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9 Descartes, Principles I.24-47 For God would deserve to be called a
deceiver if the faculty which he gave us was so distorted that it mistook the
false for the true. … Mathematical truths should no longer be suspect, since
they are utterly clear to us. And as
for our senses, if we notice anything here that is clear and distinct, no
matter whether we are awake or asleep, then provided we separate it from what
is confused and obscure we will easily recognize — whatever the thing in
question — which are the aspects that may be regarded as true. — Descartes, Principles I.30 The middle part of Descartes’s Pinciples is concerned with epistemological questions: What can we know with certainty? How can we tell it apart from what is less certain? In addressing these questions, Descartes was concerned with a tension between two of his tenets in the earlier articles of the Principles. He had maintained that we can be certain of the existence of a supremely perfect being, one who created us. Such a being could be no deceiver and therefore would not have created us with cognitive faculties that are systematically deceptive. Yet Descartes had also acknowledged that both our senses and our powers of reasoning deceive us, at least on occasion. Even if the possibility of our being systematically (consistently and persistently) deceived about what we seem to know best can be ruled out on the grounds that a supremely perfect being would not have created beings with powers that are so defective that they would never work correctly, we can’t affirm that God has made us so that we never go wrong, because, obviously, we do. God therefore countenances some degree of deception, and we need to understand how that is possible and precisely what sort of deception he countenances if we are to hope to secure ourselves from all mistakes in the future. In grappling with this issue, Descartes was grappling with a version of the problem of evil. Error is a kind of evil, just as are natural disasters or wicked acts. In asking why God permits error, Descartes was asking why God permits a particular form of evil — indeed, the principal and only form of evil that clearly exists for someone who is still in the position of doubting whether there is an external world and so wondering whether natural disasters or the wicked deeds of others might simply be dreams. In broad strokes, the solution we see Descartes offer to this problem is a version of what is often called the “free will defence.” A free will defence seeks to excuse God for allowing evil by attributing it to human free will. According to the free will defence, God had a choice whether to create beings with free wills or without free wills. Given that he chose to do the former, he is necessarily compelled to step back and allow those beings to use their wills as they see fit. Not to do that is tantamount to not endowing creatures with free will. Precisely because humans choose to do what they do and not God, their evil acts are their own fault and not God’s. This defence is easily adapted to Descartes’s situation, and that is precisely what he did. He maintained that errors in judgment are our own fault and not God’s. They do not arise because God has given us sensory or reasoning powers that lead us to misperceive the truth. Neither our reasoning nor our senses ever mislead us (and it bears stressing, as Descartes did in the passage from Principles I.30 cited above, that our senses are just as innocent of deception on this view as our powers of reasoning). Whatever we come to perceive by either means is true, and whatever is false is not perceived by either of these means. Error arises only because we do not confine ourselves to reporting just what our senses and our powers of reasoning lead us to perceive, but proceed to draw inferences and make judgments that go beyond the information that is strictly presented to us in sensory experience and clear demonstration. For instance, we judge that because we feel a pain when a certain part of a certain body is disordered, that the pain is in that disordered body part and that we just are that body and nothing more. This is not strictly what our senses tell us. The sense of feeling tells us that there is a pain and the sense of vision tells us that there is a wound in a particular body part. We judge, rather than perceive, that the one exists in the same place as the other — and we do so notwithstanding the fact that careful attention tells us that the pain is a mental state of feeling and not something that could be supposed to exist in a body part (we don’t think that an amputated limb feels pain, and we know that terrible pains can be experienced by people even when there is no corresponding disorder in any body part, as when we are dreaming.) The judgment, in this case, is a “preconception” grounded in infantile reasoning that even subsequent experience proves almost impossible to eradicate. This erroneous judgment, and others like it, is the product of our own free will and arises because we freely choose to misuse our cognitive powers. Such mistaken judgments are not, therefore, to be attributed to God. They are our own fault. However, Descartes could not offer this “free will defence” as a solution to the problem of evil without opening the door to an even more thorny issue, the problem of free will and predestination. Anyone who believes in the existence of a supremely powerful being must confront some version of this problem. A supremely powerful being