## 1. Modality and Clear and Distinct Perception



There are a number of claims about possibilities and necessities that
seem to be intuitive - for example that it is possible that
things be other than they are - but Descartes will not make his
account of modality sensitive to all of these. Famously he subscribes
to the view that when doing metaphysics we ought not affirm what we do
not clearly and distinctly perceive. Descartes reveals his commitment
to this view in a number of passages:



> 
> I should like you to remember here that, in matters which may be
> embraced by the will, I made a very careful distinction between the
> conduct of life and the contemplation of the truth. As far as the
> conduct of life is concerned, I am very far from thinking that we
> should assent only to what is clearly perceived. ...But 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.[1]
> 



If Descartes holds that when doing metaphysics we ought not speak of
what we do not clearly and distinctly perceive, a general Cartesian
theory of modality should not be sensitive to claims about
possibilities or necessities that Descartes himself would identify as
confused. There are modal claims that only seem intuitive and obvious,
Descartes might say, and modal claims that actually are intuitive and
obvious, and he would want his account of modality to accommodate only
the latter.



Indeed, one reason why it is important to highlight the distinction
between modal claims that are confused and modal claims that are not
is that there are many modal claims that we might want to give a
rigorous analysis but that Descartes would not. That is to say, the
account that he offers will not necessarily square with all of the
modal claims that we would advance pre-reflectively. For example, we
might observe a blue table in front of us and put forward the claim
that it is possible that the table not be blue and that it could have
been black. Descartes himself is going to be careful about accepting
such a claim at face-value. He subscribes to the view that strictly
speaking our senses "provide only very obscure
information" (The Sixth Meditation, AT 7:84, CSM 2:58) about the
bodies located outside of us. Our "knowledge of the truth of
such things [located outside of us] seems to belong to the mind alone,
not to the combination of mind and body" (*ibid*., AT
7:82-83, CSM 2:57), and what the mind perceives clearly about
bodies are non-sensory qualities like extendedness and flexibility
(The Second Meditation, AT 7:30-31, CSM 2:20). Or as he says
elsewhere, the certainty that we seek in metaphysical inquiry
"occurs in the clear perceptions of the intellect and nowhere
else" (*Second Replies*, AT 7:145, CSM 2:104). He adds:
"certainty does not lie in the senses but solely in the
understanding, when it possesses evident perceptions" (Preface
to the French edition of Principles of Philosophy, AT 8A:7, CSM
1:182); "Intuition is the indubitable conception of a clear and
attentive mind which proceeds solely from the light of reason"
(Rules for the Direction of the Mind, AT 10:368, CSM 1:14). Returning
now to the claim that it is possible that a given table not be blue
and that it could have been black, we need to keep in mind that on
Descartes' view colors are not in objects in the way that we
normally imagine them to be (*Principles of Philosophy* I.68,
AT 8A:33, CSM 1:217). We might also advance the claim that it is
possible that our blue table could occupy a different position in
empty space, or the claim that it could begin to move without being
pushed into motion by a cause. The first claim supposes what Descartes
denies - that there is empty space (*Principles*
II.10-12, AT 8A:45-47, CSM 1:226-28) - and the
second contradicts a Cartesian law of motion that falls immediately
out of our idea of God (*Principles* II.36-37, AT
8A:61-63, CSM 1:240-41; Nadler 1987). No matter how the
debate is resolved on these important systematic issues, it is
important to keep in mind that Descartes' theory of modality
will be somewhat
 circumscribed.[2]
 His theory of modality will do justice to truths about possibility
and truths about necessity, but much of what he takes to be possible
or necessary is not what we would take to be possible or necessary at
first glance. If we suppose that we are being charitable by allowing
his theory of modality to accommodate a modal claim that we are
certain is true, we might be foisting upon him an interpretation that
he would prefer to resist. No doubt he might be mistaken in what he
takes to be the set of true modal claims, but his account would end up
being mindful of those and not any others.



A related reason why it is important to highlight the distinction
between modal claims that are confused and modal claims that are not
is that in what is perhaps his most important and influential
philosophical work - *Meditations on First Philosophy*
- Descartes often advances a claim that in the final analysis he
rejects. He advances modal claims that he takes to be false, and many
other claims that he advances he takes to be false as well. For
example, he says that what we know best we know either from or through
the senses (First Meditation, AT 7:18, CSM 2:17); that it is possible
that God is an extreme deceiver (CSM 2:19); that it is possible that
God does not exist (CSM 2:19); that it is possible that God, the
supreme being on whom all entities depend for their existence, has
allowed the existence of an evil demon that is constantly deceiving us
(CSM 2:20); that we should use imagination to get to know our selves
better (Second Meditation, AT 7:27, CSM 2:18); that general
perceptions are apt to be more confused than particular ones
(*ibid*., AT 7:30, CSM 2:20); that bodies literally possess
qualities like color and taste and sound (*ibid*.) and heat
(The Third Meditation, AT 7:41, 43-44, CSM 2:28, 30-31);
and that the appropriate way to inquire into whether or not the works
of God are perfect is to examine the universe in its entirety (The
Fourth Meditation, AT 7:55-56, CSM 2:38-39). Descartes
does not subscribe to a single one of these views. He thinks that upon
further reflection we recognize that God is a necessary existent and
that it is impossible for Him to be a radical deceiver or to allow the
existence of a radical deceiver; that what is known best is known by
purely mental scrutiny (Second Meditation, AT 7:31, CSM 2:21); that
general perceptions are more clear than perceptions of particulars
(*ibid*.); that color and taste and sound and heat are not in
bodies in anything like the way that we imagine (Sixth Meditation, AT
7:81-83, CSM 2:56-58; *Principles* IV.198, AT
8A:322-23, CSM 1:285); and that things are good by virtue of the
fact that God wills them (*Sixth Replies*, AT 7:431-36,
CSM 2:291-94).



Descartes advances a number of claims that are false in the
*Meditations*, but he does this for good reason. He is writing
in the voice of a meditator who at the start of inquiry is not yet a
Cartesian and who in the course of inquiry is expressing views that
seem to him to be true from his first-person and non-Cartesian
point-of-view. The meditator will express and evaluate these views and
see for himself how they collapse on their own weight.



It might seem surprising that as a philosopher Descartes ever flirts
with confusions at all. When he does so he is just employing his
*analytic* method - what he calls the "best and
truest method of instruction..." (*Second Replies*,
AT 7:156, CSM 2:111). Descartes does not hide that he sometimes makes
claims early in the *Meditations* that from a later and more
sophisticated point of view he will retract. He says,



> 
> The analytic style of writing that I adopted there [in the
> *Meditations*] allows us from time to time to make certain
> assumptions that have not yet been thoroughly examined; and this comes
> out in the First Meditation where I made many assumptions which I
> proceeded to refute in subsequent
>  Meditations.[3]
> 



Descartes advances such claims because he is trying to teach his
metaphysics and because he thinks that his readers will not be in a
position to grasp that metaphysics if he only makes claims that are
 true.[4]
 Reflecting the epistemic individualism that is common in 17th-Century
Philosophy, Descartes insists that we should not accept a view until
we see its truth for ourselves (*Appendix to Fifth Replies*, AT
9A:208, CSM 2:272-73). But he also holds that at the start of
inquiry our conceptions and commitments are way off. Most of us are
inclined to affirm that what we know best we know through the senses,
along with the other falsities already mentioned, but in addition: our
conceptions of mind and God represent mind and God as sensible when
they are not; we think and speak by way of terms that we do not
understand or that may have no corresponding idea; and what we take to
be the paradigm of a distinct perception is hardly distinct at
 all.[5]
 We take in information against the background of our current
commitments and conceptions, and so are primed to reject what
conflicts with
 them.[6]
 When we work through the *Meditations* from the first-person
point-of-view, we accept or reject things when we see for ourselves
that they are to be accepted or rejected, but until our intellects are
emended we do not have the best perspective from which to see the
truth.



Descartes sees little alternative to proceeding as he does. If he just
asserts the claims that he is certain are true, other individuals who
are in a position to see those claims as obvious will recognize their
truth, but these are not necessarily the individuals whom Descartes is
trying to reach. He is also trying to reach a much larger set of
individuals: those who disagree with him, and who disagree with him
deeply. He must say something to these people, but if they are not in
a position to see the true, he will have to meet them where they are
or else they will not be prepared to engage. Accordingly, he writes
that in the *Meditations* "I had confined myself to what
I originally believed quite spontaneously and with nature as my guide,
and to the commonly held views of others, irrespective of truth or
falsity; for my purpose in making the survey was not to adopt these
beliefs, but merely to examine them" (*Seventh Replies*,
AT 7:482, CSM 2:325). In the *Meditations* Descartes is working
to "appeal to a variety of different minds" (*First
Replies*, AT 7:120, CSM 2:85). About the many false claims that he
puts forward therein, he writes



> 
> A philosopher would be no more surprised at such suppositions of
> falsity than he would be if, in order to straighten out a curved
> stick, we bent it round in the opposite direction. The philosopher
> knows that it is often useful to assume falsehoods instead of truths
> in this way in order to shed light on the truth, e.g. when astronomers
> imagine the equator, the zodiac, or other circles in the sky, or when
> geometers add new lines to given figures. Philosophers frequently do
> the same. If someone calls this 'having recourse to artifice,
> sleight of hand, or circumlocution' and says it is
> 'unworthy of philosophical honesty and the love of truth'
> then he certainly shows that he himself, so far from being
> philosophically honest or being prepared to employ any argument at
> all, simply wants to indulge in rhetorical display. (*Fifth
> Replies*, CSM 2:242)
> 



In *Second Replies* Descartes makes a distinction between the
simple and primary notions of metaphysics - which are not
derivable from anything - and other truths that can be generated
from these (CSM 2:104, 111). A dilemma that he highlights is that if a
person is so confused that they do not recognize the truth of primary
notions, it is not clear what to say to them. The primary notions are
not derived from *other* notions - that is what makes
them simple and fundamental - and so they cannot be demonstrated
or argued for, but if the philosopher just repeats them, that
won't do much good either. A further dilemma, according to
Descartes, is that primary notions often contradict the everyday
worldview to which most of us subscribe uncritically (CSM
2:111-112). If so, we are primed to reject the primary notions
of metaphysics and the further disorienting conclusions that they
entail. A philosopher like Descartes needs to say *something*
to his audience - to get them to see the force of his view
- but ironically enough, the truth will not cut it, at least not
at first. What Descartes does, then, is to employ a version of the
analytic method of ancient geometry, in which claims are made that
strictly speaking are false but that help a student to see
(eventually) what is true. He will emulate the practice of geometers
like Archimedes - who articulates the nature of a sphere on
analogy with a rectilinear figure that is inscribed in a circle, even
though the notion of a rectilinear sphere is incoherent (*Fourth
Replies*, AT 7:245, CSM 2:170-171). In the First Meditation
especially, Descartes will advance claims that are false but that he
anticipates his readers will find plausible: we will think through the
implications of these claims in a way that puts us on course to arrive
at a clear and distinct grasp of the primary notions of metaphysics.
On the way Descartes will make claims - including modal claims
- that range from false to incoherent, but later on we will be
in a position to juxtapose these against the obvious truths at which
we have arrived, and our earlier claims will be seen for the
confusions that they are.


