in the mind” and “because actually and formally it is not found in reality” (DM 7.1.4; Vollert 18). This is best understood in 23 Francisco Suarez, On the Various Kinds of Distinctions (Disputationes Metaphysicae, Disputatio VII, de variis distinctionum generibus), trans. Cyril Vollert (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1947). References to Suarez’s Disputationes Metaphysicae will be given as ‘DM’ followed by volume and section numbers. I also include the page in the Vollert edition where the passages can be found. Vollert translates ‘rationis’ as ‘mental’. 152 contrast to the second kind of mental distinction, the distinction of the reasoned reason [distinctio rationis ratiocinatae]. This kind of distinction depends upon the mind’s being able to grasp the “pre-existing” conditions in reality, so as to be affected by something in the object, or in reality, which impresses upon the mind. Thus, the origin of this distinction depends on both the operation of the intellect and “the occasion offered by the thing itself on which the mind is reflecting” (DM 7.1.4; Vollert 18). As Suarez explains, the distinction does not exist in reality, for that would amount to a real distinction. Rather, he speaks of a “foundation” in reality for the mind to make the distinction, that is, the pre-existing conditions under which we are able to draw a distinction in our minds. This seems to be what Descartes is also claiming when he distinguishes between distinctio rationis ratiocinantis and distinctio rationis ratiocinatae, though unlike Suarez, Descartes rejects the former. Although he does not give a full account of why he rejects this kind of distinction, he may have thought that it would lead to obscure and confused modes of thinking because such conceptions were divorced from reality. But reality for Descartes is a slippery notion, for mental substance and the inhering thoughts are as real as corporeal substance and its inhering modes. 24 Whatever the reason, it is clear that Descartes only acknowledges a conceptual distinction which has a foundation in reality. But investigating the conceptual distinction further in Suarez, we find a remarkable claim about the import of the distinctio rationis ratiocinatae. He says 24 This point comes from Wells (1966), 131. 153 that this kind of distinction “arises from inadequate concepts of one and the same thing” (DM 7.1.5; Vollert 19). The reason for this, he explains, is because in the conceptual distinction we form of some object, we fail to adequately represent the “whole reality contained in the object”, which includes inadequately representing the object’s essence (DM 7.1.5; Vollert 19). 25 His example is, fittingly, the concept of God, and the conceptual distinctions we attempt to draw between his attributes: Hence such a distinction invariably has a foundation in fact, even though formally it will be said to spring from inadequate concepts of the same thing. Thus in God we distinguish His justice from His mercy, because we do not conceive the sublimely simple virtue of God as it is in itself and according to the full range of its energy. (DM 7.1.5; Vollert 19) While Suarez acknowledges that we do indeed draw conceptual distinctions between the divine attributes, these distinctions are inadequate representations of God, for they fail to capture the “sublimely simple virtue of God”. The reason we perform such a distinction is rather natural, however, given the ineffable nature of God. We find such distinctions between mercy and justice in humans, and so we have a “basis” for attributing a like distinction in God. But such a distinction, because it does not exist in reality as a distinction in God, is thus termed an inadequate representation. If Descartes was basing his doctrine of distinctions on Suarez’s, then the only kind of conceptual distinction that Descartes acknowledges involves confused perceptions. And any thought which involves confused perceptions cannot be said to 25 He returns to this theme at DM 7.1.8, where he says that, in a conceptual distinction, “the mind... conceives things in an imperfect, abstractive, and confused manner, or inadequately. ... However, since the object which is the basis of the distinction is absolutely a unit, the distinction between the concepts has its origin solely in the imperfection of the concepts themselves” (Vollert 21). 154 be true, on pain of violating the truth rule. This is detrimental especially in the case of whether or not we can draw conceptual distinctions between God’s attributes. But looking back at Descartes’s definition of a conceptual distinction in Principles I.62, this seems to be what he is suggesting. He claims that in a conceptual distinction we are unable “to form a clear and distinct idea if we exclude from it the attribute in question, or, alternatively, by our inability to perceive clearly the idea of one of the two attributes if we separate it from the other” (AT VIII 30; CSM I 214). Thus, for example, if we attempt to posit a conceptual distinction between God’s will and understanding, these two concepts become confused and obscure. In fact, Descartes is saying that we recognize the conceptual distinction because the concepts become unclear when we attempt to distinguish them. The correct conclusion to draw from such an endeavor would be that the two concepts are really indistinguishable. So how exactly are we supposed to take a conceptual distinction? What function is it serving? Descartes acknowledges that there are conceptual distinctions, even if they involve confused perceptions. But, as Descartes would say, the distinction is “merely a conceptual one” (AT VIII 30; CSM I 214, my emphasis). The fact that the distinction is said to be “merely conceptual” seems to indicate the relatively low status Descartes grants this kind of distinction. And the reason is clear: our correct thinking on the matter is confused if we try to distinguish between two concepts which hold no distinction in reality. The distinction is termed conceptual, because it marks a departure from the objects themselves into mere thought, into, as Descartes admits, unclear thought. In the case of correct thinking 155 about God, we should refrain from drawing distinctions between any of God’s attributes, indeed between God himself and any divine attribute. Given the incomprehensible nature of God, only the clear and distinct perceptions we can have are to be given consideration if we wish to perfect our understanding of him. Making even conceptual distinctions violates our clear and distinct understanding that God is a perfectly simple being. So, strictly speaking, there should be no conceptual distinctions between God’s attributes. 26 One further piece of evidence that implies there are no conceptual distinctions applicable to God concerns Descartes’s statement that no priority exists between God’s will and intellect. Consider his claims in the following three passages: In God, willing, understanding and creating are all the same thing without one being prior to the other † even conceptually † . (AT I 153; CSMK 25-6) [I]t is impossible to imagine that anything is thought of in the divine intellect as good or true, or worthy of belief or action or omission, prior to the decision of the divine will to make it so. I am not speaking here of temporal priority: I mean that there is not even any priority of order, or nature, or of ‘rationally determined reason’ [ratione ratiocinatâ] as they call it. (AT VII 432; CSM II 291) [I]f we would know the immensity of [God’s] power we should not... conceive any precedence or priority between his intellect and his will; for the idea which we have of God teaches us that there is in him only a single activity, entirely simple and entirely pure. (AT IV 119; CSMK 235). In the first passage, Descartes is identifying God’s faculties on the basis of the notion of priority. The claim, I believe, is that not only is there no real priority among 26 Likewise, it would be erroneous to say that there are conceptual distinctions in God. Kaufman makes this mistake in his treatment of the conceptual distinction. See his (2000), 64. 156 God’s attributes, but we cannot conceptualize a priority. Priority, however, is not clearly defined; but the kind of priority Descartes likely means is one of logical order. That is, the divine understanding does not take logical precedence over will, or vice versa. This idea is expressed well in the second passage above, with Descartes reminding us that he does not mean temporal priority. In fact, he narrows his use of priority to that of order, nature, and rationally determined reason. Here we have the additional claim that there is neither a priority of nature, nor a priority of reason between God’s understanding and his will. This bears a striking similarity to both how Descartes defines the conceptual distinction in the Principles, and to his elucidation of that distinction in the letter to the unknown correspondent. The criterion on which a conceptual distinction is based is that a substance is unintelligible without the attribute that makes the substance intelligible. That is, the substance logically, not substantially, presupposes the attribute in question, such that to conceive the substance without that particular attribute results in unintelligibility. This can be contrasted with the case of a modal distinction, because the substance is intelligible when considered without a mode. But if logical presupposition is at the heart of the conceptual distinction, and the divine understanding does not logically presuppose the divine will (and vice versa), then there is no conceptual distinction between God’s will and understanding. 27 27 I owe the idea of logical presupposition to Gregory Walski (2001). While Walski sees a loose connection between the definition of conceptual distinction and logical presupposition, I see a much stronger connection given the discussion of substances, modes, and attributes earlier in the Principles. 157 But, one may object, priority and distinction are two different concepts. Two things may be conceptually distinct without being conceptually prior. Take Kaufman’s example of a triangle’s two essential properties, triangularity and trilaterality. 28 He claims that these are two conceptually distinct properties, though one is not logically or conceptually prior to the other. Having three angles is conceptually distinct from having three sides, even though these two properties can be true of a single object. While this characteristic may be true of created things like triangles, I believe this example fails to capture what is true of divine substance. The problem in conceptually distinguishing a unified being like God is that we are dividing our conception into distinct parts. This is clearly something that Descartes is opposed to. In the Conversation with Burman, Descartes reminds us of several consequences of the ways we conceive God. First, “from the metaphysical point of view”, we cannot conceive “that God should be anything but completely unalterable” (AT V 166; CSMK 348). Now, this could mean that God is unalterable in the metaphysical, as opposed to conceptual, sense. But Descartes relies on conceivability as a guide to metaphysical truth. So, if I clearly and distinctly perceive that there can be no alterations in God, then it follows that there are no alterations in God. But the same cannot be said of conceptual alterations, for I can never clearly and distinctly perceive of a conceptual alteration in God. Why? Because perceiving a conceptual alteration – or in other words, a conceptual distinction – in God always involves obscure and confused 28 Kaufman (2000), 58. 158 perceptions. We cannot, however, conclude that there must be no conceptual distinctions in God, for we would be guilty of denying the antecedent here. Instead, we are left with the uncomfortable conclusion that although we may draw conceptual distinctions in God, these have no metaphysical value because they do not indicate a real distinction in God. Second, we are given a reason why conceptual distinctions have no metaphysical value. Descartes tells Burman that “although we may conceive that the decrees could have been separated from God, this is merely a token procedure of our own reasoning” (AT V 166; CSMK 348). This conception of separability is suspicious, and thus not a guide to the truth of God’s nature. Descartes continues: “the distinction thus introduced between God himself and his decrees is a mental, not a real one” (AT V 166; CSMK 348). While Descartes acknowledges here the tendency to draw conceptual distinctions 29 about God, he quickly advises of the danger in doing so. Mere conceptual distinctions cannot guide our understanding, especially of God. Conceptual distinctions always involve unclear perceptions, for we are attempting to distinguish that which cannot result in a clear conception. Descartes ends this topic with the warning that “we must never allow ourselves the indulgence of trying to subject the nature and operations of God to our reasoning” (ibid.). Descartes admits the fallibility of human reasoning in determining the nature of God. The conceptual distinction involved is simply a part of this “token” reasoning process, much like the ‘order of discovery’ in the Meditations; it is not a 29 The Latin, though, is ‘mentalem quidem distinctionem’, not ‘ratione distinctio’. 159 final conclusion about the nature of God, nor of the correct conceptualization of God and his simple nature. Distinct and Separable Two key terms that we need to address, and which have been present throughout this discussion, are ‘distinct’ and ‘separable’. Notice that Descartes does not define either term when he outlines the three kinds of distinction. First, consider ‘distinct’. His definition is not easy to pinpoint, but we can gain some insight into the term by looking back at the definition of a distinct perception. In Principles I.45, he defines both a ‘clear perception’ and a ‘distinct perception’ and differentiates between the two: I call a perception ‘clear’ when it is present and accessible to the attentive mind – just as we say that we see something clearly when it is present to the eye’s gaze and stimulates it with a sufficient degree of strength and accessibility. I call a perception ‘distinct’ if, as well as being clear, it is so sharply separated from all other perceptions that it contains within itself only what is clear. (AT VIII 22; CSM I 207-8) Given this definition, we can define ‘distinct’ as “sharply separated”. This applies most readily to the case of perceptions, because the sharp separation is based on distinguishing between two or more perceptions whose separateness is apparent. As Descartes defines it, clarity is a necessary component of distinction in the case of perceptions. A few lines later Descartes claims: “a perception can be clear without being distinct, but not distinct without being clear” (AT VIII 22; CSM I 208). Thus, all three terms – clear, distinct, separate – are characterized in terms of one another. 160 Being distinct amounts to being separate; things which are distinct are always clear. A distinct perception is a perception that is separate from other perceptions; a real distinction between two objects holds when those objects are separate from one another. Furthermore, distinctions involve a comparison of one object to another. For example, if I have a clear and distinct perception of x, not only is x present to my attentive mind (resulting in x’s clarity), but it is also separated from all other objects, perhaps all my other perceptions of other objects (resulting in x’s distinctness). That is, when an object is distinct, there is a necessary comparison made to other objects to uniquely identify it, to determine that it is indeed an individual object. Otherwise, we could not acknowledge a distinction at all, for what is it to be distinct if not distinct from another object? But what does ‘separate’ mean for Descartes? The term is used in explaining the real and conceptual distinction, though it is explained as a verb: to separate. For the real distinction, separating is confined to the power God, while in the conceptual distinction, separating means our mental operation of conceiving two things apart. It seems that “to separate” for Descartes can mean either to separate in reality or in thought. When he speaks of separating in thought, he usually resorts to the phrase “apart” [‘absque’]. In elucidating the modal distinction, he uses the phrase “one apart from the other” [‘unam absque altera’] frequently. But taken either as a verb or an adjective, it is clear that separateness involves a comparison between two or more objects. To conceive two objects as separate (or distinct) is to separate in my 161 mind the one from the other. In a clear and distinct perception, separability is understood as a mental operation. What I think follows from this has an important bearing on the relation between Descartes’s account of distinctions and the divine simplicity argument. If distinctions are defined in terms of comparisons to other objects, then an absence of a distinction – that there is no distinction between two objects – would entail a simplicity or a unity. Descartes endorses this principle in the Regulae, Rule 12 where he writes: “we term ‘simple’ only those things which we know so clearly and distinctly that they cannot be divided by the mind into others which are more distinctly known” (AT X 418; CSM I 44). Notice that Descartes says “divided by the mind”, which sounds the same as the conceptual distinction from the Principles. Thus, breaking down or dividing the conception of God into separate parts would no longer render him a simple being. This principle seems to be underlying the discussion of the conceptual distinction in the Principles. For example, if I consider whether there is a distinction between two objects, x and y, I consider first whether there is a sharp separation between x and y. If I find that there is a sharp separation between the two, I call x and y distinct objects. But if I do not find a separation, and I further conclude that there can be no separation between the two based on my clear and distinct reasoning, I call x and y the same. When x and y are separable, and thus distinct, there is a kind of complexity which is not the case when x and y are inseparable. So, when there is a lack of complexity, there is likewise no distinction 162 to draw between two or more things; this amounts to there being a simplicity in some object. Once we consider the import of the conceptual distinction, it appears that there is really no distinction at all. The criterion of identifying a conceptual distinction involves an inability to form a clear and distinct idea of two attributes being separable from each other. Thus, the “two” attributes are indistinguishable (or inseparable), and imply no distinction in reality. So why does Descartes call this a conceptual distinction? The answer, I think, lies partly in something Suarez writes about the distinction of reason, and which Descartes seems to be borrowing. Suarez says that a mental distinction is not so termed because it intervenes between entities of the mind (entia rationis) . . . [R]eason does not produce the entities it thus distinguishes, but merely conceives things which are not distinct as though they were distinct. Hence it is not the objects distinguished but only the distinction itself that results from the reasoning. (DM 7.1.6; Vollert 19) Suarez indicates that we are not incorrect in calling this mental operation a conceptual distinction; it is a special operation of the mind whereby we conceive as distinct things which are not really distinct. We call it a distinction because of the mind’s ability to conceptualize an idea in diverse ways. Lawrence Nolan has recognized this problem, noting that a conceptual distinction “is not really a distinction at all in the sense of there being two things which bear a relation to one another”. 30 He acknowledges that Descartes’s use of the term ‘distinction’ in his definition is a “misnomer”. I believe this is the correct way to understand the 30 Nolan (1997c), 137. 163 conceptual distinction. Unlike the real and modal distinctions, which involve comparisons of two or more objects (or parts of objects), the conceptual distinction always involves a single object. It is our ways of understanding that object which are said to be “distinct”. Yet, as Nolan warns, it is not our particular thoughts as mental entities which are being distinguished; that would be a modal distinction. There are, properly speaking, no relata in a conceptual distinction, because there is no distinction. 31 Exclusion and Abstraction Between Principles I.60 and I.63, two additional terms come up which have a critical bearing on Descartes’s concept of distinction: ‘exclusion’ and ‘abstraction’. As noted by Dugald Murdoch, these two concepts are important for understanding Descartes’s argument for the real distinction, as well as several other key arguments in the Meditations. 32 I believe these two concepts inform the other kinds of distinction as well, especially the conceptual distinction. 33 As will become clear, abstraction is the means by which we form conceptual distinctions, and given the nature of this mental operation, we are only able to form obscure and confused perceptions. In the case of God, this serves as the principal reason we cannot 31 Ibid. 32 Dugald Murdoch, “Exclusion and Abstraction in Descartes’ Metaphysics,” Philosophical Quarterly 43 (1993): 38-57. 