will be all knowing and will have forseen, from the beginning of time, what free choices the beings it chooses to create will make. This raises the troubling question of why the creator would create the ones that it knows in advance will make the evil choices. It also raises the troubling question of how the beings can be said to be truly free if, millions of years before they were born, God already knew to a certainty what choices they would make. While these are difficult problems that must be confronted by any theist (and that invite a range of heretical solutions ranging from taking God to be limited in power or knowledge to denying the reality of free will and/or God’s concern to make only good things), there are particular features of Christianity that make them especially acute. Christians have always needed to come up with an explanation of how it was that the founder of their religion (and their God) came to such an ignoble end. The received explanation is that this was necessary and part of a plan. The crucifixion of Christ was supposed to have been a “sacrifice” necessary to “redeem” human nature from sin and earn salvation. But this poses a special problem, because the great sacrifice seems not to have worked very well. The great offering that was made for our sake notwithstanding, many people continue to lead wicked and dissolute lives — more or less about in the same proportions as they did before the time of the sacrifice. Yet God is all powerful, which would suggest that the “grace” released by the sacrifice ought to be irresistible. Confronted with this special problem, some in the early church (Augustine), the medieval church (Thomas Aquinas), the reformed churches (Luther and Calvin), and the later Roman Catholic church (Cornelius Jansen), maintained that the sacrifice only made it possible for people of all sorts to be saved (Gentiles as well as Jews, cobblers as well as kings), but not that God in fact wills that all be saved. We are all born in a state of corruption or “original sin” and none of us deserve salvation. All, in fact, deserve eternal damnation. Out of a supreme act of goodness God arbitrarily decides to redeem some of us (though none at all deserve it). Like a rich man walking down a street and generously giving money to one beggar while passing another by, we are not to blame him for not doing more, but to praise him for doing as much as he does given that all are totally undeserving. At the beginning of time God foresaw all of this and decreed that only some would be arbitrarily elected for salvation and the rest justly damned. In effect, he predestined the majority to eternal damnation. These doctrines have always been resisted by some within Christian denominations. (In fact, Augustine, who did more to forge the theology behind them than anyone, went so far as to instruct his monks not to tell the laity about them, as they are too hard for most people to “understand,” i.e., accept, and would only lead them to question their religion.) Alternative doctrines, emphasizing a role for human free choice in determining who would be saved, were advocated in the early church by Augustine’s opponent Pelagius (after whom the “Pelagian heresy” is named), in the reformed churches by Jacobus Arminius (after whom the “Arminian” heresy is named) and among later Catholics by the Jesuits, led by Luis de Molina. The reproach of heresy most often fell on the one side rather than the other because those who emphasized free will risked “making the cross of Christ of none effect,” as their opponents put it. The great sacrifice would have been pointless if people could manage to save themselves out of their own free will. But once the necessity of Grace is admitted as necessary for salvation, and the irresistibility of Grace is recognized as a consequence of divine omnipotence, and the continued existence of corrupt people is acknowledged, the predestinarian doctrines of Augustine and Aquinas and Luther and Calvin and Jansen seem inevitable. The mantle of
orthodoxy has, for all that, rested uncomfortably on the shoulders of the predestinarians. 16th and early 17th
century Descartes’s approach to this problem culminates with a whole-hearted endorsement of the mysterian theology of Paul V. QUESTIONS ON THE
1. What is the
way to acquire the most perfect scientific knowledge?
2. What things
are to be regarded as finite, what things as infinite, and what things as
indefinite?
3. Distinguish
between two different ways in which God could be considered as cause of
things and give Descartes reasons for asserting that we can only have
knowledge of one of these sorts of cause.
4. What sorts
of effects should we consider God to be the cause of, and what sort of effects
should we not consider God to be the cause of?
5. In what
sense is God not the cause of our errors?
6. Under what
conditions would God deserve to be called a deceiver?
7. What can we
be certain of once we have established the existence of God?
8. On what
does error depend?
9. Why do
errors not require the concurrence of God for their production? 10.
Why is God not to be blamed either for not
having given us an infinite intellect or for not having limited our powers of
will?
1. How is
freedom of the will to be reconciled with divine preordination of all things?
2. What must
we do to avoid error?
3. How do we
know whether or not we have clearly and distinctly perceived something?
4. What is
meant by clear and distinct perception?
5. Identify
two ultimate classes of things and three classes of affections of things.