## 2. The First Meditation and the Possibility of Radical Deception



For example, in the First Meditation Descartes entertains a number of
possibilities to the effect that we might be mistaken about results
that are perfectly evident to us. One such possibility is that we have
been created by a supremely good God but that, for reasons unbeknownst
to us, our nature is such that we "go wrong every time [we] add
two and three or count the sides of a square, or in some even simpler
matter" (AT 7:21, CSM 2:14). Another is that we have not been
created by God but have "arrived at [our] present state by fate
or chance or a continuous chain of events" (AT 7:21, CSM 2:14).
A third is that we are constantly deceived by a malicious demon (AT
7:22, CSM 2:15). Descartes mentions all of these possibilities to set
up his Third Meditation point that until we know what made our minds,
we are not in a position to trust them and so not in a position to
know anything at all (AT 7:36, CSM 2:25). None of these is an actual
possibility, though Descartes allows that we may not appreciate this
until later:



> 
> [Voetius claims that in my philosophy] "God is thought of as a
> deceiver." This is foolish. Although in my First Meditation I
> did speak of a supremely powerful deceiver, the conception there was
> in no way of the true God, since, as he himself says, it is impossible
> that the true God should be a deceiver. But if is asked how he knows
> that this is impossible, he must answer that he knows it from the fact
> that it implies a contradiction - that is, it cannot be
> conceived. ("Letter to Voetius," May 1643, CSMK 222)
> 



Descartes allows that if we are careless or not paying attention, we
can entertain the supposition that "God" does not exist or
is a deceiver, but he holds that upon reflection the supreme being is
a necessary existent, and a necessary existent that cannot deceive
(The Fifth Meditation, CSM 2:46-48). We might have thought
otherwise at the start of inquiry, before we had carefully unpacked
and examined our concepts - at a moment when we were not yet
putting forward a priori non-sensory claims, which are the only sort
of claim that are suitable as premises in a metaphysical argument. As
often happens in philosophy, we come to recognize that there are
things that seem clear to us before we think them through, and we
recognize that the reason why they seemed clear was that we
hadn't thought them through yet. As Descartes himself
writes,



> 
> In order to philosophize seriously and search out the truth about the
> things that are capable of being known, we must first of all lay aside
> all our preconceived opinions, or at least we must take the greatest
> care not to put our trust in any of the opinions accepted by us in the
> past until we have first scrutinized them afresh and confirmed their
> truth. Next, we must give our attention in an orderly way to the
> notions that we have within us, and we must judge to be true all and
> only those whose truth we clearly and distinctly recognize when we
> attend to them in this way. ...When we contrast all this
> knowledge with the confused thoughts we had before, we will acquire
> the habit of forming clear and distinct concepts of all the things
> that can be known. These few instructions seem to me to contain the
> most important principles of human knowledge. (*Principles*
> I.75, AT 8A:38-9, CSM 1:221)
> 



When we construct arguments on the basis of basic a priori principles
of metaphysics - what Descartes calls "primary
notions" (*Second Replies*, AT 7:145-46, CSM 2:104;
*Principles* I.50, AT 8A:23-24, CSM 1:209) - and
not the non a priori premises that constitute much of the early
thinking of Descartes' meditator, we recognize that God is a
necessary existent who cannot deceive and also that He is the
independent and supreme creator of all reality, both possible and
actual ("To [Mesland], 2 May 1644," AT 4:118-19,
CSMK 235; "To [Mersenne], 27 May 1630," AT 1:152, CSMK 25;
Third Meditation, AT 7:45, CSM 2:31). If so, we know on a priori
grounds that the possibilities introduced in the First Meditation are
fictional and indeed are not possibilities at all. It turns out, upon
reflection, that God did not create them. This is not just to say that
the possibilities exist but do not obtain. To say that a possibility
exists but does not obtain would be to say that it exists as a
possibility that is not actualized; it would be to say that in
addition to actual reality there also exists possible reality and that
some possible reality is never actualized. If in Descartes's
system God created only actual reality and not in addition any
possible reality, then possibilities themselves are not real -
they have no ontological status and so are not in fact possibilities,
because they are not anything. According to Descartes, God did not
create the possibility that we exist with minds that might be certain
of things that are false; He did not create the possibility that we
evolved from chance; He did not create the possibility of an evil
demon. None of these possibilities exists unless they are created, and
they do not exist just because the cognitive deliverances of the First
Meditation meditator tell us that they do. When we (or the meditator)
postulated their existence in the First Meditation, we were being
hasty, and all that we had to go on at that early stage of inquiry was
our confused pre-*Meditations* conceptions.



We might wonder though if Descartes would be happy to identify the
possibilities of the First Meditation as *epistemic*
possibilities, even if they are not real possibilities. After all, the
meditator is entertaining doubts in the First Meditation, and she is
honestly reporting that because she is not yet certain that God exists
or is not a deceiver, for all she knows God might not exist exist or
might be a deceiver. She concludes that it is possible that God does
not exist and that it is possible that He is a deceiver, and indeed
both of those claims, in the sense in which they are uttered, would
appear to be true at the moment that she utters them. It certainly
seems as though the meditator is saying something true when she
expresses that for all she knows God is a deceiver (or does not
exist), but a complication arises when we consider Descartes'
own view that a mind is not really thinking of God if they are
imagining an extremely powerful being that is a deceiver
("Letter to Voetius," May 1643, CSMK 222, cited above).
Nor are we thinking of God if we have an imagistic idea of a giant man
on a cloud (*Fifth Replies*, CSM 2:252), and we are not
thinking of mind or self if we have an imagistic idea of air or fire
(*Fifth Replies*, CSM 2:264). Regardless of how we might report
or describe our own thinking in such cases, those just are not the
things that we have in mind. If so, a question arises about whether or
not Descartes would want to allow that the First Meditation
possibility that (for example) God is a deceiver is in fact the
epistemic possibility that (for all the First Meditation meditator
knows) God might be a deceiver. He would be reluctant to allow this, I
think, because he is committed to saying that the First Meditation
meditator who thinks of God as a deceiver is not thinking of God. If
the meditator is just thinking the letters 'Deus' in
Latin, he is not thinking of God ("To [Mersenne], 27 May
1630," AT 1:150, CSMK 25), or if the meditator is thinking a
confused compound idea of God and sensible bodies (*Second
Replies*, AT 7:130-131, CSM 2:94), he is thinking of a
chimera. Descartes will not thumb his nose at pre-*Meditations*
thinking if it is a fact on the ground, but that is in part to say
that he holds that the possibilities of the First Meditation are
extremely confused. The pre-*Meditations* thinking of the
meditator is what it is, and Descartes will not pretend that it is not
operative.



Descartes is very explicit about the importance of employing (what
some might regard as a not completely honest) pedagogical method. In
order to maneuver his readers into a position in which they
*are* able to understand his metaphysics, he needs to help them
to clear up their ideas. If he simply tells us his view, we will hear
it against the background of confused ideas that (on his view) it is
imperative we discard. The view that we would walk away with would not
be Descartes' view but something else. Descartes therefore opts
for a special strategy for presenting his metaphysics: he puts things
in terms of the confusions that we understand, otherwise we will not
understand him. If we object (as does Gassendi) to this kind of
maneuver, Descartes insists that under the circumstances it is only
appropriate. He does not see anything objectionable in guiding us to
truth by way of conceptions that are false or incoherent. Instead, he
is providing a service:



> 
> [T]ake the case of someone who imagines a deceiving god - even
> the true God, but not yet clearly enough known to himself or to the
> others for whom he frames his hypothesis. Let us suppose that he does
> not misuse this fiction for the evil purpose of persuading others to
> believe something false of the Godhead, but uses it only to enlighten
> the intellect, and bring greater knowledge of God's nature to
> himself and to others. Such a person is in no way sinning in order
> that good may come. There is no malice at all in his action; he does
> something which is good in itself, and no one can rebuke him for it
> except slanderously. ("To Buitendijck 1643," AT 4:64, CSMK
> 230)
> 



The possibilities that Descartes mentions early in the
*Meditations* are not a part of his ontology. When he talks
about these, he is not interested in truth but, rather, in helping his
reader to move through and past
 confusion.[7]
 Unless we are going to saddle Descartes with the view that it really
is possible that our minds are radically defective and that
nonetheless we ought to go on reasoning *anyway*, we should
conclude that Descartes holds that the possibilities of the First
Meditation have no ontological status and hence that they are nothing
at all.