33 Nolan (1997c) also makes this observation, though my view of its bearing on the conceptual distinction is different from his. 164 distinguish God’s attributes, especially in considering the identity of his will and understanding. In explaining how we understand a real distinction between substances, Descartes states that the mental operation is one of exclusion. Borrowing his example, we understand ourselves as thinking substances to be really distinct from all other substances, “whether thinking or extended”, by excluding [‘excludere’] all these other substances from ourselves (AT VIII 29; CSM I 213). If we are able to exclude or deny corporeal substance of ourselves and still retain a complete understanding of ourselves as thinking substances, then we know there is a real distinction between mind and body. Exclusion, then, is the mental operation we employ to arrive at a complete understanding of a substance apart from other substances. If we are left with an incomplete understanding, then we say that the exclusion is mistaken and that we are not dealing with a real substance. Exclusion is also involved in a conceptual distinction, though in a negative way. Descartes says that a conceptual distinction is “recognized” when we are unable to clearly and distinctly perceive a substance because we have excluded [‘excludamus’] some attribute from the substance (AT VIII 30; CSM 214). When the distinction is between two attributes, Descartes writes that we cannot form a clear and distinct perception of either attribute when we “separate” [‘separemus’] one from the other. Because substances and their attributes, properly understood, are unintelligible if we attempt to conceive them as distinct, we cannot exclude the one from the other. Thus, exclusions can be either clear and distinct, or obscure and 165 confused. Exclusions are clear and distinct when the two things being excluded result in complete conceptions despite the exclusion; they are obscure and confused when the exclusion results in an incomplete understanding of either of the two things. Abstraction, however, is not mentioned in the course of defining the three kinds of distinction. But Descartes brings the term into play in the section immediately following the definition for the conceptual distinction. At Principles I.63, he writes: Indeed, it is much easier for us to have an understanding of extended substance or thinking substance than it is for us to understand substance on its own, leaving out the fact that it thinks or is extended. For we have some difficulty in abstracting the notion of substance from the notions of thought and extension, since the distinction between these notions and the notion of substance itself is merely a conceptual one. (AT VIII 31; CSM I 215, my emphasis) This provides us with some hint of what Descartes means by abstraction. He indicates that when we attempt to separate the notion of substance from one of its attributes, we have difficulty in forming a clear perception of that substance because we have “left out” something crucial: an essential attribute. He reiterates his claim that there is no real distinction between a substance and its (principal) attribute, and that any supposed distinction is only one of conceptualization. But what does “leaving out” amount to? How does one conceive of a substance while leaving out an attribute? Descartes offers no definitions of these terms in the Principles. In fact, in this work, there does not seem to be an important difference between exclusion and 166 abstraction. But we may look back to two other texts where these concepts become clear. First, in the 2 May 1644 letter to Mesland, Descartes explicitly acknowledges that there is a “great difference between abstraction and exclusion” (AT IV 120; CSMK 236). His example shows how abstractions do not capture the complete understanding of a substance, while exclusions do. In the case of abstractions, Descartes warns that we may not be able to draw sound conclusions; this appears to be the basis of the great difference between the two. Second, in a letter to Gibieuf of 19 January 1642, Descartes explains these concepts in some detail. An abstraction is a mental operation consisting in turning one’s thought or attention away from the components of some rich idea, and focusing our attention on only one aspect of that idea. Descartes adds that once we focus our attention back on these other components of the idea, “it is impossible to deny one of the other” (AT III 475; CSMK 202). His example helps demonstrate this. I can abstract the idea of shape from the richer idea of an extended substance, and I accomplish this abstraction by focusing my attention solely on shape, and ignoring the other ideas of extension and substance. Descartes explains that we know we are performing an abstraction because we can clearly understand that we are deriving our idea of shape from the idea of extension and substance, “since it is impossible to conceive a shape while denying that it has an extension, or to conceive an extension while denying that it is the extension of a substance” (AT III 475; CSMK 202). An exclusion, on the other hand, is not easy to pinpoint in this letter, but it seems to be defined in terms of abstraction. Whereas in an abstraction I attend to 167 only a single component of some idea, in an exclusion I attend to both components but deny one of the other. To take Descartes’s example again, I perform an exclusion when I take the idea of substance and deny of it all other ideas not included in that idea of substance. Thus, because the idea of substance is a “complete idea” – “because I can conceive it entirely on its own” – I can exclude from this idea any other ideas I may have (AT III 475; CSMK 202). Now, in this letter Descartes does not use the term ‘exclude’, but there are several other places in his writings where he seems to equate ‘exclude’ and ‘deny’. For instance, in the Regulae, ‘exclude’ and ‘deny’ are paired as synonyms [excludant vel negant], where the vel is read as ‘or in other words’ (AT X 445; CSM I 61). And in a letter to Clerselier, 12 January 1646, we see a similar pairing of “exclusion or negation” [French, ‘exclusion ou negation’] when these are contrasted with abstraction (AT IXA 215; CSM II 276). Either way, the point amounts to the same: an exclusion is a mental operation whereby both concepts are attentively considered, but one is explicitly denied of the other. An abstraction is a mental operation whereby only one aspect of some idea is attended to, while the other aspects are ignored. I think this clarification of abstraction and exclusion underwrites the idea that there cannot be distinctions of any kind in God. If we attempt to exclude God’s will from his understanding, we have an incomplete understanding of God. While the benefit of exclusions are complete understandings of the considered ideas, in the present case, the exclusion does not work. We cannot consider God’s will while at the same time deny that understanding belongs to his nature, and vice versa. We are 168 then left with abstraction. While we can abstract the idea of God’s will from his understanding, and vice versa, the conception we are left with is still incomplete, because we are ignoring some important aspect of the divine nature. Furthermore, given how Descartes defines the conceptual distinction, we see that it not a distinction at all, since it does not involve a comparison between two different objects. With the doctrine of divine simplicity established, our next task in understanding the creation doctrine is to investigate Descartes’s notion of divine freedom. While the simplicity doctrine establishes that God’s will and understanding are identical, we need a more precise view of how this divine attribute functions. Freedom So far, we have a fairly simple argument for why Descartes holds the creation doctrine, based purely on divine simplicity: if God understands the eternal truths, and God’s understanding and willing are one and the same faculty, then eo ipso God wills the eternal truths. But this argument fails to shed light on one of the most perplexing aspects of the creation doctrine, namely, Descartes’s assertion that God is entirely free in willing the eternal truths. What does this freedom amount to, and what does it entail for the creation doctrine? After all, the creation doctrine is first invoked in an effort to ground the certainty of the immutable laws of physics; yet if the foundation of these immutable laws is God’s indifferent will, that foundation 169 would seem to be capricious and unstable, just as Leibniz had noted in his Discourse on Metaphysics. Hence, we need a precise understanding both of Descartes’s account of God’s freedom, and of how this freedom is compatible with the necessity of the eternal truths. We will see that Descartes conceives of a unique kind of freedom of indifference for God, one that I argue follows from his consideration of the simplicity of the divine attributes. I want to show that, on Descartes’s account, not only is God’s understanding identical to his freedom, his omnipotence is as well: the power of God just is his freedom. Reading Descartes this way, we have an argument as to why God’s freedom does not undermine the necessity of the eternal truths. God’s power secures the necessity of such truths even though he freely creates them. Descartes warns us that human minds cannot fully comprehend this power; we can only be sure of basic truths about God concerning the creation doctrine, for example, that God creates the eternal truths freely, and that such truths are necessary and eternal given our clear and distinct perceptions of them as such. Rather than reviewing Descartes’s account of freedom generally, I want to focus my discussion on those passages from the texts which deal specifically with divine freedom. Often, these passages are pitted against and explained alongside Descartes’s account of human freedom, but I incorporate the account of human freedom only to the extent that I believe it elucidates divine freedom. Because 170 Descartes did not intend to enter into theological discussions, 34 there is little detail in the texts on the nature of God’s freedom. However, several passages contain fairly informative discussions of divine freedom: the Replies to the Sixth Set of Objections and two letters to Mesland: one dated 9 February, 1645, the other, 2 May, 1644. I will take up each of these texts in turn, arguing what I believe constitutes an adequate account of Descartes’s conception of divine freedom. I will then compare these accounts to the references to divine freedom made in the principal creation doctrine passages. My aim is to show that Descartes’s conception of divine freedom is what lends coherence to the creation doctrine, as it serves to dissolve the tension in the claim that God could have chosen otherwise in creating the eternal truths. As I have stated previously, Descartes’s claim to Mesland is meant to clarify both God’s power and our limits in understanding this power. In the Sixth Objections, the objectors warn Descartes that his account of indifference from the Fourth Meditation conflicts with and undermines God’s freedom of indifference, for Descartes had stated that indifference in the will was a sign of the will’s imperfection. Descartes had called human indifference “the lowest grade of freedom”, adding that “it is evidence not of any perfection of freedom, but rather of a defect in knowledge or a kind of negation” (AT VII 58; CSM II 40). The objectors reason that if indifference is considered a defect in humans, then it cannot be the essence of human freedom; and if indifference cannot be the essence of 34 Though, ultimately, he does carry out theological investigations in considering God’s nature and the extent of our knowledge of it. I suspect that he proclaims not to intend to enter theological discussions as a means to avoid accusations of impiety or heresy by some of his Jesuit correspondents. 171 human freedom, then it cannot be the essence of divine freedom (AT VII 417; CSM II 281). They acknowledge no difference between the indifference in humans and that in God, since, as they put it, “the essences of things are, like numbers, indivisible and immutable” (ibid.). So, because indifference belongs to the essence of divine freedom, and because essences are not changeable, it must also belong to the essence of human freedom, and so is not a defect. 35 But realizing that his objectors had misunderstood what he wrote in the Fourth Meditation, Descartes responds that freedom of the will is not same for God and humans, since no essence can be shared univocally by both God and humans (AT VII 432-433; CSM II 291-292). Descartes agrees with the objectors that God was “indifferent from eternity” with respect to everything he created. He states that indifference for God “is the supreme indication of his omnipotence” (AT VII 432; CSM II 292), and explains that we must conclude that God is completely indifferent in his actions on pain of contradiction in the very concept of God. He reasons that God must be indifferent with respect to all that he creates because there is nothing which is good or bad, true or false, necessary or possible, prior to his creation. Nothing compels God to choose the way he does, for this would entail not only a limit on God’s power, but also the existence of possibilities prior to God’s action. As Descartes states, God’s will is “indifferent from eternity with respect to everything which has happened or will ever happen” (AT VII 432; CSM II 291). I 35 To be clear, the objectors use the phrase “indifference is involved in [includitur] God’s freedom”, not “indifference is the essence of God’s freedom”. But given their supporting premise, ‘the essences of things are not divisible’, it seems straightforward that they intend indifference to be the essence of God’s freedom. 172 take this to mean that divine indifference consists in there being no prior compelling reasons for God to choose the way he does, for those compelling reasons must first have been produced or created by God. If we suppose that God is compelled to choose in accordance with some reason or possibility, then his power would be limited. 36 Descartes’s doctrine clearly states that anything which is true or good is so because God chooses it to be so. But how exactly does indifference differ for human freedom? Human indifference differs from divine indifference, Descartes explains, because God has established what is true and good, and all of our judgments – whether right or wrong, true or false – must correspond to this pre-established order. Unlike God, we cannot determine what is true or good; we can only choose our actions in light of what God has determined to be true and good. Human wills “cannot tend towards anything else” but what God has determined (AT VII 432; CSM II 292). Human indifference, then, is a state of the will where the human agent “does not know which of the two alternatives is the better or truer, or at least when he does not see this clearly enough” (AT VII 433; CSM II 292, my emphasis). We are indifferent when we lack the relevant knowledge or clear perception that makes our judgments rational. 37 It is in this sense that Descartes calls human indifference the lowest form of freedom. Any 36 This is not to say that God acts without reason. Descartes’s sense here is that there are no prior reasons which compel or influence God’s decision. The doctrine of divine simplicity guarantees that understanding is not divorced from will, such that any act of will is an act of understanding. Thus, Gods actions have reasons, but these reasons do not serve as motives to act. 37 Descartes clarifies his position on human freedom of indifference in the 2 May 1644 letter to Mesland as follows: “I did not say that a person was indifferent only if he lacked knowledge, but rather, that he is more indifferent the fewer reasons he knows which impel him to choose one side rather than another” (AT IV 115; CSMK 233). Indifference, thus, occurs in degrees. 173 lack, such as knowledge in the form of clear and distinct perception, indicates a weakness or, as Descartes puts it, a “negation”. But for God, indifference is the mark of his power: by his willing, God creates truth. There are no reasons for God’s acting prior to his willing. For humans, indifference is the mark of our lack of power: when we are indifferent, though we are still free, we are in a state of unclear perception about our choices. While there is much more clarification needed for Descartes’s account of human freedom, it is clear that Descartes believes that the essence of God’s freedom is indifference. In the 21 April 1641 letter to Mersenne, Descartes states that belief in God’s indifference need not be accepted on faith, as the Sixth objectors had indicated. Descartes provides a philosophical argument – in fact, he gives a reductio for the conclusion that God must be indifferent – in his Sixth Replies. But he provides another argument as to why divine indifference differs from human indifference. He writes: [T]he indifference which belongs to human freedom is very different from that which belongs to divine freedom. The fact that the essences of things are said to be indivisible is not relevant here. For, firstly, no essence can belong univocally to both God and his creatures; and, secondly, indifference does not belong to the essence of human freedom... (AT VII 433; CSM II 292). Since the objectors had claimed that essences are indivisible, Descartes avoids this pitfall by simply denying that indifference belongs to the essence of human freedom, as the objectors had assumed in their argument. Despite there being one kind of indifference for God and another kind for humans, Descartes denies that human indifference constitutes human freedom. He continues his reply, saying that “we are 174 also free – indeed at our freest – when a clear perception impels us to pursue some object” (AT VII 433; CSM II 292). Indifference, taken as the lack of compelling reasons, cannot constitute freedom, because we can possess compelling reasons for action and still be free. But if indifference is construed broadly as a lack of knowledge, or a lack of compelling reasons, how is it a mark of God’s power if he is indifferent? After all, if we are claiming that God’s indifference consists in there being no compelling reasons for his action, then there must also be no divine knowledge of such compelling reasons. But a lack of knowledge would likewise indicate a weakness in God. Descartes seems to avoid this problem in the Sixth Replies claim that (1) God must be indifferent from eternity, otherwise possibilities would have existed prior to his creating them, and (2) indifference for God is different from that of humans. But how is a lack of reasons justified in God’s case but not ours? Let’s consider some additional passages to answer this question. Descartes’s definition of ‘indifference’ gets some fine tuning in his letter to Mesland, 9 February 1645. Referring to his Fourth Meditation claim that indifference is the lowest grade of human freedom, he tells Mesland that ‘indifference’ means “that state of the will when it is not impelled one way rather than another by any perception of truth or goodness” (AT IV 173; CSMK 245). Indifference, on this definition, is a state of the will, not a state of the understanding, such that no reasons impel the will to choose between two or more alternatives. To be sure, the understanding provides the reasons for the will to choose from; these 175 reasons, or ideas of the understanding, are the objects upon which the will acts. Once a reason becomes compelling, the will is no longer indifferent, and the will assents to some belief or chooses some action based on that reason. In a state of indifference, I am said to be free because there are no compelling reasons to elicit an act of my will – what Descartes calls a volition – and so my choice may go either way. In the case of God, this sense of indifference does not seem to fit. First, given the doctrine of divine simplicity, indifference of the will entails indifference in the understanding. To be precise, there is not both indifference of the will and indifference of the understanding, because there is only a single divine faculty. The upshot is that in God’s case, the actions of his will are not subject to (read, limited by) whatever is in his understanding, as is the case with human faculties. The two faculties are identical. As Descartes often says, God understands something because he wills it, the ‘because’ here not having the traditional sense of ‘for the reason that’. The notion of priority is inapplicable in God’s case, but is necessary in ours. Second, consider how Descartes characterizes divine indifference from the Sixth Replies. He says that we must conceive that God’s will is “indifferent from eternity”. Surely, our wills, though indifferent, are not indifferent from eternity. We are temporal beings, and so cannot be indifferent from or for eternity. Indifference for a human will must contend with a created order of truth and goodness, and so any indifference in our wills does not entail that there are no compelling reasons; rather, we are not knowledgeable of any compelling reasons. We do not clearly see the order of truth and goodness upon which to make a free choice. For God, indifference 176 from eternity entails the dependence of a created order of truth and goodness on his willing. Where ‘indifferent’ means ‘lack of reasons’ or ‘not impelled one way or another’, Descartes’s claim about God begins to make more sense, for he seems to be claiming that from eternity, God has never been compelled by reasons to act in the way he does. If this were so, if God had been compelled to act in a certain way, or to act in accordance with some prior reason, then God would have been subject to some order of truth or goodness external to him. Third, take Descartes’s claim in the Fourth Meditation that God’s will is “greater” than the human will: God’s will is incomparably greater than mine, both in virtue of the knowledge and power that accompany it and make it more firm and efficacious, and also in virtue of its object, in that it ranges over a greater number of items. (AT VII 57; CSM II 40) Human wills and God’s will are “incomparable” in two senses. In the first sense, the divine will is more firm and efficacious than the human will given God’s power and knowledge. Although we get no argument here, it is implied that God’s power and knowledge are such that they render his will all the more firm and efficacious. Descartes seems to be suggesting that a will is more firm the more knowledge one possesses, for a changeable will would seem to be one in which the agent is not in possession of some knowledge which would ground certainty in one’s volitions. In God’s case, since his knowledge is infinite, his will is firm to the extent that it is immutable. The same is true for power and efficaciousness: since God’s power is limitless, his will is supremely efficacious. In the second sense, the divine will is 177 capable of ranging over a greater number of “items”. It is not clear that the term ‘items’ refers to ideas; this would render the divine will divisible or complex since there would be an infinite number of ideas in the divine mind. But, it is clear that Descartes is claiming that the range of the divine will, despite what we take its objects to be, is unlimited. 