6. How is it
that eternal truths or common notions might not be clearly conceived by
everyone? NOTES ON THE Principles I.29-38: Descartes’s “free will defence.” Descartes laid the foundations for his free
will defence on an account of the nature of the will and of the
“understanding” or cognitive powers (the senses and the power of
reason). As Descartes conceived of it,
free will is not something you can have just a bit of. You either have it completely and entirely,
or you just don’t have it at all. You
either have the power to will things (and we are just talking about the power
to will things, not the power to act accordingly) or you don’t. Consequently, if you have free will (and
Descartes thought we all do), then your will must be “infinite,” in the sense
in the sense of giving you the power to assent to or deny anything you can
conceive. (We don’t have infinite will
in the sense of being able to do anything we desire, but when you are still
doubting whether there is an external world or whether you have a body, that
sense of free will is not yet eligible.
Free will can only manifest itself as the power to think and to adopt
certain attitudes to what one thinks, such as assent or denial and approval
or disapproval.) At the same time
Descartes considered the will to be determined to assent to a proposition by
a clear and distinct perception on the part of the understanding. But this is not incompatible with
considering us to have infinitely powerful wills. If I were not determined by what I
understand to be the case, that would be a defect of the will (a kind of
madness) — an indication of an inability
to follow through on what I understand to be the case. Determination of the will by the
understanding is not incompatible with my freedom but an expression of my
freedom because my will is being determined by me — by what I understand —
and not by something acting independently of what I myself think. Descartes considered
it to be obvious to us from introspection that we do in fact have free
will. Given that will is either given
in its perfection or not given at all, we have no reason to complain that God
did give us this capacity. It is,
after all, what distinguishes us from all the lower orders of creation, and makes
us more perfect than most other things, which can only act as determined by
natural laws. We certainly have no
cause to blame God for making us this perfect. However, at the same
time that our wills are infinite, we are painfully aware that our understanding
is finite. We were born knowing
nothing, and we still recall how we had to learn most things and regularly
run into a lack of knowledge in ourselves.
But a lack of knowledge is not the same thing as mistaken
knowledge. It is one thing not to know
something (and perhaps to know that you don’t know it), and quite another to
think that you know something when in fact you do not. Insofar as he gave us
only a finite understanding, God only did the first of these things and not
the second. He made us so that we
would not know certain things. But he
did not make us so that we would think we know certain things when in fact we
don’t. So we can’t say that God has in
any way deceived us. If you think you
know something when you really do know it, you aren’t deceived. If you are aware of not knowing something
and you really don’t know it, you aren’t deceived, either. Deception only arises in the case where you
think you know something that you really don’t, and we have yet to see what
accounts for that. Neither can we justly
complain that God should have given us stronger powers of knowledge than we
in fact have. A creator is under no
obligation to put everything he could possibly make into each of his
creatures. We don’t criticize a
watchmaker for making watches that only tell time and don’t also display the
calendar date. As long as the watch
tells the right time we think that the artisan worked to perfection and don’t
attribute the fact that other functions were not built in to shoddy
workmanship. God, in particular,
should not be expected to only make supremely perfect things. That would be tantamount to the expectation
that God only create rival deities, a limitation that is not only ridiculous
but absurd (if you think that unity is part of the essence of God.) Given that God is not
to be blamed for either giving us infinite wills or finite understandings, we
can see how Descartes could argue that we come to make mistakes for which God
is not blameable. Mistakes arise when
we exercise our wills to make judgments about matters we do not understand,
rather than restricting ourselves to what we actually perceive, either by our
senses or reason. Since these mistakes
are the product of our own exercise of our free will they are our own fault,
and not God’s. Principles I.42-50: The means of avoiding error. Having offered this analysis of how it is
that we come to make mistakes, notwithstanding God’s goodness, Descartes
considered himself to be in a position to offer an account of what we need to
do in order to avoid error. Error
arises when, out of impatience and a strong desire to discover the truth, we
leap ahead of the information provided by the senses and reasoning and assent
to or deny things not contained in the information supplied by the senses and
not rationally deducible from that information. These erroneous judgments are the product
of the employment of an incorrect method, or no method at all, in searching
out the truth. The correct method
ought to be one that confines itself to identifying what is clearly and
distinctly perceived by the senses and what intuitively evident principles or
“eternal truths” are grasped by reasoning, and then proceeds to slowly and
carefully identify the simple natures exhibited in sensory experience and to reason
from them by appeal to the common notions or eternal truths, pausing along
the way to make frequent reviews. In
effect, it is the method of Discourse
II. However, if we are to
apply this method we need to be able to identify what is really clearly and
distinctly perceived and separate it from what we might only think is clearly
and distinctly perceived. At Principles I.45 Descartes defined a
clear perception as one that is “present and accessible to an attentive
mind,” illustrating his point with an analogy with visual experience, where
what reflects a sufficient degree of light to the eye to enable it to be
distinguished from its surroundings is said to be seen “clearly.” He then further defined a distinct perception
as one that “contains within itself only what is clear,” presumably meaning
that the component parts of what is distinctly perceived must be understood
so well as to be readily distinguishable from one another. He further illustrated these definitions
with the example of pains and other sensory states which, he claimed, are
clear (because they can easily be distinguished from one another and from
things that are not sensory states) but “confused” (i.e., not distinct),
because we do not see what makes them up clearly enough to be able to say
whether they are to be considered states of mind or states of body. Neither the
definitions, nor the analogies, nor the examples are very helpful. One would think that if you can’t tell
whether a pain is a mental or a physical state that would suggest that it is
not just confused (not distinct) but obscure (not clear) since you can’t tell
it apart from its surroundings well enough to be able to tell whether they
are physical things or mental things.