But Descartes did worry that in the wrong hands his references to the
(incoherent) possibility of radical deception might actually backfire.
In a letter to Mersenne, he acknowledges that his 1637 *Discourse
on the Method* argumentation for the existence of God would have
been more rigorous had he introduced "doubts and scruples"
that "show... which judgements depend only on the pure
understanding" ("To Mersenne, 27 February 1637," AT
1:350, CSMK 53). He says that he leaves those out of the
*Discourse* but that he might include them in his
"treatise of metaphysics" (*ibid.*). The doubts
that appear in the *Meditations* but not in the
*Discourse* are the hyperbolic First Meditation arguments to
the effect that we might be mistaken about matters that are utterly
evident to us. Descartes writes that "I left th[ese] out on
purpose and after deliberation, mainly because I had written in the
vernacular. I was afraid that weak minds might avidly embrace the
doubts and scruples which I would have had to propound, and afterwards
be unable to follow as fully the arguments by which I would have
endeavoured to remove them. Thus I would have set them on a false path
and been unable to bring them back" (*ibid.*). That is to
say, Descartes omits the hyperbolic doubts from the *Discourse*
because he is afraid that some minds might take them seriously and
reason to a point from which there is no return Cunning (2023, chapter
four). For example, they might conclude at the end of the First
Meditation that it is *true* that it is possible that we are
deceived about matters that are utterly evident to us, and we might
then assert that all of the reasoning that comes after the First
Meditation is entirely up for grabs. Of course, as a matter of
historical fact it is not just weak minds that take seriously the
argumentation of the First Meditation. Descartes seems to be thinking
that an educated reader would see the First Meditation for what it is
- perhaps a reader who is fluent in Latin and not just the
French vernacular, and who would perhaps be familiar with the methods
of a geometer like Archimedes. And it is easy to imagine why he would
think that. A philosophy instructor will often start a lesson with an
analogy that is incoherent but that highlights the intuitive force of
an opposing view instead: for example we might begin a class in ethics
by pointing to surveys and case studies that show that the vast
majority of Nazi soldiers believed that their treatment of Jewish
prisoners during WWII was just, and we might ask if the conclusion to
draw is that morality is entirely a matter of opinion, or even that
Nazi ideology is to be accepted. Perhaps a student then approaches us
after class and says that they would like to become a Nazi. Descartes
would be right to say that the student has a weak mind, though we can
also understand why in certain instructional circumstances he might
want to use a different lesson plan instead. He was mistaken to think
that all readers of the *Meditations* would notice that the
reasoning of the First Meditation is just meant to help us to see
"which judgements depend only on the pure understanding,"
for example the judgments about the nature of wax at the end of the
Second Meditation and the primary notions that are central to the
argumentation for the existence of God in the Third. Those are known
by "an act of purely mental scrutiny" (AT 7:31, CSM 2:21),
and as such they leave the confused claims of the First Meditation in
the dust.


## 3. The Eternal Truths



Descartes is infamous for his doctrine of the creation of the eternal
truths:



> 
> You ask me by what kind of causality God established the eternal
> truths. I reply: by the same kind of causality as he created all
> things, that is to say, as their efficient and total cause. ("To
> [Mersenne], 27 May 1630," AT 1:152, CSMK 25)
> 



On the surface the position is baffling, especially when considered in
conjunction with Descartes' view that God is omnipotent. The
author of *Fifth Objections*, Pierre Gassendi, complained that
the view is very difficult to conceive. Descartes' reply is
interesting:



> 
> You say that you think it is 'very hard' to propose that
> there is anything immutable and eternal apart from God. You would be
> right to think this if I was talking about existing things, or if I
> was proposing something as immutable in the sense that its
> immutability was independent of God. 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 truths which
> we can know concerning them, are independent of God. Nevertheless I do
> think that they are immutable and eternal, since the will and decree
> of God willed and decreed that they should be so. Whether you think
> this is hard or easy to accept, it is enough for me that it is true.
> (*Fifth Replies*, AT 7:380, CSM 2:261)
> 



Descartes holds that each and every thing depends on God for its
existence and that, as things, eternal truths depend on God as well.
One of Gassendi's worries is that if God can do anything and
thus can alter any item that He creates, nothing that He creates is
immutable.



Another reason that Descartes' view is difficult to conceive is
that he takes eternal truths to be necessary. That is, it is difficult
to conceive how eternal truths could be necessary if they were created
by a free act of God. Descartes is clear that the eternal truths are
necessary: he says that "the necessity of these truths does not
surpass our knowledge" ("To Mersenne, 6 May 1630,"
AT 1:150, CSMK 25). If eternal truths are necessary, however, it
should not be the case that they could have been otherwise. Yet
Descartes' commitment to divine omnipotence appears to commit
him to this view:



> 
> You ask what necessitated God to create these truths; and I reply that
> he 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. And it
> is certain that these truths are no more necessarily attached to his
> essence than are other created things. ("To [Mersenne], 27 May
> 1630," AT 1:152, CSMK 25)
> 



It appears that something in Descartes' comments about the
eternal truths has to give. It might be that, since Descartes is
clearly not prepared to adjust his commitment to divine omnipotence,
he instead has to abandon his view that they are necessary (Frankfurt
1977; Plantinga 1980, 110-113). On this interpretation,
developed and defended by Harry Frankfurt, all eternal truths are
inherently contingent because they could have been false, and they
could have been false because God could have made their
contradictories true. Frankfurt's interpretation is motivated
not only by Descartes' commitment to divine omnipotence; there
are also some texts:



> 
> ... God cannot have been determined to make it true that
> contradictories cannot be true together, and therefore... he
> could have done the
>  opposite.[8]
> 



> 
> 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.[9]
> 



If Frankfurt is right, Cartesian eternal truths are not really
necessary; they "are inherently as contingent as any other
propositions" (42). They may appear to be necessary to our
rational faculties, but this is just a function of the makeup of our
rational faculties and not of the necessity of the truths themselves.
Frankfurt then argues more generally that Descartes holds that for all
we know our rational faculties may be wrong about other things as
well. After all, we are mistaken about the necessity of the eternal
truths, which seems so very obvious, and so we might might be mistaken
about anything else that is similarly evident. If Frankfurt is
correct, Descartes holds that there is a way that reality appears from
the viewpoint of the clearest of human reasoning, and the best that we
can do as rational agents is to take up that viewpoint. But we can
never get outside of it to see how things are
 absolutely.[10]



If Descartes holds that eternal truths are necessary in any robust
sense, Frankfurt's view has an obvious drawback. It also suffers
from the problem that it [Frankfurt's view] cannot be formulated
without supposing that Descartes allows that there is a human
perspective from which eternal truths can be seen to be non-necessary,
but an important component of Frankfurt's view is the thesis
that Descartes thinks that it is part of the structure of a human mind
to regard eternal truths as wholly necessary.



Another drawback for Frankfurt's view is that it is
self-contradictory in postulating that, according to Descartes, we
cannot make claims about what reality is like absolutely. On
Frankfurt's view, Descartes holds that God is omnipotent in the
sense that He can do anything at all and has authority over even the
eternal truths. That is to say, Descartes holds that *absolutely
speaking* it is true that God can do anything at all and has
authority over the eternal truths. Frankfurt's Descartes is not
entitled to say that. He is only entitled to say that from a finite
human perspective it appears to be true that God can do anything and
has authority over the eternal truths. If Frankfurt is right, what is
maximally obvious to a finite mind is just that - what is
maximally obvious to a finite mind. It is not a guarantee of actual
truth.



An alternative view (developed and defended by Edwin Curley) is that
Descartes holds that eternal truths are necessary, but that they are
not necessarily so. On this reading, Descartes' view involves
iterated modalities: a number of truths are possibly necessary, but
God chooses only some of these possibilities to be the actual
necessary truths (Curley 1984, 579-603). One of the passages
that supports such a reading is from the already-cited letter to
Mesland:



> 
> 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.[11]
> 



On Curley's reading, Descartes secures the necessity of eternal
truths by arguing that God willed them to be necessary, and hence it
can be said that it is false that they could have been otherwise. But
Descartes also holds that God created the possibility that they not be
necessary, and that is why they are not necessarily necessary, as it
could have been the case that they could have been otherwise. Some
commentators have argued that a problem for Curley's view is
that it cannot allow Descartes to hold that eternal truths are
absolutely necessary - if it could have been the case that a
given truth could have been otherwise, then it is not a necessary
 truth.[12]
 Curley indeed admits that, on his view, Descartes was confused about
the modal status of eternal truths (Curley 1984, 589). They might be
hypothetically necessary, but nothing more than
 that.[13]
 Another problem is that Curley's view appears to put a severe
constraint on divine omnipotence: if God wants to make an eternal
truth false, He cannot make it false without first willing that it not
be necessary, for a necessary truth cannot be made false. If God
alters the status of the truth so that it is no longer a necessary
truth, He can make it false, but He cannot make it false straightaway.
A final problem is that Curley's reading supposes that there is
some point at which God's will could have been otherwise, but
God is eternal, and part of His essential perfection is to be wholly
immutable (*Principles* II.36, AT 8A:62).