38 Since the divine understanding is infinite, the range of the divine will is likewise infinite. The human will, by contrast, can range over – that is, can assent to or deny – only what is contained in our finite understandings. The knowledge that accompanies our wills is limited, and in this sense our wills cannot compare to God’s. 39 This does not conflict with Descartes’s later assertion in the Fourth Meditation that it is “in virtue of the will that I understand myself to bear in some way the image and likeness of God” (AT VII 57; CSM II 40). This likeness is understood strictly in terms of the basic function of the will: “in our ability to do or not do something (that is, to affirm or deny, to pursue or avoid)” (ibid.). 40 Since God (trivially) has this ability, we are said to be like him, though we are hardly said to be divine. 38 Cf. Principles I. 27: “For in the case of God alone, not only do we fail to recognize any limits in any respect, but our understanding positively tells us that there are none” (AT VIIIA 15; CSM I 202). 39 It is interesting to note that, although Descartes here speaks of the knowledge and power that “accompany” God’s will, I believe we can understand this to be a way of expressing the doctrine of divine simplicity. God’s knowledge is coextensive with his will because, as Descartes argues elsewhere, will and knowledge for God are one and the same. The distinction, then, between the human will and God’s will can be drawn precisely on the criterion of simplicity: the human will is not coextensive with its understanding, and so there is no simplicity of these faculties. 40 Cf. the letter to Mersenne, 25 December 1639 (AT II 628; CSMK 141-2). The letter is troubling because Descartes claims that God has given us an “infinite will”, though he proclaims in the Principles that he reserves the term ‘infinite’ for God alone. But his initial characterization is that “God has given us a will which has no limits”, so the problem may only be a matter of word choice. 178 I think these considerations show the difference between the way Descartes conceived the divine will and the human will. As we’ve seen, simplicity plays a role in one case but not the other: God’s faculties being a unity, it follows that indifference is not confined to God’s will. On the other hand, indifference is strictly a function of our wills, though it is not a necessary function. When indifference is characterized as ‘a lack of compelling reasons’, in our case the definition reveals the lack of clarity of our perception or the lack of knowledge on our part. But in the case of God, a lack of compelling reasons indicates a power. This power is to be construed, in this matter, as a kind of vision that God has in willing the way he does. Because, as Descartes claims, God understands by his willing, he is said to be indifferent with respect to everything he accomplishes. The lack, then, is not indicative of a negation or privation in the case of God. One final passage on divine indifference that I want to consider before comparing these texts to the creation doctrine texts is the pivotal 2 May 1644 letter to Mesland, one of the most abstruse creation doctrine texts in the corpus. This text will serve as a handy segue since it constitutes a creation doctrine text and elaborates further on the meaning of divine indifference; I reproduce it here in part: I turn to the difficulty of conceiving how God would have been acting freely and indifferently if he had made it false that the three angles of a triangle were equal to two right angles, or in general that contradictories could not be true together. It is easy to dispel this difficulty by considering that the power of God cannot have any limits, and that our mind is finite and so created as to be able to conceive as possible the things which God has wished to be in fact possible, but not be able to conceive as possible things which God could have made possible, but which he has nevertheless wished to make impossible. The first consideration shows us that God cannot have been determined to 179 make it true that contradictories cannot be true together, and therefore that he could have done the opposite. The second consideration assures us that even if this be true, we should not try to comprehend it, since our nature is incapable of doing so. And even if God has willed that some truths should be necessary, this does not mean that he willed them necessarily; for it is one thing to will that they be necessary, and quite another to will this necessarily, or to be necessitated to will it. I agree that there are contradictions which are so evident that we cannot put them before our minds without judging them entirely impossible, like the one which you suggest: ‘that God might have brought it about that his creatures were independent of him’. (AT IV 118- 119; CSMK 235) Among other topics addressed to Mesland in this letter, Descartes elaborates on and ties together many of the themes I have been discussing (or will discuss) in relation to the creation doctrine: simplicity, omnipotence, freedom, indifference, possibility, and dependency. The discussion occurs toward the end of the letter in a single paragraph, which opens with Descartes’s response to a problem most likely posed by Mesland in a previous letter. As he states it, it is “the difficulty of conceiving how it was free and indifferent for God to make it not true that the three angles of a triangle were equal to two right angles, or generally that contradictories cannot be [true] together”. 41 Descartes’s troublesome response deals crucially with God’s indifference and God’s power. Mesland is asking how we can reconcile or clearly perceive that God was free to make some necessary truths not true, and Descartes claims that God could have done otherwise in his creation. This letter, essentially, is the source of trouble for the creation doctrine. 41 The translation from the French is my own. CSMK translate the past tense form of “it is” in the subjunctive, but I retain the simple past tense of the verbs. The word ‘true’ in brackets is contained in the CSMK translation. 180 Descartes’s reply is that the solution to the conceptual difficulty is easy to remove: we need merely consider the power of God as compared to the limits of our own conception. As I discussed in Chapter One, Descartes asks us to make two considerations in order to arrive at the proper resolution of this conceptual difficulty: (1) that God’s power is without limits; (2) that our minds are created by God as finite entities. Accepting (2) provides justification for accepting (1), though Descartes himself imposes no priority of order between the two; he only asserts that we accept the conjunction of the two. Descartes explains (1) as meaning that nothing determined God to act in the way he did. The problem that we have in conceiving this comes down to understanding God’s freedom of indifference. And Descartes believes that we can “dispel” the problem by attending to the idea that God’s power cannot have any limits. But the statement ‘God’s power cannot have any limits’ is a reference to God’s potency, or his omnipotence. So the way to resolve the problem of conceiving how God’s indifference works is to reflect on his omnipotence. Thus, in one sense, God’s power is meant to be understood in terms of his freedom, and vice versa, and the guiding concept here seems to be divine indifference. The two attributes of freedom and power, though, must amount to the same thing, according to the divine simplicity thesis. Just as there are no limits which restrain God’s power, there are no alternatives which restrain God’s freedom. Thus, the difficulty is dispelled by a careful consideration of God’s freedom, power, and simplicity. 181 If this suggestion is acceptable, there is now a satisfactory way to interpret the problematic “could” in this letter. The “could” need not be understood modally, as a possibility that God has willed, or a possible state of affairs God might have willed; it should be understood strictly as a claim about God’s freedom of indifference. Let’s look again at (2) and see how Descartes explains it. The import of considering the finite nature of our own minds is that we realize: (2a) we are capable of conceiving as possible that which is in reality possible; but (2b) we are not capable of conceiving as possible that which God made impossible, but which he could have made possible. Descartes here shows us the proper limits on our conception, and what we are justified in concluding in this case about God and what is possible. (2a) and (2b) make an important claim about what we can clearly conceive as a genuine possibility: only what God has willed to be a genuine possibility. That is, we cannot conceive as possible that which God has made impossible. Likewise, we cannot conceive as possibly false that which God has made necessarily true. Why, then, does Descartes insist on the further claim in (2b) that, even so, God could have made such things possible? Descartes does state: “God could have done the opposite in making it true that contradictories cannot be true together.” I believe that Descartes is motivated by two principles in adding this final remark to (2b). The first principle can be explained by looking at what he says in defense of (2b) a few lines later in the letter. He writes that “even if God has willed that some truths should be necessary, this does not mean that he willed them 182 necessarily; for it is one thing to will that they be necessary, and quite another to will this necessarily, or to be necessitated to will it”. This is precisely a declaration of God’s freedom. Descartes uses the notion of divine freedom of indifference to explain and support the contention that God could have made contradictories true together. This does not imply that God has made some set of possibilia, namely, the possibilities that eternal truths are false; it merely states that there were no constraints on God’s freedom when he willed the eternal truths. This is further backed by Descartes’s tying together the two considerations, (1) and (2), as another principle: “if we would know the immensity of his power we should not put these thoughts before our minds”. Admittedly, this claim involves reference to God’s power, not his freedom. But consider how the rest of the letter unfolds: But if we would know the immensity of his power we should not put these thoughts before our minds, nor should we conceive any precedence or priority between his intellect and his will; for the idea which we have of God teaches us that there is in him only a single activity, entirely simple and entirely pure. This is well expressed by the words of St Augustine: ‘They are so because thou see’est them to be so’; because in God seeing and willing are one and the same thing. What I find remarkable about this letter is how all these themes – power, freedom, and simplicity – are harnessed together in the space of a single paragraph. Initially, the reason Descartes gives Mesland for refraining from putting such difficult thoughts before the mind is that the human mind is finite and God’s power is beyond our comprehension. But now we are given a second reason: because God’s will and understanding are a unity. Descartes moves from power to simplicity all as a means to explaining how God’s freedom is capable of being understood by our finite minds. 183 We are able to clearly conceive the simplicity of God’s intellect and will, though we cannot clearly conceive how God is indifferent in willing the eternal truths. It is the idea of simplicity which is to guide us out of the difficulty, not the idea of divine freedom by itself. The consideration of God’s power – that it is without limits – also “dispels” the difficulty, for this shows us how incapable we are of fully comprehending God’s freedom. Fortunately, we can clearly understand that God is indifferent in his creation, even though we cannot clearly understand how God is so. Kaufman has argued for a similar reading of the controversial “could” in this letter. He states that we should read the ‘could’ not in terms of possibilities, but in terms of God’s indifference. As Kaufman correctly points out, reading Descartes’s statement in terms of possibilities leads one into Universal Possibilism or Limited Possibilism; Kaufman’s strategy is to divorce this term from its normal sense of modality, at least in the case of the Mesland letter. I think this is the right step in coming to a proper understanding of Descartes’s doctrine. Kaufman proposes that we understand the ‘could’ in the proposition ‘God could have done the opposite in making it true that contradictories cannot be true together’ to mean: (K) For any eternal truth P, it is not the case that there were any independent factors preventing God from willing not-P or impelling him to will P. 42 Reading the passage from the Mesland letter this way does not necessarily entail a statement about the modal status of not-P. That is, Descartes is not talking about possibilities in this letter; he is not declaring that not-P is a real possibility, a truth 42 See Kaufman (2002), 38. 184 that God could have established. I agree with Kaufman that Descartes is talking about the state of God’s will in establishing the eternal truths, and this amounts to understanding the source of the eternal truths with respect only to God’s freedom, or his power of willing. To be sure, it is not as though God must necessarily choose from P or not-P. This would be to impose a logical constraint on God’s will, and God’s indifference goes beyond this. Rather, the emphasis is on the lack of external constraints influencing God’s will, and this includes any logical constraints. Kaufman is concerned to demonstrate the compatibility between Descartes’s two claims, (a) that the eternal truths are freely created by God, and (b) that the eternal truths are necessarily true. 43 The interpretive problem is showing how these claims are compatible. Taking account of all the creation doctrine passages, especially the 1644 letter to Mesland, Kaufman argues that (a) requires the truth of another claim: (c) for any eternal truth P, God could have willed that not-P is true. 44 The crucial step in avoiding the conclusion that Descartes’s doctrine is incoherent depends on how we interpret (c). Given that (c) grounds (a), we have a rather straight-forward explanation of the ‘could’ as an indication of God’s freedom of indifference, not as the ‘could’ of possibility. Stating that God could have willed differently than he did is just to reiterate God’s indifference with respect to willing 43 Kaufman (2002), 25ff. 44 Strictly speaking, this cannot be correct, for in the letter to Mesland, Descartes only talks about a single eternal truth, ‘contradictories cannot be true together’. Likewise, there are some eternal truths about God which it does not make sense to say that God wills, such as ‘God exists’, and for which we can say God could have willed the opposite. I postpone discussion of these remarks until the next chapter. 185 anything. Thus, Kaufman takes (c) to amount to no more than the statement (K) above, because the creation doctrine passages limit the extent to which we can interpret this statement. As Kaufman states, one important restriction on our interpretation of (c) is “that we cannot employ unwilled possibilities”. 45 This is what he accuses Frankfurt and Curley of doing in their interpretations, namely, of claiming that it is possible that not-P, where P is an eternal truth. Not-P is an unwilled possibility because God does not will the possible falsity of any eternal truth. Since all modality comes from God, not-P cannot be a possibility as long as P is an eternal truth. But P is still an eternal truth – and hence a necessary truth – despite the fact that God freely establishes it as such. Let’s now return to the creation doctrine passages to see how this understanding of “could” as a reference to freedom and power is applicable to an overall understanding of the doctrine itself. Recall that Descartes’s initial letter to Mersenne, 15 April 1630, had stated that God could change the eternal truths if his will can change. This is a misleading statement by Descartes, since it is followed by the claim that God’s will is eternal and unchangeable. This seems to imply that God cannot change the eternal truths. Does Descartes really intend to draw this conclusion? It depends on how we understand this claim, for it seems to suggest that God lacks the power to overturn the eternal truths. I believe we need to read this claim as a subtle reference to God’s freedom. Descartes does not state that God cannot change the eternal truths; he claims only that were God’s will to change with 45 Kaufman (2002), 39. 186 respect to the eternal truths, these truths really wouldn’t be eternal. The difficulty lies in the imagined adversary equating ‘God’s will can change’ with ‘God’s will is free’. Descartes does not, indeed he cannot, equate these two, for he accepts the principle that God’s will is free and eternal. So, Descartes really rejects the first statement. We cannot clearly understand God’s freedom in terms of changing one’s mind or will; we can only understand it in terms of freedom of indifference. Considering the letter to Mersenne, 27 May 1630, we see Descartes move from a discussion of the eternality of God’s will to his freedom. He writes that “from all eternity [God] willed and understood [the eternal truths] to be, and by that very fact he created them” (AT I 152; CSMK 25). It is God’s free exercise of will which brings about the eternal truths. Mersenne had asked Descartes what necessitated God to create the eternal truths he did in fact create. Descartes responds that God was not necessitated, but was free to choose the eternal truths, free “to make it not true that all the radii of the circle are equal”, free “not to create the world” (AT I 152; CSMK 25). Descartes does not tell Mersenne, as he does Mesland, that God “could” have made it not true that all the radii of the circle are equal. He specifically states that God was free to make [libre de faire] such truths, perhaps in response to Mersenne’s question about what necessitated God to act in the way he did. What is striking about this earlier letter to Mersenne is that the example is the same as in the Mesland letter: God’s freedom to make it not true that the radii of a circle are equal. In the Mersenne letter, Descartes is responding to Mersenne’s question about God’s freedom, and so the response is put in terms of what God was 187 free to do. In the Mesland letter, the subject is God’s power [puissance], and Descartes’s response is put in the language of God’s ability or power to do the contrary [il a pû faire le contraire]. The two attributes are, however, identical: what God is free to do is no different from what he is able to do. Again, his remark in the Sixth Replies corroborates this: “the supreme indifference to be found in God is the supreme indication of his omnipotence” (AT VII 432; CSM II 292). We arrive at our understanding of God’s omnipotence via our concept of his freedom, even if there are limits on that conception. Thus, I maintain that we need to understand Descartes’s use of ‘could’ in terms of God’s freedom. The Sixth Replies passage presents us with a more difficult interpretive task. Descartes tells his objectors that “there is no need to ask how God could have brought it about from eternity that it was not true that twice four make eight, and so on; for I admit this is unintelligible to us” (AT VII 436; CSM II 294). Descartes’s reply initially sounds dismissive: his tone suggests that he thinks he doesn’t need to answer that since we shouldn’t be raising such questions in the first place. Despite this implied attitude, there is additionally no direct reference to freedom here. The subject is the dependency of all things on God. But I think we can achieve a similar understanding of this claim even if we substitute the ‘could’-phrase with ‘free to make’. As I just suggested above, Descartes is putting his response in terms of dependence and what God “could” have done because this is the language the objectors use. But as he continues his reply, he relates this dependency to God’s freedom of indifference: 188 If anyone attends to the immeasurable greatness of God he will find it manifestly clear that there can be nothing whatsoever which does not depend on him. This applies not just to everything that subsists, but to all order, every law, and every reason for anything’s being true or good. If this were not so, then, as noted a little earlier, God would not have been completely indifferent with respect to the creation of what he did in fact create. (AT VII 435; CSM II 293-294) Everything must depend on God; otherwise we are in violation of the thesis of divine indifference. Thus, Descartes conceives a strong connection between God’s freedom of indifference and his omnipotence, for we need merely assume that God chooses from among alternatives to see that this assumption would undermine his omnipotence. Again, indifference and power are used interchangeably to resolve difficulties in our conception about God. We will never arrive at a full comprehension of God’s power, 46 but we can resolve the difficulties, thinks Descartes, if we always keep in mind certain basic truths about God and his attributes. The most important, I believe, is the divine simplicity thesis, and Descartes employs this principle as much as he can to clarify points of contention between himself and his objectors. I now want to turn to a closer analysis of Descartes’s understanding of God’s omnipotence. As I stated above, given the divine simplicity thesis, freedom and omnipotence are identical in God. I have pointed out several passages already which incorporate God’s indifference to explain his power. But Descartes makes other remarks about God’s power which need explanation. For example, Descartes’s 46 For example, see his Meditation 4 remark: “since I know that my own nature is very weak and limited, whereas the nature of God is immense, incomprehensible and infinite, I also know without more ado that he is capable of countless things whose causes are beyond my knowledge” (AT VII 55; CSM II 39). 