Descartes’s argument for modal voluntarism

ABSTRACT

Descartes famously espouses modal voluntarism, the doctrine that God freely creates the eternal truths. God has chosen to make it true that two plus two equals four, for instance, but he could have chosen otherwise. Why, though, does Descartes endorse modal voluntarism? Many commentators have noted that he regularly appeals to divine omnipotence to justify his doctrine. This strategy is usually thought to be unsuccessful, however, because it seems to presuppose—question-beggingly—that the eternal truths are in the scope of God’s power. This paper argues that Descartes’s appeal to divine omnipotence has more going for it than meets the eye. Like many other medieval and early modern philosophers, Descartes assumes that God has the power to control everything that remains unfixed by his own essence. At the same time, though, he denies that the eternal truths are fixed by, or grounded in, the divine essence. The combination of these two commitments leads to modal voluntarism. The paper also argues that the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) may play an important role in the reasoning that leads Descartes to endorse modal voluntarism. This is surprising, given that the PSR appears to be deeply at odds with modal voluntarism.

KEYWORDS:

• Descartes
• modal voluntarism
• eternal truths
• omnipotence
• Principle of Sufficient Reason

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Malebranche, for example, was very critical of Descartes’s voluntarist doctrine (see 1980, LO 615). Other Cartesians, however, follow Descartes in his endorsement of modal voluntarism (for instance, Robert Desgabets and Antoine Le Grand). For a helpful overview, see Easton 2009.

2 See, for instance, Frankfurt 1977 and Curley 1984.

3 See Kenny 1970; Chappell 1997; Schmaltz 1991; Bennett 2001; Rozemond 2008; and Hattab 2016.

4 There were, of course, some attempts to answer this question as well. See Curley 1984; Karofsky 2001; Kaufman 2002; Kaufman 2003; Pessin 2010; Macbeth 2017; and Jordan 2018.

5 Aquinas and Leibniz are two well-known proponents of this picture (see ST I, q. 15 and 1875–1890, G IV.427-428/AG 36).

6 It should be noted that not all commentators agree with this reading. In both passages, Descartes adds a qualification to his voluntarist-sounding statements. In the letter to Mersenne, after saying that God ‘was free to make it not true that all the radii of the circle are equal,’ he qualifies this by adding: ‘just as free as he was not to create the world.’ And in the letter to Arnauld, Descartes says that he ‘would not dare to say that God cannot make a mountain without a valley, or bring about that 1 and 2 are not 3’ (my emphasis). These qualifications open up some room for alternative, non-voluntarist readings. David Cunning, for example, reads Descartes as a necessitarian (Cunning argues that this follows from God’s immutability; see Cunning 2010, 193–196). On this reading, God was in fact not free to not create the world (and so, by analogy, he also was not free to create different mathematical truths). Descartes’s qualification in the Arnauld letter might be taken to suggest that all Descartes wants to convey is that we should abstain from making judgments about God’s nature (see Nelson and Cunning 1999). In this paper, I will not argue against such alternative readings directly. I do think, however, that the overall picture developed here makes the voluntarist reading the more plausible one.

7 For a very helpful discussion of several different senses of indifference, see Lennon 2011, 577–602. See also the discussion of divine indifference in Kaufman 2003.

8 This passage shows that Descartes’s God not only wills this to be true; God also wills that it cannot be otherwise.

9 For a discussion of such two-way powers in Descartes, see Ragland 2013, 240.

10 This is emphasized by Frankfurt 1977, 42.

11 This is pointed out by Kaufman 2003.

12 For a detailed discussion of Descartes’s account of divine freedom, see Kaufman 2003.

13 In its purest form, such a view can be found in Kenny 1970. One common objection against the Platonist reading is that Descartes seems to rule out explicitly eternal and immutable entities besides God (see Rozemond 2008, 51).

14 See Chappell 1997 and Bennett 2001.

15 There is one passage in the Fifth Meditation which might cause some trouble for the conceptualist reading. Descartes there suggests that essences are ‘not invented by me or dependent on my mind’ (AT 7.64; CSM 2.45).

16 See Schmaltz 1991; Rozemond 2008; and Hattab 2016.

17 This is the position most commentators take. See for example Curley 1984, 592–596 and Schmaltz 1991, 152. For the opposing view, see Frankfurt 1977, 47.

18 See Curley 1984, 581 and Perler 2001. If this reading is correct, Descartes would have a conception of necessity which is different from the contemporary one.

19 Schmaltz 1991 and Karofsky 2001 work with somewhat similar frameworks.

20 This translation is taken from Adriaenssen 2015, 62. The original reads: ‘divina essentia secundum rationes ideales est forma exemplaris qua essentiae creaturarum sunt id quod sunt.’