An alternative reading of Descartes' comments on the eternal
truths suggests still another interpretation. Jonathan Bennett has
pointed out that in some of the key passages in question Descartes
does not say that God can make contradictories true, but that we
should not say that God cannot make contradictories true (Bennett
1994, 653-55). In such passages, for example in the
already-cited 1648 letter to Arnauld, Descartes is not saying anything
about God's power but about us and what we ought not say.
Presumably, he is just invoking his Fourth Meditation rule for judging
in these passages, as he is very explicit that when we do metaphysics
we ought not affirm what we do not clearly and distinctly
 understand.[14]
 Since we do not come close to understanding what it would be for one
and two to add up to something other than three, and since we do not
understand God's being unable to do something, the prospect that
God cannot make 1 and 2 not add to 3 is hopelessly confused.
Accordingly, we ought not speak of it. The same analysis also applies
to the important passage in the 1644 Mesland letter. Immediately after
saying that God can make contradictories true together, Descartes
takes it back: "... even if this be true, we should not try
to comprehend it, since our nature is incapable of doing so."
Descartes' claim that God can make contradictories true is
something that we ought not affirm when doing metaphysics and thus
something that should have no bearing on our interpretation of
Descartes' system. He tentatively flirts with the claim that God
could have made it possible for contradictories to be true together,
but then for systematic reasons he retracts it: he says that "we
should not put these thoughts before our minds" and that in God
there is "only a single activity, entirely simple and entirely
pure." Perhaps in a nod to divine omnipotence he says that God
could have made contradictories to be true together, but then he
checks himself and remembers that God wills by a single act that is
immutable and eternal. God is omnipotent, for Descartes, but as in any
other case he understands omnipotence in way that squares with the
other pillars of his system.



Bennett is right to emphasize the passages in which Descartes says of
a number of incoherent states of affairs that we ought not say that
God cannot bring them about. Bennett extends his view in ways that
lead to some of the same problems that arise for Frankfurt, however.
According to Bennett, Descartes does not take true modal claims to
apply or conform to real possibilities or necessities. In particular,
they do not apply to God. Instead, modality is just a function of how
our minds have been constructed. Bennett thus arrives at a conclusion
that is similar to the one in Frankfurt, but from a different point of
departure. Frankfurt supposes that for Descartes God is omnipotent in
such a way that He can make eternal truths false, and thus that for
any truth that we find to be necessary, its necessity is merely
apparent. But Bennett does not think that *any* modal truths
pertain to God. He grounds his interpretation on a text in which
Descartes appears to offer the conceptualist account straightaway:



> 
> 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 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. (*Second Replies*, CSM 2:107; Bennett
> 1994, 647-648)
> 



Like Frankfurt, Bennett concludes that any claims that we make about
God and His necessary existence, or about the impossibility of His
being a deceiver, are not a reflection of real possibilities and
necessities that pertain to God, but just a reflection of our minds
and how we are compelled to think (Bennett 1994, 656-658). A
worry for Bennett (which as we have seen is also a worry for
Frankfurt) is that Descartes appears to want to secure at least some
results that are true absolutely speaking - for example, that
God is supremely independent and that God has created finite minds in
a way that puts constraints on what we take to be possible. In
addition, a textual concern for Bennett is that in the passage that he
takes to be the "strongest evidence for [his] reading"
(Bennett 1994, 647) Descartes does not say that possibility has no
relation to the "object itself." He says that any serious
account of possibility must coincide with what our concepts tell us is
possible; otherwise, there would be no way for our minds to know
possibility, and "every other item of human knowledge...
[would be] undermine[d]" as a result. This is an evidential
misfire, and even worse - Bennett's interpretation
supposes that there is an unbridgeable gap between what we take to be
true and what is actually true, and as such it would appear to
undermine all human knowledge from the very start. It rules out all
human knowledge from the start by supposing that for Descartes we can
never obtain any assurance that our clearest and most compelling
perceptions of reality correspond to the way that reality is in fact.
If there is an interpretation of Descartes according to which there is
no such gap, Cartesian knowledge would have at least some chance at
 vindication.[15]



Lilli Alanen has proposed an interpretation along these lines. She
objects to all of the views considered above: if they do not downplay
the necessity of Descartes' eternal truths by making them merely
hypothetical, the interpretations eliminate their necessity altogether
and at the same time commit Descartes to saying that best we can do
epistemologically speaking is to arrive at results that seem to be
true from human our point-of-view (Alanen 2008, 359-364). Alanen
herself concludes that in Descartes's system there are necessary
truths that are fully necessary and that have been authored by God.
She adds, however, that our understanding of divine activity is
limited in such a way that we have no understanding of how necessities
(or possibilities) *could* be the product of His free will
(*ibid.*, 364-367). A fulcrum point of Alanen's
view is that there are no modal claims that apply to divine activity
because God is always the author of any modal claims and hence they
are always the subsequent *product* of that activity:



> 
> The idea that I take Descartes's controversial claims to express
> is, roughly, that it would be a mistake to assume some notion of
> modality in terms of which Descartes's concept of divine power
> could be explicated, and that we should not even try to do so. There
> is no modality prior to or independently of God's act of
> exercising his power.... (*ibid.*, 364)
> 



Alanen argues that for Descartes we are being hasty if we attempt to
point to considerations that we do not at all understand - for
example divine activity and any modalities that we think might apply
to it - and if we then appeal to those considerations as a basis
for understanding the necessity of eternal truths. But that does not
mean that we should conclude that truths about the necessary and the
possible are merely subjective. Eternal truths like that two and two
add to four are in fact necessary, even if we do not understand the
backstory of God's production of them (*ibid.*,
365-367).



Alanen's view is ingenious, but a serious worry that arises for
it is that Descartes appears to hold (and without the slightest bit of
equivocation) that there are modal claims that pertain to God and that
are useful for explicating His behavior. For example, we conclude in
the Fourth Meditation that God cannot be a deceiver and therefore that
whatever we clearly and distinctly perceive is true. We would also
appear to be entitled to include that because God is wholly immutable,
the laws of nature are utterly constant (*Principles of
Philosophy* II.36, CSM 1:240). Alanen is certainly right that none
of the necessary truths that God wills would apply to His activity,
but that does not mean that no modal notions at all apply to His
activity - especially if Descartes himself makes so clear that
divine immutability and the impossibility of divine deception are data
that are to guide us in inquiry. And they are not simply guides in the
sense of regulative principles or heuristics. We cannot once and for
all lay down a result, for Descartes, unless we recognize that it is
true that God exists and that it is *impossible* for Him to be
a deceiver. Descartes holds that there are modal claims that apply to
God, and he holds that God does not author these claims. Instead, they
apply to God by His nature. God is not the cause of any aspect of His
essence or existence: His "essence is so immense that he does
not need an efficient cause in order to exist" (*Fourth
Replies*, AT 7:241, CSM 2:168); "he has existed for eternity
and will abide for eternity" (The Fifth Meditation, AT 7:67, CSM
2:46); "His essence is such that He possesses from
eternity" all the divine attributes, and "it is impossible
for such a being to have the power and will to give itself something
new" (*Fourth Replies*, AT 7:241, CSM 2:168). For
example, God does not decide His own immutability, and He does not
decide any other attributes that apply to His nature, but as in all
cases there are no truths about modality that are independent of
Him.



Another attempt to preserve the necessity of eternal truths in
Descartes' system is to run with such data and argue that if God
wills a truth for eternity and His will is wholly immutable, the truth
is eternal and necessary, and there does not exist the possibility
that it be otherwise. Such a possibility would not exist automatically
- for it would only exist if God created it - and if
Descartes holds that eternal truths are necessary, that is a signal
that he supposes that God never created that possibility at all.



One important passage is in the 1644 letter to Mesland (quoted above)
in which Descartes says that "God cannot have been determined to
make it true that contradictories be true together, and therefore that
he could have done the opposite." As has already been noted,
later in the paragraph he takes it all back. In the larger passage, he
writes,



> 
> 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 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
> doctrine 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.
> 



There are similar passages elsewhere in Descartes' corpus, where
the view that Descartes that takes himself to be able to express, and
to express intelligibly, is that "there is always a single
identical and perfectly simple act by means of which he [God]
simultaneously understands, wills, and accomplishes everything."
If God is wholly immutable and wills the truths of mathematics and
geometry in a single act for eternity, it would appear that we are
entitled to infer the result that those truths are necessary, just as
we can infer from the impossibility of divine deception that our clear
and distinct perceptions are true. We must also consider the Third
Meditation passage in which Descartes says that in God there is
absolutely nothing that is potential (AT 7:47, CSM 2:32). If there is
just a single activity in God, and if it is simple and eternal, and
also immutable, then it makes no sense to talk of God as changing
course and actualizing an alternative set of possibilities aside from
than the one that actually obtains (Cunning 2023, 192-211). It
might be tempting to think that although God wills all of creaturely
reality by a single immutable and eternal volition, God might have had
a different immutable and eternal volition. But in God there is
absolutely no potential being - a kind of being that Descartes
says "strictly speaking is nothing" (*ibid.*). If
so, there do not exist alternative possible eternal truths, and there
does not exist the possibility of a change in God's eternal and
immutable will, and so (contra Frankfurt et al) eternal truths are
absolutely necessary.



A final consideration to mention in favor of the view that Descartes
holds that eternal truths are absolutely necessary is that it is
sensitive to the important worry raised by Broughton (1987) and Nadler
(1987) - that if Descartes holds that the eternal truths of
mathematics, etc., could have been otherwise, then he is committed to
the conclusion that physical laws admit of more necessity than (for
example) the truth that two and two add to four. Descartes is clear
that physical laws follow from God's nature (for example
*Principles* II.36-37, CSM 1:240-241), and so they
are absolutely necessary, but that would mean that he supposes that
physical laws are more necessary than eternal truths. If anything, we
would expect the story to go the other way around - that eternal
truths would be necessary and that physical laws would be wholly
contingent. In Descartes' system it would appear that laws of
physics are necessary and that eternal truths are necessary as
well.