189 system could not be coherent if his conception of omnipotence entailed that God can do absolutely anything, even the logically impossible. I want to argue that Descartes’s consideration of God’s power is his way of claiming that God is impenetrable, and does not lead to the incoherent thesis that God can do the logically impossible. Omnipotence Given that God has created our universe and laid down eternal laws, does it make much sense to assert that he is nonetheless indifferent to all of this? After all, we are given eternal truths, truths which cannot be otherwise and which have always been, and will always be, true. As long as we are clear and distinct that certain truths are eternally true, we cannot be mistaken. It would seem to be in God’s interest to preserve these truths as he made them, for otherwise, he would be a deceiver. This, however, seems to put a constraint on God’s power, for it obligates him to eternally preserve their truth value once he has created them. For Descartes to suggest that God is always free to will in any way he chooses seems to make the order of nature and mathematical necessity capricious. Indeed, it seems to shed doubt on the entire project of certainty which Descartes is after in the Discourse, Meditations, and Principles. If God is omnipotent, as Descartes claims many times, why couldn’t he choose to overturn the eternal truths? Indeed, what compels him to maintain order? In one sense, Descartes’s answer to this question is ‘God could choose to overturn the eternal truths’. If we insist on the claim that there are no limits on 190 God’s power or freedom, then our answer follows directly from the a priori deduction of God’s nature. But in another sense, the proper answer to this question would seem to be ‘God could not overturn the eternal truths once he has willed them’, given the immutability and goodness of God as well as the eternality of these truths. That is, once God chooses to create an eternal order of necessary truths, he would not rescind them; in establishing the eternal truths, God must bind himself to such an order. In this sense the eternal truths are said to be eternal and necessary, for their eternality and necessity depend on an action of God’s will. But this answer obviously conflicts with the first. How can God be both indifferent and determined? Are the attributes of God inconsistent? It seems that Descartes’s doctrine is trapped in a dilemma. If God is absolutely indifferent, then he could overturn the eternal truths; this contravenes the doctrines of divine benevolence and immutability. But if God is not indifferent, then we contravene the doctrines of divine freedom and omnipotence. If God binds himself to certain truths he created, doesn’t this restrict his otherwise absolute power? One way of avoiding this dilemma is to argue that Descartes was implicitly working with a well-known distinction between two kinds of power in God: absolute power and ordained power. 47 In making sense of Descartes’s claim that God could have decreed otherwise in establishing the eternal truths, we interpret the ‘could’ in 47 This distinction is often referred to in Latin: ‘potentia dei absoluta et ordinata’. My understanding of the distinction comes from Blake Dutton, “Indifference, Necessity, and Descartes’s Derivation of the Laws of Motion,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 34 (1996): 193-212, and James Petrick, “Descartes on Divine Indifference and the Transworld Validity of the Eternal Truths,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 36 (1998): 417-432. 191 terms of God’s absolute power. This is the kind of power God has regardless of what he actually wills. In saying that God is limitless, that everything depends on him, and that he is completely indifferent, we are speaking of his absolute power. Thus, when Descartes claims that God could have done otherwise, he means that God has the absolute power to have chosen otherwise, to not have been necessitated to choose as he did. However, God did in fact establish certain eternal truths. Moreover, Descartes claims that God is immutable and not deceptive. Thus, when Descartes claims that God establishes a certain order and binds his will to that order, he is considering God’s ordained power. God would not alter the eternal truths given his immutability and goodness; so when Descartes says that God cannot do something, he is referring only to God’s ordained power. Absolutely speaking, we cannot say of anything that it could not be brought about by God. Does Descartes operate with this medieval distinction in mind? Spinoza thought Descartes did, and some passages have been interpreted as coming close to suggesting this distinction. 48 For example, consider the following exchange between Descartes and Burman: [Burman] But does it follow from this that God could have commanded a creature to hate him, and thereby made this a good thing to do? [Descartes] God could not now do this: but we simply do not know what he could have done. In any case, why should he not have been able to give this command to one of his creatures? (AT V 160; CSMK 343) This passage could be read as involving both senses of power. When Descartes says “God could not now do this”, he is referring to God’s ordained power: because God 48 James Petrick argues that Spinoza correctly interprets Descartes under this distinction. See his (1998), especially 422ff. 192 has already set up the eternal truth that it is bad for a creature to hate God, the truth cannot be violated. God’s immutable will makes the truth necessary. But the very next ‘could’ seems to refer to God’s absolute power. Indeed, the use of ‘now’ suggests two different meanings for the word ‘could’ in the first sentence of Descartes’s reply. The final question Descartes poses reinforces this interpretation: given God’s absolute power, nothing prevented him from initially willing that it would be good to hate God. If Descartes was using this distinction, some of the more pernicious problems surrounding the creation doctrine could be solved. The ‘could’ from the Mesland letter would be referring to God’s absolute power; this would render implications about possibilities and alternate eternal truths neutral since we separate absolute power from what God actually wills. Only God’s ordained power would have implications for possibility and necessity. However, I do not think that Descartes uses this distinction. For one, there is no explicit mention of this well-known distinction anywhere in the texts. Thus, there is no textual evidence to support the contention that Descartes uses this distinction. Second, given Descartes’s view of divine simplicity, a distinction of powers in God would be contradictory. This distinction is not a conceptual one either: the powers are said to be in God, despite what we think about them. Third, the distinction purports to know something about God which is unknowable: how God’s power works. Descartes is very clear that while he can understand that God is omnipotent, he cannot understand what this 193 power consists in. The absolute/ordained distinction violates a key feature of omnipotence: the cognitive impenetrability of the divine nature. Let me explain what I mean. As we saw in previous chapters, Descartes often characterizes God’s power in terms of causal dependence: all things, including the eternal truths, depend on God as the cause of their being. This idea suggests that were God not to exist, absolutely nothing else could exist. Of course, Descartes acknowledges that modes depend on the substance in which they inhere, such that were the substance to be taken away or destroyed, the mode or attribute would likewise be destroyed. But the kind of dependence that Descartes has in mind concerning God and his relation to created things is one of causal dependence. As Descartes succinctly puts the matter to Mersenne, “God is the author of everything” (AT I 152; CSMK 25); to Burman, he acknowledges that “There is nothing we can think of or ought to think of that should not be said to depend on God” (AT V 160; CSMK 343); and in the Sixth Replies, Descartes states that “there can be nothing whatsoever which does not depend on [God]” (AT VII 435; CSM II 293). Descartes emphasizes that God has a causal role in establishing all things. God is the efficient and total cause of everything, 49 including all that is necessary, possible, and impossible, and including “all order, every law, and every reason for anything’s being true or good” (AT VII 435; CSM II 294). It is clear, then, that Descartes conceives God’s omnipotence to consist partly in the dependence of all things on God, but also in his creative power to bring everything into being. 49 This phrasing – “efficient and total cause” – comes from Descartes’s letter to Mersenne of 27 May 1630 (AT I 152; CSMK 25). 194 But dependence is only one way that Descartes understands God’s power. Often when he discusses God’s omnipotence, he adds a statement about the limits of human understanding of such power. We are not limited in our understanding that all things depend on God; Descartes repeatedly claims that such a truth can be known by finite minds and is certain. Rather, he insists that we cannot fully grasp the power God has in bringing about what he wills. To Mersenne, Descartes claims that we are capable of grasping those truths which God establishes as eternally true, but the “greatness of God, on the other hand, is something which we cannot grasp even though we know it” (AT I 145; CSMK 23). In his two follow-up letters, Descartes reiterates the incomprehensibility of God’s power and distinguishes between ‘knowing’ and ‘grasping’. He tells Mersenne that “most people do not regard God as a being who is infinite and beyond our grasp... God is a cause whose power surpasses the bounds of human understanding” (AT I 150; CSMK 24-5). Repeating this thesis, he writes: I know that God is the author of everything and that these truths are something and consequently he is their author. I say that I know this, not that I conceive it or grasp it; because it is possible to know that God is infinite and all powerful although our soul, being finite, cannot grasp or conceive him. In the same way we can touch a mountain with our hands but we cannot put our arms around it as we could put them around a tree or something else not too large for them. To grasp something is to embrace it in one’s thought; to know something, it is sufficient to touch it with one’s thought. (AT I 152; CSMK 25) According to this letter, though God is said to be an incomprehensible being, he is incomprehensible insofar as we are unable to grasp his nature. Grasping in this sense seems to amount to a complete or exhaustive understanding of the subject or 195 object. I grasp x when I clearly and distinctly understand everything in the nature or essence of x. Thus, I grasp the idea of body when I understand all of the essential properties of body, namely, extension. However, if I fail to understand all there is to understand of body, I am not grasping it, though I may still understand what a body is; my knowledge is incomplete. In the case of God, there is an important difference; the nature of an infinite being is such that we cannot grasp it even in principle though we can understand it. This is because our minds are finite. Thus, there are certain truths about God which we can understand, but we cannot grasp God in his entirety. Descartes is cautious in his words to Mersenne that he only “knows” some truths about God; he does not claim to “grasp” such truths. As long as we are clear and distinct about those aspects of God which are accessible to the human mind, then our knowledge of God is as complete as it can be for a finite mind. In Principles I.19, Descartes explains that “it is in the nature of an infinite being not to be fully grasped by us, who are finite” (AT VIIIA 12; CSM I 199). Human minds, being finite, cannot completely fathom the infinite. This suggests that only an infinite mind can grasp what is infinite, and the only infinite mind on the Cartesian system is God’s mind. Because our minds are finite, we grasp something by means of imposing limits on it. This fact, Descartes explains, saves us the trouble of trying to determine the extent of the infinite: “since we are finite, it would be absurd for us to determine anything concerning the infinite; for this would be to attempt to limit it and grasp it” (AT VIIIA 14-15; CSM I 201- 202). As long as the number of essential properties of some object is finite, then a 196 human mind can grasp that object. But we cannot grasp – that is, impose limits of understanding on – the infinite. Grasping, then, implies limiting, especially in the case of a finite mind. Being finite, our intellectual reach, so to speak, is limited; we understand something as far as our intellect can embrace it. Thus, since God is unlimited, we can never hope to grasp his nature. This mysteriousness of God is an essential part of Descartes’s doctrine about the eternal truths. As I stated in the last section, Descartes recognizes many of the conceptual difficulties associated with the doctrine. One problem is the impenetrability of God. Most of the claims Descartes makes about God’s impenetrability have to do with God’s power or omnipotence. We know and can be sure that God is all powerful, but what does this power consist in? While we can come close to describing some of the effects of God’s power, we simply cannot know how the power of God works. What is more, given the impenetrability of God’s power, some of the things God wills are likewise impenetrable. Descartes makes this claim at Principles I.25. At first glance, the passage seems to be a declaration about the priority of divine revelation over clear and distinct perception, but Descartes makes an important claim about the impenetrability of some things created by God. He writes: We must believe everything which God has revealed, even though it may be beyond our grasp. Hence, if God happens to reveal something about himself or others which is beyond the natural reach of our mind – such as the mystery of the Incarnation or of the Trinity – we will not refuse to believe it, despite the fact that we do not clearly understand it. And we will not be at all surprised that there is much, both in the immeasurable nature of God and in 197 the things created by him, which is beyond our mental capacity. (AT VIIIA 14; CSM I 201) Here we see that not only is the nature of God beyond our grasp – though not beyond our understanding – certain “things created by him” are likewise beyond our grasp. Although no specific created things are mentioned here, this passage mirrors a similar claim made to Mersenne: “I do not deny that there are things in God which we do not understand, just as even in a triangle there are many properties which no mathematician will ever know” (AT III 274; CSMK 166). Descartes admits that even created things, such as geometry and mathematics, can have impenetrable natures or properties. Of course, we can never determine what these properties are. But I think there is a strong theme of impenetrability surrounding the creation doctrine: our finite minds can glimpse only part of the nature of God and the nature of eternal truths. Impenetrability is not a theological or religious belief; it is a metaphysical truth about finite minds which attempt to grasp the nature of the infinite or eternal. For Descartes, this discovery of the impenetrability of God and of some of his creation is transformed into a method of inquiry. His proposed method of conducting philosophical investigations is stated at the beginning of the Principles, but he reminds us along the way about the importance of God’s impenetrability: Now since God alone is the true cause of everything which is or can be, it is very clear that the best path to follow when we philosophize will be to start from the knowledge of God himself and try to deduce an explanation of the things created by him. This is the way to acquire the most perfect scientific knowledge, that is, knowledge of effects through their causes. In order to tackle this task with a reasonable degree of safety and without risk of going 198 wrong we must take the precaution of always bearing in mind as carefully as possible that God, the creator of all things, is infinite, and that we are altogether finite. (AT VIIIA 14; CSM I 201, my emphasis) The proper philosophical frame of mind, then, involves always reminding ourselves about our finitude, that is, our inability to fully grasp God’s infinite nature. I believe that this doctrine of impenetrability significantly underwrites Descartes’s notion of omnipotence. Descartes breaks from the scholastic tradition which conceived of God as bound by the laws of logic – namely, willing only what is logically possible – and conceived of a sharp division between his powers. His conception of God is that he is an unlimited being, and he characterizes this limitlessness in terms of God’s power: “the power of God cannot have any limits” (AT IV 118; CSMK 25). This fact alone gives us the idea about God’s impenetrability. Thus, we see Descartes making the rather difficult claims about what God could have done in setting up the eternal truths. He knows he can safely assert that “God cannot have been determined to make it true that contradictories cannot be true together, and therefore that he could have done the opposite” given the unlimited power of God. But this unlimited power carries with it our inability to grasp how such a power works. What sound initially like pious claims are really statements which necessarily follow from the doctrine he is advancing. In the 15 April 1630 letter to Mersenne, Descartes characterizes God’s power as “beyond our grasp” (AT I 146; CSMK 23). He then says “we can assert that God can do everything that is within our grasp but not that he cannot do what is beyond our grasp. It would be rash to think that our imagination reaches as far as his power”. 199 This passage is evidence that Descartes does not think that God can do what is logically impossible. Descartes is always careful never to make bold claims about what God can or cannot do, because he always considers the greatness and impenetrability of God. Descartes can only claim what he is clear and distinct about; thus, his view is that we should never assert that God cannot do something, and this view comes from our inability to know the immensity of God’s power. Descartes is true to his own proposed method of philosophical inquiry, and that is why we see him warning us not to “put these thoughts before our minds” – such as, ‘God could have made contradictories true together’ – for they are in principle unknowable. 200 CHAPTER FIVE THE ONTOLOGICAL STATUS OF ETERNAL TRUTHS In this chapter, I take up the topic of the ontological status of the eternal truths. I argue that given certain aspects of Descartes’s creation doctrine, namely the theses (1) that God is the efficient cause of the eternal truths, (2) that God is a simple being, and (3) that the eternal truths are the foundation of Cartesian physics, the eternal truths have a kind of being external both to human minds and to God’s mind. I take up this issue primarily because I want to argue that since Descartes saw a connection between the creation doctrine and his work in physics, the eternal truths must have a status outside minds. This view is most readily applicable to those truths concerning mathematics and nature; it is trickier to categorize the eternal truths concerning God. Of course, human minds have access to these truths, so there is a conceptual aspect to them, or as Descartes would put it, these truths have objective being in human minds. The same is true for God’s mind, though divine objective being is a topic that Descartes says very little about. But if God has access to these truths, and he creates them, I believe that a form of Platonic realism is suggested by the texts related to and concerning the eternal truths. The primary difficulty with this interpretation is that Descartes gives no argument for a Platonistic theory of eternal truths, and several other texts have strong anti-Platonist language. Therefore, and as other scholars have done, I argue by way of ruling out the alternative views, namely, conceptualism – the view that eternal 201 truths have their ontological seat in human minds – and neo-Platonism – the view that eternal truths have their ontological seat in God’s mind. I will first consider the view that eternal truths are mental concepts. While this interpretation gets significant textual support, I will show that it cannot accommodate some important passages that suggest otherwise. Second, I will consider both conceptualism and neo-Platonism, highlighting what I think is wrong with each. Finally, I will offer my argument for Platonism – the view that eternal truths have their status outside of human minds, God’s mind, and corporeal substance. I restrict the domain of my argument to Descartes’s doctrine of eternal truths – thus, I do not want to claim that Descartes is a realist concerning all universals. Instead, I only want to argue that Descartes’s texts suggest that the eternal truths should be understood as metaphysically distinct from both mental and corporeal substance. Eternal Truths as Concepts I want to begin by determining what Descartes means by the term, ‘eternal truth’. He often uses this phrasing, but he sometimes adopts synonymous expressions: ‘common notions’, ‘simple notions’, ‘primary notions’, ‘axioms’, ‘maxims’, ‘principles’, ‘ideas’, etc. The question is whether he always means by these synonymous expressions the same thing as ‘eternal truth’. Descartes’s earliest mention of eternal truths appears in the 15 April 1630 letter to Mersenne, where he calls them ‘mathematical truths’. As Descartes proclaims to Mersenne: “The mathematical truths which you call eternal have been laid down by God...” (AT I 202 145; CSMK 23). 