And one might wonder whether it isn’t a blind adherence to the
“preconception” that sensations are mental states that led Descartes to
declare that they are clear but confused, and so not perceived as qualities
of external objects. If there is
anything that is clearly perceived about colour it is that colours have shape
and relative location, which mental states cannot have, unless the mind is a
body. Descartes tried to deny this (Replies to the 6th set of
objections to the meditations, AT VII:436-38), and
insist that we do not “clearly and distinctly” perceive colours to be
extended, but instead “confuse” them with the surfaces of bodies, but it is
hard to see what criterion is being applied to determine that our perception
of colours as extended is “confused” rather than “clear and distinct.” The definition of a distinct perception as
containing clearly perceived parts is not of any help at all. Be this as it may,
Descartes did have a criterion ready to hand for determining when judgments are
based on what is clearly and distinctly perceived. As has been noted, he maintained that a
clear and distinct perception on the part of the understanding determines the
will. Clear and distinct perception
could accordingly be defined as perception that leaves no room for doubt,
however extravagant. On this account,
“common notions” or “eternal truths” such as that equals added to equals are
equal or that nothing can have no properties leave
no room for doubt. Likewise, those
relations between the simple natures present in our sensory experience that
could only be otherwise if the simple natures themselves were changed, such
as that orange is more like red than it is like green or that triangles have
internal angles that sum to two right angles would leave no room for
doubt. The only way doubt about these
things could arise is if we accept the possibility that we might be
systematically deceived, and we have learned that God exists and that while
he might have made us so that we do not know everything, he is no deceiver
and so would not have made us so that a proper employment of our cognitive
powers would mislead us. What we know
so clearly and distinctly that we are forced to believe it and are incapable
of seeing any reason to doubt must be true. Principles I.24-28
and 38-41: Freedom and predestination. Descartes’s attempt to excuse God for
permitting error by appealing to our free choice is not entirely
satisfactory. Granting that it was
good of God grant us free will and that he could not be blamed for having
given us only limited understanding, we might nonetheless wonder why a
supremely perfect artisan, building a device that necessarily incorporates
some imbalance in the working parts, would not do what he could to correct
for that imbalance by incorporating compensating design elements. Granting that we freely choose to judge
about matters that we do not clearly and distinctly perceive, it is
nonetheless the case what we do so only because we are anxious to discover
the truth and perhaps impatient to do so or reluctant to do a lot of work on
the way to doing so. These are
character traits that we all have to varying degrees. Some of us are less curious than others,
others less impatient, others more industrious. Had God made us all indifferent enough,
patient enough, and industrious enough we would not have been tempted to
employ our free will to misuse our powers of judgment. Instead, he only made some of us like that
and others not. In effect, he gave
some the “grace” to be able to avoid error while leaving the rest
without. Admittedly, in doing this he
might not have made the rest in any way defective (in the sense of putting
something bad into them). He might
simply have refrained from putting in all that is good into them that he could
have. And even granting that he is
only to be praised for condescending to give us as much as he did
(undeserving wretches that we are) and not blamed for failing to give us
more, the consequence seems to be that some have been created expressly to get
things wrong and so run themselves into perdition — using their own free
wills all the way, so that only they and not God can justly be said to be the
cause of their damnation — but only because they weren’t granted the
character traits necessary to keep them from freely choosing to abuse our
powers of judgment. Descartes’s
“Paulinian” or “mysterian” response to this objection is carefully laid over Principles I.24-28, where it is
introduced by way of a general discussion of what we are in a position to assert
about God’s nature. Being finite
beings, Descartes declared, we are in no position to comprehend the
infinite. Accordingly, when presented
with questions about infinite things, such as whether space extends to
infinity, whether matter is infinitely divisible, or whether an infinite
number is even or odd, we cannot presume to give an adequate answer, and if
we do, we simply run into paradoxes, like Zeno’s paradox of composition or
(to speak anachronistically for a moment) Grünbaum’s infinity machine paradox. Zeno asked if a very