Still, we need to contend with the passage in which Descartes says
that God was free to make the radii of a circle unequal, and with the
passages in which Descartes says more generally that God is free with
respect to each and every thing that He does. One way to read these
passages is to make the assumption that Descartes has a libertarian
conception of divine freedom and then conclude that if Descartes says
that God is free to do something, there exists the possibility that He
do it and also the possibility that He do something else (perhaps the
 opposite).[16]
 Descartes himself appears to understand divine freedom in very
different terms, however. He 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. It is
> self-contradictory to suppose that the will of God was not indifferent
> from eternity with respect to everything that 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. (*Sixth Replies*, AT 7:431-32, CSM 2:291)
> 



Descartes holds that God is free in creating the eternal truth that
the radii of a circle are equal. If God's freedom in this and
other cases just consists in His complete indifference and
independence, then the Cartesian claim that God is free to do
*x* does not entail that there exists the possibility that God
not do *x* or that there exists the possibility that God do
something
 else.[17]



Descartes makes a number of otherwise puzzling claims about
God's freedom to create the eternal truths, but if we interpret
these in the light of Descartes' stated conception of divine
freedom, they begin to look fairly mundane. A problem, however, is
that taken together the claims encourage the reading that Descartes is
a necessitarian. We consider for example the following comment that
Descartes makes to Mersenne:



> 
> 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. ("To Mersenne, 15 April 1630,"
> AT 1:145-46, CSMK 23).
> 



Here Descartes allows that there exists the possibility that God
create alternate eternal truths only if God's will is mutable,
but of course Descartes holds that God's will is wholly
immutable, and immutable for eternity. God is still free of course,
but in a way that squares with His immutability: divine freedom is to
be understood in terms of indifference and independence. The worry
that is starting to arise is that if God is the immutable and eternal
author of all reality - the eternal truths and everything else
that exists - then there does not exist the possibility that God
will an alternate series of creatures, and hence God does not author
that possibility, but instead everything that happens happens
necessarily. Descartes subscribes to a version of the Spinozistic view
that divine freedom is a matter of
 indifference,[18]
 and there is also some systematic evidence that Descartes accepts the
Spinozistic doctrine of necessitarianism. As Descartes recognizes in
the 15 April 30 letter to Mersenne, we might encounter some cognitive
dissonance in recognizing God's freedom *as*
 omnipotence.[19]
 He appears to subscribe to the view that the eternal truths are
necessary and that everything else that happens is necessary as
 well.[20]
 As he is reported to have said in *Conversation with
Burman*:



> 
> Concerning ethics and religion,... the opinion has prevailed that
> God can be altered, because of the prayers of mankind; for no one
> would have prayed to God if he knew, or had convinced himself, that
> God was unalterable.... From the metaphysical point of view,
> however, it is quite unintelligible that God should be anything but
> completely unalterable. It is irrelevant that the decrees could have
> been separated from God; indeed, this should not really be asserted.
> 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. Then again, although we may conceive that the decrees could
> have been separated from God, this is merely a token procedure of our
> own reasoning: 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 5:166, CSMK
> 348)
> 



We must repeat again, however, that this latter passage is from
*Conversation with Burman*, which was an interview in which
Descartes reported his views, and not a primary text that Descartes
wrote himself. The view that Descartes puts forward in the passage is
very much in line with the texts in which Descartes says that God is
simple and immutable, and creates by way of a single unchanging act
for all eternity, and indeed it pushes those texts to their logical
conclusion. The passage is from an interview, however, and some might
worry that it is not fully authoritative.



If Descartes holds in the final analysis that everything that happens
happens necessarily, it is easy to see how he can hold that eternal
truths are necessary and created by a God that is free (in the
Cartesian sense). However, Descartes will still have to contend with
the objection that there are texts in which he seems to be committed
to the existence of unactualized possibilities and, in particular,
texts in which he appears to be committed to a non-compatibilist view
of human
 freedom.[21]
 This objection will be discussed in sections four and six below.



Thus far we have considered the interpretive issue of whether or not
Descartes' eternal truths could have been otherwise. A question
that still remains to be considered concerns the ontological status of
Descartes' eternal truths, regardless of whether or not they
could have been otherwise.



One view is that since Descartes' eternal truths are neither
finite mental things, finite physical things, nor God, they must be
something akin to Platonic forms (Kenny 1970, 692-700). A
problem with this view, of course, is that it does violence to
Descartes' parsimonious dualism. Another problem with the view
is that Descartes says that eternal truths are beings which
"have no existence outside our thought"
(*Principles* I.48, AT 8A:23, CSM 1:208).



A second view is that eternal truths are to be located in God
(Schmaltz 1991, 135; Rozemond 2008, 41-63). One of the merits of
this view is that it provides for eternal truths to be eternal in a
very robust sense. God is eternal, and anything else is eternal if it
is housed in His eternal mind. Still, the view conflicts with the fact
that Descartes holds that eternal truths are creatures and are housed
in finite minds only.



A third reading of Descartes on eternal truths is that they are ideas
in finite minds. If truth is the conformity of thought with its object
("To Mersenne, 16 October 1639," AT 2:597, CSMK 139), then
eternal truths are ideas. But Descartes has also said that eternal
truths have no existence outside of our thought. They are true ideas,
but not true ideas in the mind of God because eternal truths are
creatures. A problem with this third reading, however, is that,
although it allows eternal truths to be *truths*, it is not
clear that it allows them to be *eternal* (Chappell 1997,
123-27). In some passages Descartes does distance himself from
the appellation 'eternal truth': he refers to "those
truths which are called eternal" ("To Mersenne, 27 May
1638," AT 2:138, CSMK 103) and to "[t]he mathematical
truths which you call eternal" (To Mersenne, 15 April 1630, AT
1:145, CSMK 23). And he allows that things can be identified as
'eternal' so long as they "are always the
same" (*Fifth Replies*, AT 7:381, CSM 2:262). So a
deflationary view of the eternality of Cartesian eternal truths might
be in order. However, Descartes says to Mersenne that "from all
eternity [God] willed them [eternal truths] to be, and by that very
fact he created them" ("To [Mersenne], 27 May 1630,"
AT 1:152, CSMK 25). Descartes as a rule shies away from making claims
about theological matters, but it is not clear that we want to
attribute to him the view that finite minds are co-eternal with
 God.[22]
 Perhaps he holds that human minds exist at every point in the series
that God wills, or perhaps his understanding of the eternality of
eternal truths is more deflationary: God wills a single series for all
eternity, and that series includes unchanging true ideas in finite
minds.


## 4. Unactualized Possibles



Descartes is unambiguous that there are some things that we clearly
and distinctly perceive to be possible. To Mersenne he speaks of
beings whose existence we clearly perceive to be possible ("To
Mersenne, March 1642," AT 3:544-45, CSMK 211); he also
says that God "can bring about everything that I clearly and
distinctly recognize as possible" (*Fourth Replies*, AT
7:219, CSM 2:154). In *First Replies* he says that



> 
> ...we 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.[23]
> 



In addition, he says to Mesland that "our mind is finite and so
created as to be able to perceive as possible things which God has
wished to be in fact
 possible."[24]
 The interpretive issue here is what Descartes is talking about when
he speaks in such terms. One interpretation that immediately suggests
itself is that Descartes holds that there are things or states of
affairs that, though not actual, are counterfactually
 possible.[25]
 A number of considerations speak in favor of such a reading. One is
that Descartes' view that mind and body are really distinct
appears to be the view that minds and bodies that are in fact united
can exist
 apart.[26]
 Another is that Descartes says that we have clear and distinct
perceptions of possible existence and of what is possible, thus making
it appear that he holds that God's creatures include not only
actuals but also unactualized
 possibles.[27]
 Finally, a possibilist reading fits Descartes within a long tradition
of figures like Scotus and Bradwardine who posit possible being to
secure the meaning and reference of claims about things that could be
but aren't (Normore 1991, 69-71; Normore 1986, 224,
231-34). If Descartes wants to make claims about unactualized
possibles and if he does not want those claims to be non-sensical,
unactualized possibles need to have some kind of ontological status in
his system.



Descartes may in fact be committed to attributing reality to
unactualized possibles, but a few interpretive problems arise if he
does. One is that as we have seen he says elsewhere that unactualized
being is nothing. In the Third Meditation, he argues that the
objective reality of the idea of God cannot have been caused by
potential perfections towards which a finite being might be evolving
because potentialities are nothing and so have no causal power. He
says,



> 
> ... I perceive that the objective being of an idea cannot be
> produced merely by potential being, which strictly speaking is
> nothing, but only by actual or formal being. (AT 7:47, CSM 2:32)
> 



If Descartes holds that potential being is nothing, then it is
difficult to see how he can include unactualized possibles in his
ontology.



Another interpretive problem is that it is difficult to see exactly
where possible reality would fit into Descartes' ontology. For
Descartes, all reality depends for its existence on God - even
possible reality ("To [Mesland], 2 May 1644," AT
4:118-9, CSMK 235). A possible being is thus a creature with an
ontological status. Descartes holds that truth is the conformity of
thought with its object, that "[t]ruth consists in being"
("To Clerselier, 23 April 1649," AT 5:356, CSMK 377), and
that true ideas are "ideas of real things" (The Third
Meditation, AT 7:43, CSM 2:30). Clear and distinct perceptions of
possibilities conform to reality and are of real things; they have a
truth-maker. A clearly and distinctly perceived possibility has some
ontological status, and the question is what exactly that is. This is
a question on which the Descartes literature has been largely silent,
but the options would appear to be that possibilities are either
creatures or ideas in the mind of God.



If possible beings are creatures, there is some difficulty in making
room for them in Descartes' ontology. Descartes is fairly clear
that the only creatures that exist are finite minds and bodies and
their modes:



> 
> I recognize only two ultimate classes of things: first, intellectual
> of thinking things, i.e. those which pertain to mind or thinking
> substance; and secondly, material things, i.e. those which pertain to
> extended substance or body. Perception, volition and all the modes
> both of perceiving and willing are referred to thinking substance;
> while to extended substance belong size (that is, extension in length,
> breadth and depth), shape, motion, position, divisibility of component
> parts and the
>  like.[28]
> 



One category of being in Descartes' ontology is thinking
substance (and its modes), and another is extended substance (and its
modes). If Descartes' possibles are just created thinking or
extended substances, then presumably they are actuals and not
possibles.