1 A few lines later in this letter, Descartes refers to these same truths as ‘laws of nature’, and he even suggests that they are all innate ideas in human minds. The derivation of the laws of nature from certain truths about God’s essence which Descartes offers in The World depends crucially on our having innate ideas about God, but to refer to them as innate ideas is curious. Thus, we see that Descartes expresses ‘eternal truth’ in a variety of ways. We have yet to see whether he means the same thing in every instance. In the follow-up letter to Mersenne, Descartes claims that “the existence of God is the first and the most eternal of all possible truths and the one from which alone all others proceed” (AT I 150; CSMK 24). Thus, a metaphysical truth – ‘God necessarily exists’ – can be an eternal truth; in fact, this particular truth generates or grounds all other eternal truths. If this truth were false, or if human beings could not clearly and distinctly perceive this truth, no knowledge would ever be certain, as Descartes laboriously attempted to show in the Meditations. But the surprising claim is that ‘God necessarily exists’ is supposed to be the “most eternal of all possible truths”. What does Descartes mean by this claim? Is he suggesting that there are degrees of eternality, whereby one eternal truth can be “more eternal” than another eternal truth? Descartes’s language is confusing, but he claims that God’s infinite 1 Several commentators have taken issue with Descartes’s specific wording here (“which you call”) as well as similar wording in another letter to Mersenne, 27 May 1638: “those truths which are called eternal” (AT II 138; CSMK 103). These commentators feel that Descartes separates his own understanding from Mersenne’s understanding of the word ‘eternal’. I do not wish to enter the debate concerning Descartes’s wording, but I do assume that for Descartes, the word ‘eternal’ involves crucially the notion of being dependent on or created by God. This comes out most readily in the Fifth Replies to Gassendi. 203 nature being beyond our grasp, all truths, including the eternal truths, are subject to God’s power. He gives a brief argument for this conclusion: since God is a cause whose power surpasses the bounds of human understanding, and since the necessity of these truths does not exceed our knowledge, these truths are therefore something less than, and subject to, the incomprehensible power of God. (AT I 150; CSMK 25) One important point that is implicit in Descartes’s words to Mersenne here, and in the previous letter, is that eternal truths are those truths which we can clearly and distinctly comprehend. As Descartes says, “There is no single one that we cannot grasp if our mind turns to consider it. They are all inborn in our minds” (AT I 145; CSMK 23). Any ‘truth’ about God’s nature which we could not clearly and distinctly understand would not be called an eternal truth. This is what I take Descartes to mean by his statement that the necessity of the eternal truths does not exceed our knowledge of them. 2 In the last of the series of letters to Mersenne, Descartes equates eternal truths with created essences. He writes: For it is certain that [God] is the author of the essence of created things no less than of their existence; and this essence is nothing other than the eternal truths. (AT I 152; CSMK 25, my emphasis) There seems to be a distinction being drawn here between the essence of a thing and the existence of that thing. Thus, we can draw a distinction between the essence of a corporeal object (namely, its extension) and its existence (its being an actual object as opposed to just a possible object). But Descartes also adds that the essence of 2 Here, as well as other places, Descartes mentions necessity but offers no definition of the term. 204 created things are just the eternal truths. How are we supposed to understand this claim? Does he mean that for any created object, its essence is a set of eternal truths about that object? For example, corporeal substances are instances of created things. Do we say that extension is really only eternal truths about corporeal substances? And which eternal truths do we include: only truths relative to these kinds of substances, or do truths about God also get included? As we just saw in the previous letter to Mersenne, the eternal truth that God exists seems to ground or justify all other eternal truths, so it would seem to be a necessary part of the eternal truths about anything else. How do we account for a plurality of truths being equivalent to a single essence? One way to account for this is to read Descartes as arguing that eternal truths are nothing other than ideas. This is precisely how the conceptualist interpretation reads Descartes. This account is supported by Descartes’s use of synonymous expressions for ‘eternal truths’. He frequently talks of “common notions” and “simple notions”, and a close look at this usage reveals that he often speaks univocally of common notions and eternal truths. 3 Consider this passage from the Regulae: To this class we must also refer those common notions which are, as it were, links which connect other simple natures together, and whose self-evidence is 3 Whether Descartes believes that ‘notion’ always means ‘idea’ or something mental is contestable. For instance, one section of the geometrical demonstration in the Second Replies is titled “Axioms or Common Notions” (AT VII 164; CSM II 116). On the present interpretation, these axioms would just be eternal truths conceived as nothing more than ideas in human minds. But this seems strained, especially given that Descartes defines ‘idea’ in another section and never refers to these axioms as ideas. For an argument that ‘common notions’ should not be identified with ‘eternal truths’, see John Morris, “Cartesian Certainty,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 47 (1969): 161-168. 205 the basis for all the rational inferences we make. Examples of these are: ‘Things that are the same as a third thing are the same as each other’; ‘Things that cannot be related in the same way to a third thing are different in some respect’. These common notions can be known either by the pure intellect or by the intellect as it intuits the images of material things.” (AT X 419-420; CSM I 45). By ‘common’, Descartes means that which can be attributed to either mental or corporeal substances. 4 Descartes is talking here about simple natures: those properties of objects which we are capable of perceiving clearly and distinctly such that they “cannot be divided by the mind into others which are more distinctly known” (AT X 418; CSM I 44). The examples he gives of common notions are informative: they are examples of those kinds of truths that he elsewhere calls “eternal”. In fact, these examples are just tautologies. And a tautology would seem to be an eternal truth for Descartes, since it is a proposition that can never be false. This idea of common notions is repeated at Principles I.13. Descartes argues that common notions are properly ideas that concern those simple natures. He states that “the mind has within itself ideas of numbers and shapes, and it also has such common notions as: If you add equals to equals the results will be equal” (AT VIIIA 9; CSM I 197). The mind contains not only ideas of simple natures, such as numbers and shapes, but it also contains ideas which are, in a sense, propositions concerning those simple natures. These common notions are not of our own making; as Descartes says here, as well as in the Fifth Meditation which this passage parallels, 4 Moreover, Descartes means by ‘common notion’ what we would nowadays consider standard: common or universal acceptance of a proposition. Cf. Letter to Mersenne, 29 January 1640 (AT II 629; CSMK 142). 206 the mind “finds [within itself] certain common notions” which it cannot doubt when it thinks of them. Finally, at Principles I.49, Descartes states that eternal truths are called common notions: [W]hen we recognize that it is impossible for anything to come from nothing, the proposition Nothing comes from nothing is regarded not as a really existing thing, or even as a mode of a thing, but as an eternal truth which resides within our mind. Such truths are termed common notions and axioms. The following are examples of this class: It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be at the same time; What is done cannot be undone; He who thinks cannot but exist while he thinks; and countless others. (AT VIIIA 23-24; CSM I 209) This passage is striking, for it states not only that eternal truths are called ‘common notions’, but that this class of supposed entities is nothing more than ideas in our minds. This corroborates Descartes’s earlier statement to Mersenne that all the eternal truths are “inborn in our minds” (AT I 145; CSMK 23). Now, Descartes states that these truths cannot be regarded as “really existing” things, nor as modes of a thing. I take him to mean that eternal truths are neither substances nor modes. Even though an idea is a “really existing” thing, in the sense that ideas have formal reality because they are modes or operations of the mind, the precise meaning of “really existing” in this passage seems to be substantial being since it is contrasted with modal being. 5 A general picture of what eternal truths are begins to emerge across these passages. Eternal truths have a distinctively conceptual aspect. Not only does 5 Cf. Principles I.48: “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” (AT VIIIA 22; CSM I 208). CSM note that by ‘affection’, Descartes means ‘mode’. 207 Descartes call them innate ideas and common notions, he says that we clearly and distinctly perceive eternal truths. Supposedly, the only things we can clearly and distinctly perceive in Cartesian philosophy are ideas. Furthermore, there is a hierarchy of truths of which later ones “proceed” from earlier ones. Thus, the eternal truth, ‘God exists’ is “the most eternal” because it is the truth upon which all other truths are based and can be derived. These truths or propositions are the results of our mentally deducing what follows necessarily from the axiom, ‘God exists’. Additionally, what seems to be true of all eternal truths and common notions is their clarity and distinctness and their dependence on God. Eternal truths are those truths which we are capable of grasping: to embrace it fully within our thought and understand it comprehensively. They are self-evident in the sense that they require no justification, other than perhaps the favored eternal truth about God’s existence. For Descartes, a common notion is one which “cannot be denied by anybody” (AT II 629; CSMK 142), and this is certainly true for any eternal truth. This helps tighten the similarity between ‘eternal truth’ and ‘common notion’, for the unifying element is their commonality, both in terms of their being innate (common) to all human minds and their subject matter: God, minds, natures, numbers, and the like. And though these truths are eternal, they are created by God. This suggests that God’s eternality is different from a truth’s eternality; the former is more eternal, as Descartes himself says, than the latter because the latter necessarily depend on the former. God, as the formal cause, possesses more reality (and eternality) than the eternal truths could possibly possess. 208 However, this picture also includes a reference to eternal truths as ‘mathematical truths’, ‘laws of nature’, and ‘essences’. This conflicts with the interpretation that eternal truths are simply ideas. Could Descartes really have been reducing the laws of nature or the essences of created substances to just ideas in the mind? After all, extension is the essence of corporeal substance: how can extension have a different metaphysical status than the substance to which it belongs? There must be something in the substance that the idea of a substance’s essence is about. What is more, since the eternal truths are subject to God’s power and understanding, don’t they have some kind of being outside of human minds on this account alone? What I think the foregoing discussion shows is that although Descartes often writes of eternal truths in conceptual language, this does not entail that he argues that eternal truths have a conceptual ontological basis. To be sure, our concepts of eternal truths are what we are acquainted with when we consider any particular truth, such as Nothing comes from nothing. We have access to this truth through an innate idea in our minds. The eternal truths have a conceptual aspect because (1) we can think about them, and (2) we can be clear and distinct about them. The passages where Descartes refers to eternal truths as ‘common notions’ and the like emphasize their epistemic status, that is, that we can be clear and distinct about their truth. But when Descartes refers to eternal truths as ‘essences’ or ‘laws of nature’, he seems to be emphasizing their metaphysical status, and this does not clearly point to conceptualism. I do not dispute Descartes’s contention that eternal truths exist in our minds as truths, or have some kind of being because God understands them; what 209 needs to be settled is whether either of these constitutes their primary ontological status according to Descartes. Problems with Conceptualism about Eternal Truths The conceptualist interpretation that I want to argue against holds that eternal truths have their ontological status as concepts in human minds. 6 Given the above discussion, it would be difficult, if not outright erroneous, to deny that Descartes accords some conceptual status to eternal truths. Any idea that I have, whether or not the object of my idea has existence outside my mind, has at least objective reality, that is, has existence as a concept in my mind. This is immediately obvious for such objects as the sun and the moon: they are really existing corporeal objects, yet they also have existence in my mind because I can have ideas about them. I do not think, however, that Descartes intends to claim that eternal truths are only concepts in human minds. There are several passages which conflict with a thorough-going conceptualist interpretation. Thus, I contend that in those passages where Descartes speaks of eternal truths conceptually, he is merely referring to eternal truths as we understand them, not to their ontological status. Many scholars who interpret Descartes as a conceptualist are correct to attribute objective being to eternal truths; however, they err in their judgement that this is their only ontological status. 6 Two defenders of the conceptualist interpretation are Vere Chappell and Lawrence Nolan. See Chappell, “Descartes’s Ontology,” Topoi 16 (1997): 111-127, and Nolan, “The Ontological Status of Cartesian Natures,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 78 (1997b): 169-194, and “Descartes’ Theory of Universals,” Philosophical Studies 89 (1998): 161-180. 210 Conceptual language and “existence” The strongest evidence suggesting that Descartes may have been a conceptualist with respect to eternal truths occurs at Principles I.48 and I.49. Consider the first passage: 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. (AT VIIIA 22; CSM I 208) 7 To be sure, this sounds very conceptualist: if an eternal truth has existence only in the mind, according to Cartesian metaphysics, it’s an idea. And it seems that Descartes is explicitly claiming that eternal truths have no existence outside our thought. Lawrence Nolan has argued that Descartes takes eternal truths, and the true and immutable natures they express, to be innate ideas in human minds, conceived in terms of their objective reality. 8 But is this really what is captured by Descartes’s claim in this passage? His precise wording is that eternal truths have no existence outside our thought, not outside the human mind taken as thinking substance. It is important to keep in mind the context of the claim Descartes is making here. He is referring to “objects of our perception”, not to things generally. It is possible that all Descartes means is that as objects of perception, eternal truths have no existence outside the mind. When I conceive an eternal truth, such as Nothing comes from nothing, the object of my thought need not refer to some existing entity, abstracted from something particular, though it may be true of some particular entity or state of 7 As CSM point out, an ‘affection’ is a mode; thus, a mode of a substance. See CSM I 208, fn. 1. Cf. Principles I.49. 8 Nolan (1997b), 169. 211 affairs. That is, as a proposition, this eternal truth has only objective being. Descartes’s subject matter in this passage is the objects of perception and how we regard them. Another way of putting this point is that we cannot conceive of eternal truths divorced from our understanding of them. The language of the passage is epistemic, but this need not imply that eternal truths are only mental concepts. Let’s look at the follow-up passage, Principles I.49: But when we recognize that it is impossible for anything to come from nothing, the proposition Nothing comes from nothing is regarded not as a really existing thing, or even as a mode of a thing, but as an eternal truth which resides within our mind. (AT VIIIA 23; CSM I 209) Descartes seems to be concerned about reifying entities based on our ways of thinking. When we consider the idea that Nothing comes from nothing in abstraction from any particular case, we would err if we concluded that this proposition has the same metaphysical status as a substance or a mode. What I take Descartes to be claiming in this passage is that considering what is true of a substance, such as that nothing comes from nothing, this truth is not a property of the substance in the sense of an extra entity, such as a mode. We cannot regard this eternal truth as “a really existing thing”, that is, as having actual existence – the existence of a substance or mode. In fact, it seems to be an attribute of the substance, given the reference to both substances and modes; but Descartes makes no specific claim here. These two passages from the Principles do not explicitly state that eternal truths only have status as thoughts in human minds. I think the main distinction Descartes intends is that eternal truths cannot be considered substances or modes; 212 they do not have the same ontological status as these kinds of entities. This is what he means when he uses the word “existence”. We regard them as thoughts in our minds because they do have objective being in our minds when we think of them, i.e., when considered as objects of our perception. Eternality, human finitude, and God Marleen Rozemond has recently argued 9 that one principal problem for conceptualists is how a finite mind can ontologically ground something eternal. It is reasonable to assume, she writes, that Descartes did not believe that human minds have always existed. 10 But the eternal truths are those truths which have always been true: they are eternal, for God has willed them from all eternity, as Descartes writes to Mersenne. Thus, we have these two claims, which Descartes accepts: (1) Human minds have not always existed (i.e., they are not eternal); (2) Eternal truths have always existed (i.e., they are eternal). These two statements are incompatible with conceptualism, unless one is willing to abandon one of them. The first seems too difficult to deny: it goes against both the textual evidence and common sense. Descartes repeatedly talks about the finitude of human minds across many texts. Although our souls, being mental substances, are immortal, they are created, and cannot be said to have existed from eternity. 9 “Descartes’s Ontology of the Eternal Truths,” in Contemporary Perspectives on Early Modern Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Vere Chappell, eds. Paul Hoffman, David Owen, and Gideon Yaffe (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2008), 41-63. 10 Ibid., 46. 213 Can we deny the second, that is, deny the eternality of eternal truths? This is what Vere Chappell seems to do in his argument for conceptualism. As Rozemond notes, Chappell believes that Descartes does not hold “the objects and the truths of mathematics... [to be] strictly and literally eternal”. 11 I agree with Rozemond that Chappell’s interpretation goes too strongly against Descartes’s own “description of these truths as eternal”. 