small object, like a millet seed, takes up some space. If it doesn’t, then it has 0 extension and so does not exist. If it does, then it must be divisible into
parts. But then what about those
parts? Do they take up some space or
don’t they? If they don’t, then
however many of them there are, they don’t add up to anything and again the
millet seed can’t exist. If they do,
then they must in turn be divisible into parts and the question recurs for
those parts and leads to a further question: are there infinitely many parts
or not? If there are infinitely many,
then either they have some size or they don’t. If they have some size, then they add up to
something infinitely big, not just to a millet seed. If they have no size, then they don’t add
up to anything. On the other hand, if
there are only finitely many parts, then the question recurs about those
parts. If they have some size then
they must be divisible into parts and so there are more than the finitely
many parts we said there were. If they
have none, then they don’t add up to anything. Any way you look at, it seems absurd that a
finitely extended object like a millet seed should exist. Writing somewhat
later, Adolf Grünbaum asked us to conceive a machine built to press the
switch on the lamp. A press of the
button turns the lamp on. A second
press turns it off. In the first half
minute, the machine presses the button once.
In the next quarter minute it presses it again. In the next eighth minute it presses it a
third time, and so on at each step taking half the time it took at the
previous step. Since the interval
between 1 and 2 is infinitely divisible the machine will end up pressing the
button an infinite number of times.
But since time passes, at the end of one second it will have completed
the infinite task of pressing the button an infinite number of times. Then the question arises. Given that the lamp was off to start with,
will it be off or on at the end of the second? It must be one or the other. It cannot be both or neither. One way, an infinite number of presses
would have to be an odd number, the other, an even number. But this is absurd if we think that
infinity means that for any given sum, even or odd, one more could always be
added. Descartes’s position
was that we have no business thinking like this. As finite beings we cannot hope to grasp
what is involved in infinity. The best
we can do is say that for any given space we can conceive there is one that
extends out beyond it, that for any given part we can conceive there are
parts it is divisible into, and that for any given number we can conceive
there is one that can be added to it.
But to positively declare that space or division goes on forever, or
to presume to conceive an infinite sum is more than we can do. All that we can manage is to declare that
the series of steps proceeds indefinitely. With this position on
the unknowability of infinite things to back him up, Descartes was in a
position to attempt to block the controversy over free will and
predestination. We know from a clear
and distinct perception that we are free, he maintained. But it also follows evidently from the
concept of a supremely perfect being that God must have foreseen and
preordained all things. In effect, he
must have predetermined what choices we would make through giving us the
different character traits, the degree of intelligence, the life experiences
(inspiring some, say to look for a method to avoid deception while others
rest assured that they are getting things more or less right without one),
and so on that he distributed among this.
We cannot say that this means that we are not really free because we
experience in ourselves a power of spontaneous choice that can lead us to act
in defiance of all character traits and past experience. And even though this, too, would have been
foreseen and preordained by God, there is no reason to abandon either our
commitment to our own freedom or our belief in God’s pre-ordination. The two do not fit together well, but we
need to think that God’s power is infinite, and like other infinities is not something we can hope to comprehend. The manner in which infinite power is
exercised over human minds must remain a mystery for us. In the meantime, we
must affirm both what we clearly and distinctly perceive (freedom) and the
revealed truths of our religion (preordination). ESSAY QUESTIONS AND RESEARCH PROJECTS Compare Descartes’s
position on the freedom of the will, as presented in Principles I.24-50 with Hobbes’s, as presented in Human nature XII, and determine which
is more plausible and which provides a more thorough and adequate account of
the phenomena of the will. Note that
Hobbes authored a set of comments on Descartes Meditations (the third set in the so-called “objections and
replies,” commonly in with the editions of the Meditations). In his
twelfth objection, Hobbes charged that Descartes had merely assumed the
freedom of the will without proof and that his position is not obviously
true, as it is denied by many, notably Calvinists (i.e., those who believe in
predestination and the possibility of doing good
only through Grace). Assess the
adequacy of Descartes’s reply to Hobbes on this matter. |