21 For the differences between Aquinas and Henry, see Wippel 1981.

22 See Wippel 1981.

23 Wippel 1981 makes this point with respect to Aquinas, Henry, and Godfrey of Fontaines.

24 See Adriaenssen 2015, 64, who also provides an account of why this view is attributed to Henry.

25 See Knuuttila 1996 and Knuuttila 2017, sect. 4.

26 See Schröker 2003, 359 for a discussion.

27 See Hoffmann 2009.

28 Of course, this makes it somewhat difficult to understand why the essences are the way they are. As far as I can see, proponents of the Independence Model refuse to answer this question and accept some kind of bruteness. For more on this point, see section 4.

29 See AT 5.223-224; CSMK 3.358-359 and AT 7.432; CSM 2.291-292. I will discuss both passages below.

30 For versions of this see Frankfurt 1977, 39; Curley 1984, 583; Alanen 1991; Jordan 2018.

31 This of course has not escaped commentators (see, for instance, Curley 1984, 583).

32 This is Aquinas’s understanding of omnipotence. See ST I, q. 25, a. 3 co.

33 See, for instance, Bennett 2001, 64–65.

34 See also Descartes’s letter to Mesland from May 2, 1644 (AT 4.118).

35 This has been pointed out by many scholars. See Schmaltz 1991, 145–148; Karofsky 2001, 249–252; and Kaufman 2002, 38–39.

36 For this point, see also Schmaltz 1991, 149: ‘Yet when he suggests in the first two of his letters to Mersenne that taking eternal truths to be true independent of God is the only alternative to taking such truths to be created by an act of God’s will, he neglects the view of his main interlocutors.’

37 See especially the illuminating discussions in Schmaltz 1991, 149–152 and in Karofsky 2001.

38 See Schmaltz 1991, 148.

39 This point is also emphasized by Schmaltz 1991, 150.

40 That it is considerations concerning divine freedom which lead Descartes to reject the Comprehension Model is clear from passages like the following from the Sixth Replies: ‘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. 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 7.431-2; CSM 2.291). See also AT 5.160; CSMK 3.343 and AT 5.166-167; CSMK 3.348.

41 For a similar comparison between Aquinas and Descartes, see Schmaltz 1991, 152.

42 For a similar point, see Schmaltz 1991, 152.

43 In what follows, I will discuss the views Schmaltz develops in Schmaltz 1991.

44 Having said that, I do agree with Schmaltz’s suggestion that, for Descartes, the eternal truths do not coincide with the divine essence because this would make God unfree. Thus, understood correctly one may accept both ‘because’ claims, Schmaltz’s and mine.

45 For a proponent of the Independence Model it is the other way around: because they stick to the orthodox understanding of divine omnipotence, they conclude that God cannot control everything that remains undetermined by the divine essence.

46 So, what is possible in this world (in the actual world) may be different from what is possible in other worlds that God can create. Like many other commentators (for example, Curley 1984, 581), I tend to think of the Cartesian’s God creative activity as having two steps: God ‘first’ decides what is possible (and what is necessary and what is impossible) and ‘then’ chooses which of the possibilities he has established in the first step to actually create. But God could have gone differently already at the beginning, in which case there would have been different possibilities. So, there is a sense in which God could have created a world in which what is possible is different from what is possible in our world.

47 See Dasgupta 2016 for a very helpful contemporary discussion of metaphysical rationalism.

48 See Broughton 2002, 155–160 and Della Rocca 2007, 240.

49 Lawrence Nolan has pointed out that Descartes’s employment of the PSR in this context becomes especially clear in the Second Replies (see Nolan 2014, 144).

50 See for example sect. 2 of Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics (G IV.427-428/AG 36).

51 I am grateful to an anonymous referee for pointing out to me that the following two options are very different from each other and that one must carefully distinguish between the two.

52 For this notion of aptness, see Dasgupta 2016, 6–9. Dasgupta calls facts which are not apt for being grounded ‘autonomous’ (Dasgupta 2016, 5).

53 See the discussion in AT 7.235-240; CSM 2.164-168.

54 So, Descartes and Spinoza pursue opposite strategies. While Descartes grounds as little as possible in the divine essence, Spinoza grounds everything in the divine essence.

55 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Humboldt University and at University of Groningen. I am grateful for the feedback from the respective audiences. I owe special thanks to Han Thomas Adriaenssen, Dominik Perler, and an anonymous referee, who all provided detailed feedback on earlier versions of this paper.