12 Lawrence Nolan has also criticized Chappell on this point, arguing that Chappell’s interpretation is ad hoc, particularly given the weak textual basis for it. 13 I add to these two criticisms that Chappell’s interpretation sounds like a form of Universal Possibilism: if an eternal truth is not really eternal, then it is not really necessary. As I argued in Chapter One, this reading distorts Descartes’s rather straight-forward statements about our clear and distinct perceptions of necessary truths. Can the conceptualist settle the problem of something eternal being grounded ontologically in something finite? Nolan offers one solution worthy of discussion. He claims that the conceptualist does not need to reconcile either of the two claims above. In fact, the objection posed need not concern the conceptualist at all; as Nolan states, the problem “arises independently as a result of Descartes’ radical voluntarism and its implication that the eternal truths are created”. 14 The problem is not unique to conceptualism; the problem is understanding how anything created can also be eternal. Nolan reminds us that Descartes’s own answer to this problem is 11 Chappell (1997), 127; quoted in Rozemond (2008), 46. 12 Rozemond (2008), 46. 13 Nolan (1997b), 184. 14 Ibid. 214 that God is incomprehensible, and that the eternality of eternal truths is beyond human comprehension. However, I do not think that the question of ontological status is the same as the problem of eternality. Whether or not we understand (or fail to understand) how something can be eternal, it is a separate question as to what the metaphysical nature of such eternal truths are. Nolan illicitly shifts the burden of proof to the objector, indeed to the Cartesian system generally. This is evidenced by considering Rozemond’s own answer to the question regarding the ontological status of eternal truths. As I will consider in more depth below, Rozemond’s view is that eternal truths are grounded in God’s mind. Prima facie, this directly answers the question of ontology as well as the compatibility problem, and I believe it better accommodates the claim which Nolan offers about the incomprehensibility of God. A related problem concerns Descartes’s statement to Mersenne that “from all eternity [God] willed and understood [the eternal truths] to be, and by that very fact he created them” (AT I 152; CSMK 25). Descartes argues that God can understand everything that a finite mind can understand, and since finite minds can understand the eternal truths, God can understand them. But if eternal truths have their ontological status in finite minds, it follows that some of God’s ideas depend on human minds. This is especially problematic for those eternal truths concerning God. Certainly, God knows that he necessarily exists. Why would the ontological status of this truth be a concept in human minds? Did God not know that he necessarily exists before he created human minds? What I find problematic with this statement and the claim behind conceptualism is that God’s understanding the eternal 215 truths would be both co-extensive with and dependent on the human understanding of such truths. If the eternal truths are ontologically dependent on human minds, then God, in understanding these truths, would depend on human minds for access to these truths. Before I explore the idea that the eternal truths have their ontological status in God’s mind in more detail, I should note that given the above objection, there must be some initial credibility to the interpretation that eternal truths have a status outside human minds. On the argument that God creates the eternal truths – the essences, the true and immutable natures – there must be some status outside human minds if God understands such truths and if these truths are subject to his power. A significant part of the doctrine of divine simplicity consists in Descartes’s statement that God understands the eternal truths because he wills them; so, divine simplicity alone suggests a status outside human minds. It is a separate argument to say that there is such a thing as divine objective being, and that this is the foundation of eternal truths, but I think it follows quite clearly from Cartesian metaphysics that if God understands the eternal truths, (1) they have some kind of status or being, and (2) this being is external to and not dependent on human minds. Objective being and true and immutable natures Returning to Nolan’s argument for conceptualism, he says that for Descartes, the eternal truths have ontological status as innate ideas in human minds, with respect to their objective being, but that the formal reality of these ideas does not 216 reside outside the human mind. This is not to say that they lack a formal cause: God is the efficient and total cause of our innate ideas. Nolan’s reading relies on a similarity between the Third Meditation discussion of objective being and the Fifth Meditation discussion of the true and immutable nature of a triangle. Descartes says of his idea of a triangle, that though no triangles may exist in reality, he has an idea of the nature of a triangle, which “cannot be said to be nothing”. Nolan notes that this discussion is strikingly similar to Descartes’s notion of the objective being of ideas from the Third Meditation: the mode of being by which a thing exists objectively or representatively in the intellect by way of an idea, imperfect though it may be, is certainly not nothing, and so it cannot come from nothing. (AT VII 41; CSM II 29) Compare this to the Fifth Meditation claim about the true and immutable nature of a triangle: I find within me countless ideas of things which even though they may not exist anywhere outside me still cannot be called nothing; for although in a sense they can be thought of at will, they are not my invention but have their own true and immutable natures. (AT VII 64; CSM II 44-5) The two passages are, as Nolan observes, closely parallel. The first states that the objective reality of an idea cannot be called nothing, while the second asserts that certain ideas are in my mind which likewise cannot be called nothing. Nolan interprets Descartes’s wording in the Fifth Meditation passage as a strict correspondence to that in the Third Meditation. Nolan concludes that Descartes must be referring to objective being when he uses the phrase, ‘cannot be called nothing’. 217 However, I believe the correspondence between these two passages is not as close as Nolan argues. While the Third Meditation passage concerns the objective reality of an idea, the Fifth Meditation passage concerns the being of the thing which the idea is about. Descartes is not considering here the objective being or representational content of the idea. He is concerned with the existence – in the sense of existence external to his mind – of the things which his ideas are about. I base my interpretation primarily on the phrase “even though”. Descartes is not denying that triangles have existence outside our thought, but on the supposition that they do lack existence, they would still have some sort of being in terms of their true and immutable nature. The phrase “even though” suggests that Descartes does indeed believe that triangles exist outside his thought. But they might not exist in reality: they have some status in virtue of their essence, and this status is not dependent on his mind. In fact, if there is a correspondence between these two passages which attests to Descartes’s views on the ontological of eternal truths, a more likely response would be that the true and immutable nature would have to have a basis outside of our ideas of them just as the idea of God must derive from outside ourselves. Eternal truths and the laws of nature There are several other passages that conflict with the conceptualist’s argument. First, consider the original letter to Mersenne, where Descartes refers to eternal truths as laws of nature, and compare the following passage from the 218 Discourse, Part Five, where Descartes discusses the relationship between ‘notions’ and laws of nature: I have noticed certain laws which God has so established in nature, and of which he has implanted such notions in our minds, that after adequate reflection we cannot doubt that they are exactly observed in everything which exists or occurs in the world. Moreover, by considering what follows from these laws it seems to me that I have discovered many truths more useful and important than anything I had previously learned or even hoped to learn. (AT VI 41; CSM I 131) Descartes begins this passage with a distinction between God’s establishing laws in nature, and God’s establishing (or as he puts it, ‘implanting’) ideas of these laws in human minds. No doubt, Descartes believes that our ideas of these laws are part of our set of innate ideas, that is, ideas which we neither receive empirically (adventitious ideas) nor invent by a process of our will. 15 He reasons from this that he cannot doubt that these laws are observable in nature. It seems that because Descartes discovers that his innate ideas are those which God has given him directly, he can be certain that the laws of nature he observes really do occur in the world. I believe Descartes’s wording here is crucial: God establishes laws in nature, and he gives human minds notions of this. He does not say that God establishes laws of nature in human minds. Returning to the letter to Mersenne, we see Descartes making similar remarks: “it is God who has laid down these laws in nature just as a king lays down laws in his kingdom. ... They are all inborn in our minds just as a king would imprint his laws on the hearts of all his subjects if he had enough power to do so”. We 15 See Meditation 3. Cf. Comments on a Certain Broadsheet (AT VIIIB 358; CSM I 303). 219 perceive that the laws hold in nature through our ideas about them; but these laws do not reduce to our ideas, just as the laws in a kingdom are not reducible to what is inscribed in the hearts of the subjects. The laws hold for and govern a kingdom, and the subjects are expected to follow such laws. Now the conceptualist may object that by “established in nature”, Descartes means no more than “implanted in our minds” by God. Nature need not be reduced to corporeal substance: for Descartes, both corporeal and mental substances constitute nature, where ‘nature’ is to be understood as consisting of all of God’s creation. So, in establishing laws in nature, God merely implants notions of these laws in our minds. What is more, God always acts simply; that is, it would be contrary to the divine simplicity thesis that God first establishes laws in nature, and then implants notions in our minds. If and when God acts, it is a single, unified act. The way God establishes laws in nature is by implanting certain ideas in our minds. Against the first objection, that “establishing in nature” means nothing beyond “implanting in our minds”, we may reply that trying to identify these two propositions fails to capture the overall sense of this part of the Discourse. Descartes implies that by ‘laws in nature’ we should understand laws governing corporeal substance, not mental substance. He continues this section by stating that his treatise, The World, was an attempt to explain the truths which he learned from considering “the nature of material things” (AT VI 41; CSM I 132). The laws of nature were argued to be those decrees of God which governed the material world. They are, of course, discoverable by the mind since God gave us clear and distinct 220 notions about them; this accounts for Descartes’s conceptual-sounding language about them. But laws are what nature is governed by, despite what we think about it. As Descartes says, God gives “regular concurrence to nature, leaving it to act according to the laws he established” (AT VI 42; CSM I 132). The regularities are in nature, not in our minds. The same is true for eternal truths: they have extra-mental status even though Descartes usually speaks of them epistemically. Looking at the final sentence of the quoted passage above, we also notice a distinction being drawn between the laws of nature and the truths which we can know about them. Descartes says “by considering what follows from these laws...”, indicating that it is the mind’s consideration or contemplation of the laws of nature and what can be deduced from them which yields the “useful and important” truths, i.e., the eternal truths. Thus, it seems that the eternal truths are those concepts which concern laws or regularities in nature. This is not to say that the laws themselves are just the ideas we have innately. In one sense, they closely correspond such that they may be viewed practically as being one and the same. Again, I don’t think that Descartes is claiming that eternal truths are merely concepts: they are truths which are discoverable through a consideration of the laws of nature, but this doesn’t entail that they only have their seat in the mind. Secondly, it is no violation of the doctrine of divine simplicity to say that God both establishes laws in nature and implants innate ideas of these laws in our minds. The contention is not that God performs two actions. Rather, two results 221 follow from God’s single action. 16 In a single act, God produces a multitude of results, beyond just the creation of the laws of nature and our innate ideas about them. God establishes necessary truths and contingent truths, but he doesn’t perform two separate acts. Likewise for creating two really distinct substances. Descartes comes close to saying something like this just a few lines later in the same section of the Discourse. He considers a scholastic opinion that “the act by which God now preserves [the world] is just the same as that by which he created it” (AT VI 45; CSM I 133). 17 This is nothing other than the concern over the simplicity of God’s actions. Descartes thinks he upholds this truth through his contention that God establishes laws in nature for the world to operate. The original act of creation is just God’s establishing, or setting in motion, the laws of nature. Truths about God, Truths about Extension Another problem related to the laws of nature concerns the kinds of eternal truths. As proponents of conceptualism would no doubt admit, God establishes eternal truths, even the eternal truths concerning God. I think a primary motivation for the conceptualist view has concerned this aspect of eternal truths: that among them are eternal truths about God’s nature. If God establishes all eternal truths, it would be bizarre to claim that God establishes some law of nature that guarantees his own existence. And given Descartes’s statement that God is the efficient cause of 16 Rozemond (2008) also makes a similar point: “there is a difference in the effects of God’s creative activity, its enactment” (45). 17 Cf. The World, Chapter 7 (AT XI 37-8; CSM I 93). 222 the eternal truths, God must also cause himself to exist. We could settle all these metaphysical problems, the conceptualist contends, by proposing that eternal truths are just innate ideas in our minds. Thus, God doesn’t really cause himself to exist; rather, he establishes in our minds ideas about him for which we can be certain, such as that he exists necessarily, and that he establishes all things in nature as their efficient and total cause, etc. But while this seems to work for those eternal truths concerning God, it subjects the other eternal truths to a related difficulty. What are we to think of eternal truths which concern geometric properties? 18 Are these just ideas that God has implanted in our minds? This is a difficult argument to make especially when these kinds of truths concern extension, the essence of corporeal substance. If eternal truths all have the same ontological status – and there is no reason to doubt that Descartes draws an ontological distinction among eternal truths – then the essential properties of mathematics and corporeal substance would be just ideas in our minds. Thus, by maintaining that all eternal truths have the same ontological status, and that all eternal truths are simply ideas in human minds, the conceptualist trades one problem for another: the truths about God are accounted for by being no more than our ideas about God, but the truths about corporeal substance and mathematics are subject to the difficulty of being no more than our ideas about them. 18 A further problem which I don’t consider in this project is that of the moral law. If God’s commandments are eternal, are these no more than innate ideas in human minds? 223 The Problem of Unknown Truths A final difficulty for the conceptualist is that placing the eternal truths in human minds presents problems for Descartes’s philosophy of mind. Consider what Descartes says to Mersenne with respect to both the incomprehensibility of God and of mathematical properties: “I do not deny that there are things in God which we do not understand, just as even in a triangle there are many properties which no mathematician will ever know – which does not prevent everyone knowing what a triangle is” (Letter to Mersenne, 31 December 1640; AT III 274; CSMK 166). The problem is that if every property of a triangle is a necessary truth, i.e., an eternal truth, and some properties of a triangle are unknown and will never be known, then some eternal truths are unknown. Now, this conflicts with Descartes’s claim that there is no eternal truth “that we cannot grasp if our mind turns to consider it” (AT I 145; CSMK 23). To fix the interpretation, we might suggest that not every property of a triangle is an eternal truth. That is, of all the possible properties of a triangle, some are known (the eternal truths) and some are unknown. We may even suggest that these properties are still necessary properties, given the nature of geometrical figures, but not eternal truths. But if that is so, then not every eternal truth is a necessary truth. This is not, to my mind, the correct understanding of Descartes’s words. I believe we must understand Descartes to be arguing that to call something an eternal truth presupposes and requires that the mind understand the truth. Thus, a triangle, for example, has many properties, some of which we can grasp clearly and distinctly; truths about these properties are called eternal truths. But, as Descartes 224 tells Mersenne, there are other properties of a triangle which we cannot grasp, and perhaps will never grasp; these properties do not merit the title ‘eternal truth’. This consequence poses a peculiar problem for the conceptualist, because if all the properties of a triangle have their ontological footing in human minds, then there are some aspects of the mind which are inaccessible. But if the essence of triangles lies outside human minds, this claim by Descartes would be consistent with his philosophy of mind, especially the thesis that the contents of my mind are evident to me. As long as the properties of triangles are extra-mental, we are not in danger of having ideas which are conceptually inaccessible. Problems with the Neo-Platonic Interpretation As I stated above, a significant problem with the conceptualist interpretation is that there is no satisfactory account of God’s understanding of the eternal truths. This is not to say that we must be able to conceive how God understands such truths. Such knowledge of the divine is surely beyond our grasp, as Descartes himself affirms. But if God understands the eternal truths, which Descartes repeatedly proclaims, then there must be some status of the eternal truths outside of human minds. Since God is the only mind who has understood and willed such truths from all eternity, eternal truths have been true long before human minds were created. Now, on the suggestion that eternal truths cannot have their status in something finite like human minds, a reasonable alternative is that their ontological status lies in 225 God’s understanding. Indeed, what more eternal, immutable, and infinite source could there be on the Cartesian system than God? This is the position which Tad Schmaltz 19 and Marleen Rozemond have taken. Schmaltz argues that Descartes believes God’s decrees constitute the eternal truths, decrees which are inseparable from God himself. Thus, the eternal truths are acts of God and a necessary part of him. Even though God freely wills such truths, they are not distinct from his nature. The strongest textual basis for Schmaltz’s view comes from the Conversation with Burman. There, Descartes supposedly contends that we should never assert that God’s decrees can be separated from God. He writes: For although God is completely indifferent with respect to all things, he necessarily made the decrees he did, since he necessarily willed what was best. We should not make a separation here between the necessity and the indifference that apply to God’s decrees; ... the distinction thus introduced between God himself and his decrees is a mental, not a real one. In reality the decrees could not have been separated from God: he is not prior to them or distinct from them, nor could he have existed without them. (AT V 166; CSMK 348). As long as God’s decrees include the eternal truths, it seems that God is not really distinct from the eternal truths, given Descartes’s words to Burman. Rozemond believes that the identity involved here refers to the content of such decrees, not to the acts of God’s will as such. Like Nolan, she argues that the eternal truths have their existence as objective beings, though on Rozemond’s account, the eternal truths have their ontological status as objective beings in God’s mind. As she argues, the 19 Tad Schmaltz, “Platonism and Descartes’s View of Immutable Essences,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 73 (1991): 129-170. 