Of course, one might suggest that Descartes' dualism entails
that there are two kinds of things - thinking things and
material things - but that in each of these classes there are
substances with actual existence and also substances with possible
existence. On such a view, the class of thinking substances (for
example) includes thinking substances with actual existence and
thinking substances with possible existence.



There are a couple of problems with this view, however. One is that
Descartes holds that it follows from God's essence that God is
eternal and that His will is wholly immutable (The Third Meditation,
AT 7:45, CSM 2:31; *Principles* I.56, AT 8A:26, CSM 1:211;
"To Mersenne, 15 April 1630," AT 1:145-6, CSMK 23;
*Principles* II:36, AT 8A:61, CSM 1:24). If it is a necessary
truth that God is eternal and that His will is immutable, and if God
contains absolutely no potentiality, then there does not exist the
possibility that God's eternal will could have been other than
it is. So that possibility does not exist; and neither does it appear
that there exist any possible creatures. Descartes holds that there is
a single series that God preordains and that is (as would be expected)
immutable (*Principles* I.40-41, AT 8A:20, CSM 1:206). If
God created things that were merely possible, it is unclear how He
would be able to actualize them instead of the things that are
actualized in the series, if none of the requisite possibilities
exist, and so it is unclear how they would constitute
*possibilities*. These alleged possibilities (if they are
anything) would be among all of the other creatures; they would be
actuals.



It might of course be the case that Descartes just insists that there
are possible existents in addition to actual existents. Alternately,
it might be the case that like Spinoza (in *Ethics* Part IV,
definitions three and four), Descartes uses the expression
"possible existence" to describe actually-existing
creatures, and in a way that is consistent with a denial of non-actual
reality. For example, in some places Descartes identifies things as
having possible existence to highlight that they are dependent
creatures, and creatures whose existence cannot be read straight from
their concept. To describe the kind of existence had by finite
creatures generally, he uses 'possible existence' and
'contingent existence' interchangeably: he sometimes
speaks of the beings that depend on God for their existence as having
"possible or contingent existence" (*Second
Replies*, AT 7:166, CSM 2:117; *Notae*, AT 8B:361, CSM
1:306), and sometimes he speaks of them as having just
"contingent existence" (*Principles* I.15, AT
8A:10, CSM 1:198). When he says that creatures have possible
*or* contingent existence, he identifies the two kinds of
existence: "possible or [*sive*] contingent
existence" (AT 7:166). If contingent existence is just the kind
of existence had by beings that depend for their existence on
God's will and whose existence cannot be established by an
analysis of their concept alone (Fifth Meditation, AT 7:63-66,
CSM 2:44-46; *Rules for the Direction of the Mind*, AT
10:421-22, CSM 1:45-46), then the fact that a thing has
possible existence in Descartes' ontology does not suggest that
the thing does not actually exist. Such a thing exists, but in a way
that has it wholly dependent on God. Descartes also suggests this
definition of "possible existence" when he contrasts
necessary existence with the kind of existence had by creatures in
*First Replies*: unlike necessary existence, the existence had
by a creature is marked by the fact that it "has no power to
create itself or maintain itself in existence" (AT 7:118, CSM
2:84). It might be that like some of his predecessors Descartes is
using 'possible existence' to describe a kind of being had
by actually existing
 things.[29]



If possibilities are not creatures that exist in addition to thinking
substances and extended substances, another interpretive option is to
say that they are ideas in the mind of God, but that God does not
actualize. This interpretive option is precluded by Descartes'
commitment to the identity of God's will, intellect, and
creative activity:



> 
> ...in God, willing, understanding, and creating are all the same
> thing without one being prior to the other even conceptually.
> ("To Mersenne, 27 May 1630," AT 1:152, CSMK 25-26)
> 



> 
> 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. ("To Mersenne, 6 May
> 1630," AT 1:149, CSMK 24)
> 



A philosopher like Leibniz will insist on a distinction between
God's understanding and will so as to secure the existence of
things in God's understanding that God does not actually create.
A philosopher like Spinoza will point out that a thinker who is
committed to the identity of God's will and intellect is
committed to the view that there is nothing that God understands that
God does not create. Spinoza will add that such a thinker is not
restricting God's omnipotence if God is the cause of all being
and if alleged unactualized possibilities are outside the scope of
God's intellect and will. Descartes appears to be siding with
Spinoza here: what is *not* the object of God's
understanding is nothing at all, and what is the object of God's
understanding is created and made
 actual.[30]
 If Descartes is seriously committed to the identity of God's
intellect and will, it is difficult to see how he can also be
committed to the existence of unactualized possibles.



There are a number of passages in which Descartes speaks of what is
possible. To fix an interpretation of these passages, we can look to a
number of different places. One is common-sense. We might argue that
any view is crazy that does not admit that there are things that could
happen or exist but that do not. Since Descartes is not crazy, what he
must mean when he speaks of the possible is unactualized being. Or, we
might argue that Descartes is continuing in the tradition of thinkers
who clearly *do* posit unactualized possibles. If these figures
include unactualized being within their ontologies, and if Descartes
is building on their work, then his claims about the possible are
about unactualized being. Or, we might attempt to isolate parts of
Descartes' system that have a bearing on what
"possible" might mean in his system. Parts of this system
entail that 'possible existence' is just the actual
existence of dependent beings. If by "possible existence"
Descartes just means the dependent existence of actually existing
creatures, then passages in which Descartes speaks of a thing as being
possible or having possible existence are not evidence that Descartes
holds that there are things that could be but are not. Of course, it
might just be the case that Descartes has reason to help himself to
entities that the rest of his system shuts out.



If Descartes does hold that there are things that could be but are
not, his view still demands the important qualification discussed in
the first section above. He of course realizes that in everyday
discourse we speak of things that can happen but don't. However,
if our understanding of these things is not clear and distinct, and if
our understanding of them as possible is not clear and distinct, then
Descartes will not introduce them as possibilities. Descartes
appreciates that according to common ways of speaking, all kinds of
things are possible. As we have seen, he considers this concept of
'possible' after Mersenne introduces it in *Second
Objections*:



> 
> 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.... (*Second
> Replies*, AT 7:150, CSM 2:107)
> 



Here Descartes might seem to be offering a theory of possibility
according to which what it means for something to be possible is just
for it to be conceivable (Bennett 1994, 647-49). However, this
cannot be Descartes' view. Descartes holds that whatever we
clearly and distinctly perceive is true and that truth is "the
conformity of thought with its object" ("To Mersenne, 16
October 1639," AT 2:597, CSMK 139). If a possibility that we are
considering is clearly and distinctly perceived, then our clear and
distinct perception conforms to reality, and the possibility that we
are conceiving is not merely conceptual. Instead, there is also an
object to which the clear and distinct perception conforms - the
sort of thing posited by commentators who argue that Descartes holds
that God's creation consists not only of actuals but of
unactualized possibles. Thus, for any possibility of which we have a
conception, if there is no object to which that conception conforms
- that is, if the possibility exists *only* in thought
- the possibility is not clearly and distinctly perceived.
Possibilities which exist *only* in thought are not part of
Descartes' ontology and so on Descartes' view are not
possibilities at all. Descartes' remarks to Mersenne actually
bear this out. He is indeed considering the view of possibility as
conceivability, but in doing so he is merely acknowledging what
"everyone commonly means" by 'possible'.
Descartes sometimes speaks of the possible as clearly and distinctly
perceived. It is on these passages that any interpretation of
Descartes' views on possibility must be built.


## 5. Real Distinction



Any interpretation of Descartes' views on modality needs to be
sensitive to his view that mind and body are really distinct. The
conclusion of his Sixth Meditation argument for substance dualism is
that "I am really distinct from my body, and can exist without
it" (AT 7:78, CSM 2:54). A natural reading of Descartes'
conclusion has him saying that, for any minds and bodies that are
united, it is counterfactually possible that they be
 separated.[31]
 His argument would be as follows:


1. I clearly and distinctly understand mind apart from body and body
apart from mind.
2. God can bring about whatever I clearly and distinctly
perceive.
3. God can bring about that mind is apart from body and body is apart
from mind.
4. If God can bring about that mind is apart from body and body is
apart from mind, then mind and body can exist apart.
5. Mind and body can exist apart.



Such a reading is sensitive not only to Descartes' Sixth
Meditation comments but also to his further remarks on real
distinction in *Fourth Replies*. There Descartes says that for
"establishing a real distinction it is sufficient that two
things can be understood as 'complete' and that each one
can be understood apart from the other" (AT 7:221, CSM 2:156). A
thing is complete, for Descartes, when it is a substance:



> 
> ... [B]y a 'complete thing' I simply mean a substance
> endowed with the forms or attributes which enable me to recognize that
> it is a substance. (AT 7:222, CSM 2:156)
> 



Since a Cartesian substance is a thing that is ontologically
independent (*Principles* I.51-52), a complete thing is
an ontologically independent thing. When we clearly and distinctly
perceive mind and body to be complete, we know that they are
substances. When we still clearly and distinctly perceive them to be
substances after clearly and distinctly perceiving them apart from
each other, we know that they are not the same substance under
different descriptions. On this view, Descartes holds that mind and
body are ontologically independent substances, and their distinctness
consists in their ability to continue to exist even after God
separates them (Wilson 1978, 196-98).



An alternative interpretation of Descartes on the real distinction
between mind and body reads the distinction as consisting in the fact
that they are non-identical substances, but not in the fact of their
separability (Rozemond 1998, 28-37). Descartes holds that a
sufficient condition for establishing a real distinction between two
things is clearly and distinctly perceiving them to be non-identical
substances ("Synopsis of these following six Meditations,"
AT 7:13, CSM 2:9; *Fourth Replies*, AT 7:221-223, CSM
2:156-58). If so, he holds that the substantiality of two
non-identical substances does not consist in their being separable,
even though in fact they are separable (Rozemond 1998, 3-8). On
this view, mind and body are separable for Descartes; it's just
that their separability is a consequence of the (different) fact that
they are really distinct (Rozemond 1998, 28-37).



A third reading of the Cartesian real distinction stresses the
difficulty in making room for unactualized possibilities in
Descartes' system. The reading also highlights that Descartes
holds that our clear and distinct perceptions are veridical but says
(in his proof of real distinction) that God *can* bring about
whatever we clearly and distinctly perceive. Descartes is clear in
other texts that the reason why he mentions God's power in the
proof of real distinction is to remind us that no matter how unlikely
we think it is that our intimately united minds and bodies could also
be really distinct, God has enough power to have made *all* of
our clear and distinct perceptions veridical:



> 
> You agree that thought is an attribute of a substance which contains
> no extension, and conversely that extension is an attribute of a
> substance that contains no thought. So you must also agree that a
> thinking substance is distinct from an extended substance. For the
> only criterion we have enabling us to know that one substance differs
> from another is that we understand one apart from the other. And 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. But we can clearly understand a thinking substance that
> is not extended, and an extended substance that does not think, as you
>  agree.[32]
> 



In *Fourth Replies* Descartes say that his reason for
mentioning God's power in the Sixth Meditation proof of real
distinction is to remind his reader that our clear and distinct
perceptions are veridical (AT 7:226, CSM 2:159). In the Sixth
Meditation itself he arrives at a clear and distinct perception of
mind as an immaterial substance and body as a material non-thinking
substance and is immediately struck by the union of his mind and body:
"It is true that I may have... a body that is very closely
joined to me" (AT 7:78, CSM 2:54). He says that
"nevertheless" his mind and body are really distinct.
Descartes appreciates that the facts of mind-body union and mind-body
separation are
 opposed.[33]
 In the context of demonstrating the real distinction between mind and
body he reminds us that God's power is such that there can be
creatures that have nothing in common but that are intimately
 united.[34]



If we take seriously the consideration that there is no room in
Descartes' ontology for unactualized possibilities, the real
distinction between mind and body does not amount to their
counterfactual
 separation.[35]
 God has willed the series of creatures from eternity, and the claim
that mind and body can exist apart might amount to the claim that when
a given mind and body are separated in the series, each is
ontologically independent and so continues to
 exist.[36]
 That is, instead of reflecting that there is anything more in
Descartes' ontology than what is contained in the series that
God wills and preordains, the claim that mind and body can exist apart
might amount to Descartes' note in "Synopsis of these
following six Meditations" that in the Sixth Meditation he is
attempting to re-assure us that "the decay of the body does not
imply the destruction of them mind" (AT 7:13, CSM 1:10). Or as
he puts it elsewhere, he is attempting to "prove the
existence... of our souls *when* they are separate from
the body" ("To Mersenne, 25 November 1630," AT
1:182, CSMK 29, emphasis added). If so, the claim that mind and body
can exist apart does not posit the existence of possible reality any
more than the *Principles* III.47 claim that it is possible
(over time) for bodies to exhibit all the configurations of which they
are capable (AT 8A:103, CSM 1:258).



If Descartes holds that potential being is strictly speaking nothing,
and if his ontology and his commitment to divine immutability, divine
preordination, and (his particular conception of) omnipotence bar
possibilities from his system, it is not exactly clear what to make of
the possibility of mind and body existing in separation. One view is
that Descartes is committed to the reality of this possibility and
that, with his commitment to other possibilities, this commitment is
part of a pattern of Descartes' helping himself to entities that
his system does not allow. That is, it might be the case that
Descartes wants his system to be rich enough to posit possibilities
and that, when it isn't, he posits them anyway. Or, it might be
the case that because the *Meditations* does not attempt to
analyze (and then refine) the meditator's
pre-*Meditations* view of modality, the 'can' in
Descartes' claim that mind and body can exist apart is the not
fully analyzed 'can' of the
 vernacular.[37]


## 6. Possibility and Human Freedom



The whole project of the Fourth Meditation would appear to suggest
that Descartes is committed to the view that human beings can do
something other than what God preordains. The Fourth Meditation tells
us that error is avoidable, that we err not as as a result of the way
that we are constructed but as a result of our mis-use of one of the
faculties that God has provided us, and that to avoid error we must
refrain from affirming what we do not perceive clearly and
distinctly.



But there are passages in Descartes' corpus that make a surface
reading of the Fourth Meditation problematic. One is of course the
*Principles* I.40-41 text in which Descartes says that
God pre-ordains everything from eternity. He does admit that "we
can easily get ourselves into great difficulties if we attempt to
reconcile this divine preordination with the freedom of our will, or
attempt to grasp both these things at once" (AT 8A:20, CSM
1:206). But this just means that he himself appreciates the
problem.



There are other difficult texts as well:



> 
> ...[P]hilosophy by itself is able to discover that the slightest
> thought could not enter a person's mind without God's
> willing, and having willed from all eternity, that it should so
> enter.... When Your Highness speaks of the particular providence
> of God as being the foundation of theology, I do not think that you
> have in mind some change in God's decrees occasioned by actions
> that depend on our free will. No such change is theologically tenable;
> and when we are told to pray to God, that is not so that we should
> inform him of our needs, or that we should try to get him to change
> anything in the order established from all eternity by his
> providence...[,] but simply to obtain whatever he has from all
> eternity, willed to be obtained by our prayers. ("To Princess
> Elisabeth, 6 October 1645," AT 4:314-6, CSMK 272-73)
> 



> 
> The greater we deem the works of God to be, the better we observe the
> infinity of his power; and the better known this infinity is to us,
> the more certain we are that it extends even to the most particular
> actions of human beings. ("To Princess Elizabeth, 6 October
> 1645," AT 4:315, CSMK 273)
> 



> 
> As for free will, I agree that if we think only of ourselves we cannot
> help regarding ourselves as independent; but when we think of the
> infinite power of God, we cannot help believing that all things depend
> on him, and hence that our free will is not exempt from this
> dependence. ... The independence which we experience and feel in
> ourselves, and which suffices to make our actions praiseworthy or
> blameworthy, is not incompatible with a dependence of quite another
> kind, whereby all things are subject to God. ("To Princess
> Elisabeth, 3 November 1645," AT 4:332-3, CSMK 277)
> 



> 
> Henceforth, because he [the man who meditates upon God] knows that
> nothing can befall him which God has not decreed, he no longer fears
> death, pain or disgrace. He so loves this divine decree, deems it so
> just and so necessary, and knows that he must be so completely subject
> to it that even when he expects it to bring death or some other evil,
> he would not will to change it even if, *per impossible*, he
> could do so. ("To Chanut, 1 February 1647," AT 4:609, CSMK
> 310)
> 



In the *Principles* I.40-41 discussion, Descartes appeals
to divine incomprehensibility to make sense of how human freedom and
divine preordination are to be reconciled. God is infinitely powerful,
and He somehow made a universe in which it is true both that human
beings are free and that God has preordained everything from eternity
(AT 8A:20, CSM 1:206). Perhaps we should just assume that Descartes
thinks that human freedom is inconsistent with divine pre-ordination
and that we cannot make sense of human freedom (except by appeal to
divine incomprehensibility).



Another interpretive option is to emphasize that in
*Principles* 1.40-41 Descartes is saying only that our
experience of freedom and independence is in tension with divine
pre-ordination (Cunning 2010, 138-42). There is a way in which
our experience of freedom is perfectly consistent with divine
pre-ordination, of course, if God has immutably decreed all of our
mental life for all eternity and if our mental life includes some
experiences and not others. But it might seem puzzling why we have an
experience of freedom at all. Still, if Descartes allows that human
freedom itself is consistent with divine pre-ordination, then he is
not a libertarian but a compatibilist.



Passages outside of the *Meditations* might be easily read as
consistent with the view that for Descartes there does not exist any
unactualized possible reality, but the view appears not to square with
many of the claims of the Fourth Meditation. The Meditation does
contain compatibilist-sounding claims - for example, that the
will is maximally free when it is compelled to affirm truth (AT 7:58,
CSM 2:40); that it would be impossible for us to be in a state of
indifference if we had distinct perceptions only (*ibid*.); and
that assent and dissent are a matter of the will being pulled and
compelled by reasons (AT 7:59; CSM 2:41). However, the whole point of
the Fourth Meditation would seem to be that God is imperfect if our
errors (and false affirmations) are inevitable, and thus that on any
given occasion it is always possible for us to affirm or deny. In a
recent book, C.P. Ragland reasons along these lines - he argues
that the Fourth Meditation supposes a view of freedom according to
which a finite mind has a two-way libertarian power to affirm or not
affirm in cases where its perception is not clear and distinct.
Otherwise, it is not clear what the sense is in which finite minds
would have the power to avoid error, or what the sense is in which
error would be on us and not on God (Ragland 2016,77-81, 234).
Ragland points to a number of other passages in defense of his
libertarian interpretation. One is *Principles* I.37, in which
Descartes says that



> 
> it is a supreme perfection in man that he acts voluntarily, that is,
> freely; this makes him in a special way the author of his actions and
> deserving of praise for what he does. We do not praise automatons for
> accurately producing all the movements they were designed to perform
> ... when we embrace the truth, our doing so voluntarily is much
> more to our credit than would be the case if we could not do
> otherwise. (CSM 1:205)
> 



This passage as quoted is strongly suggestive of the libertarian
reading, especially the bit at the end, but there is actually an issue
of translation that needs to be addressed. A more literal translation
of the last clause - "... quam si non possemus non
amplecti" (AT 8A:18) - is "... than if we were
not able to not embrace it." This latter language is in fact
similar to the language in the Fourth Meditation, where Descartes
sounds quite compatibilist. He says in the Fourth Meditation that
"the will consists simply in our ability to do or not do
something" (CSM 2:40), but he also says in the same breath that
our will is free in cases where it is irresistibly compelled to affirm
a clearly and distinctly perceived truth. The will does not possess a
two-way power in such instances, but it still consists in an ability
to do or not do. That is to say, the will has in its arsenal a
capacity to affirm and a capacity to deny, but not a two-way
contra-causal power. Ragland would presumably respond to the
translational concerns about *Principles* I.37 by saying that
there is a larger and more pressing philosophical concern: that
Descartes holds that volitions are praiseworthy, but volitions cannot
be said to be praiseworthy if they could not be otherwise (Ragland,
61-62, 77-78). However, we might present the same concern
back to the libertarian: if a volition is a modification of a mental
substance, and it materializes in that substance without a prior
modification as its cause, volitions would seem to pop into existence
from nowhere, and the will instead would be a loose cannon. Perhaps
Ragland might respond here by introducing the notion of agent
causation and saying that, for Descartes, a mental substance itself is
able to generate a volition, and not as a result of the activity of
any of its modes. However, there are tremendous difficulties in trying
to make sense of how agent causation would work in a substance-mode
ontology. If we imagined a substance with no modes whatsoever -
in line with the thought experiment that Spinoza presents in *Short
Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being* (84) - it is
difficult to make any sense at all of the process by which a volition
would form in that substance. If the substance has no modes, but then
it all of a sudden had a volition, there would be no reason why it
formed that particular volition rather than some other, and there
would be no reason why it formed the volition at that particular
moment and not at a different moment. If we do start positing reasons,
in terms of some specific underlying mental activity that was brewing
beforehand and was a precursor to the volition, we could then think
about the case of two qualitatively identical substances that both
have that same underlying activity and a lot more activity besides. If
both substances are identical and have all of the same modes, we could
ask if a volition could occur in one that did not occur in the other.
But the same set of concerns would seem to arise. There would be no
reason for the volition to appear, in which case it would again be
random, and the notion of accountability for volitions would make
little sense.



A compatibilist reading of the Fourth Meditation resolution of the
problem of error would have to emphasize the following: that the
Meditation provides reasons that push and compel the will to refrain
from affirming perceptions that are not clear and distinct; that the
Meditation speaks of the will as being pushed and pulled by reasons
that are presented to it (CSM 2:40-41); and that Descartes
insists that upon further reflection - reflection which occurs
past the *Meditations* - it is clear that the entirety of
our mental lives depends on God's eternal and immutable will and
that, as a result, nothing that happens (including pain and death, and
presumably error) is bad; and that something (like error) can be the
outcome of God's will if we just understand it in its full
context. In the Sixth Meditation, Descartes offers a similar theodicy
to explain the occurrence of misleading sensations - for
example, the feeling of a pain in a part of the body that has been
amputated. Descartes argues there that if we are going to have a body,
things like that will sometimes happen; they are just part of the
territory for a mind that is embodied, and for reasons that are not
entirely clear to us, it is better to be embodied than not (CSM
2:57-61). The Fourth Meditation theodicy might be exactly
parallel. If we had just a will or just an intellect, we would never
err, but there are advantages to having both. When the two are brought
together, however, the intellect sometimes pushes and pulls the will
to affirm or deny. A finite intellect has limited information, and
some of the affirmations that it compels the will to make will not
conform exactly to reality, but it is better that we have both than
that we have just one. Furthermore, we can trust that "insofar
as these acts depend on God, they are wholly true and good" (CSM
2:42), and so perhaps there is a perspective from which even our
erroneous affirmation are getting at truth, in an incomplete manner,
or just confusedly.



A final problem for the view that Descartes subscribes to a
libertarian conception of freedom is that in the end it is required to
appeal to a doctrine of divine incomprehensibility to explain how
divine providence and foreknowledge are consistent with libertarian
freedom. Ragland does this (Ragland 2016, 230-235), as does Wee
(in Wee 2014, 199-200). We do not need to force Descartes to
appeal to divine incomprehensibility if we interpret him as a
compatibilist, and as we have seen we could save him from additional
trouble as well. It is one thing for a philosopher to appeal to divine
incomprehensibility in a case in which there are two truths that are
in tension, or a case in which a truth is mysterious in the face of
other truths, but it is an entirely different thing for a philosopher
to appeal to divine incomprehensibility after positing a logical
contradiction. Descartes does not do that anywhere, and for good
reason. He does appeal to divine incomprehensibility in the course of
trying to understand why we would have an *experience* of
independence if God has preordained everything from eternity, and that
experience is mysterious indeed, but Descartes does not say anywhere
that freedom itself is inconsistent with divine preordination. As we
have seen, however, in one passage he speaks of the



> 
> independence which we experience in ourselves, and which suffices to
> make our actions praiseworthy or blameworthy, [and which] is not
> incompatible with a dependence of quite another kind, whereby all
> things are subject to God. (CSMK 277; also Ragland, 212)
> 



A final issue to consider in the context of discussing
Descartes' view on human freedom is the issue of the extent to
which finite minds are compelled or drawn to affirm clear and distinct
perceptions. There are a number of texts in which Descartes reflects
that view that finite minds are wholly unable to refrain from
affirming a clear and distinct
 perception.[38]
 Indeed, we might think that the only way that we would be able to
know that God's non-deceiverhood secures the truth of clear and
distinct perceptions is if those perceptions are utterly compelled.
There are passages, however, in which Descartes appears to reflect the
view that it is within the power of the will to refrain from affirming
a clear and distinct perception. One is *Principles* I.37, in
which Descartes says that "when we embrace the truth, our doing
so voluntarily is much more to our credit than would be the case if we
could not do otherwise" (AT 8A:19, CSM 1:205). But this passage
is especially odd given that only a few lines later in
*Principles* I.43 Descartes offers one of his statements of the
view that we are unable to doubt clear and distinct perceptions (in
which we are embracing the
 truth...).[39]



Another passage in which Descartes appears to reflect the view that it
is within the power of a finite will to refrain from affirming a clear
and distinct perception is in "To [Mesland], 9 February
1645." There Descartes writes that



> 
> absolutely speaking... it is always open to us to hold back from
> pursuing a clearly known good, or from admitting a clearly perceived
> truth, provided we consider it a good thing to demonstrate the freedom
> of our will by so doing. (AT 4:173, CSMK 245)
> 



An examination of the larger context of this passage in the shows that
it is not in fact evidence that Descartes holds that it is within the
power of a finite will to refrain from affirming a clear and distinct
perception. In the previous letter to Mesland Descartes had said
that



> 
> I agree with you when you say that we can suspend our judgment; but I
> tried to explain in what manner this can be done. For it seems to me
> certain that a great light in the intellect is followed by a great
> inclination in the will; so that if we see very clearly that a thing
> is good for us, it is very difficult - and on my view
> impossible, as long as one continues in the same thought - to
> stop the course of our desire. "To [Mesland], 2 May 1644,"
> AT 4:115-6, CSMK 233)
> 



Descartes' view that clear and distinct perceptions are
will-compelling is the view that so long as the intellect has a clear
and distinct idea, it is impossible for the will to refrain from
affirming it. What it is for a finite mind to clearly and distinctly
perceive *X* is for its intellect to have a clear and distinct
idea of *X* and for its will to affirm X, but while the
intellect is presenting this clear and distinct idea, the will cannot
stop affirming it to turn its attention to something else. Instead,
another idea must be put in place of the clear and distinct idea, and
by something other than the
 will.[40]
 As Descartes says by way of qualification in the February 1645
letter, we suspend judgment when something else distracts the will
from a clear and distinct idea (AT 4:173, CSMK 245) - for
example the desire to exhibit our freedom (Nelson 1997,
163-64).



It is tempting to assume that Descartes accepts the Spinozistic view
that the will is at the mercy of the clarity with which the intellect
has ideas. (Of course, in Spinoza's language the view is that
there is no distinction between will and intellect and that to the
extent that we understand something our will is drawn to affirm it.)
Descartes appears to accept this view in the case of clear and
distinct ideas at least, and it would make sense for him to think that
the compellingness of truth and goodness does not disappear when our
grasp of it is slightly weakened. But such a reading is speculative at
best.



A final passage to consider is in *The Passions of the Soul*
I.41. There Descartes says that "the will is by its nature so
free that it can never be constrained" (AT 11:359, CSM 1:343).
This passage might appear to reflect a libertarian view of freedom,
but there is a multitude of passages in which Descartes says that the
eternal and immutable divine decree reaches down to "the most
particular actions of human beings" (AT 4:315, CSMK 273) and to
"anything... we could ever do" (*Principles*
I.40, AT 8A:20, CSM 1:206). On a natural reading of the
*Passions* I.41 passage, Descartes is highlighting that a will
by its nature is free and unconstrained, but that it is not free and
unconstrained when its nature is adulterated - for example when
it is attached to a body. In the same vein we might say that a diamond
is by its nature beautiful, but that it is not beautiful when it is
encrusted in dirt (Cunning 2023, 229-230, 250-257). As per
the Fourth Meditation, a will is free not when it is indifferent but
when it affirms utterly compelling clear and distinct perceptions, and
a mind that is unencumbered by a body has clear and distinct
perceptions only (*Fifth Replies*, AT 7:375, CSM 2:258;
*Second Replies*, AT 7:130-131, CSM 2:94).


## 7. The System and its Pillars



It is presumably an adequacy condition on the interpretation of the
work of any systematic philosopher that the work be interpreted in
light of the central tenets of that philosopher's system. The
interpretive problem of course is that for almost any such philosopher
there are controversies about what these central tenets are. It is
uncontroversial that Descartes sometimes speaks of possibility and
necessity. What is not so uncontroversial is what he is talking about
when he talks about these. In particular, if Descartes is committed to
the view that there is unactualized possible being, then either (1)
the alleged parts of his system that seem to disallow such being are
not parts of his system, (2) the parts of his system that seem to
disallow such being do not really disallow it, or (3) he is not a
wholly systematic philosopher. There is no chance that (3) is right,
but much work remains to be done in debates over (1) and (2).