The Uses of Thought and Will: Descartes’ Practical Philosophy of Freedom

ABSTRACT

I offer a reading of the role of freedom in Descartes’ Meditations and other writings that sees freedom’s role in “assenting to ideas” as a matter of psychological possibility, and its role in action as governed by epistemic norms. The will has two constitutive aspects, for Descartes: there are volitions that terminate in the soul, and volitions that terminate in the body. When these two aspects, the input and output sides (in Paul Hoffman’s phrase), harmonize, the result is an expression of free agency. I argue that Descartes holds that norms exist only where there is some responsibility to live up to (or fail by), rather than there being any normative standard antecedently given in nature, and that this makes the matter of governing our own freedom all the more pressing. Descartes’ central concern in this area is to locate a way of coping with inevitable ignorance and uncertainty, and I discuss the elements of how he proposes that we do so. I argue also that there is a great deal of continuity between Descartes’ counsel on how to believe and on how to act, and that Cartesian practical philosophy is a coherent continuation of the project of the Meditations.

KEYWORDS:

• Descartes
• free will
• Cartesian ethics
• ethics of belief

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. For instance John Carriero, whose illuminating Between Two Worlds is an extended critical exposition of, and commentary on, the Meditations.

2. References to the Meditations are to the standard Oeuvres de Descartes edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, cited as AT, followed by volume and page numbers.

3. I will pass over the Cartesian circle in silence. I think it can be overcome, but this is not the place for it.

4. Hobbes, objection 13, in the Third Objections, AT VII, 191–92, who writes for example that “things which are proven to us by good arguments, or told to us as credible, we are compelled to believe whether we wish to or not.” See also Williams, Descartes.

5. Williams, Descartes, 176.

6. Dialetheic logic defends the claim that this is not merely psychologically possible, but in some limited contexts normatively required. See for instance Priest, In Contradiction: A Study in the Transconsistent.

7. See the passage quoted above from AT VII, 57–58.

8. Hoffman, “Freedom and Strength of Will,” 241–60.

9. The tenor of Descartes’ replies at AT VII, 376–79 to Gassendi’s rather wordy and laboured objections is awfully close to “if you want to be a fool, carry on.”

10. Albritton, among others, makes this point in “Freedom of the Will and Freedom of Action,” 239–51.

11. Ragland, The Will to Reason, 223–24. Ragland gives a lucid exposition of the various ways (none of them really satisfactory) in which Scholastic and other thinkers struggled with this problem, and positions Descartes’ path vis-à-vis the array of options in the religious debates of his day.

12. The doctrine has a long history. It is an inheritance of Aristotelian hylomorphism, though transformed by various thinkers of the Christian Middle Ages from Aquinas in the thirteenth century to Francisco Suárez in Descartes’ own lifetime. Robert Pasnau’s “Form, Substance and Mechanism,” 31–88, offers a history of the fate of substantial forms through the medieval and early modern periods. A sample of representative primary sources from both ends of the Scholastic period is Aquinas, On Being and Essence, esp. 238; Suárez, On the Formal Cause of Substance, esp. 19.

13. In fact, in that article Descartes makes the overblown claim that total mastery over the passions is possible, with sufficient conditioning. I think the charitable reading is that he got carried away in this bit, since it is inconsistent with the bulk of the physiology and psychology expressed in the work as a whole. Cottingham, in “Cartesian Ethics,” 193–216, rightly stresses the relative opacity of passions to reason in Descartes.

14. One particularly noteworthy example of the subsequent influence of Descartes’ theoretical/practical thought is Mary Astell’s work, especially A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II (1697), which articulates and expands both Cartesian epistemology and ethics in interesting ways. Indeed, Descartes’ influence was decisive on the resurgence of women philosophers in the seventeenth century. In this connection see, for example, Jacqueline Broad, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century.

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Notes on contributors

Mark C. R. Smith

Mark C. R. Smith is a faculty member in Philosophy at Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada. His work ranges over questions in the philosophy of mathematics, epistemology, and early modern philosophy.