226 thesis of divine simplicity prevents one from postulating a plurality of decrees existing in God, and so she contends that Descartes must have held that the content of these decrees have objective being in God’s mind, a “low level form of reality” which does not pose a problem for God’s simplicity. 20 Rozemond believes that Descartes draws on Duns Scotus’s discussion of objective being in God to support his own argument that God is not distinct from his decrees. While the eternal truths are located in God, they do not violate divine simplicity because they exist as a lower form of reality in God. While I believe that neo-Platonism – or, as Rozemond refers to it, “moderate Platonism” – is better than conceptualism to the extent that it acknowledges some status for eternal truths outside human minds, it cannot adequately account for the ontological status of eternal truths because the view conflicts with three tenets of Descartes’s philosophy, namely, (1) that God is the efficient cause of the eternal truths, (2) that God is a simple being, and (3) that human minds do not comprehend innate ideas through God. The latter is a principal thesis of Nicholas Malebranche, who starkly opposed Descartes’s creation doctrine. Let me outline these three objections before moving on to my case for Cartesian Platonism. Vere Chappell has criticized Schmaltz with failing to account for Descartes’s view that the eternal truths are external to God’s mind because God creates these truths. 21 The force of Chappell’s objection comes from the early statements of the creation doctrine in the letters to Mersenne. It is difficult to accept Descartes’s 20 Rozemond (2008), 55-6. 21 Chappell (1997), 124. 227 words to Mersenne that God is the efficient cause of the eternal truths while maintaining that these truths are identical to God. The notion of God being the efficient cause of the eternal truths, as well as his implanting ideas of the eternal truths in our minds, carries with it the notion that these truths are really distinct from God. If God is the efficient cause of the eternal truths, he cannot be identical to the effect. The laws of nature, which are eternal truths, although they can be deduced from truths about God, are not located in God’s mind, nor are they features of God. God is not extended, but the true and immutable nature of corporeal substance is extended. 22 Eternal truths are creations of God and as such, depend on him as much as any other creature. But this claim of dependence follows from Descartes’s claim that God causes or establishes the eternal truths. Descartes tells Mersenne that he does not think that the eternal truths emanate from God, as light rays emanate from the sun. He also states something similar in the Fourth Replies (to Arnauld). He writes that God does not stand in an efficient causal relation to himself, that God cannot be his own efficient cause (AT VII 235-236; CSM II 164-165). This suggests that eternal truths are distinct from God because he is their efficient cause. On the view of moderate Platonism, the eternal truths would have to emanate from God because they exist as necessary ideas in his mind. God could not help but establish these same ideas in human minds (and the world) because they would just be the 22 One difficulty is that Descartes acknowledges in the Second Replies (AT VII 137) that God contains number and length – properties of extension – eminently. This would seem to be true for anything God creates: he is the formal cause and so must contain any reality of the creature at least formally or eminently. 228 features of his own mind. This cannot be Descartes’s view, despite what Burman reports. This picture seems to be confirmed by Descartes’s contention that God freely creates the eternal truths. If the eternal truths were a part of God, they would be a necessary part of God, and thus God wouldn’t seem to be indifferent with respect to them. 23 When Descartes says that God has complete control over the eternal truths, this is because they are free creations of God’s. But God does seem to be indifferent with respect to the fact that ‘nothing comes from nothing’, or that ‘twice two equals four’, etc. He is indifferent with respect to every eternal truth he creates because these did not exist prior to his willing them and giving them being. Rozemond attempts to defend her view against this objection by directing us to the principle of objective reality from the Third Meditation. In this principle, Descartes declares that “there must be at least as much <reality> in the efficient and total cause as in the effect of that cause” (AT VII 40; CSM II 28). 24 Rozemond argues that this principle allows God to be the efficient cause of objective beings as well as eternal truths. 25 Her strategy is to read Descartes as applying this same principle about objective reality to God’s mind and human minds alike; thus, God is the efficient cause of the objective reality of the eternal truths as they exist in his 23 This is not to deny that the eternal truths are necessary. They are, of course, necessary, but they aren’t a part of God. My reasoning in this section is something like the following: (1) If anything is a part of God, then it’s a necessary part of God. (2) If something is a necessary part of God, then God doesn’t freely create it. (3) God freely creates the eternal truths. (4) Therefore, the eternal truths are not a necessary part of God. (5) Therefore, the eternal truths are not a part of God. 24 The brackets indicate the translators’ inclusion of the French version of the Meditations. 25 Rozemond (2008), 56. 229 mind. She acknowledges that it sounds odd to assert that “God creates objective beings in his own mind”, but that Descartes himself noticed this problem and therefore told Mersenne that it may be better to claim that God establishes eternal truths rather than creates them. 26 She even admits that her view of moderate Platonism, especially with respect to the issue of efficient causality, is “philosophically puzzling”, but no more puzzling than Descartes’s statement to Burman that God’s decrees are not distinct from him, and yet he is indifferent with respect to them. 27 I find Rozemond’s treatment of this objection troubling. First, it is not clear that Descartes’s use of the objective reality principle in the Third Meditation is applicable to God’s mind. If we extend Descartes’s statements about objective reality in this passage to God’s mind, then we must be prepared to accept his other statements about objective reality and likewise apply them to God. An immediate problem is Descartes’s characterization of objective reality as a lesser form of reality. At the end of the same paragraph where Rozemond seeks her textual backing, we see Descartes say “the mode of being by which a thing exists objectively <or representatively> in the intellect by way of an idea, imperfect though it may be...” (AT VII 41; CSM II 29). It is quite troubling to postulate an “imperfect” aspect of God. Likewise, in the First Replies to Caterus, Descartes says that objective being “is of course much less perfect than that possessed by things which exist outside the intellect” (AT VII 102; CSM II 75). He agrees with Caterus’s statement that 26 Ibid., 56-7. 27 Ibid., 57. 230 objective reality is not actual reality, and specifies that “actual” means “located outside the intellect”. But, God is an actual being and is pure actuality, yet he is a purely intellectual substance. Two tensions arise from this consideration: (1) if there is objective reality in God, then there is non-actuality in God; and (2) if there is objective reality in God, then that objective reality may just reduce to actuality because it is external to our minds. The source of the problem, I think, lies in attributing objective reality – at least as Descartes applies this to human minds – to God. Just as it is mistaken to conceive divine freedom to be the same as human freedom, it is mistaken to conceive divine objective being in the same way as human objective being. If Descartes thinks there is divine objective being, then it is not the same as the objective being he characterizes in the Meditations. Rozemond herself says that objective being even for God is a low level form of reality, and while she uses this thesis to defend her position from the charge of violating divine simplicity, it ends up violating the thesis of divine perfection. She accepts Descartes’s own characterization of objective being as an “inferior form of being”, “not an actual being – ens actu”, and “less perfect” than actual being. 28 I cannot see how this reading is fitting given Descartes’s repeated claims that God is pure perfection. How can there be an imperfect form of being in God? 29 One may legitimately ask, how else does God understand or think except by way of his ideas? Descartes’s answer would be that God’s ultimate nature is unknowable, but that 28 Ibid., 53. 29 Descartes also characterizes the eternal truths as “something less than, and subject to, the incomprehensible power of God” (AT I 150; CSMK 25). This would seem to rule out that the eternal truths are a necessary part of God, i.e., a feature of God. 231 given the thesis of divine perfection – a thesis we can be certain is true – it would be wrong to attribute to God a form of being that is imperfect. If God thinks by way of ideas, such a theory of ideas is not the one Descartes presents for human minds. Second, I think that Rozemond’s concluding remarks that her view is philosophically puzzling is a strong indication that it is the incorrect view. Although any view needs to accommodate Descartes’s troubling claims about the inconceivability of God, Rozemond’s technique appears to avoid the puzzle created rather than address it. In fact, if we take Descartes’s words to Burman seriously (and Rozemond seems to), we could not conclude that eternal truths have objective being in God’s mind: “But these things are not for our reason to know, and we must never indulge or permit ourselves to subject God’s nature and operations to our reason” (AT V 166; CSMK 348). 30 Claiming that the eternal truths have their ontological status in God’s mind as objective being is to subject God’s nature to our reason. Turning to the second objection, that moderate Platonism violates the thesis of divine simplicity, I have briefly stated that Rozemond believes she avoids this charge by locating the ontological status of eternal truths in the objective being of God’s ideas. She contends that because objective being is not real being, divine simplicity is not affected by a plurality of eternal truths. However, I cannot see how Descartes could acknowledge two different kinds of reality in God. In Scholastic terminology, if God is the greatest being which we can conceive, it is greater to consist of one kind of being than two. Consider also that objective being has a 30 Quoted in Rozemond (2008), 57. 232 “passive” nature to it. That is, it is the mode of being by which ideas represent objects. The state of mere representation is a passive state, where the mind merely receives information. This cannot apply to God, given Descartes’s statements that God is pure activity and can never be passive. Passivity suggests dependence on an object; therefore, God is never passive because he cannot be dependent on anything. These aspects of God all contribute to the thesis of divine simplicity. God does not think or will the same way that humans do given his simple nature. A final problem that I find with moderate Platonism is that it rather fits Malebranche, who explicitly rejected Descartes’s view of the eternal truths. If the eternal truths have their ontological status as ideas in God’s mind, Descartes would be advocating something akin to Malebranche’s view that eternal truths are coeternal with God, and exist as uncreated exemplars in him. In Elucidations of the Search After Truth, Malebranche rejects Descartes’s argument that God “produces order and truth by an entirely free will”. 31 He conceives of eternal truths as identical to God’s eternal wisdom: “Order, truth, eternal wisdom is the exemplar of all God’s works, and this wisdom is not created”. 32 To assign the eternal truths to the mind of God is to deny a central feature of Descartes’s creation doctrine: that they depend on God’s will. Malebranche distinguishes his own view of eternal truths from Descartes’s on precisely this point: This learned man did not notice that there was an order, a law, a sovereign reason that God necessarily loves, which is coeternal with Him and according 31 Nicolas Malebranche, Elucidations of the Search After Truth, trans. Lennon and Olscamp (Columbus: Ohio State University, 1980), 586. 32 Ibid. 233 to which He necessarily acts, given that He wills to act. For God is indifferent in what He does external to Himself, but He is not indifferent, although perfectly free, in the way in which He does it; He always acts in the wisest and most perfect way possible. He always follows the immutable and necessary order. 33 Malebranche says that Descartes was mistaken about this doctrine because he failed to see that “only Eternal Wisdom enlightens [minds], and that intelligible ideas that are their mind’s immediate object are not created”. 34 This first claim I take to be a reference to Malebranche’s doctrine that the human mind has “vision in God”, a view which he defends with rigor in The Search After Truth. The doctrine essentially states that human minds “see” or comprehend all ideas through an intimate union with God’s mind. As Malebranche puts it, “all minds see eternal laws, as well as other things, in God ... They know order and eternal truths, and even the beings that God has made according to these truths or according to order, through the union these minds necessarily have with the Word, or the wisdom of God, which enlightens them...”. 35 This is the view that Malebranche faults Descartes for not having advocated. For Malebranche, the eternal truths have their being in God’s mind, yet it is crucial that God does not freely create these truths. The eternal truths follow necessarily from the immutable order that defines God. This is clearly not Descartes’s view, and so I believe we cannot attribute moderate Platonism to him. 33 Ibid., 587. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 234. 234 A Case for Platonism While it is fairly obvious that the texts do not point directly to a Platonistic interpretation of the eternal truths, I believe that a version of Platonism is nonetheless implied, especially in the passages where Descartes discusses the creation doctrine. I base my interpretation primarily on the letters to Mersenne – the core of the theses comprising the creation doctrine – where Descartes first announces that the doctrine has a close connection with his physics. Rather than review the arguments that have been offered in the past for interpreting Descartes as a Platonist, 36 I want to highlight those passages I believe could imply such a reading. I start with the famous passage from the Fifth Meditation, where Descartes talks about the true and immutable nature of a triangle, and draw on several other texts which help explain Descartes’s meaning in this passage. Next, I turn to the early correspondence with Mersenne; I will compare these letters to passages from The World and the Discourse. I will show that a common theme unites Descartes’s view of eternal truths: if eternal truths are identical to essences, which the 27 May 1630 letter to Mersenne asserts, then there is good reason to believe that Descartes holds these to be extra-mental entities. 36 Two prominent advocates of Cartesian Platonism are Anthony Kenny and Margaret Wilson. See Kenny (1968), Chapter 7; Kenny (1970), 692ff; and Wilson (1978), Chapter 5. 235 I agree with many commentators that the Fifth Meditation alone does not conclusively show that Descartes was a Platonist with respect to eternal truths. 37 Consider what Descartes says in the following passage: I find within me countless ideas of things which even though they may not exist anywhere outside me still cannot be called nothing; for although in a sense they can be thought of at will, they are not my invention but have their own true and immutable natures. When, for example, I imagine a triangle, even if perhaps no such figure exists, or has ever existed, anywhere outside my thought, there is still a determinate nature, or essence, or form of the triangle which is immutable and eternal, and not invented by me or dependent on my mind. (AT VII 64; CSM II 44-45) These words do have, as Rozemond puts it, “strong Platonic flavor”. 38 Descartes’s last line could be taken as an endorsement of Platonism: there exists an immutable and eternal essence that is not dependent on his mind. But the vagueness that surrounds the word “depend” should give us pause: does Descartes mean that essences do not reside in human minds? Does he mean that we do not invent these essences, in the sense of create? And the phrasing “even if no such figure exists anywhere outside my thought” may suggest that Descartes believes that such a figure and its essence really do exist inside his thought. Because the language is not clear, this passage on its own does not warrant a Platonist interpretation. But when we turn to Descartes’s replies to Gassendi’s objections to this section of the Meditations, a stronger picture emerges as to Descartes’s position on the matter. With respect to this passage from the Fifth Meditation, Gassendi raises 37 The particular wording in this passage is interesting, for we see Descartes combine the phrases “true and immutable nature”, “essence”, and “eternal”. I think many commentators have relied on the identity among ‘eternal truths’, ‘essences’, and ‘true and immutable natures’ based on this passage as well as the letter to Mersenne. 38 Rozemond (2008), 43. 236 two problems for Descartes. First, he objects to Descartes’s implication that the essences of things could be eternal and immutable and yet independent and distinct from God (AT VII 319; CSM II 221). Second, Gassendi comes across as anti- Platonic, because he does not believe that essences can exist, or have any being, apart from the things of which they are true. He gives a rather explicit pronouncement of his own position: How can people defend the thesis that the essence of man, which is in Plato, say, is eternal and independent of God? ... It is true that after seeing the nature of Plato and of Socrates, and similar natures of other men, the intellect habitually abstracts from them some common concept in respect of which they all agree, and which can then be regarded as the universal nature or essence of man, in so far as it is understood to apply to every man. But it is surely inexplicable that there should have been a universal nature before Plato and the others existed, and before the intellect performed the abstraction. (AT VII 319-320; CSM II 222) This is straight-forward conceptualism about true and immutable natures and universals. Gassendi believes that natures are mentally abstracted from their particular instances, and that we don’t have a right to call them eternal and immutable. He offers his own view in response to what he finds in the Fifth Meditation passage concerning true and immutable natures. He even calls a triangle “a mental rule” which we apply to individual cases, and that we cannot say that a triangle “is a true nature distinct from the intellect” (AT VII 321; CSM II 223). Descartes’s reply to Gassendi echoes the language of the 15 April 1630 letter to Mersenne. He tells Gassendi that the objection against postulating anything eternal and immutable independently of God would have been legitimate under two conditions: (1) that he was advocating eternal and immutable natures which are 237 “existing things”, or (2) that he was advocating eternal and immutable natures whose immutability is independent of God. Descartes, of course, denies that he is doing either of these. From (1), we see that Descartes does not think that eternal and immutable natures are existing things (Latin, re existente). It is not clear what Descartes means by “existing things”, but it is reasonable to assume that he means substances. I take him to mean that eternal and immutable natures are not concrete objects. From (2), we get an introduction to one aspect of the creation doctrine: that eternal and immutable natures depend on God’s immutability. It is clear that Descartes believes that natures are immutable and eternal, and that they are so because God decreed them to be. Gassendi, on the other hand, denies that natures are immutable and eternal for two reasons. First, he believes that only God can be immutable and eternal, and second, because these natures are derived from our perception of individual instances of things. They have no real being outside our thoughts. Descartes clearly positions his view in opposition to Gassendi. He believes that natures have eternality and immutability because of God’s decree, and he believes that because natures really are eternal and immutable, they must be distinct from what is finite. 39 Descartes explains this to Gassendi through the analogy of Jupiter and the Fates, just as he explained to Mersenne in the 15 April 1630 letter. He writes: But just as the poets suppose that the Fates were originally established by Jupiter, but that after they were established he bound himself to abide by them, so I do not think that the essences of things, and the mathematical 39 Of course, eternal truths can be true of finite substances. The truth itself is not finite. 238 truths which we can know concerning them, are independent of God. (AT VII 380; CSMK 261) The primary concern is whether the Fates are independent of Jupiter, just as the eternal and immutable natures are independent of God. Descartes reveals here that he believes that God sets up these natures as eternal and immutable and conforms his will to them. In fact, the story of Jupiter and the Fates changes somewhat from the letter to Mersenne. There, Descartes wrote that “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 Styx and the Fates” (AT I 145; CSMK 23). So, in this case, we have Descartes denying that we can compare God to Jupiter, but in the later reply to Gassendi, he makes the comparison. I believe that Descartes changed his mind about this comparison, perhaps through his correspondence with Mersenne, and settled on the view that the comparison is legitimate only if we assert at the same time that the eternal and immutable natures God establishes are not independent of him. In any case, Descartes seems to be of the opinion that eternal and immutable natures are set up by God, but are not independent of God. This discussion sheds light on Descartes’s position with respect to the ontological status of eternal truths. While Gassendi admits his conceptualism with respect to natures or essences, Descartes gives no indication that he agrees with him. Descartes continues his response by drawing on Gassendi’s claim that we get our ideas of universals from particular instances. Descartes denies that we get our ideas of triangles from particular instances. He even reasons that Gassendi’s view leads us 239 to deny the “real existence” of triangles. This is strong evidence that Descartes is no conceptualist, and that he believes that eternal and immutable essences are real, but are not substances. It is clear that he does not think that natures are existing things, and though this characterization – ‘existing things’ – by itself is vague, it is modified somewhat by the second condition mentioned above, that a nature is not an existing thing in the sense that it exists independently of God. These themes are also taken up in the Conversation with Burman, where Descartes appears to posit the existence of “actual essences”. Burman asks Descartes about the Fifth Meditation passage concerning the true and immutable nature of a triangle. In that passage, Descartes maintains that there is a true and immutable nature of a triangle because various properties can be demonstrated of it. Burman analogizes Descartes’s reasoning to the case of a chimera. Because various properties can be demonstrated of a chimera, there must be a true and immutable nature of it. But, chimeras are supposed to be fictitious entities, yet they would not be fictitious on the account given in this passage. 40 Descartes invokes his truth rule, namely, that the properties we clearly and distinctly perceive in a chimera are true entities. At first, it seems as though Descartes is admitting that chimeras are not fictitious entities because they have true and immutable natures; this is how Burman took it. But, of course, Descartes could not admit that chimeras actually exist. According to Descartes, a fictitious entity is one which we merely suppose to exist (AT V 160; CSMK 343). A distinction is drawn between the essence of a chimera 40 See AT V 160; CSMK 343. 240 and the essence of existing objects. Descartes refers to the latter essences as “actual essences”. But fictitious entities can apparently have true and immutable natures as well. Thus, Descartes appears to be putting forth the following metaphysical picture: entities are either fictitious or real, but both kinds of entities have true and immutable natures because of the simple natures of which they are composed. Our clear and distinct perceptions pick out those true and immutable natures. Descartes then compares his view to mathematical objects. He says that “all the demonstrations of mathematicians deal with true entities and objects, and the complete and entire object of mathematics and everything it deals with is a true and real entity” (AT V 160; CSMK 343). So like the case of the chimera, our clear and distinct perceptions of mathematical demonstrations refer to real entities with true and immutable natures. The object of mathematics, he says, is different from the object of physics in that physical objects are said to have both true and immutable natures and actual existence. A mathematical object is merely possible, that is, “something which does not actually exist in space but is capable of so doing” (AT V 160; CSMK 343). Again, the metaphysical picture that emerges is complicated, but seems to amount to a distinction between true and immutable natures having either possible existence, in the case mathematics, or actual existence, in the case of physics. Descartes refers to the objects of physics having “actual essences”, essences that have actual being. We might infer that the objects of mathematics have “possible essences”, in that they don’t have actual being, but are capable of having it. 241 The more important point, though, is that both actual and possible beings have true and immutable natures and are said to be true entities. Turning now to the early letters to Mersenne, we see more evidence of Platonism. Descartes tells Mersenne that he came upon the doctrine of the eternal truths in the course of determining the foundations of physics. In fact, he says that in the course of philosophizing on the nature of God, he discovered the foundations of physics (AT I 144; CSMK 22). The key doctrine that he proceeds to tell Mersenne about is the creation doctrine. Just after identifying the essences of created things with the eternal truths, 41 Descartes writes the following: You ask what God did in order to produce them. I reply that †from all eternity he willed and understood them to be, and by that very fact he created them†. Or, if you reserve the word †created† for the existence of things, then he †established them and made them†. (AT I 152-153; CSMK 25) Descartes appears to be denying that eternal truths are existing things, though he clearly maintains that they have being. Given his discussion with Burman, essences (or eternal truths) are real entities, but they may not have actual existence. “Existing things” must refer to actual objects, such as substances, and so it is legitimate for him to claim that essences are not substances. The remark about how God establishes eternal truths, though, weighs heavily in favor of the Platonist interpretation. Descartes says that from all eternity God establishes and wills these truths. This act gives them their eternality, but it also suggests that God gives them being. Descartes 41 This is the only passage where Descartes explicitly equates essences and eternal truths. It would seem, rather, that eternal truths are about, or are expressions of, essences. This is the sense I believe Descartes means in this letter. But if eternal truths are about essences, the question of Platonism could easily be settled for eternal truths: they could very well be considered simply the ideas we have of essences. Whether essences are extra-mental entities would be the concern. 242 specifically says, “from all eternity he willed and understood them to be” (my emphasis). Now, it isn’t clear what kind of being they have. But Descartes, in his previous letter to Mersenne, says that eternal truths are true or possible. This suggests that he has in mind entities which are true and real, but which merely lack actual existence. And true and real entities have true and immutable natures, as he tells Burman. This also nicely fits with how he characterizes mathematical objects: as possible entities with true and immutable natures. One challenge to the Platonist position is that it undermines the dualist ontology which characterizes Cartesian metaphysics. After all, Descartes admitted the existence of only two kinds of substance and their modes. On this model, eternal truths could not have a separate, substantial existence: if we wish to preserve Cartesian dualism, eternal truths must have a status within corporeal substance or mental substance, or perhaps both. David Cunning 42 has recently argued that Descartes is a thorough-going actualist, and that true and immutable natures “are just the objects that have those true and immutable natures” (Cunning, 239). As he argues, true and immutable natures are nothing more than the objects which are said to possess them: “they simply reduce to beings that Descartes describes more fully under a different description” (Cunning, 246). Cunning points to Principles I.48 as evidence that Descartes could not have been a Platonist: But I recognize only two ultimate classes of things: first, intellectual or thinking things, i.e. those which pertain to mind or thinking substance; and 42 David Cunning, “True and Immutable Natures and Epistemic Progress in Descartes’s Meditations,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 11 (2003): 235-248. 243 secondly, material things, i.e. those which pertain to extended substance or body. (AT VIIIA 23; CSM I 208) If mind and body are the only two ultimate ontological categories, then Cunning’s argument is strong. Of course, modes of these substances seem to be a distinct ontological category, but they are contained in their respective substances, or as Descartes says, they are “referred to” their substances (AT VIIIA 23; CSM I 208). I find Cunning’s overall argument very appealing. For one, it nicely correlates the eternal truths with Descartes’s theory of attributes. That theory holds that attributes are distinct from their substances only in our thoughts; in reality, an attribute is not distinct from its substance. As Cunning advocates the interpretation of Descartes as an actualist about metaphysics, eternal truths would be akin to the attributes of a substance, that is, not distinct from substances in reality. But there is some vagueness in how Descartes characterizes his dualism in this particular passage from the Principles. He writes that there are only two ultimate classes of things. We have seen how, in previous passages, the term ‘thing’ can mean something quite specific for Descartes. In this case, it could very well be referring only to ‘existing things’, just as it does in the Fifth Replies. I think that given the context, ‘thing’ is just equivalent to ‘substance’, for Descartes goes on to elucidate the word ‘thing’ in terms of his view of substance dualism. But this does not entail that mental and corporeal substances are the only two classifications or categories of being. As long 244 as there is a distinction between being and existence, mental and corporeal substance could not exhaust everything that has being. 43 Additionally, as I argued in Chapter Three, I do not think that Descartes is an actualist with respect to everything that has being. A problem for my interpretation, however, is that we only get subtle hints that Descartes postulates different kinds of being, such as possible being. I rely heavily on those passages where Descartes acknowledges a distinction between essence and existence, actual and possible being, and real and fictitious entities. These passages indicate categories of reality, some of whose members possess actual existence, but all of whose members have some mode of being from the fact that we can conceive of them at all. On Cunning’s view, it would follow that the true and immutable nature of any object is just the object, and that such natures are true of their objects. Thus, a corporeal object can have a property which is eternal, yet we would not say that the object itself is eternal. This suggests that properties have a different sort of being than the substances in which they inhere or are true of. Cunning’s interpretation prevents the distinction between the essence of an object and its existence, yet we see Descartes telling Hobbes that there is more than a conceptual distinction between essence and existence. He writes, “The distinction between essence and existence is known to everyone” (AT VII 194; CSM II 136), which suggests that he objects to Hobbes’s implied nominalism. If Descartes thought there was only a conceptual distinction 43 Given the remarks to Burman, this means that substance dualism isn’t affected by the additional category of possible being, which seems to be where Descartes classifies mathematical objects and truths. 245 between essence and existence, I don’t see why he would be disagreeing with Hobbes. 44 Finally, Descartes’s claim in the Fifth Replies about true and immutable natures doesn’t fit well with Cunning’s actualist account. Descartes says that true and immutable natures are not identical with “existing things” (AT VII 380; CSM II 261). Surely, Cunning would not interpret Descartes as denying that physical bodies are mutable, finite, existing things. But natures or essences are immutable. And Descartes clearly tells Gassendi that essences are not existing things. So I don’t see how ultimately Cunning’s view will work as an interpretation of true and immutable natures. Once the finite body is destroyed, the immutable nature would likewise be destroyed with it, but this is a contradiction in the very concept of a true and immutable nature. I believe that while the evidence for Platonism is not explicit, it can be read quite fluidly into the passages concerning the creation doctrine. This is how both Anthony Kenny and Margaret Wilson read Descartes, though they find that such an interpretation conflicts with other aspects of Cartesian philosophy. I do not wish to dispute that Platonism is at odds with, say, Descartes’s conceptualism about universals in the Principles. What I find intriguing, though, is how Descartes sees a connection between mathematics and physics, and how the eternal truths doctrine plays an unmistakably crucial role here. 44 It is also worthy to note that in this same reply to Hobbes, Descartes rejects Hobbes’s use of the phrase “eternal names”, and puts forward his own accepted phrasing, “concepts or ideas of eternal truths”. If Descartes were a conceptualist, he would mean “an idea of an innate idea”, but this sounds wrong. 246 This is most evident in the last chapter of The World. Descartes lays out the laws of nature which he believes God establishes in the material world. He is first concerned to show that because matter and its qualities undergo many changes, and since the action of God never changes, the rules governing these changes must inhere in the world (or matter) itself (AT XI 37; CSM I 92-93). That is, the laws of nature, though they come from God, are “imposed on” nature, because they are rules governing a changing substance. God’s act upon the world is what Descartes calls “preservation”. Since God continually acts, but always in the same way, and these laws govern changing bodies, Descartes’s settled position is that God continually preserves laws which govern the motions of matter. He then outlines three principal laws of nature, which he argues follow from God’s immutability and simplicity: (1) Each individual part of matter continues always to be in the same state so long as collision with others does not force it to change that state. (AT XI 38; CSM I 93) (2) When one body pushes another it cannot give the other any motion unless it loses as much of its own motion at the same time; nor can it take away any of the other’s motion unless its own is increased by as much. (AT XI 41; CSM I 94) (3) When a body is moving, even though its motion for the most part takes place along a curved path... each of its parts individually tends always to continue moving along a straight line. (AT XI 43-44; CSM I 96) One subtle detail of this chapter of The World is that Descartes alternates freely between calling the laws of nature ‘rules’, ‘laws’, and ‘truths’. This variability speaks against either a strict conceptual or neo-Platonist reading of ‘truth’. 247 After stating the three laws of nature, Descartes reemphasizes their dependence on God. This dependence is characterized not only as God being the efficient cause of these laws, but also as “God’s preserving each thing by a continuous action” (AT XI 44; CSM I 96). God’s immutability is the source of the regularities of the laws of nature, and it is his immutability which grounds our understanding that he acts always in the same way. Descartes adds that several other rules or laws could be demonstrated of matter; he does not undertake to deduce these rules, but instead states that any other laws “follow inevitably from the eternal truths on which mathematicians have usually based their most certain and most evident demonstrations” (AT XI 47; CSM I 97). Here we have a link between the laws of nature and eternal truths. Descartes continues: “the truths, I say, according to which God himself has taught us that he has arranged all things in number, weight, and measure” (AT XI 47; CSM I 97). It follows from this that it is an eternal truth that all material substances have the properties of number, weight, and measure. Moreover, God teaches us these truths about the world, and he does this by giving us a natural knowledge of them: innate ideas. Descartes thinks these truths are necessary to such an extent that he claims “if God had created many worlds, they would be as true in each of them as in this one” (AT XI 47; CSM I 97). I think this is strong evidence that eternal truths – especially those concerning the material world – are created by God in order to both govern the material world and to guide our thinking clearly and correctly. They are not merely features of mind, nor of God’s mind, because God sets them up and imposes them onto the creation. And these 248 laws contain a necessity which is also derived from or imparted by God: the very immutability of God grounds the necessity of the laws of nature. So it looks as though the creation doctrine, as proclaimed with enthusiasm to Mersenne in 1630, does not make an explicit appearance in The World. But it does seem to be working in the background. God establishes the laws of nature and continually preserves them given his own nature. Now, simplicity in terms of the identity of God’s attributes does not play a prominent role, but I believe that it is sufficiently captured by Descartes’s frequent affirmations of God’s immutability and God’s always acting in the same way. As I argued in Chapter Four, the doctrine of divine simplicity follows from and is grounded on the idea of divine immutability. Not all the eternal truths govern the material world: there are many eternal truths about mental substances, about divine substance, and those which are general enough to apply to all substances. If these eternal truths have a single ontological status, it would seem that they are neither strict mental entities, nor corporeal entities, nor divine ideas. Although they follow from divine ideas, they are external to God, because some of them (namely, the laws of nature) govern changing bodies. We have a realm of truth that corresponds to all which God creates and all which he wants us to know about himself and nature, but which is distinct from substantial existence. Descartes’s deduction of the laws of nature from the nature of God points to a unique view of the ontological status of such laws: they are eternally true laws belonging to a distinct ontological category from either corporeal or mental 249 substance. While they are true of these substances, they are not to be identified with them, for they are neither “existing things” nor modes. Thus, they do not have their ontological footing in human minds or in the divine mind. Descartes’s repeated claims that God is the efficient cause of the eternal truths attests to their lying outside the divine mind in terms of their ontological status. To be sure, because we can be clear and distinct about such truths, and because God is omniscient, these truths can be conceived, and thus they have objective being. And because there is no reason to regard one eternal truth as being different ontologically from another, they do not belong to corporeal substance. The final chapter of The World gives evidence against categorizing eternal truths as merely conceptual, either for God or for human minds. Thus, I maintain that Descartes must have believed that eternal truths have being outside of the category of substance. 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Abstract (if available)

Abstract My dissertation is an exploration of Descartes's "creation doctrine". I seek to provide an explanation of what the doctrine means and how it fits within his philosophical system. The creation doctrine states that eternal truths, such as the truths of metaphysics, mathematics, and logic, are freely created by, and depend entirely upon, God. Thus, principles and axioms which we normally hold to be absolutely necessary are not only established by God (thus implying that they came into existence), but also are established by a free act of God (thus implying that they are contingent on a will). I address this subject in response to recent criticism that Descartes's doctrine commits him to incoherence. I believe that Descartes's doctrine can be interpreted more judiciously than has been done in the literature, given his apparent commitments to certain methodological, philosophical, and theological principles.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Considine, Daniel Todd (author)

Core Title Descartes's creation doctrine and modality

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Philosophy

Publication Date 10/31/2008

Defense Date 10/10/2008

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Descartes,eternal truths,modality,OAI-PMH Harvest,Platonism

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Van Cleve, James (committee chair), Heidsieck, Arnold (committee member), McCann, Edwin (committee member)

Creator Email dconsidi@mscd.edu,dtconsidine@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1740

Unique identifier UC1426860

Identifier etd-Considine-2490 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-125412 (legacy record id),usctheses-m1740 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Considine-2490.pdf

Dmrecord 125412

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Considine, Daniel Todd

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu